The Common Growl

Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community

Thomas Claviez

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823270927, 9780823270910
• eBook ISBN: 9780823270934
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

No longer able to read community in terms colored by a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity, closeness and sameness, or the myth of rational choice, we nevertheless face an imperative to think the common. The prominent scholars assembled here come together to articulate community while thinking seriously about the tropes, myths, narratives, metaphors, conceits, and shared cultural texts on which any such articulation depends. The result is a major contribution to literary theory, postcolonialism, philosophy, political theory, and sociology.

The Poetics of Community

COMMUNITY AND ETHNOS

ROBERT J. C. YOUNG

What is a community? If we found one would we know it? Would we want to be a part of it? How would we know it if we were? How, in fact, do you know if you’re in a community—or if you are, do you always feel fully a part of it? Does a community emerge from shared work, personal contact, friendship, or can you be part of a community without even knowing the people in it? How do we even know if we are a member of a single community or of several interrelated or even distinct ones?

What if, on the other hand, we considered community not from the point of view of the individual as something to which we might equivocally belong, but from the perspective of the community itself, as a subject: “the community”? Instead of uncertainty, things immediately begin to look more definite and restrictive. Communities, it is argued, become closed, with an innate tendency to wish for an undivided social identity—what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “immanentism.”1 If so, this makes the relation of the individual to the community even more problematic than before, though for antithetical reasons: Whereas before you felt uncertain as to whether you were fully a part of it, now the community wants you to belong too much. Moreover, once the community is figured as a subject in its own right in this way, it runs in imminent danger of being metaphorized beyond itself. In recent decades the focus of discussions of community has always, implicitly or explicitly, assumed a relation of community to nation. Philosophers have tended to presuppose the identification between the two that politicians have been keen to promote, so much so that much of the interrogation of community amounts to a covert philosophical analysis of the forms of nationalism and its dangers. In their drive for modes of being-together, it is suggested, the danger of communities is that they are inherently totalitarian.

In response to this, the line of philosophical inquiry that begins with Georges Bataille and develops through Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben, has involved an attempt to redefine community against its tendency toward totalization.2 This interest in redefining community is derived from the apparent relation of community to communism, in which historically, as they see it, community writ large became totalitarian. The descent of communism into totalitarianism means, in this view, that community itself will always be potentially tainted. Articulated through Bataille’s notion of sovereignty, philosophers have tried to redefine the form of community in order to create a non-coercive model. Instead of trying to find new ways in which people create communities based on the traditional model of a set of shared features as a group, they have offered a possibility of community constructed on the idea of the singular plural, that is, of individuals who remain singular individuals but in a relation to a community which has no boundaries or lines of exclusion.3 The question that follows is what relation such singularities may have to each other in a philosophical context in which totalities and essences, and the politics of identity formation founded on sameness and an excluded other, have been disallowed. How do you conceive of a community that is not based on identity, Agamben asks, not based on being something—being French or Muslim or gay—but on being in common, via the notion of the singular plural?4 How do you theorize a community without closure, without othering, a community which allows the singularity and difference of each of its members? How, in other words, can you reconcile community and difference, a “community without unity,” as Nancy puts it?5 A community of affiliations without collectivity or a sense of belonging is of course an entirely paradoxical idea, which is why philosophers have defined it negatively, particularly through Nancy’s term désoeuvrement—strictly untranslatable in English, but suggesting the very opposite of a quality that we associate with community, which arguably provides the foundation of community from a conventional view, namely that it is something that works, a working together. Désoeuvrement’s inoperativity is what makes any community, in Agamben’s formulation, always a community to come—like democracy, it is always in the process of being constructed for the future but not yet in the now. So Agamben reformulates community away from the vertical synchrony of metaphor, from sharing and substitutability, to the horizontal prospectiveness of metonymy, of clinamen, a relation of leaning or contiguity and therefore also of contingency, a narrative always in process or an unfinished becoming. This community that is structured temporally rather than spatially, without a sense of belonging or identity, indeed without any shared features at all beyond the conjunction of the moment, as in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, becomes a “community without community” as Nancy famously puts it.

What, in practice, could such a community be? The community without community, I want to argue, is less of a paradox than the historic form that many communities have taken. While philosophers have tended to consider community in antithetical terms—that is, either top down, from the total community to the individual person whom it seems to subsume, or from the individual’s relation to the totality which threatens her singularity—other theorists and novelists typically work differently, never conceptualizing the community as a subject in its own right, but rather showing how in practice community can never be totalizable, or indeed community itself was never achieved so as to become more than the sum of its parts. From this perspective, the immanent power of community becomes more conflictual, riven, and “disworkly.”

The idea of the intrinsic unachievability of community can already be found in Freud’s essay known in English as Civilization and Its Discontents (1931). A more accurate translation of its original title, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, would be Unpleasure in Culture, with the word unpleasure suggesting the uneasiness that the individual feels within his or her own culture or community. The acquisition of a common culture, Freud argues, is achieved through the denial, suppression, renunciation, or repression of the instincts in the individual. The result is good for the community, while by contrast the acquisition of communal norms is always unpleasurable for the individual. This is why communities can never be homogeneous, as even the East German state discovered despite its best efforts. The rather different malaise of contemporary culture or civilization in his own day, Freud argues, comes from too successful a history of sublimation. The paradox is that the more successful sublimation is, the more ambivalent individuals feel about it and the more inclined they are to reject it. In other words, the development of culture produces an increasing tension or dissensus between the community and the individual. For Freud, therefore, becoming adult, becoming part of a community, is something about which at best we can only feel ambivalent. The community’s gains are also the losses of its individual members. It is arguable that recent theories of community have been nothing so much as attempts to theorize the basis of this ambivalence as an intrinsic part of community itself. What Freud suggests is that the culture or the community will never succeed in being holistic, because the more it becomes so, the more uneasy its members will feel. The community has its own resistance to itself built in, and this is the reason for its typical heterogeneity: Communities act out a conflictual poetics of dissent, and only exist performatively in that process. The real problem comes when a certain holistic idea of the community, which is how it is imagined that communities should be, is extended to the idea of the nation.

What this suggests is that Nancy, Blanchot, and Agamben’s radical attempt to rethink the community backward, without the elements which had previously been regarded as foundational to it, is somewhat skewed by their project to undo the history of totalitarian communism, in the broader context of a perceived failure of secular humanism.6 If we take the link to the historical practice of communism away from the concept, it is an open question whether community suffers from the holistic paradigm from which Nancy et al. seek to release it. Communities are not imprisoned, their borders are open—even in certain respects the prison itself (like any institution, or community, it is made up of a constantly changing set of people). The widespread use of the term “community” to describe the nation has had the unfortunate effect of distorting the community into the image of the nation, with all the attendant disadvantages of nationalism and totalitarianism. Nancy suggests as much himself when he discusses the seemingly endemic link between community and nostalgia. Just as nationalism is often the long-distance creation of diaspora figures, the idea of community, national or otherwise, is often the creation of those who have moved beyond it, and it is they who nostalgically create the sense of its bounded edenic harmony. The nostalgia is misconceived: community, Nancy himself suggests, is always lost; it is always marked by lack and evanescence, change and disappearance, disruption and strife. Why, though, has it been felt that community is so vulnerable to totalitarian pressures? Historically it is easy to see why, from Bataille onward, French writing on community in particular has been the product of the identification of community with communism and its attempt to enforce the idea of the nation as a homogeneous entity. In the 21st century, however, the correlation may seem less compelling than it used to appear.

The identification of nation with community originates with Joseph Stalin’s 1913 essay on “Marxism and the National Question.” Here Stalin begins with customary directness by asking the question “What is a nation?” Since as a progressive Marxist he eschews any traditional identification of nation with race, Stalin chooses a definition most compatible with communism: “A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people.”7 However, Stalin is taking here what is strictly a non-Marxist position, since for Marx a “real community” can only be achieved with the withering of the state after the achievement of communism. Anything before that, he calls “illusory community.”8 Although Stalin does not mention the illusion, for him the community of a nation is nevertheless certainly designed to be a stage that will in time be transcended by a federation of workers of all nationalities. For now, the nation is defined as a community that possesses a common language, territory, economic life, and “psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.”9 Claims to nationhood are then assessed according to whether the claimant can fulfill these criteria: So the Jews cannot be a nation because they have no territory or common language; small linguistic groups in the Caucasus cannot be nations because they have no literature. It becomes clear that community is not in itself an attribute of a nation, and never offered as a test as such; rather, a nation has to possess one or more common attributes. Nevertheless, the Stalinist identification of nation with community remains unchallenged. In 1983 it was notably endorsed and made more substantial by Benedict Anderson, whose Imagined Communit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: The Common Growl
• Half Title
• Introduction: Toward a Poetics of Community
• The Poetics of Community
• The Politics of Aesthetics
• Sociological Reflections
• Acknowledgments
• Works Cited
• List of Contributors
• Index of Names
• Subject Index
• Series Page