Cultural Studies

Volume 8, Issue 1

Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway, Lawrence Grossberg, Janice Radway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134834990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

ARTICLES

COMMUNITIES, ENVIRONMENTS AND CULTURAL STUDIES

LAURIE ANNE WHITT AND JENNIFER DARYL SLACK

Introduction

It is difficult not to be pessimistic. About the environmental degradation of the planet, about the resurgence of the New Right and of the newly virulent racism of neofascism, and about the ability of cultural theorists to intervene effectively with respect to all of these. The tendency of Western societies to parse out humans as separate from and dominant over nature is a habit of thought and a pattern of action which buttresses the tendency to parse out certain humans as separate from and dominant over others. Similarly, capitalism's ready reduction of the natural world to exploitable resources for the growth of capital aids and abets a comparable reductivism with regard to human labour. Yet so well-entrenched are these buttressing effects that the nature and extent of their complicity has been overlooked by cultural theorists, whose critiques of the oppressive social formations of late capitalism are resoundingly silent about the relationship of human communities to the other-than-human world in which they are situated. This, despite the fact that the problematics of this relationship are manifestly in play at so many junctures of political and cultural struggle—from the imposition by the First World corporations of technology and development plans fashioned in their own interests on Third World peoples to their dumping of assorted toxic wastes on the lands and among the indigenous communities of the Fourth World.

Some ‘pessimism of the intellect’ is all the more in order given that cultural studies itself seems increasingly caught up in the pursuit of academic stature, in bending its applicability to increasingly rarefied exchanges of ‘high (postmodern) theory’ and away from generative strategies for intervention. Yet, just as Gramsci's revolutionary is also afflicted with an ‘optimism of the will’, so too there seems to be little option for cultural theorists. We have to proceed with a belief that there are significant ways in which we can intervene, with the conviction that critiques of contemporary cultural and social practices can be so formulated as to issue in effective change, in the transformation of existing structures of power. Though we may tangle with the thickets of theory, we can avoid immiring ourselves in them. We can avoid losing sight of the issues which motivate our project, and without which cultural studies would remain more/mere academic exercise.

In earlier work (Slack and Whitt, 1992), we contended that it is necessary for cultural studies to resist anthropocentrism, and to consider as integral to its normative concerns the other than human. We also suggested a direction for conceptualizing relationships between the human and the other than human: as ‘multiple articulations of community’ (587). In this paper, we explore in more depth the concept of community, intent on illustrating how, by contextualizing communities, by working in terms of multiple articulations of community based on notions of solidarity and significance, and by situating communities in their material contexts, there is some promise of eventually cutting through theory and making our way to basic strategies for action.

Why community?

If the concept of community evokes nothing else, it evokes images of connection. It is our contention that what needs re-examination—both within cultural studies and for use by cultural studies—are the kinds of connection through which we understand the relations between the human and the other-than-human world. By contextualizing communities, by probing the manner and significance of their situatedness in the material world (whether the immediate landscape be ‘natural’ or ‘urban’), we hope to demonstrate how the other than human is a vital player in the construction of community. Geographical and ecological features of community are rarely incidental to political and cultural struggle: they contextualize—enable and constrain—relations of power.

To date, cultural studies has assumed a curious posture with respect to the concept of community. It tends to enjoy a somewhat subterranean existence in the research of cultural theorists. Neither wholly present nor wholly absent, ‘community’ has seldom been far from the surface as an object of inquiry or as a theoretical construct in terms of which we analyze and critique cultural, social and political formations. When treated explicitly as an object of inquiry (as in Raymond Williams's discussions of ‘community of process’ and ‘community of selected emphasis and intention’ (Williams, 1965; 1975), in Janice Radway's ‘interpretive communities’ (Radway, 1985), or in the analysis of a particular community such as the ‘New Age community’ (Ross, 1992)), community is typically taken to refer to the existence of groups that produce—and processes of producing—common meanings, images, patterns, rhythms and modes of organization (Williams, 1965:47). But such direct mention of the term is rare. More commonly, cultural theorists have taken as their objects of study groups and group processes—defined, for example, by state, nation, society, gender, race, class, ethnicity or subculture—without explicitly invoking or exploring the concept of community.

The discourse of community (as an explicit object of analysis) has traditionally been the purview of political science, sociology, history, philosophy and ecology. Not only is there a rich history of the term within these disciplines, but there is currently a resurgence of interest in community (e.g., Fowler, 1991). Such resurgence is due in part to a growing recognition of the ability of the term to rally the intellectual (both popular and academic) imagination and to infuse practice. As Robert Booth Fowler has put it:

This journey in search of community is now too popular and too central to an understanding of contemporary political thinking in the United States for us to ignore the opportunity to study and learn from this powerful impulse. (Fowler, 1991:ix)

But it is also partly a proactive and reactive response to the fragmentation, atomization and displacement that riddles contemporary Western societies. In the compelling words of Hannah Arendt:

What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. (Quoted in Sandel, 1984:17)¹

To engage these disciplinary discourses on community directly would draw cultural studies into the problematics of community as set by those disciplines. We wish to avoid this even while acknowledging and drawing from more traditional disciplinary approaches to community, and to address instead the concerns of community as they are posed from within the commitments of cultural studies. The literature on community is extremely fertile, and cultural studies will want to reap from such disciplinary discussions what is of value to its own unique project.

It might be tempting to try to present a taxonomy of conceptions of community. But that is not possible without obliterating the range of intentions, taxonomic criteria, and levels of analysis that have been brought to bear on the matter of community. As Fowler contends:

No set of categories can capture the current range of conceptions of community which are part of a large and expanding conversation. The idea of community is now too alluring to be contained any longer within a discrete group of intellectual discussions. (1991:39)

While it is not the project of this paper, there is clearly some interesting work to be done by cultural theorists on the relations of power expressed within the various taxonomies of community.

Having noted these caveats, it must also be stressed that cultural studies has much to gain from a close scrutiny of the concept of community. We contend that the research strategies of cultural theorists would be enhanced in at least three important respects by more direct consideration of the concept of community and the role—implicit or explicit—that it has played thus far in cultural studies, as well as of the valuable resources that it supplies for current and future work in the field.

The first of these is that by identifying communities as vital sites of resistance to which cultural studies must attend, a valuable middle level of theoretical analysis may be opened up. Research by cultural theorists has tended to emphasize one or the other of two rather divergent problem contexts. On the one hand there have been efforts to examine and critique practices of subject formation, a focus which has generated—in Martin Allor's (1989) terms—questions regarding ‘the ways in which the individual is inserted into social positions.’ Such microlevel concerns may be contrasted to theorizing at the macrolevel addressed primarily to the forces operative in social, political and economic formations.² Culture itself, according to Allor, has ‘come to designate a problematic of mediation which attempts to link…practices of subject formation and the analysis of power or hegemony in the social formation’ (1). If Allor is correct in this casting of culture in the middle or mediating ground between the processes of subject formation and those of social formation, then a strong case can be made for more explicit theorization of the concept of community within cultural studies.

Indeed, it may well be that we cannot fully understand culture without carefully attending to community since the latter seems so clearly to occupy just this middle ground. The processes of subject formation cannot be fully understood without reference to the context in which they occur—typically, communities—and to the ways in which communities shape, and reciprocally are shaped by, the individuals who inhabit, and conduct their lives within them.³ Nor can we have a rich grasp of the effectivity of forces operative in the larger social formation without considering how they are mediated by communities. It is typically within and through communities that individuals experience and resist the oppressive forces which intrude on their lives. Moreover, we need to consider the not unlikely prospect that communities are themselves generative of unique and distinctive forces not reducible to those operative in the larger social formation, forces which may serve to buffer and/or exacerbate existing relations of power and dominance. Finally, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, it seems promising to explore the idea that communities can be regarded as complexly constructed unities, in which differing principles of articulation (e.g., along the lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender) can be drawn together to analyze and critique differing configurations of community forces and differing types of both community development and subject formation (1986:12).

There is a second compelling reason for cultural theorists to consider attempting a more explicit and thorough theorization of community. Since community (unlike, say, social formation) is a term that exerts so much power in popular discourse, we would do well to better understand it. Given that people often understand their own social locations in terms of the presence or absence of community, it makes sense to work with the term rather than to try to excise it from popular discourse and replace it with another. It seems a far more promising project to reflect critically on the nature of community, to appreciate the value and danger of appeals to it, to describe and critique existing communities, and to rearticulate a conception of community—both theoretically and popularly—that seems worthy of allegiance. As Dick Hebdige, working the terrain between postmodernism and cultural studies, has suggested, we need ways to identify and talk about ‘larger collective interests,…the belief in the capacity of human beings to empathise with each other, to reconcile opposing viewpoints, to seek the fight-free integration of conflicting interest groups…[and] the cultivation of consensus’ (1986:92). Attention to community can be a response to that need.

Moreover, the concept of community is uniquely suited to the project in which cultural studies is engaged. That project is at once normative and descriptive, committing us to the empirical description and explanation of cultural and social practices as well as to an interventionist strategy which aims to transform oppressive power relations. Similarly, appeals to community—whether they occur at the level of popular discourse, of social policy, or of theory—have typically assumed a simultaneously normative/descriptive character, serving not only to describe and structure our social, cultural and political experience, but also as a means of critiquing and legitimating a wide range of policies and practices (Plant, 1978; Minar and Greer, 1969).⁴ While the normative aspect of such appeals has not received the attention it deserves, it has not gone unnoticed by cultural theorists. Raymond Williams, for example, has noted that

Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term. (1976:66)

Finally, it may only be by re-examining the concept of community in light of the distinctive commitments of cultural studies that we will be able to address effectively what is manifestly a site where intervention is needed, is demanded and is actively taking place—the natural world. Communities are embodied; they are materially embedded in specific physical environments. We need, in our analyses and strategies for action, to contextualize community. Without some consideration of how material, geographical and ecological conditions and interdependencies are partly constitutive of community, of how they figure in and configure relations of power, cultural theorists will have little to contribute—by way of substantive interventionist proposals—to political struggle in the next millennium.

The particular conception of community for which we argue is one that encourages us to think about and theorize the reasons and practices that bring human communities and the other-than-human world together in relations of solidarity and significance. This effort to articulate a non-anthropocentric conception of community represents a marked departure from previous conceptions, which, however divergent, have for the most part assumed without argument the viability of anthropocentricism.⁵

A notable feature of the discussion that follows is our commitment to a view of community, not as a ‘unity of sameness’, but as a ‘unity in difference’, one characterized by what Iris Marion Young (1990) has referred to as an ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’. Fred Dallmayr has argued that such an openness involves the cultivation of diversity:

Community may be the only form of social aggregation which reflects upon, and makes room for, otherness or the reverse side of subjectivity (and inter-subjectivity) and thus for the play of difference—the difference between ego and Other and between man [sic] and nature. (1984:142–3)

We should perhaps emphasize what we do not take ourselves to be offering here. We are not proferring a definition of community that is exhaustive. Nor is it our primary concern to map conclusive limits for some definitive ‘ideal’ of community, the kind of positively valorized conception of which Williams took note. These would be ambitious but largely academic exercises which would leave us estranged from the project of formulating strategies for action. We are engaging in a critique of some typical features of the concepts of community that already exist and are currently operative in real cultural and political struggles. The conceptual critique we offer is informed by the normative commitments of cultural studies and singles out several salient issues (unity and difference, solidarity and significance, and the material context of community) where those commitments are in play. The intent is to fashion an enriched and politically activated conceptualization of community that provides both a way of recognizing the effectivities of various commitments to communit...