Many commentators (including me elsewhere in this blog) have called attention to the many ideological and political dangers that this term brings along with it. Quite apart from these uses of the term and the discourses they arise in, it is worth pointing out a number of obvious things about the term itself:
1. It quite literally doesn't exist. Capital as it is usually understood could hardly be a more concrete term meaning money and wealth and the means to acquire more of it as well as other goods and services (especially in "a non-barter system" - Wiktionary). "Social capital" cannot be spent or banked in any normal sense (and if it is used - whatever this means - you can be left with as much or more of it than you had when you started)
2. The word "capital" has a number of key features that the word "social" just cannot be appended to. It is a quite extraordinary example of a category error on a par with "thoughtful cheese" or "colorless green ideas" (whether or not these "sleep furiously")
3. Any useful sense of the term could just as usefully be replaced by the term "solidarity" (except that this is far too political a term for those communitarians who tend to use the term social capital).
4. Whilst solidarity hints at an activity or disposition towards activity as well as situating itself within a discourse of struggle and difference, the term social capital is a reification - a thing word rather than a doing word. It is a concept (if one can even call it that) that encourages merely a passive and apolitical stance.
-----Original Message-----From: Paul Cotterill [mailto:paul.cotterill@usa-is.co.uk] Sent: 03 February 2008 12:11To: Jon Griffith; AGregg@lasa.org.ukCc: ceri.hutton@gmail.comSubject: Re: Fwd: Discussion documentandyI sense in sixth sort of way that you (and don flynn) may be interested in this new article from Natali Letki (she being polish) challenging view that diversity in itself reduces trust in neighbourhoods (in the UK). Also, here's a Putman thing and an American view as ? counterpointsI've not read them yet but will this week sometime. Never mind the detail, I agree with Letki on the basis of the abstract......................
From Jon Griffith:
hello again
A quick skim of Letki and Stolle et al suggests that, not for the first time in this extraordinary 'debate', both are fatally undermined by treating social capital as if it actually exists.
It doesn't, it's a product (in the sense it's referred to here) of Robert Putnam's fevered sociological imagination, and therefore nothing has an effect on it, nor does it have an effect on anything - it's not there.
The only way to bring sanity back into the this type of discussion - about real people living in real places - is to abandon this concept and say what one actually means - black people, white people, behaviour, money, physical resources, how people spend their money, what they do to each other, legal and illegal drugs, illness and health, inequality of wealth, education etc etc, ie all the usual old fashioned contents of political debate.
The idea of social capital, and the discussion of this idea, turns all this into apolitical mush.
I don't understand why so many otherwise intelligent people seem believe in it, but you're right about the Sixth Sensiness of it - as if the discussion is being conducted by people who don't know that they're dead.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Both Cameron and New Labour exhibit the dangers of communitarian approaches to crime. In a speech in Salford Cameron declared "we are collapsing into an atomised society, stripped of the local bonds of association which help tie us together" - bonding and bridging social capital rear their heads again! (I have described this elsewhere as - it will all be allright if we learn to eat samosas together). There is indeed an atomisation that is ocurring throughout Britain and it is precisely because of the market driven policies that he and his party have always supported. Increasingly we seem to know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Status and self worth is increasingly defined by conspicuous consumption. It is the inequalities of status, power and income that have done so much to breakdown social solidarity ever since Thatcher declared that "there is no such thing as society". The fact that he makes so much of this atomisation without seeing that it is increasing inequality - a serious dose of affluenza - that fuels resentment and anger between different individuals and groups and results in the very demise of the sense of "community" that as a conservative he is so nostalgic for.
John Rentoul argues (Independent on Sunday 20/1/08) that New Labour and the Cameroonians are conducting a rhetorical dutch auction using precisely the nostaligia for an imagined past that we have noted earlier: "it is the human condition to believe that everything was better in the good old days , and to be swayed by plausible rhetoric promising a future that resembles a misremembered past." Of course this is not the human condition at all - but it is a very powerful and dangerous ideology. Just as Blair promised to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime" (and then forgot about the second part of this aphorism as society became even more unequal under New Labour), so Cameron is promising far more than could conceivably be delivered by any government. If, as Cameron asserts, the breakdown of society is a consequence of the breakdown of community (which itself is a consequence of the breakdown of the family) it is dificult to see what any government could do about this. Cameron in the same Salford speech is reduced to an appeal to the public to "imagine what it would be like if we had the will and the determination to change. Imagine a society where families are living together rather than being paid by the state to live apart". This imagined community is not just a cheap rhetorical device, it is a powerful and reactionary appeal to a concept which both leads us away from an analysis of what is really going on and simultaneously promotes a full frontal attack on the welfare state which still provides support for the poorest and most deprived people in our unequal society. We are back to blaming the victim again.
Whilst conceding that Labour has done some good things (at the level of tax credits as an alternative to a more thoroughgoing redistributiveattack on poverty), nevertheless Labour's facile promotion of "community cohesion" has spawned what Rentoul calls the "ludicrous situation of setting targets" for (as the Government puts it) "the percentage of people who have meaningful interactions with people from different backgounds" - with 'meaningful interactions' defined by the DCLG as "engaging in conversation or some other form of social interaction" not at work, school or college "at least once a month". This is samosas on a truly industrial scale.
John Rentoul argues (Independent on Sunday 20/1/08) that New Labour and the Cameroonians are conducting a rhetorical dutch auction using precisely the nostaligia for an imagined past that we have noted earlier: "it is the human condition to believe that everything was better in the good old days , and to be swayed by plausible rhetoric promising a future that resembles a misremembered past." Of course this is not the human condition at all - but it is a very powerful and dangerous ideology. Just as Blair promised to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime" (and then forgot about the second part of this aphorism as society became even more unequal under New Labour), so Cameron is promising far more than could conceivably be delivered by any government. If, as Cameron asserts, the breakdown of society is a consequence of the breakdown of community (which itself is a consequence of the breakdown of the family) it is dificult to see what any government could do about this. Cameron in the same Salford speech is reduced to an appeal to the public to "imagine what it would be like if we had the will and the determination to change. Imagine a society where families are living together rather than being paid by the state to live apart". This imagined community is not just a cheap rhetorical device, it is a powerful and reactionary appeal to a concept which both leads us away from an analysis of what is really going on and simultaneously promotes a full frontal attack on the welfare state which still provides support for the poorest and most deprived people in our unequal society. We are back to blaming the victim again.
Whilst conceding that Labour has done some good things (at the level of tax credits as an alternative to a more thoroughgoing redistributiveattack on poverty), nevertheless Labour's facile promotion of "community cohesion" has spawned what Rentoul calls the "ludicrous situation of setting targets" for (as the Government puts it) "the percentage of people who have meaningful interactions with people from different backgounds" - with 'meaningful interactions' defined by the DCLG as "engaging in conversation or some other form of social interaction" not at work, school or college "at least once a month". This is samosas on a truly industrial scale.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
In an interesting article in the Guardian (Inequality is closing down our concern for others, Friday Jan 18th) Jenni Russell shows how it is that perceived and actual feelings of inequality and lower status in our increasingly stratified society are the real threats to social and community cohesion. "Everyone is aware that as the rewards for reaching the top have grown exponentially, so the penalties for failing have grown more savage. As one Labour-voting father said, inequality eats away at the spirit of community. He feels he can't risk his children falling to the bottom and he wants to use what he has to help them, rather than contributing more to the common pot".
An approach which starts with an analysis of actual capital (rather than a lack of "social capital") would surely be a more fruitful way of analysing the reasons for the breakdown of social solidarity that the communitarians and others spend so much effort decrying. Their attempts to blame the victims (cf the New East End - see previous posts) rather than looking at the real economic causes can all be tracked back to the increasing feeling that they themselves would lose by any concerted attempt by the state to redistribute wealth and get the rich to pay even an equable proportion of their wealth to the common good. Certainly the old Labour notions of redistribution through direct taxation have lost their salience with New Labour's disgraceful panderings to the wealthy. Blair's obsession with his super rich friends and Peter Mandelson's remarks about not giving a damn about people becoming filthy rich are only the most obvious examples of this trend.
What is clear is that the wealth of those at the top does matter to society as it becomes the benchmark by which even the well off middle classes assess their own status. Taxing the rich is important not just for the revenue it would raise for the exchequer.
At the other end of the spectrum Lynsey Hanley's poignant descriptions of how local authority tenants on many large Council estates (Estates - an Intimate History, Granta 2007) are made to feel like social pariahs should have more to tell us about the breakdown of "communities" and the growth in anti-social behaviour than so many of the recent attempts to blame the "undeserving poor" for their own situation. As Hanley says, we must get back to a situation where social housing is seen as an integral part of the national housing stock, and not something that is seen as shameful.
Kids going to school to be bullied for not having the right £100 trainers is not at all just a remark about fashion. Status markers are increasingly important as constitutive of self-respect in our increasingly unequal and marketised society. Local authorities decrying young people "hanging around and causing trouble" on estates where there is nothing for them to do and nowhere to go no longer seem to notice their own inconsistency - when as so often they have allowed youth and community services to atrophy.
Communitarians have noticed that in some European states there is noticeably less social breakdown. Rather than concluding that this is because these are higher taxed and less unequal societies where differentials of abject poverty and super wealth are less marked, some of them (Goodhart et al) have claimed that it is because they have less immigration. There is now a constant and appalling denigration of "chavs" and those living in council accommodation. Attacks on welfare benefit recipients and refugees as scroungers and the attempts to portray an increasing underclass as the authors of their own downfall are all ways to stop us looking clearly at the real relations of power, wealth, status and inequality that are the real causes of social breakdown. Blaming the victims has now become a leading component of social policy.
An approach which starts with an analysis of actual capital (rather than a lack of "social capital") would surely be a more fruitful way of analysing the reasons for the breakdown of social solidarity that the communitarians and others spend so much effort decrying. Their attempts to blame the victims (cf the New East End - see previous posts) rather than looking at the real economic causes can all be tracked back to the increasing feeling that they themselves would lose by any concerted attempt by the state to redistribute wealth and get the rich to pay even an equable proportion of their wealth to the common good. Certainly the old Labour notions of redistribution through direct taxation have lost their salience with New Labour's disgraceful panderings to the wealthy. Blair's obsession with his super rich friends and Peter Mandelson's remarks about not giving a damn about people becoming filthy rich are only the most obvious examples of this trend.
What is clear is that the wealth of those at the top does matter to society as it becomes the benchmark by which even the well off middle classes assess their own status. Taxing the rich is important not just for the revenue it would raise for the exchequer.
At the other end of the spectrum Lynsey Hanley's poignant descriptions of how local authority tenants on many large Council estates (Estates - an Intimate History, Granta 2007) are made to feel like social pariahs should have more to tell us about the breakdown of "communities" and the growth in anti-social behaviour than so many of the recent attempts to blame the "undeserving poor" for their own situation. As Hanley says, we must get back to a situation where social housing is seen as an integral part of the national housing stock, and not something that is seen as shameful.
Kids going to school to be bullied for not having the right £100 trainers is not at all just a remark about fashion. Status markers are increasingly important as constitutive of self-respect in our increasingly unequal and marketised society. Local authorities decrying young people "hanging around and causing trouble" on estates where there is nothing for them to do and nowhere to go no longer seem to notice their own inconsistency - when as so often they have allowed youth and community services to atrophy.
Communitarians have noticed that in some European states there is noticeably less social breakdown. Rather than concluding that this is because these are higher taxed and less unequal societies where differentials of abject poverty and super wealth are less marked, some of them (Goodhart et al) have claimed that it is because they have less immigration. There is now a constant and appalling denigration of "chavs" and those living in council accommodation. Attacks on welfare benefit recipients and refugees as scroungers and the attempts to portray an increasing underclass as the authors of their own downfall are all ways to stop us looking clearly at the real relations of power, wealth, status and inequality that are the real causes of social breakdown. Blaming the victims has now become a leading component of social policy.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Reply to Don Flynn
Hi Don
Thanks for this which was really helpful and most of which I very much agree with. Particularly your views on the role of politics in community action. I think though there is an issue about what sort of politics – the term has been eviscerated down to the notion that politics locally is done by political representatives – Councillors or even community/regeneration workers rather than being “the lynchpin of activity” in the way you describe. This of course is not helped by the tendency of some Councillors and the orthodox political parties that they represent seeing representational politics as somehow more authentic and real (and therefore their own powers as more legitimate) then the involvement that grows from the grassroots through local or interested people’s involvement in what are sometime called “community organizations” . Yes of course such communities do retain the potential to be self-critical and oppositional – at precisely which point they very often lose their funding or are sidelined by the local Town Hall or its inhabitants!
My point was not that we should never use the term “community” but that we should be far more suspicious and alive to our almost ubiquitous use of the term which actually devalues it as a currency. We should use it more judiciously and avoid facile or tautologous uses such as “the local community” when we mean local people or “the black community” when we are thereby lumping together such completely different groups as 3rd generation African Caribbeans, recent arrivals from the Congo or the Horn of Africa and the growing number of mixed race people in the capital. My objection is not to the term “Black” , especially where it is being used (as it was in the 60s and 70s) as a political term, but rather to the notion implied in the term “community” that there is some substrate that unifies and homogenizes black people apart from their collective struggles
Thanks for this which was really helpful and most of which I very much agree with. Particularly your views on the role of politics in community action. I think though there is an issue about what sort of politics – the term has been eviscerated down to the notion that politics locally is done by political representatives – Councillors or even community/regeneration workers rather than being “the lynchpin of activity” in the way you describe. This of course is not helped by the tendency of some Councillors and the orthodox political parties that they represent seeing representational politics as somehow more authentic and real (and therefore their own powers as more legitimate) then the involvement that grows from the grassroots through local or interested people’s involvement in what are sometime called “community organizations” . Yes of course such communities do retain the potential to be self-critical and oppositional – at precisely which point they very often lose their funding or are sidelined by the local Town Hall or its inhabitants!
My point was not that we should never use the term “community” but that we should be far more suspicious and alive to our almost ubiquitous use of the term which actually devalues it as a currency. We should use it more judiciously and avoid facile or tautologous uses such as “the local community” when we mean local people or “the black community” when we are thereby lumping together such completely different groups as 3rd generation African Caribbeans, recent arrivals from the Congo or the Horn of Africa and the growing number of mixed race people in the capital. My objection is not to the term “Black” , especially where it is being used (as it was in the 60s and 70s) as a political term, but rather to the notion implied in the term “community” that there is some substrate that unifies and homogenizes black people apart from their collective struggles
From Don Flynn (Migrants Rights Network)
Thanks for this interesting paper Andy - I hope it's sparked off the discussion you want to see underway.
I entirely agree with your central argument - that the constellation of terms and concepts about 'community' and 'community cohesion' has given rise to a set of apolitical, bureaucratic practices which, at their worst, close down the space which might otherwise exist for actitivites which provide a critical apprasal of the real power structures which underpin concrete, actually existing communities. Where I think you might be creating a hostage to fortune is in centring so much of your criticisms on the word 'community' itself - almost to the point of suggesting that it be jetisoned in favour of another term, or group of terms, which better convey the fluctuating and contingent nature of actually existing communities. The problem is there isn't an obvious candidate for this role, wihch conveys what we know is relevant to this discussion, about those incidents where the features of geograpthical location or sectional interest do generate a sense of 'community' which is reasonably coherent and has the potentional to be self-critical and oppositional. The position of the mining communities in the mid-eighties is a case in point.
For me, the nub of the issue is what you describe as the need to see "the creation of community as an active and political process." The real setback of the last three decades has been the reduction of the capacites which had once existed for critical political appraisal of the processes of community formation. This loss is largely connected to the decline in working class organisation, which had once connected a sense of local otrganic solidarity with a wider consciousness of the place of class in the grand narrative of national, and sometimes international life. The practices generated around labour party and trade union branches, cultural associations (the WEA, etc), even chapels and church halls, had once provided local 'community' leaders with a mirror in which they were required to judge the reflection of the image they were cutting in the wider national, imagined, community of national and international life. The hollowing out of all of these organisations has led to this opportunity for critical reflection being lost, and for the grievances which initially motivated the formation of common identity to become a permanent howl of visceral protect against the lousy hand life had dealt them, with little or no capacity for moving beyond the sence of victimhood and injustice.
This decline in local politics has created the vacuum into which all the bureaucratic, professionalised forces of the social cohesion industry have rushed. Being bureaucratics, and not organically connected to the social forces that have produced dissonnance and tension, they thresh around looking for ways of acquiring traction in the array of problems they spread out before them, and that has tended to mean reifying categories which once where used in a fairly easy fashion into a hardened set of concepts which refer to hardened social facts. The problems for the poor old term 'community' is that it has suffered precisely this fate, and via the mechanistic thinking of functionalist sociology (of which communitarianism is just one species) has been reinvented as an iron law of social existence.
From our standpoint I think there is little we can do,for the time being, about the wretched state of organisation amngst the working class. I personally will proclaim my commitment to trade union activism and a democratic system based on mass membership political parties, but all of that is an investment for another day.
What can be usefully done in the here and now, I think, is to insist on the relevance of politics to the business of being activity in the domain of community action, regeneration, etc. The presumption that the task of building cohesive communities is essentially a technocratic one, involving the building of social capital and improving networks, has to be challenged and replaced by a stronger sense that activism, if it means anything, requires an assessment of the balances of power and interest which local societies into hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion, frank and open debate about the implications this has for policies and strategies, and the formation of commitment to one side or the other in battling forward with solutions. All of these things make politics the lynchpin of activity, rather than a rather embarasing fact of life that we try to push into the corner as much as possible.
So, the discussion I think we ought to be founding is one entitled 'the politics of community action', which requires the legions of officials and consultants to appraise the positions they occupy against the matrix of power relations, and to give a pulic account of themselves as people who are changing what; by which means; in collaboration with who; and to what ends?
Tha's my tuppennyworth. How are you planning to take this discussion forward? Looks like a Facebook community forum to me (sic).....
All the best,
Don
Thanks for this interesting paper Andy - I hope it's sparked off the discussion you want to see underway.
I entirely agree with your central argument - that the constellation of terms and concepts about 'community' and 'community cohesion' has given rise to a set of apolitical, bureaucratic practices which, at their worst, close down the space which might otherwise exist for actitivites which provide a critical apprasal of the real power structures which underpin concrete, actually existing communities. Where I think you might be creating a hostage to fortune is in centring so much of your criticisms on the word 'community' itself - almost to the point of suggesting that it be jetisoned in favour of another term, or group of terms, which better convey the fluctuating and contingent nature of actually existing communities. The problem is there isn't an obvious candidate for this role, wihch conveys what we know is relevant to this discussion, about those incidents where the features of geograpthical location or sectional interest do generate a sense of 'community' which is reasonably coherent and has the potentional to be self-critical and oppositional. The position of the mining communities in the mid-eighties is a case in point.
For me, the nub of the issue is what you describe as the need to see "the creation of community as an active and political process." The real setback of the last three decades has been the reduction of the capacites which had once existed for critical political appraisal of the processes of community formation. This loss is largely connected to the decline in working class organisation, which had once connected a sense of local otrganic solidarity with a wider consciousness of the place of class in the grand narrative of national, and sometimes international life. The practices generated around labour party and trade union branches, cultural associations (the WEA, etc), even chapels and church halls, had once provided local 'community' leaders with a mirror in which they were required to judge the reflection of the image they were cutting in the wider national, imagined, community of national and international life. The hollowing out of all of these organisations has led to this opportunity for critical reflection being lost, and for the grievances which initially motivated the formation of common identity to become a permanent howl of visceral protect against the lousy hand life had dealt them, with little or no capacity for moving beyond the sence of victimhood and injustice.
This decline in local politics has created the vacuum into which all the bureaucratic, professionalised forces of the social cohesion industry have rushed. Being bureaucratics, and not organically connected to the social forces that have produced dissonnance and tension, they thresh around looking for ways of acquiring traction in the array of problems they spread out before them, and that has tended to mean reifying categories which once where used in a fairly easy fashion into a hardened set of concepts which refer to hardened social facts. The problems for the poor old term 'community' is that it has suffered precisely this fate, and via the mechanistic thinking of functionalist sociology (of which communitarianism is just one species) has been reinvented as an iron law of social existence.
From our standpoint I think there is little we can do,for the time being, about the wretched state of organisation amngst the working class. I personally will proclaim my commitment to trade union activism and a democratic system based on mass membership political parties, but all of that is an investment for another day.
What can be usefully done in the here and now, I think, is to insist on the relevance of politics to the business of being activity in the domain of community action, regeneration, etc. The presumption that the task of building cohesive communities is essentially a technocratic one, involving the building of social capital and improving networks, has to be challenged and replaced by a stronger sense that activism, if it means anything, requires an assessment of the balances of power and interest which local societies into hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion, frank and open debate about the implications this has for policies and strategies, and the formation of commitment to one side or the other in battling forward with solutions. All of these things make politics the lynchpin of activity, rather than a rather embarasing fact of life that we try to push into the corner as much as possible.
So, the discussion I think we ought to be founding is one entitled 'the politics of community action', which requires the legions of officials and consultants to appraise the positions they occupy against the matrix of power relations, and to give a pulic account of themselves as people who are changing what; by which means; in collaboration with who; and to what ends?
Tha's my tuppennyworth. How are you planning to take this discussion forward? Looks like a Facebook community forum to me (sic).....
All the best,
Don
From Rob Gregg Dean of Arts and Humanities, Richard Stockton College, New Jersey.
In reply to the community Confusions discussion paper:
Actually, a lot of the issues you raised are ones that have concerned me over the years — particularly in my earlier guise as an African-Americanist (both in my book on African American migration and my on-line book about migration more generally). Two things occur to me, off the top of my head — I believe there are a lot of other things in there (just thought of a third).1) There’s a degree to which I wonder whether the notion of community can ever be simply the positive attributes as opposed to the negative ones — i.e. Radical rather than reactionary. As a force for change for bringing people on the outs into power, or of increasing the power they might have, then it surely takes on a more progressive aspect. But, while it is doing this, it is nonetheless also (simultaenously) manifesting the reactionary part in its very definition. It is creating “fictions” about the community and inventing histories of its nature in order to mobilize people, and in so doing it is silencing (to borrow from Trouillot — Silencing the Past) narratives that hinder such mobilization — aspects of differentiation, class, gender, color, age, etc., that might fragment the “community” from within. As such, community can be turned into (or realize) its more reactionary form by its own success and the establishment of community institutions that entrench elements who then jealously guard their privileges (either from internal threats, or new external ones — i.e., newer immigrants); or it might realize this form through increased pressure from without and its lack of “success” to gain power (one of the things that I argued in my first book was that increased segregation of African American communities led to increased fragmentation and inability to unite in opposition to oppression — contra the Marxist assumption, I suppose). So in terms of a synchronic scheme the division in your definition works, but as soon as movement occurs both elements of community are always present — making it such a hot potato politically.2) Related to this, your passive/active dichotomy is something that I was wondering about. I think this dichotomy serves an important purpose to get us beyond old sociological (Toennies — gemeinschaft and gesselschaft and all that) notions of community that place it in a modernization framework of community (passive and traditional) and society (active and modern). Clearly community is always more active than this old theory suggested, but I wonder if it is ever really passive. In other words, there are things that people did in the past, but are they really expressions of “community” and “culture” until they are no more, or are, in a way, threatened with extinction, at which point they become actively created and invented. Is this what Anderson is talking about in Imagined Communities? Again, this means that community is never simply a reflection of a historical reality (though this will be the claim), but is instead a political intervention made for other purposes. It either becomes the reactionary claim keeping certain people in line (e.g., immigrants to the United States who frequently repressed advances for women in their communities because such things would threaten the ethnic group and would be mark it as potentially dysfunctional), or it becomes an argument for blaming the victim for claiming that the reason that others have failed to adapt/assimilate, etc. is because of the nature of their community (i.e., that it is dysfunctional and attempting now to help it would be “throwing money at the problem”).3) I loved your description of the community organizations of the 1980s and it reminded me of the impact of money that was put into American cities in the 1960s (the Great Society) and the impact it had on inner city African American communities. What such community organizations tended to do — better funded as they were with better resources than other local, community groupings — was move people out of their churches and other such places into the community/recreational centers. This was fine until all the money ran out (Vietnam war/OPEC) and the communities were left with neither the rec centers nor their own organizations, at which point others could then say that the problem with them was that they were weak communities (dysfunctional) and so should be written off — thus the Great Society ironically ended up weakening the position of many. Which reminds me — I hope you have been watching The Wire — definitely the best show ever produced on American tv.
Rob Gregg (Dean of Arts and Humanities) Richard Stockton College, New Jersey
In reply to the community Confusions discussion paper:
Actually, a lot of the issues you raised are ones that have concerned me over the years — particularly in my earlier guise as an African-Americanist (both in my book on African American migration and my on-line book about migration more generally). Two things occur to me, off the top of my head — I believe there are a lot of other things in there (just thought of a third).1) There’s a degree to which I wonder whether the notion of community can ever be simply the positive attributes as opposed to the negative ones — i.e. Radical rather than reactionary. As a force for change for bringing people on the outs into power, or of increasing the power they might have, then it surely takes on a more progressive aspect. But, while it is doing this, it is nonetheless also (simultaenously) manifesting the reactionary part in its very definition. It is creating “fictions” about the community and inventing histories of its nature in order to mobilize people, and in so doing it is silencing (to borrow from Trouillot — Silencing the Past) narratives that hinder such mobilization — aspects of differentiation, class, gender, color, age, etc., that might fragment the “community” from within. As such, community can be turned into (or realize) its more reactionary form by its own success and the establishment of community institutions that entrench elements who then jealously guard their privileges (either from internal threats, or new external ones — i.e., newer immigrants); or it might realize this form through increased pressure from without and its lack of “success” to gain power (one of the things that I argued in my first book was that increased segregation of African American communities led to increased fragmentation and inability to unite in opposition to oppression — contra the Marxist assumption, I suppose). So in terms of a synchronic scheme the division in your definition works, but as soon as movement occurs both elements of community are always present — making it such a hot potato politically.2) Related to this, your passive/active dichotomy is something that I was wondering about. I think this dichotomy serves an important purpose to get us beyond old sociological (Toennies — gemeinschaft and gesselschaft and all that) notions of community that place it in a modernization framework of community (passive and traditional) and society (active and modern). Clearly community is always more active than this old theory suggested, but I wonder if it is ever really passive. In other words, there are things that people did in the past, but are they really expressions of “community” and “culture” until they are no more, or are, in a way, threatened with extinction, at which point they become actively created and invented. Is this what Anderson is talking about in Imagined Communities? Again, this means that community is never simply a reflection of a historical reality (though this will be the claim), but is instead a political intervention made for other purposes. It either becomes the reactionary claim keeping certain people in line (e.g., immigrants to the United States who frequently repressed advances for women in their communities because such things would threaten the ethnic group and would be mark it as potentially dysfunctional), or it becomes an argument for blaming the victim for claiming that the reason that others have failed to adapt/assimilate, etc. is because of the nature of their community (i.e., that it is dysfunctional and attempting now to help it would be “throwing money at the problem”).3) I loved your description of the community organizations of the 1980s and it reminded me of the impact of money that was put into American cities in the 1960s (the Great Society) and the impact it had on inner city African American communities. What such community organizations tended to do — better funded as they were with better resources than other local, community groupings — was move people out of their churches and other such places into the community/recreational centers. This was fine until all the money ran out (Vietnam war/OPEC) and the communities were left with neither the rec centers nor their own organizations, at which point others could then say that the problem with them was that they were weak communities (dysfunctional) and so should be written off — thus the Great Society ironically ended up weakening the position of many. Which reminds me — I hope you have been watching The Wire — definitely the best show ever produced on American tv.
Rob Gregg (Dean of Arts and Humanities) Richard Stockton College, New Jersey
Monday, January 14, 2008
Even the Guardian agrees that community is a "mush" word
Peter Preston in todays Guardian 14/1/08 page 30:
"So, goodbye "community". You have been the political mush word of the last year, the word that turns political grit into benign vacuity. But too much community saps the spirit, and suddenly as 2008 gets a grip, other challengers finally burgeon".
Interestingly, the next article to the right "Scousers are the culture" on Liverpool's creativity also uses an interesting sense of the term community:
"A well-run capital of Culture could involve and reward the city's creative community in a project that would last way beyond the end of the year".
Though I am not sure what a creative community is I find myself less antagonistic to this use of the term community than many others. Firstly it implies a group of people actively developing ideas - and "instead of importing culture, creating it". Secondly it is not as simple as it usually is with the term community to find alternative ways of saying this without using the term. What do you think?
"So, goodbye "community". You have been the political mush word of the last year, the word that turns political grit into benign vacuity. But too much community saps the spirit, and suddenly as 2008 gets a grip, other challengers finally burgeon".
Interestingly, the next article to the right "Scousers are the culture" on Liverpool's creativity also uses an interesting sense of the term community:
"A well-run capital of Culture could involve and reward the city's creative community in a project that would last way beyond the end of the year".
Though I am not sure what a creative community is I find myself less antagonistic to this use of the term community than many others. Firstly it implies a group of people actively developing ideas - and "instead of importing culture, creating it". Secondly it is not as simple as it usually is with the term community to find alternative ways of saying this without using the term. What do you think?
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