Conceptualising Community: Beyond State and Individual

Conceptualising Community Beyond the State and Individual

David Studdert

Conceptualising Community

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Conceptualising Community Beyond the State and Individual David Studdert

© David Studdert 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4636–2 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4636–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Studdert, David, 1954– Conceptualising community : Beyond the state and individual / David Studdert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4636–1 1. Community life. 2. Community development. 3. Community organization. 4. Social groups. I. Title: Conceptualizing community. II. Title. HM761.S78 2005 302⬘.01—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2005051273

To Valerie and Couze without whose support, interest and love this book would not have happened

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Contents Introduction

1

Part I Conceiving Community and Sociality 1 The Social Science Approach to Sociality and Community

9

2 Social Capital and New Forms of Trust

31

3 The Third Way and Communitarians

46

4 Foucault and Cultural Discourses

66

Part II Current Conceptions – Problems with Method 5 The Individual/State Axis

87

6 Mechanistic Theory and the Social

114

Part III New Conceptions – Community through Sociality 7 Arendt: Sociality and Community on its Own Terms

135

8 Community through Sociality

158

Conclusion: Looking Forward

186

Notes

194

References

202

Index

217

vii

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Introduction

I’m sitting here at my desk in Paris trying to account for all the communities I believe I belong to. First, the ones I belong to by birth – as an Australian from Sydney. These two communities are joined together by location, knowledge of location, language and all the implicit understandings that go with that. These ‘knowledges’ are part of my being-ness, the sediment if you like of thirty years in both that city and that country. If I was to fly there tomorrow I could get into a cab and immediately have a conversation establishing me as a member of that community. Furthermore by getting in the front seat I would immediately make a statement about myself as a Sydneysider and an Australian. Crucially this would be the case even if I was totally ‘faking’ it, that is if I was not a Sydneysider all, but simply someone with a well rehearsed ‘act’. Then there is the community of Paris the city where I live. Here I am learning the nuances and implicit judgements which constitute the sort of knowledge I take for granted in Sydney. I walk my neighbourhood, people shake my hand, say hallo, we have clumsy but friendly conversations about football and the weather and in general they accept me. Of course this is all very superficial, nonetheless it does represent a form of reassurance both for myself and the people I interact with. Then there are the more narrow communities – as a musician for instance, as an expat, as an inhabitant of this block of flats, as a longtime fan of Chelsea football club and many more; there are literally dozens. What is important is that they all give me some degree of shared commonality. I’m sure that each of you can similarly account for communities that you belong to, as I have done. However as you read this book you will discover, perhaps with some surprise, that this ‘common sense’ idea of 1

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Conceptualising Community

community is not the one the social sciences and sociologists entertain. In fact you may discover that their idea of what a community is bears little or no resemblance to it. There are very specific historical and methodological reasons for this discrepancy; reasons that I discuss in due course. For the moment, to distinguish the two, I refer to the social science version of community as the ‘Cartesian’ community. However before we begin examining the reasons for this discrepancy, I would like to think a little longer about the common sense view of community and to specifically think about the characteristics of the community it pictures. For there are several points which we can discern here which can help us in the task of unravelling the social science community. And the first of these is that the communities I belong to are multiple and this communal multiplicity is not something that I have control over. Rather it is created in the act of sociality, in the social being-ness that I inhabit and was born into. So, to give a simple instance, if I go to an expat soiree in Paris – of which there are a continual stream – I will not simply take my Sydney communal being-ness into that encounter, but all my other communities as well. Some of which may be very foreign to the other Sydneysiders, the other Australians present. And this will happen regardless of any consciousness on my part or theirs. Likewise if I am a Chelsea football fan with a particular history, say as a ‘Chelsea head-hunter’ from the 70s and 80s, I will implicitly take that history that being-ness into my interactions with all my other communities, even other Chelsea fans and this will happen once again whether the other people involved know about it or not. So the first thing to say is that we all belong to multiple, over-lapping communities. Second, and staying with the expat example – any community that emerges from these expat interactions will be a constructed as a hybrid outcome of all our previous socialities and histories. And once again this occurs whether I want it to or not. So multiplicity and hybridity are both ongoing processes, both present in every community and both contained in the action of sociality as it constructs and re-constructs our communal being-ness. For community is never a fixed state, rightly it should be considered a verb not a noun, and it is always the outcome of sociality as an action – be that action or speech – and it is therefore impossible to perform without the presence of other people. As such the intersections of our multiple histories occur in a space which we can never entirely control. And because it is an outcome of a series of actions community is never an abstraction like ‘history’ or ‘mankind’. Without action and sociality,

Introduction 3

community cannot exist – it has no ‘laws’ or buildings as the state does, it relies on action and speech. So when I sit at my desk and think about community, I am not actually a member of a community. I am only a member of a community when I am engaging in social action – sociality. For community is not something I can decide entirely on my own. I can, it is true, quit at least some communities though not all, but my membership of a community depends on something beyond myself – it depends on others recognising and allowing me – just as I recognise and allow them. Now these four elements which I have briefly described as being characteristic of the common sense community need to be borne in mind through the course of this book, because it from this perspective that the analysis of what I term the Cartesian community, the social science version of community, will precede. Therefore, the elements which I claim are inherent in every communality and act of sociality and they include: ● ● ● ●

●

Multiplicity. Hybridity. Action, not thought as creative of community. Communality as something constructed by some form of conscious or unconscious agreement. Community as something more than the individual.

Now as I’ve said this common sense approach does not correspond to the Cartesian community ordained and supported by the social sciences. Yet this disparity between academic elaborations of community and the common sense view of communal life is not something new. As we shall see Modernism in both its academic and political forms has always viewed community with apprehension and ambiguity. Academically the reasons for this are clear, not only is the social science view of community structured around perspectives inherited from modernism, it is also articulated within the discursive regime of modernism and within this discursive regime all social relationships including community, are subservient to the privileged relationship of the state/ individual axis. This privileging leads to a secondary and derivative status being attached to community. As such, much of the academic debate is not in fact concerned with community or social being-ness at all, but exists rather to sustain this foundational privileging. For this reason among others, this book argues that the social sciences have never satisfactorily engaged with the conjoined actions, speech

4

Conceptualising Community

and imaginations of the social world itself. As a result I hope to show that the entire debate about community – a debate which in recent decades has been quite vociferous – represents a prolonged series of successive sedimentations built upon a small number of profound and comprehensive ‘untruths’. Thus, while the academic community generates a vast array of books ostensibly about community, the language of the social sciences, like political language itself, seems lifeless, irrelevant and outmoded; the communities they speak of seem enfeebled, still born, hardly worth fighting for, bearing little resemblance to the communal life taking place – albeit in a reduced form – outside, in our truncated social world or indeed within the television fantasies that promise an old fashioned community some where, someplace. Now of course this contemporary landscape needs to be set against the backdrop of the last two hundred years, a period where the idea of community as something equal to or different from the state has slowly disappeared from our thought. For what is certainly true is that over this period, as the state has appropriated control of public space and increasingly marshalled our lives, we have come gradually to invest our diminishing communal aspirations in the state as the forum for achieving these aspirations. As a result, our vision of ourselves as social beings and public people, as people grounded in something other than the state, has faded from our view. Yet, lacking any sense of an independent communal life and any matching sense of the importance of our own sociality, in short a unity of the inside and outside, we have no means left to judge the state or its servants. Disillusioned we have come increasingly to confine our emotions, our human and social being-ness to our private lives, to our friends, to the apparent honesty and integrity of our own psyches. As a result the private prism of our own personalities, our own fragmented concerns and our own subjective ‘truths’, has become everything, for it is all we have left to judge anything. As Arendt said in 1958, without an agreed public reality there is only perspectivism, and a fragmented, individualized reality. Now in 2005 our public life at every level is increasingly distinguished by an alienating, empty, legalised formality, while our sociality is contained within the narrow, fragmented dictates of our own desires and the contrived sociality of the market and consumer choice. Relationships of any sort are increasingly mediated, defined and expressed solely through the instrumental reasoning of rewards and personal satisfactions. As a result our relations with others, especially strangers, have become defined by fear and anxiety. Raucous laughter at night makes us uneasy, for even our

Introduction 5

most immediate world has become an unknown place, and while crime in most categories remains stable or declines, fear of crime escalates in a never-ending spiral. In part this desire to reconcile the inside and the outside is what has prompted this book. For without any method for understanding ourselves as social beings, our ability to change the public world is also diminished, and increasingly the world ‘out there’ appears as an object beyond our ability or even imagination, to challenge, change or engage with in any meaningful or positive manner. In relation to community then, this work attempts to redress what Latour (1993, p. 5) calls the dysfunction between the way our knowledge is understood and the issues currently pressing upon us – primary among which is the nature of our communal being-ness. Furthermore this dysfunction is ours as much as the academies, for while the academy has surrendered any interest in describing the world to those who inhabit it, we have lost the eyes to recognise what we need and the tongue to ask for it. For all these reasons this book attempts to engage with the idea of community as the ongoing part of ourselves which we have relinquished. As far as organisation goes, Part I is devoted to an exegesis of current and historical work on community. This is clearly necessary to provide the basis for the sustained methodological criticism which comprises Part II. Part III utilises the work of Hannah Arendt to develop a post-mechanistic and post-essentialist approach to community. I apologise in advance if the argument presented here seems on occasions to wander from the topic of community. In my defence I can only say that community as a concept is so ephemeral and yet so pervasive that it touches and incorporates many, many issues. This is particularly true when one is trying – within word limits – to propose and simultaneously justify, a root and branch alteration to how community is theoretically configured. Thus, there are undoubtedly, though not consciously, omissions and incomplete explanations of conflicting positions, whether these disqualify the work is something for others to judge.

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Part I Conceiving Community and Sociality

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1 The Social Science Approach to Sociality and Community

There is no sociological consensus therefore to the meaning, experiential content and behavioural consequences of the primary condition of ‘being with others’. The ways in which that condition can be made sociologically relevant are yet to be fully explored in sociological practice. (Bauman 2000, p. 63) Over the last two decades the theme of community has become salient with all manner of political actors. It is present in political discourse in terms like ‘community policing’, ‘community health’ and ‘community care’ and it runs through the speeches and programs of all major politicians1 and political parties. Concurrently the topic has also shifted to the forefront of social science investigation, particularly in the AngloSaxon world which has borne the full brunt of neo-liberalism. This renewed interest is directly traceable to widespread concerns over social cohesion and the degenerative effects on community of two decades of neo-liberalism and globalisation (Bauman 2001; Giddens 2001; Putnam et al. 1993, 2000; Rheingold 1994; Sullivan 1990). This notion of a crisis in social cohesion is based upon a number of specific factors including: a perceived decline in voluntary association (Hirst 1994; Putnam 2000), a growing cynicism towards political and social institutions (Putnam 2000), a pervasive disenchantment with institutional politics (Giddens 1998), a rise in socially damaging neoliberal individualism (Bauman 1996; Sennett 1998), the destruction of traditional industrial communities because of the success of globalisation (Rifkin 1995; Sullivan 1990), and a perceived decline in general normative codes and symbols in the wake of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s (Etzioni 1998) – all of which has been played out against the 9

10 Conceptualising Community

backdrop of the collapse of the long post-war economic boom, the political arrangements responsible for it and latterly, against the instability occasioned by the ending of the Cold War and the rise in terrorism. That social upheavals of this magnitude have produced a series of responses and counter responses goes without saying. Indeed the last forty years have seen successive intellectual and political re-alignments, counter responses and reconfigurations. Furthermore, it is clear that the problems inaugurated by these upheavals are still with us, and appear no closer to resolution. Of course the social sciences were also affected by these seismic economic, social and cultural upheavals: the death of modernism, the rise of first, cultural studies then post-structuralism, the turn to discourse – sociology has splintered into mutually exclusive camps where discursive theorists of one strand or another engage in one corner, while the tenured survivors of modernist sociology studiously ignore them, acting as if the rational individual, the Archimedean point and instrumental reason were still viable, functioning and naturalised building blocks, for whatever insights form the bedrock of their latest work. There are a number of reasons for this. Sociology was undoubtedly the quintessential modernist discipline. The founding fathers – Marx, Durkheim and Weber – were classically figures of high modernist thought, permeated with an overarching humanism, a faith in history, a grand narrative style and a tempered but constant faith in inevitable progress. As such one of the telling signs of sociologies’ current state is the declining influence of the ‘big three’ within the discipline. Marx of course, is totally absent, while Durkheim and Weber appear more often nowadays as ‘straw-men’ paraded for ritual ‘de-flocking’ or discursive credibility, rather than authority figures relevant to the ‘post-industrial’ world. In this regard the position of Foucault is revealing, for his work is highly contentious, with one side constantly championing and referencing him, while ‘traditionalists’ rarely mention him at all.2 What is it for? This is the question that increasingly haunts sociology. In the fifties and the sixties the endless battles between Marxist and Liberal sociologists did at least represent two distinct and dynamic world views linked to the outside world by ongoing wars of the liberation, viable communist parties, the anti-war movement and the Cold War itself. In contrast, contemporary deconstructionists continually assert an endless oppositional logic which forever begs the question why, to what purpose, while a humanist sociology half-heartedly

The Social Science Approach 11

maintains the veracity of liberal totems long discarded by the post-global society they purport to defend. Indeed it often appears as if sociologists like Giddens and Putnam, men of standing within the discipline, aim their work more at the audience of power than at any of their academic contemporaries.3 Yet for all this apparent splintering, sociologists, even of the modern hue, have more in common – certainly about community and sociality – than might appear at first glance. Much of the apparent difference amounts to what Arendt terms a simple reversal of value, where one absolute value opposes another, while the overarching theoretical framework remains unchanged (Arendt 1958, p. 17). It is precisely these foundational theoretical similarities that are highlighted by the debate over community and it is these similarities that I want to explore. For this current theoretical impasse is not an accident. Rather it is the logical outcome of the intellectual thought which has shaped western knowledge and its theoretical engagement with sociality and the world around us. In relation to community therefore, if we seriously desire to transcend this current impasse, we must engage root and branch with this legacy as a first step towards understanding and moving beyond it. Towards that end this chapter presents an account of the historical antecedents upon which the social sciences, and particularly sociology, have constructed themselves as ‘knowledges’, while the next three chapters provide an exegesis of the contemporary debates. Such an investigative preamble is central to the eventual argument that this book proposes.

Plato and the primacy of thought The continual relevance of Plato within the western tradition relates to the primacy he ascribes to thought (contemplation) over the affairs of men. Given that sociality and communal activity is founded upon action and speech as action, this ascribed primacy functions as one barrier to any understanding of community as being-ness. It is this that I want to briefly examine. In his famous cave analogy Plato established a potent dichotomous polarity between the world of human-beings and the refined eternal beauty of contemplated thought. In this contrast, thought is seen as eternal unchangeable pure and perfect, while the shadows that delude and confuse us are precisely the actions of sociality: the affairs and interests of worldly men.

12 Conceptualising Community

In Plato’s hierarchy – and it is a hierarchy – ordinary people, preoccupied by their day to day interests and sociality, are dazzled and blinded by the sunlight of eternal essences, the sunlight of ‘eternal truth’. In this Platonic sense, human existence is the cave, the underground, in which most men are trapped (p. 292). Thus for Plato, truth exists outside the world of human affairs, outside the plurality and lives of ordinary people, and here we can see clearly the source of the primacy ascribed by the western intellectual tradition – our tradition – to the singularity of ideal truth over the plurality of human affairs, with its multiple perspectives and its relative truths. This separation of the ideal and the day-to-day is given further weight by Plato’s distinction of knowledge and opinion. According to Plato man must distinguish one from the other ‘so as to be able to “define in his discourse and distinguish and abstract from all other things the aspect and idea of the good” so as to be able to “gaze on that which sheds light on all … [and] use it as a pattern for the right ordering of the state and the citizens themselves” ’ (Angus 2000, p. 20). An ambition that lingers among sociologists and social scientists to this day. Plato therefore inaugurates the separation of thought from action, of knowledge from opinion and in the process inaugurates the by now commonplace western philosophical search for a calm, stable and eternal vantage point from which the activity of life can be perused, judged and commented upon. So, in place of the decay, ephemerality, plurality, noise and uncertainty of ordinary life, this tradition purports to offer us the calm vantage of eternal thought, the perfect shape and contemplation of ideal forms. Of course Plato’s eternal unchanging truth has been altered by the trace and shift of time, much in the manner of life itself. In his work, thought for instance is contemplation, a mystic exercise akin almost to Buddhism, however the modern scientific revolution starting in the sixteenth century, had little use for such mystical traditions, indeed their ‘revolution’ was aimed at precisely those legacies of Christian thought. To this end contemplation was replaced with thought, an altogether less passive, more restless activity (Arendt 1958, p. 293) and for our purpose, the first stage in this transition is the work of Descartes.

Descartes Descartes’ philosophical work springs from two roughly concurrent discoveries – first that the universe could be described by mathematical laws and second that, contrary to our sense perception, and indeed to

The Social Science Approach 13

the common sense view of centuries of philosophers, the earth circled the sun and not vice versa. These literally earth shattering discoveries changed forever western humanities idea of itself and Descartes’s reformulation of philosophy in the light of these discoveries place him at the starting point of modern western thought. Descartes quite correctly perceived that these two ideas called into question not only centuries of accepted ‘knowledge’, but also any simple linkage we believed we had to the world through our common sense(s). Thus his work, for all its pious religiosity, is a full rejection of the authority of all previous ancient and medieval philosophers. After all – and this was the question that Descartes so starkly posed – if we cannot even trust our visual perception which tells us that the sun moves while the earth stands still, then what exactly can we trust? Descartes’s work and his answers amount to a total rejection of the obviousness of our own senses as guides to any knowledge of the world and a retreat into the apparent security of our own subjectivity and thinking – ‘I think therefore I am’. The only guarantee that we exist asserts Descartes is rationality, our capacity literally to think in a certain way about ourselves. Since Descartes then, everything has become relative, and doubt as to who we are and what our place is, has become a ‘self-evident motor which has moved all thought’ (Arendt 1958, p. 274). Naturally some of these concepts have been bastardised, altered and simplified since. The deficiencies of the Cartesian unitary rational subject for instance are now commonly acknowledged (Henriques et al. 1984), indeed it has been the object of sustained interrogation over the last thirty years. What has been less commented on however is the impact of Cartesianism on our relation to the communal. For the most crucial thing about Descartes, at least from our perspective, is that he responds to the loss of metaphysical certainty by inaugurating a separation between our subjective, internal knowledge and the objective world. So, on one hand, there is the world out there, understandable only through objective universal laws: laws which crucially, exist beyond our common sense comprehension. Our senses, indeed our common sense, cannot prove these laws to us. In contrast, there is the world of personal subjectivity, a world which functions as the unique source of our beingness and the only ‘truth’ that we actually exist. The objective world becomes the province of scientific investigation while subjectivity

14 Conceptualising Community

becomes unique. It is not an exaggeration to say that this split forever changed the manner in which we see our being-ness in the world: the subjective and the objective worlds are forever separated and they can never be united for each is only accessible through mutually antagonistic methods. The result has been a reductionist propagation of subjectivity which Enrique Dussel terms ‘solipsistic subjectivity without community’ (Dussel 1998, p. 17). Now whether or not this is true for science is an issue beyond our ken, what is important is that these innovations in thought are adopted in regard to investigation into all facets of the world ‘out-there’, the world beyond our subjectivity, and this includes community. Of course in inaugurating this division Descartes not only supports the primacy inscribed to abstraction and idealism (and with it the historical demonization of sociality) endemic within the western tradition and clearly sourced in Plato (Arendt 1961, pp. 108–14; Villa 1996, p. 166), but he takes it a step further. For while this separation and privileging of abstraction over action has characterised all western thought before and since (Arendt 1961, pp. 108–9, 117 ff), it attains its apotheosis in the fragmented and mechanistic Cartesian world view characteristic of modernity (Villa 1996, p. 121). After Descartes the certainty human beings had about themselves was not to be found in their role as a social species, as communal beings all with equal access to the world around them, but rather in the lonely isolation of their own subjectivity. Therefore men and women are not human, because of their links, obligations, freedoms and existence within the social – a typical medieval formulation, but essentially, that is because of their own isolated rationality which has no exterior justification or reference point. This withdrawal of consciousness from the world is formalised theoretically by Descartes’s creation of the Archimedean point. While this totem has also been largely discredited, it none the less implicitly underlines many of these accounts of community. The notion that there is a stable point from which the whole can be observed, is of course a fantasy, albeit one which has exerted an enormous fascination for the western modern tradition, perhaps because it corresponds with that tradition’s secret fear of instability, mortality, chaos and change. Given that fear and doubt are powerful motivations for Descartes, it is hardly surprising that he sought a fixed point from which knowledge could be certain and unshakable, however, it does represent yet another retreat from commonality and from common sense as a shared, structuring device for our common being-ness. As Arendt observes, the Archimedean

The Social Science Approach 15

point removes from being-ness ‘the human condition of being an inhabitant of the planet’ (Arendt 1958, p. 242). Other implications of Cartesianism are more subtle but just as devastating. The reduction of life to process for instance is an inevitable outcome of the privileged position Descartes ascribes to mathematical reasoning and abstract laws. In total then, Descartes’s philosophical innovations effectively deprive us of the capacity to understand sociality and the common world as either created through action or as an organic unity, precisely because the Cartesian model represents nothing less than the withdrawal, some might say, expulsion of being-ness from the social. In this model sociality – the action of being social – has no value in itself. It is simply and always the manifestation of ‘higher’ that is abstract forces, be these forces history, economics, religion, the ‘protestant spirit’, psychology, rationality, the market, power – the list is endless. In short, sociality as action has been deprived of its uniqueness, reduced to a ‘norm’, a process, in which its value lies only in the result and in the capacity of action to imitate and describe abstract universal laws. From this perspective sociality is investigated exclusively for what it can tell us about something else, and the result of this ‘instrumental reasoning4 is a ‘dimmed down world’ in which action can never be allowed its individuality, but must always denote a product of thought. Thus, as Heidegger says we never meet anything truly new, truly strange, we only ever encounter things we are prepared for (i.e. have thought about) in advance.

Hobbes and the mechanistic method The retreat from commonality which Descartes inaugurates is applied to politics by his close contemporary, the British social philosopher and scientist Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes remains the most pervasive influence within modern social theory and the widespread survival and continued relevance of his work can best be illustrated by listing briefly the areas where his influence defines the parameters of what sociological thinking means, especially in relation to community. The initial point to note is that Hobbes is the first philosopher to begin with a normative idea of man (that is an essentialism of man)5 rather than a notion of what his duties are (King 1974, p. 163): ‘duties’ which of course refer to obligations of social interconnectedness. Not only does this continue the severing between human being-ness and the

16 Conceptualising Community

common world inaugurated with Descartes, but the creation of this artificial normative and ideal man (Boucher and Kelly 1994, p. 15) paves the way for the invention of citizenship, that isolated, ahistorical relationship which by passes the social as a source of identity and binds each person in their solitary individuality to the abstract machinery of the state. While this latter step took many centuries to construct, its origins clearly lie in the work of Hobbes. In conjunction with this, Hobbes also develops the idea that human beings become citizens by an active renunciation of all previous ties – ties of kinship, religion and community; ties in other words which lie outside, and are perhaps contrary, to those of the state. Thus, community as an independent, sustaining source of identity or referential social validation, is made impossible by the disappearance of the wider social world (Villa 1996, pp. 189,194) and the individual is forced to look into themselves for their identity and their values (Auge 1995, p. 92). The linkage is direct: Descartes’ idea of brushing away previously existing claims to ‘know’ (Venn 2000, p. 107) mirrors the artificial man which Hobbes creates and the later demand that Locke places upon the potential members of his new commonwealth (Locke 1988; 89 [1–5]). Clearly these demands are intended to frame the way in which human beings view their social environment. Indeed, Hobbes begins the process by which the social becomes subservient to the state and expresses itself politically, exclusively through state action. Once again this process takes many centuries to accomplish in a concrete form, theoretically however, after Hobbes the social becomes increasingly viewed through a universal and idealised terminology. A terminology in which the political aspects of sociality are increasingly channelled through the state, and the social itself is described in a universal political language6 derived from the interests of state power. In this language the state and the community are naturalised as inter-connected and mutual extensions of each other. Over the last four centuries the result has been that sociality as action has become heavily mediated precisely through the use of this terminology, while the possibilities of political action independent of the state have almost slipped from the realm of language itself (Dumont 1986, p. 84). Equally clearly this is precisely the intention of a philosopher who regards the social as essentially chaotic, ephemeral, ‘nasty brutish and short’ (In this regard see King’s discussion of Hobbes, King 1974, pp. 163–97). And here we touch another innovation of Hobbesian thought, for he is the first to personify the social as essentially conflictual

The Social Science Approach 17

(King 1947, p. 198) and thus to elevate conflict into a key determiner of all later social theory. Of course it could be argued that the state always sees the social as riven with conflict, that the state’s monism cannot but help see the plurality of the social as something to be repressed or at least contained and controlled, but perhaps here we are getting ahead of ourselves. What needs to be stated clearly at this juncture is that this privileging of conflict (Rosanvallon 1988, p. 211) is – as Hobbes clearly understood (King 1974, p. 197) – coterminous with a diminished role ascribed to co-operation. A situation which once again leans social science discussion of the social away from community, which is after all more about co-operation than conflict. Yet here we need to check ourselves again for a simple dichotomy of conflict and co-operation is an direct outcome of the Hobbesian privileging of conflict and his theoretical construction of politics and society as primarily a problem of order. What we should and can say here is that such a privileging of conflict does place the state at the focus of social science investigation, for it is the state which Hobbes offers as the forum and agent for the resolution of such conflict. Thus, by elevating conflict to a privileged position, he conjointly elevates the state as well. Finally, there is something else which needs to be noted in relation to Hobbes, something which has been probably his most pervasive legacy, for Hobbes inaugurates mechanistic theory as the method for investigating the social; a move which provides the very foundations for the social science claim to be a science at all, and which remains to this day, the basis of all social science methodology7 (King 1974 is very good on this pp. 163–97 from a liberal point of view). There is much more to be said about mechanistic methodology in due course. Plato, Descartes, Hobbes are the three conceptual founders of the Western academic tradition’s engagement with the social. Of course over intervening centuries their work has been augmented and subtly shifted by various interventions. Locke in his role as a ‘pen for hire’, further develops the notion of renunciation as the key to entering into the civilisation of the state, while elevating the household with its patriarchal hierarchy as the pre-eminent social formation. German idealism, principally in the form of Kant and Hegel, cements the idea of the state as not only different from community but also as the primary and highest form for the marshalling of sociality. Rousseau develops the notion of the ‘state of nature’ in which the individual pre-exists communal relations. Crucially however, these additions are developments not innovations, and they retain intact the privileged and foundational perspectives

18 Conceptualising Community

inaugurated by the trio of founding fathers: attitudes central to understanding contemporary social science articulations concerning sociality and community – all of which applies particularly to Hobbes and Descartes, for these two represent an attempt to formulate the philosophical basis for ‘the new artificial animal … termed the commonwealth or state’ as Hobbes puts it (Hobbes 1997). In this regard Hobbes is the first to utilise mechanical metaphors, particularly the workings of a clock, to describe the state and by implication the social over which it rules. Of course the one thing absent from this sleek new machine was anything concerning their contemporary socialities or their own contemporary communities. Indeed, existing communal socialities are the very thing Hobbes’ work consistently demonises and from Hobbes forward, community, with its entrenched and supposedly inflexible socialities and superstitions, becomes the other, the object to whatever social engineering project Hobbes and his heirs deem appropriate.

The liberal approach to community These then are the sources of the liberal notion of community and what they support and justify are the increasingly successful attacks which liberalism makes upon the notions of public rights and obligations central to the so-called organic medieval community. In place of the medieval public enunciation of rights and obligations, liberalism offers equality as the outcome of rational self-interest among (middle class) individuals. The individual’s social role and achievement depend upon energy, talent and individual hard work and all life-situations are entered into through social contract and voluntary agreement – all of which is in perfect harmony with emerging capitalism and the emerging notions of property, equality and representational democracy. Concurrently liberalism also establishes a division between ‘private, domestic life with its particularistic relationships and practices and public life with its abstract and universal laws and rules’ (Fraser 1999, p. 7): a division which of course reproduces the public division of society into demarcated, essentialised forms such as civil society, the market and the state. The overall effect of this is to create a thin version of community more akin to association, where social being-ness and sociality are divorced from the construction of subjectivity and where power relations are enunciated exclusively through the individual/state axis.

The Social Science Approach 19

The concept of community in sociology Underlying themes By the mid to late nineteenth century the conjoined industrialisation and state building process with its resultant social displacements and its worldwide destruction of communities was in full swing, bringing in its wake a developing need to theorise and justify the process. It was in this context that Sociology developed – hesitantly it must be said – as a discipline attuned to the calculation and measurement of society: a society it should be noted already position as co-terminious with the state. From the very first Sociology was positioned to explain and rationalise what contemporaries referred to as ‘the social question’. In relation to community the need for rationalisation and justification stemmed from the act of industrialisation itself, precisely because – beginning with the enclosure movement in Britain – the entire process was constructed upon the destruction of existing communities and existing communal traditions (Bauman 2001). Crucially, as one reads sociologists like Comte, Marx and Durkheim one is immediately struck by the absolute consensus regarding the destruction of these communities: uniformly across the political spectrum, from ‘radicals’ like Marx to ‘conservatives’ like Comte, we find identical descriptions concerning this process. There never seems to be a doubt that this process is both necessary and irreversible. No one, even the champion of the proletariat, is prepared to contest the necessity for the wholesale destruction of these communities. Indeed, the only issue uniting Marx and Liberalism (apart from their underlying humanism) is their conjoint notion that these communities are bastions of superstition and barriers to progress. Naturally justifications vary: Marx sees them as barriers to the historical mission of a conscious working class, Liberalism views them as obstacles to the march of progress, rationality and the free individual, yet the conclusion is the same. Looking back of course, the similarities between them are probably more striking than their differences. Both are fuelled by an almost blind faith in progress; all accounts are underwritten by the primacy ascribed to abstraction, mechanistic theory and process and all of them call on sociality and community to adjust to the objective world out there, an adjustment of course validated by the abstraction of hidden laws. Indeed, it is beneath the banner of these hidden laws that the ‘disembedding of the traditional order’ (Beck 1998, p. 24) is inaugurated, a process begun with the French revolution and continued by the

20 Conceptualising Community

industrial revolution itself. The society that emerges from this upheaval however is always an incomplete one, for it can never be closed or finalised, it remains a slave to its own progressivist rhetoric and the political necessity to provide increasing wealth, it always ‘pushes beyond itself, it has lost order’ (Freyer 1930, p. 165 quoted in Beck) and can never find a new order to replace it. Thus, for sociology as the inheritor of this discourse, the present can never attain a settled closure; it is always precarious, always in a state of crisis and revolution. Within this paradigm ‘community’ comes to represent therefore not the sociality of human being-ness, but a historical abstraction, the arch stone of sociologies’ incomplete description of itself, the ultimate, discursive other to the ephemeral, chaotic and unfinalizable present. No one exemplifies this more literally than Comte: his search for a positive social logic, the dual status of his work as both a political project and social investigation, his preoccupation with the ‘laws’ of social dynamics and social stability, the primacy he places on social harmony, cohesion and concord, his biological metaphors and his commonplace Hobbesian notion that without these laws society is simply the chaotic clash of opposing interests – all attest to the grip this dislocation assumed within the sociological imagination. And while he displays all the classic responses – responses that still inform sociology over a century later – Comte is also father to the pervasive notion of what Andrew Wernick (2000) terms the socio-theology of l’Humanite. That is, the abstract creation of a social simulacrum, a notion of society, in which society was understood as having the properties of a living being over and above individual actions of sociality, governed by abstraction/laws which it is the task of empirical investigation to establish (p. 59). That this ontologizing of the social is conceived intellectually (p. 60) only conceals the fact that as conceived by Comte, this social has no centre – no ‘we’ as Wernick notes (ibid), and thus, it represents at its contradictory core, not so much a theory of the social but, ‘a theory of the impossibility of the social’ (p. 61). In short it is a theory of society without sociality. Moreover, because there is no social present in Comte’s society, his political project is also ‘out of kilter’ because it seeks to define what it itself denies. What is present in Comte however, as Wernick makes clear, is an ideal, an institutionalised version of the social, offered of course as a replacement for community, and it this which sets a precedent for the commentators we shall be discussing. Further, as has probably been grasped

The Social Science Approach 21

by now, Comte’s theological and sacred notion of society as an organism working and striving towards some duplication/replacement of god, not only manifests the entire Platonic history of western intellectual abstraction, it also conceals sociality in its face to face being-ness by making it subservient to precisely the sort of abstraction which not only fears the indeterminacy of sociality, but which seeks also to replace it with its ‘realist’ rhetoric (ibid). Comte therefore provides a bridge over which the general western philosophical tradition marches into the particular technical city of sociology. The person however who theorises the disappearing community in a strict disciplinary sense, is the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855–1936), whose book Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (1887) lays the guidelines for all later modernist attitudes to community.

Tonnies Tonnies simplifies a series of ideas first proposed by another German, Otto Gierke in the process reducing Gierke’s complex account to a simply idealised dichotomy in which community appears in two forms: the natural organic, affective Gemeinschaft and the artificial, purposive, instrumental Gesellschaft. Tonnies argues that there are two basic forms of human will: the essential will, which is the underlying, organic, or instinctive driving force; and arbitrary will, which is deliberative, purposive, and future (goal) oriented. Groups that form around an essential will, in which membership is self-fulfilling, Tonnies termed Gemeinschaft (often translated as community). Groups in which membership was sustained by some instrumental goal or a definite end, he termed Gesellschaft (often translated as society). For Tonnies, family life is the general basis of life in the Gemeinschaft and as such the form finds its most perfect expression in village and town life. Indeed the village community and the town themselves can be considered as large families, the various clans and houses representing the elementary organisms of its body; guilds, corporations, and offices, the tissues and organs of the town. Here, original kinship and inherited status remain an essential, or at least the most important, condition of participating fully in common property and other rights. Conversely, the city is typical of Gesellschaft in general. It is essentially a commercial town and, in so far as commerce dominates its productive labour, a factory town. Its wealth is capital: wealth which, in the form of trade, usury, or industrial capital, is used and multiplies. Capital is the

22 Conceptualising Community

means for the appropriation of products of labour or for the exploitation of workers. The city is also the centre of science and culture, elements hand in hand with commerce and industry. Here for instance, the arts must make a living; they are exploited in a capitalistic way as is every activity and so, spurred by commerce, thought in all its forms, spreads and changes with astonishing rapidity. Speeches and books through mass distribution become stimuli of far-reaching importance while the arts themselves become commodified and exploited. Thus, Tonnies fleshes out his simple polarity to encompass differences in art and spiritual belonging. For instance Gesellschaft represents the triumph of thinking over religion and imagination, while city life represents the decline of folk traditions and the rise of the condition of Gesellschaft-like civilization, in which peace and commerce are maintained through conventions and an underlying mutual fear. The state protects this civilization through legislation, politics, science and public opinion, while the mass media glorifies it as the necessary and eternal progress towards perfection. In contrast, the substance of the Gemeinschaft consists of concord, folkways, mores, and religion. Each individual receives his share from this common centre, which is manifest in his own sphere, that is, in his sentiment, in his mind and heart, and in his conscience as well as in his environment, his possessions, and his activities. It is fair to say I think that this simplistic dichotomy has underwritten sociologies’ attitude to community ever since (Bauman 2001). In other ways Tonnies’s work bequeaths a legacy to sociology; the historical discontinuity, manifest in the sharp and mutually exclusive configuration of two entirely distinct states, being simply the most pervasive. Even Tonnies’s slightly nostalgic tone in which the city is seen as inevitable and progressive but somehow also destructive and alienating, has almost become de rigeur among sociologists, including Durkheim and Weber, both of whom soften the inevitability of process and the harshness of their dispatch with a sentimental and futile middle-class melancholy. Yet from this distance we can see that Tonnies’s account, far from being sympathetic to the communities he sentimentalises over, is in truth underwritten by the very western intellectual inheritance of which we have been speaking; the very tradition which has always demonised community, and displaced sociality, and action, constitutive of sociality, to a secondary place within its intellectual hierarchy. For while he portrays the Gesellschaft city as de-humanising and implicitly decries the loss of spiritual and creative unity which he claims personifies theGemeinschaft, the destruction of this community (notice

The Social Science Approach 23

he speaks of it in the singular as if every one was the same) is attributed, not to greed and capitalism, but rather to a ‘natural’ outcome of expansive personality, a invisible process against which opposition is futile and to which of course, human beings and the social must adjust. Clearly this polarity is an idealism (what sociology likes to term a ‘type’): equally of course nominating an abstraction like ‘individual will’ as an historical driving force neatly naturalises and de-politicises the violence and particularity of dispossession, while concealing the responsibilities and actions of hierarchal power beneath the higher unaccountable and rarefied, abstractions of history and process. In passing it should be noted that the role of the rational unitary individual is stressed both as an agent for causation (as a bearer of the new emerging social forms) and as the outcome of the development of the Gesellschaft, a formulation which in its circularity boldly anticipates a century of such sophistic circularity, particularly in regard to the unitary rational individual, who to this day continues to function sociologically as both cause and outcome. Of course the neat division of community and society is perfectly suited to the emergence of the mass society and the de-socialised mass individual. Naturally this process is irreversible: equally this irreversibility is built into the iron abstractions which impose themselves as necessities upon the social even as they destroy it. Other strands of Tonnies’s legacy will be encountered during our study of the contemporary debate. One is the notion that community is a historically specific social formation belonging to a particular time and a particular place (Giddens 1918; Bauman 2001). A formulation which allows sociologists to claim that what is taking place in the contemporary world, what surrounds them in their own life, is not and never can be ‘community’. A subtle displacement which of course means – as we shall see – that the only language possible for contemporary social formations is the language of the state – conflict, subjectification, interests and others. Moreover, this displacement allows community to be a perpetual object which is always either going or coming, but which can never be present (Bauman 2001 is a good example of this). So under this discursive construct it is possible to acknowledge that some thing approximating community did exist in industrial cities during the Fordist era, while once again contending it has disappeared in the post- industrial world (Bauman 2001). Meanwhile, an entire regiment of recent commentators has discovered how the flexibility of the term grants them space to indulge their futurist prognostications without reference to pesky items such as facts or figures.

24 Conceptualising Community

Tonnies’s work creates therefore a certain useful openness and flexibility surrounding its historicity, for as long as the object labelled community is ‘disappearing’, then his basic polarity can be utilised for almost any time period. But the usefulness of Tonnies work doesn’t stop there, he also inaugurates – perhaps unwittingly – the convention whereby community within Sociology becomes a kind of residue category for items, practices and habits which cannot be subsumed under more crucial headings such as ‘civil society’ and the ‘market’, the ‘state’. Thus, while the state symbolically represents ‘progress’, rationality science and so on, community by implication represents superstition, prejudice, ritual all the residue of medieval, non-rational life, and it continues to do so. Ultimately of course, the implications of theoretically constructing community in this manner, of describing it and regulating it to the status of some lost Eden, are profound. And this theoretical disappearance of course, precisely mimics the actual political destruction taking place in the increasingly industrialised world of the late nineteenth century.

The historical development of the cartesian community within sociology This is a necessarily brief description of the later development of community8 within sociology. From our perspective the crucial figure among the ‘big three’ of Weber,9 Marx and Durkheim is the latter, though of course it should be borne in mind that Weber adopts or at least accepts the fundamental paradigm outlined by Tonnies. Durkheim Durkheim is crucial because his functionalist and positivist view of society provides the springboard for the specific work on community that develops in the United States during the 1920s and beyond. Despite efforts to portray him as possessing a radical steak (Fenton, Rainer, Robert and Hammett 1984; Giddens 1995) the bulk of his work is clearly devoted to questions of social cohesion. His notions of pathology and normality, his inauguration of type construction as the defining methodological tool, the centrality of his dichotomy between mechanical and organic solidarity and his notion of the social fact, all clearly point to the pre-eminence of social cohesion within his account, as well of course to the legacy of the Tonnies (Elias 1974, p. xii) – a legacy which is inherent in his notion of history as tracing a path from simple to complex social forms as well as his characterisation of old communities as

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social forms based on ‘resemblance’, in which individual consciousness is barely discernable. Furthermore, while it is clear that organic solidarity was something that society aspired to but had yet to achieve, the notion that mechanical and organic solidarities are found in every society and therefore Durkheim is not proposing a simple oppositional (Cohen 1985, pp. 23–25), is rather undercut by the fact that he never models instances where organic solidarity occurred in a predominantly mechanical social formation. The most crucial legacy of Durkheims’ work occurred in America with the Chicago school and their descendants. Here Tonnies’s and Durkheim was simplified even further by a variety of commentators: Robert Parks, Robert and Helen Lynd, Warner, McIver, Zimmerman and Robert Redfield to name a few. Characteristically their actual empirical methodology shared many similarities. A heavy reliance on participant observation and biological metaphors was a sustaining thread through a variety of permutations – the ecological approach of Parks, the community as organisation typified by Hillery, community as microcosms personified by Stein’s, The Eclipse of Community and the notion of communities as types for whom Redfield stands as the defining totem. As a generalisation this work takes the notion of type construction and establishes a series of Functionalist distinctions: community–association, folk–urban and localistic–cosmopolitan which mirrored Tonnies and Durkheim, while ignoring the gradations some authors claim underwrote the dichotomies of Tonnies and Durkheim (ibid, p. 25). What is clear is that the Chicago school establishes these dichotomies as absolute, static and essentialist types. Redfield, for instance, in his famous study of Indian villages in the Yucatan peninsula during the 1930s and 1940s portrayed the villages as isolated, homogeneous, suspicious of outsiders, integrated and smoothly functional. In addition, through the study of three further communities, he proposes a continuum mapping an ‘inevitable’ series of stages through which these folk villages become urbanised – a continuum which mirrors Tonnies almost exactly. Interestingly, when another researcher Oscar Lewis, visited the same village he came to an utterly different conclusion emphasising instead the lack of cooperation, the underlying individualism, the tensions between villages and the distrust, envy and fear that characterised inter-personal relationships, even in this most traditional of communities. As Norbert Elias observes (1974, p. xiv) this difference shows how within these accounts the personal intruded into the supposedly

26 Conceptualising Community

scientific mode of the researcher. Indeed as Bell and Newby note the heavy reliance upon participant observation has made these studies notorious for their idiosyncrasies (ibid, p. xlvi). Overall, functionalist thinking permeates the Chicago school all the way from Parks in 1915 through to Merton and Hillery in the 1950s, as well as a substantial amount of British work for example, Arensberg and Kimball, Alwyn Rees, and W.M. Williams to name a few. What these works all reveal of course is the investment that sociologists have in this myth of a lost paradise inaugurated by Tonnies. Indeed as late as 2001, a respected English sociologist Zygmunt Bauman used Redfield’s notions virtually wholesale as the basis for his work on community, illustrating once again the enduring grip of this silly fantasy of harmonious village life10 on those who should know better. Aside from honourable contributions from the likes of Anthony P. Cohen (1985) whose innovative work engages with community as a symbolic cultural field with variable personal meanings, the study of community has become a virtual academic backwater ever since. The decline of rural communities after 1945, as well as the turn away from Liberalism with its notions of urban improvement, coupled with the rise of Cultural Studies and Post-Structuralism within the Academy has meant that outside the United States the study of community excites little interest and less attention, so that when the debate about community emerges again in the 1990s, it does so in an utterly different form – with its own foibles, its own take on the legacy of Tonnies and an entirely different agenda.

Sociality as a concept I do not intend to provide a detailed history of the usage of the word sociality.11 As a term it functions currently as an unproblematic, largely undefined substitute for the terms ‘community’ and ‘social’.12 It occurs in Simmel and in a more detailed manner in the work of Mead.13 Undoubtedly Mead’s work contains extremely powerful insights – from the perspective of an investigation into community. However, Mead’s definition of sociality is far too idiosyncratic, while his own theory is beset with too many problems to serve as the basis for the approach being developed here. In general, despite a cluster of theoretical attempts, similar problems occur with them as with Mead. Typically the word designates a narrowly defined interaction purporting to be comprehensive, but which is circumscribed by the terms of its enunciation. One exception is

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Theodore R. Schatzki (1996) who formulates a method for the investigation of the social utilising Wittgenstein. It is an impressive piece of work to which, unfortunately, I cannot do justice. Additionally, there are some limited uses of the word – prior to its recent take-up within cultural studies – confined principally to social constructionist readings (Shulzt and Luchmann 1974). These approaches however, while they may utilise the word, remain trapped within the state/subject axis and as such its use is infused with the assumptions of a determining mechanistic configuration (see Schutz and Luckmann 1974 for one example of how sociality is ultimately reduced to the interactions of a conscious I). As such, while occasionally I find myself in agreement with some aspects of all these works, they are simply inappropriate for my purpose. What characterises these accounts and distinguishes them from the account offered here, is that previous accounts, including Mead, attempt to explain what sociality is in every particular instance, while this work in contrast, wants to understand how it can be investigated (again Schatzki is the exception). The former approaches tend to locate sociality as one form among many, each of them essentialised and fragmented within a mechanistic paradigm. In contrast this work seeks to investigate sociality as the pre-eminent, inter-relational source of all social forms. The definition of sociality adopted here is that sociality is the space of appearance that comes into being whenever human beings are together in the manner of speech and action (Arendt 1958, p. 199).

Conclusion Every discourse has key words, phrases which evoke the whole, for sociology community is such a term as it marks both its ambition and its failure. Hence the quiet desperation which fuels frequent claims about its ambiguity, its impossibility (ref Keller 2003; Mandelbaum 2000; Mason 2000; Taylor 1987; plus a host of others). As Anthony Cohen rather tetchily announces, in terms all sociologists would recognize: community is one of those words – like ‘culture’, ‘myth’, ‘ritual’, ‘symbol’ – bandied around in ordinary, everyday speech, apparently readily intelligible to speaker and listener which when imported into the discourse of social science however causes immense problems. (Cohen 1985, p. 11) Indeed! And as such, the entire history of sociology’s engagement with community perfectly encapsulates the conflation of fear and hope that

28 Conceptualising Community

have always marked it as a discipline. Nor do I use these terms lightly, for the fear that underlies sociology is the fear of social collapse, the loss of social cohesion, and it is a sullen fear as well, unspeakable, recurring and, given the open-ended nature of the capitalist project, ever present and ultimately unresolvable. Something which is obvious when we review the issues driving the current debate: exactly the same issues needless to say, which drove Durkheim and others in Sociology’s early gasp. Of course with this fear, comes prediction, the term rationality attaches to dreams of hope: the hope that through science and education, stability can be restored to a social system constructed on eternal change and institutional instability. And central to this conflation is the notion of community, symbol of what was lost: object of hope and prediction in the search for reconstruction, stability and social cohesion and the implicit, defining model against which all new orderings are judged. Indeed one can measure sociology’s desperate investment in this matter by the intensity with which they cram sociality into the tight shoe of rationality, idealism, prediction and the scientific method. Of course, accommodating sociality into a western philosophical tradition constructed to exclude precisely that, is undeniably a problem, the issue is why sociology has spent so long trying. And try they do – endlessly. Something which explains the typical sociological slide between the analytical and the normative; a slide almost de rigeur in every sociological age, but there is something else, for what is a normative vision but a fantasy and like all good creators of fantasy fiction – Kafka comes to mind – these sociologists fill their visions with the cold objects of reality, all the more to convince us of the authenticity of their fantastic worlds. And if fantasy seems too strong a word, consider this – not only were the early modernist fears and predictions about the decline of community far in advance of the actual historical world wide decline of community (even in Europe and the United States) but they were and continue to be, book-ended by the polarities of idyllic community and social collapse, neither of which are factually true. For the lost, ideal community of Sociology has never existed (Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner 1983), as the most superficial reading of the historical record will confirm and for that matter, neither in most cases has the predicative future, where scientific forms of solidarity bind together fragmentation and expel disorder. Yet, still they try; Redfield’s version of the lost community being matched forty years later by

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Agamben’s notion of the coming community (1993), both as fantastic and ungrounded as each other, yet both typical of the very fear and hope I have been describing. So while the term ‘community’ comes to represent for Sociology, something lost, impossible, something – post 1970s – explicitly confined to the margins of the discipline, an altogether, different positioning underlies that apparent rejection. In this ‘hidden’ positioning, community is central, for it is the implicit yardstick against which all versions of sociality and human interactions are judged – the state, civil society, class, even, dare I say it – network sociality’s, post-social relationships, plural networks’, ‘flexible webs’, ‘active trust’, communities of choice, power networks and Social Capital. Formulations which seek precisely the sort of encompassing and binding capacity perceived to belong to the lost community. And this search, located somewhere between what cannot be acknowledged and what cannot be ignored, continues to be creative of sociological tension; a tension moreover enunciated in precisely Cohen’s terms – as a conflict between the common sense meaning and the methodological problems inherent upon its use. So, underlying Sociology as a discipline is the yardstick of the lost, all embracing community, the thing Sociology tries eternally to re-create, albeit in a ‘higher form’ a Comte would have it, and it is this search which commentators of all stripes, often refer to as the problem of order (Bauman 1992). I prefer however to look at this problem from a different perspective and term it ‘the problem of the lost community’ primarily because the term captures perfectly the strange concoction of utopianism, fear, prediction science, wilfulness, power, fantasy, Cartesian rationality and analysis, which is Sociology. So, if the answer to the question, ‘how green was my valley’ is not very, then this is an answer sociology doesn’t want to know. Indeed a deal of the contemporary accounts, as we shall see, remain in search of this new balance, this new space this new equilibrium, this caring sharing society of which Comte was the first prophet, but certainly not the last. Of course what these dichotomous and pervasive fantasies also represent is what Bonnie Honig (1993) terms, the displacement of politics; just as it also means the removal of sociality, the chaos and ephemerality of everyday existence which contains politics. So welcome back to Plato, Hobbes, Descartes and their ideal world; ever present amidst a plethora of sociologists, all swearing blind they’re expelling the transcendental and the superstitious from this new, shiny, rational world.

30 Conceptualising Community

Indeed, the impossibility of reconciling the fear and hope surrounding the word community is what has driven the rejection of the term in post 1970s Sociology. Yet there is, as we shall discover, a certain disingenuousness in this rejection, primarily because these attempts to replace the term ‘community’ with notions such as ‘network society’, ‘everyday life’, ‘new space’, ‘civil society’, ‘trust’, ‘social capital’, ‘network theory’ and so on – have simply revealed the difficulties of such a displacement, which is why as terms, they often feel strangely incomplete and desultory. Moreover, the search itself rather calls to mind the old joke about the drunk who having lost his glasses in the night, somewhere over there, is looking under the street lamp here, because this is where the light is. For not only does community remain – albeit within a new configuration – the best umbrella term for the combination of subjectivity and objectivity expressed within all actions of sociality, the problems which these new terms attempt to address are simply repeated within the new formulations, precisely because they have been avoided rather than confronted. Moreover, as any junior de-constructionist will tell you, there is another question contained in the old joke, which is who is shining the light in the first place? ‘Sociality’, ‘community’, two words, lots of questions – the next chapter attempts to put some meat on the bone.

2 Social Capital and New Forms of Trust

The two strands of current debate dealt with in this chapter – Social Capital and Trust – are conjoined here because they represent a conservative, political and theoretical reaction to the over arching post 60s issue of social cohesion. Additionally, they present themselves in limited terms: terms concerned mainly with aspects of micro sociality. In contrast the Chapter 3 deals with Third Way and Communitarian advocates, who, while fundamentally conservative in orientation, also present a far wider project which, in both instances, seeks a fundamentally new type of ethical and political space. Of course there is some overlap between all four strands in terms of their ideas, targets and motivation. Indeed, in passing it should be noted that all four strands are underpinned, in one way or another, by a narrative of loss which though it takes differing formulations, uses the past as a yardstick to indict the present for some perceived failure or deficiency.

Social Capital In its many guises Social Capital has become a key concept for government policymakers and academics over the last ten years (Barron et al., 2000). As we shall see this is in part because the term itself represents a simple re-packaging of themes historically familiar within American sociology. The term itself, as one of its main proponents Robert Putnam records, has a myriad of authors (Putnam 2000, p. 19), indeed one of its proclaimed strengths – at least for advocates – is precisely this positioning within the ‘cycle of ideas’ (ibid, p. 19). Others have attributed the honour to Coleman (1988), while some commentators claim the term 31

32 Conceptualising Community

originated as a means of identifying aspects of local community central to the functioning of city neighbourhoods during the late Fifties, a claim which of course locates the work as a direct off spring of Parsonian Functionalism (Tempest, Mackinley, Starkey 2004). Regardless of origin, what is clear is that there are multiple strands within a general overarching category. Some of the ‘founders’, like Coleman for instance, concentrate upon educational performance, others, and here Robert Putnam is the leading light, focus upon civic tradition. Presently the notion of Social Capital is widely used in a variety of fields including sustainable development, management literature (Kogut and Zender 1992; Galvic and Eishadt 2000), as well as work designed to address issues of continuity in the transmission and accumulation of social inequality (Hogan and Owen, 2000) and to analyse career paths in the television and financial industries (Tempest et al. 2004). Others, Cohen and Prusak (2001) for instance, emphasise the importance of language and particularly shared narratives of mutual effort as a key factor in developing and sustaining aspects of Social Capital. Others (e.g. Hughes, Bellemy, Black 2000) use such concepts in education. Additionally, much of the work connected with Trust, and the revival of civil society utilises Social Capital concepts. Mention should also be made of the work of Richard Sennet (1998) who, though not commonly associated with Social Capital, has a clear interest in trust (p. 10, 24) as well as the corrosion of social networks (ibid, p. 122), a persistent social capital theme. Francis Fukuyana (1995) is also closely associated with the Social Capital agenda as are Uslander (1999, 2002) and Etzioni, whose work clearly builds on Social Capital as well as Communitarian ideas. Recent British work has also utilised Social Capital conceptualisations in work concerning community (Morgan 1996), gender and intergenerational divisions within family life (Edwards Rosalind 2004) as well as the place of gender in the understanding of both Social Capital and the family. Finally, reference should be made to the work of Pierre Bourdieu the French sociologist whose work on Social Capital originated independently of the American stream and who deals much more directly with the interdependence of cultural and social aspects within capital accumulation. In general then, Social Capital can be seen as an umbrella term for the study of the diverse range of resources and linkages existing and provided by the web of social relations (Adler and Kwon 2002, p. 17).

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A brief history Of course, this general interest in social linkage and social cohesion was also characteristic of Parsonian Functionalism during the 1940s and 1950s. Not surprisingly however, given the intellectual and historical odium attached to Functionalism, this is not a legacy many Social Capitalists are eager to trumpet. Whatever the antecedents, the contemporary strand of Social Capital thinking emerged in the 1980s beginning with Coleman (1988). The concerns raised in that work and the general outline of what constitutes Social Capital owes more than a little to the work of economists and in particular the work of Gary S Becker (1976) and others like Mark Granovetter (1983). However the wider take-up of the concept is undoubtedly due to the influence of Robert Putnam who emerged in the 1990s as the leading figure in Social Capital thinking. His initial contribution entitled ‘Making Democracy Work’ (1992) was a comparative study of post 1970s political decentralisation and reform in various Italian provinces. Clearly influenced by de Tocqueville’s notions of civic community, Putnam and his co-writers sought to explain variations in institutional performance through the strength or otherwise of civic life (ibid, p. 15). The tone of his writing, indeed the style of his investigation, is exemplified by the following quote: Some regions of Italy we discover are blessed with vibrant networks and norms of civic engagement, while others are cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation and a culture of distrust. (Ibid) Over the next five years Putnam also contributed a study for the Trilateral Commission (Pharr, Susan and Putnam 2000) as well as ‘Bowling Alone’ (2000), both of which attempted to explain declining rates of American civic, electoral and social participation. While Putnam’s earlier work still located the term Social Capital within quotation marks, the later works are more comfortable in the use of such conceptualisation. Indeed ‘Bowling Alone’ concludes with a specific programme for the restoration of Social Capital within American life. Despite such open identification however there is a strange ambivalence about Putnam’s use of the term. For the most part ‘Bowling Alone’ reads like a functionalist text from the 1950s, complete with reams of quantities statistics, normative judgements and an atmosphere that appears to look back as much at it peers forward. Putnam himself is

34 Conceptualising Community

clearly emotionally inclined towards older forms of community. When comparing newer forms of social participation such as Greenpeace with more traditional, older style pre-sixties social institutions like the Moose lodges (Putnam 2000, p. 158), Putnam notes that it is hard not to prefer the latter, composed as they are of ‘real ties to real people – that is by Social Capital’ (ibid) over the direct mailing ‘single strand surf by interactions’ which he claims characterise modern communal bonding. A preference which perhaps betrays his distrust of political action, as much as it reveals his nostalgic motivation and small town perspective.1 All of which, confirm the claims of some commentators (Edwards 2004) to identify a ‘Social Capital lost story’ (p. 2) in the sense that the general narrative of Social Capital appears concerned with redressing an asserted social ‘breakdown and demoralisation’. Additionally, commentators on Trust often couch their entire picture of what trust is, upon a foundational picture in which social trust is either declining or breaking down entirely: a picture derived as we shall see from a rather questionable and selective sense of history. Regardless of Putnam’s proclivities however, Social Capital has – over the last ten years – gained wide credibility among policy makers and academics. One suspects this is because its discourse fits snugly with the political need to address the general sense of faltering social cohesion does so in a relatively cost efficient, more ‘grounded’ manner; a manner that contrasts favourably with the more airy fairy pronouncements of the Third Way and Communitarian advocates, which in any case it rather compliments. What is Social Capital The term has a number of definitions, a situation which attests perhaps to its hazy conceptualisations: as one study notes (Serageldin and Grootaert 2000, p. 45) ‘examples of Social Capital are easier to provide than one specific definition’. There are however clearly commonalities within these accounts, and the first of these is the notion that Social Capital encompasses norms, relationships, expectations that bind people together within all forms of communities and as such, it is predominantly concerned with what creates stable communities and enhances their co-operative capacity, particularly in an economic sense. Indeed Social Capital is built upon what Arrow (1974) claims is the ‘widespread consensus that social networks affect economic performance’ (Arrow 1974, p. 3), a claim which does nothing to diminish Turner’s wider characterisation of Social Capital as ‘the latest approach for a sociology of economic development’ (Turner 2002, p. 94).

Social Capital and New Forms of Trust 35

For Coleman, Social Capital is a resource defined by its function, lodged neither in the person nor in the implements of production but rather in the combination of the two (Coleman 1988, p. 16). Social Capital is thus embodied in relations among persons and, exists in parallel with the concepts of financial, physical and human capital (p. 36) as one of the elements that facilitate productive activity (p. 19). This style of language is continued by Putnam (2000, p. 19), who uses precisely the same economic categories as Coleman, ‘whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, Social Capital refers to connections among individuals’. Thus, for Putnam ‘Social Capital’ refers to the moral resources and public good which activate the latent human capital of individuals and populations (Putnam et al. 1993, p. 167), expressed through binding, but informal relationships that work to accentuate incentive, to defect and reduce uncertainty and to provide models for future co-operation. All with the long-term aim of enhancing trust as a property of the social system as much as a personal attribute (p. 28). On another occasion he defines Social Capital as having an ‘impact on the productivity of the community’ (Putnam et al. 1993). Indeed economic terminology is endemic within Putnam’s work – he also describes Social Capital on various occasions as a ‘drawing fund one can draw on in times of need’ (Putnam 2000, p. 34) akin to a ‘favour bank’ (p. 21). Others such as Dasgupta and Sergeldin (1999) while questioning some aspects of Putnam and Coleman’s approach, none the less confirm the economic perspective, claiming that ‘whatever else Social Capital may be it is emphatically an economic good’ (Desguptar et al., p. x). So in one sense Social Capital can be viewed simply as an extrapolation of explicit economic notions into an arena which, while it had always been implicitly modelled through mechanistic notions of process and instrumental rationality, had, at least until the 1980s, maintained the coherence, veracity and independence of its own distinct discourses. Thus, it can be seen as part of the long-term historical process by which the language of economics has come increasingly to colonise all area of social and cultural discourse (Fevre 2000). Indeed, it is no accident that the development of Social Capital paralleled the ideas of economists like Granovetter (1985) whose work in the 1980s sort to explain the perceived failure of the American economy, particularly in relation to Japan. Economists of this sort attacked traditional economics as being under-socialised and insufficiently embedded; for failing in short, to recognise or value concrete personal relationships and the role of personal networks in the creation of trust

36 Conceptualising Community

and the enforcing of norms; precisely the issues later raised by Coleman and Putnam. Indeed the work of Becker is very interesting in this regard, for he has arrived at the notion of Social Capital via an economic trajectory, a progression illustrated by his statement that ‘Social Capital is the economic way of looking at life’ ( Becker Gary 1996, p. 140). Perhaps it is this economic focus which accounts for the slight unease that surrounds the use of the word community within Social Capital literature. Putnam for instance has multiple definitions for Social Capital some of which clearly serve as substitutes for community. For instance, in a recent book he provides the following definition, ‘whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, Social Capital refers to connections among individuals – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness. … In that sense Social Capital is closely related to what some have called “civic virtue” ’. (p. 19). He adds that Social Capital calls attention to the fact that ‘civic virtue’ is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of social relations. A definition which locates the work as clearly concerned with communal relationships. However, he also refers to community as the ‘conceptual cousin’ of Social Capital (p. 21) and a concept which sounds ‘warm and cuddly’.2 In any case within this economic discourse, Social Capital is distinguished from other forms of capital, from financial and physical capital, by its supposed common nature; in short by the fact that it supposedly benefits everyone and not just the individual who creates it (Edwards p. 35); though of course capitalism has long claimed that a common benefit accrues to everyone from all forms of capital. Indeed, there are those who remain sceptical at what they term the vague and casual empiricism surrounding the application of the term capital to social relations (Solow, Robert 2000, p. 6). In turn, others question whether it is possible to simply transpose ways of thinking from one realm to another (Arrow 1974, p. 4) and query whether the linkage that Putnam postulates between membership of associations and economic efficiency (ibid) is really as simple and direct as he maintains. Regardless of these qualms the first point I want to stress regarding Social Capital is that it is concerned with subjective and objective intrapersonal linkages within the social and it expresses these linkages in the language of economics.3 The second element relates to its grounding as an attempt to bridge the agency/materiality divide. Coleman is quite clear on this point when he states that Social Capital should be seen as ‘part of a theoretical

Social Capital and New Forms of Trust 37

strategy that involves use of the paradigm of rational action but without the assumption of atomistic elements of social relationships’ (Coleman 1988, p. 36). This, in simple language, means that while they maintain the notion of a rational subject, this subject is now configured within a ‘fluid’ of social interaction, rather than in the simple and brutal theoretical isolation that has traditionally surrounded the classical Cartesian rational subject. In this context Coleman adds that, ‘taking the conception of Social Capital as a resource for action is one way of introducing social structure into the rational actor paradigm’ (ibid), a statement which aligns with his general thrust of combining rational economic models of behaviour with social organisational theories. From this perspective then Social Capital is part of an ongoing attempt to theoretically bridge the agency/structure divide. For conservative sociology, trying to salvage the rational unitary individual without surrendering rationality has been a persistent concern since the 1980s and taps into what Chapter 5 identifies as one of the overriding and defining polarities inherent within the social science paradigm. Finally, I want to stress the manner in which the Social Capital theorising attempts to overcome another persistent, widely perceived sociological deficiency, which is the weak linkage between the macro and the micro levels of society, particularly in relation to the effect of government policy on the choices of individual social actors. The perceived social problems outlined earlier, have lead to a concern that government requires greater means and information regarding the actions of actors at the micro social level. As Partil and Spenser (2004) conclude, Social Capital allows for the possibility to explore people’s micro social worlds, though of course this claim should be taken in the light of the general difficulty experienced by mechanistic models in bridging this divide. Thus the bulk of Social Capital work emphasises micro, local arenas; arenas in which the interactions and linkages within the social can be measured and mapped as a prelude for some form of later interventional practice. Advocates tend therefore to specifically frame their interest in community in terms of accounting for differences in performance in government departments or in facilitating ‘delivery’ networks through enhancing community involvement in provision of public goods: something which is claimed to be possible through studying networks of social relations. It is this aspect of Social Capital which unites advocates, like Coleman (1988), Fukuyana (1995), Luhmann (1979), Uslaner (1999) and Putnam (1993), all of whom focus specifically on inter-actional linkages between

38 Conceptualising Community

public and semi public institutions and socio-economic outcomes at a regional and local level. In this regard even work which purports to differentiate itself from Putnam is concerned with the capacity of institutions to change social behaviour at the micro level. In general, as Edwards notes, Social Capital, ‘provides a link between ordered families, ordered communities and an ordered society through shared values’ (Edwards, p. 4). These three issues, issues from which it can be said that Social Capital has originated, must of course be set against the backdrop, outlined earlier, of concerns over social cohesion within western democracies. In this regard some commentators perceive the rise of Social Capital as an attempt to instil certainty – An interpretation which is perfectly compatible with the parallel claim that Social Capital is attempting to develop a theoretical complexity capable of linking sociology more closely to the ‘real world’. Clearly for-conservative commentators, the breakdown in the coherency and norms of society are mirrored somewhat by the theoretical confusion which has arisen because of the attacks upon, for instance, the Cartesian subject. Of course the overriding exception to all of this is the work of Bourdieu, whose conceptualisation of Social Capital conceives it as a series of linkages made up of social obligations, formed over time into durable networks derived from membership or groups and which, unlike kinship obligations, must be worked at continuously to shape and accumulate material and symbolic exchanges and obligations. Of course Bourdieu’s interest is in how Social Capital continually produces and reinforces social inequality, a perspective entirely different from that of the other commentators mentioned. Broadly speaking then Social Capital can be seen as an umbrella term concerned with people’s values, with the resources they can access and the socially negotiated ties and relationships which both define what they can access and what use they can make of this access. In contrast to Bourdieu however, the prime concern of the AngloSaxon variants of Social Capital is clearly social cohesion, whether as a direct outcome of economic factors, or indirectly in relation to families, communities and social norms in general. As many commentators observe (Fine 2000; Portes 2000; Green 1998), the concept itself illustrates one aspect of sociological theorising, whereby social problems are soluble through non-economic solutions and the moral health of society is prior to, and causative of, economic problems, thus continuing a fine sociological tradition whereby problems of economic redistribution are recast as moral issues (Fine 2000; Portes 1998).

Social Capital and New Forms of Trust 39

Types of Social Capital The hazy conceptualisations which distinguish Social Capital literature prompt a resort to metaphors when describing Social Capital. Indeed, typically, in both Coleman and Putnam there is a conflation between what Social Capital is and what it does – ‘Social Capital is defined by its function’ (Coleman 1988, p. 16). Thus, while Social Capital is described as a quality, it is also defined – usually in hindsight – as a process (a function), an effect: a conflation generally characteristic of mechanistic thought and to which both Coleman and Putnam seem blithely unaware. Of course defining something by effect is inherently troublesome, precisely because there is no finishing point to an effect; therefore to construct the idea of an ending, a limit – something which clearly Putnam and Coleman both do – is to define in advance the very thing one is supposedly searching for. Hence the resort to metaphors and from the metaphorical perspective, Social Capital is often described as either glue or oil; the former describing the binding attributes of Social Capital and the latter the ‘lubricating’ elements within social interaction (Putnam 2000, p. 21; Coleman 2000; Serageldin et al., p. 44). Thus, for Coleman, who utilises this metaphor, Social Capital ‘inheres’ in the structure between persons and among persons (Coleman 1990, p. 302) and this inhering includes obligations and expectations, trustworthiness, norms and effective sanctions. This general description fits Coleman’s description of social bonding as an untrammelled social good (1988). Moreover, his picture of the social world tends to be permeated with an idealist, not to mention conservative quality. He identifies the family and education as the prime source of Social Capital and identifies the most important ties of social capital as predominantly those between the parents and their children. For Coleman the enhancement of Social Capital depends upon the attention given by the adults to the child (p. 28), a resource which allows children to develop their own Social Capital, and which comes together with wider social ties to form a dense interlocking structure of cohesive norms, trust and obligation. Communities are made up (glued) by social networks formed from people who share the same values and who live in families in which typically both parents are present and finally, in which there are – just like in the ideal community – a homogeneous set of values. Diversity and plurality are not elements Coleman appears to value very highly; indeed it’s not something he appears to have given much thought to. Indeed he goes so far as to suggest that the ‘most prominent element of structural

40 Conceptualising Community

deficiency in modern families is the single parent family’ (Coleman 1988, p. 28). Putnam, by contrast, has a more developed picture of what he sometimes terms ‘networks and associated forms of reciprocity’ (Putnam 2000, p. 21), and this is despite the fact he also resorts to the same metaphors – ‘trustworthiness lubricates social life’ (p. 21). His motivation for this more developed framework is, as he says, because it is important to distinguish ‘positive’ Social Capital from negative manifestations of the same (p. 22). To this end he proposes two forms of Social Capital: bonding (or exclusive) and bridging (or inclusive) both operating mutually within the social (p. 22) to give Social Capital both a private and a public face. As Putnam describes it, bridging is the oil and refers to linkages between people from different social groupings, these links are important because of they allow access to external assets and information diffusion, and here he quotes Granovetter and other economists and supports them in their claim that such bridging links are good for ‘getting ahead’ (p. 23). Additionally, bridging can foster ‘broader identities and reciprocity’ (which he’s already defined as one of the positive attributes of Social Capital), while bonding, which is between people from similar groupings, tends to confirm ourselves to ourselves – ‘within our narrow selves’ (p. 23). As far as metaphors go, Putnam is a little more informed as to modern adhesives and lubricants – instead of glue he characterises bonding as being ‘superglue’ and bridging as ‘Wd 40’(ibid, p. 23), a piece of metaphorical one-upmanship which clearly separates him from Coleman’s more naive theorising. Moreover, like the 1950s American anthropologist Vernon Turner, he conceives of two forms of social interaction, two axis if you like, cooperative that is, horizontal and hierarchical that is, vertical. According to Putnam, Social Capital as materialised in reciprocity, operates along both axis. Interestingly, unlike Coleman, Putnam takes care to distinguish between good and bad forms of Social Capital, a move which of course introduces value (i.e. political) judgements into the equation. To this end he equates greater value to bridging over bonding, primarily because it links people and groups across ethnic and kinship barriers, a preference which locates him clearly within the modernist camp. While he warns about the effects of bonding and clearly entertains greater doubts about it than about bridging, it should in fairness be pointed out that he does state clearly that both can ‘under many circumstances’ (p. 23) have positive effects. In total then, both Putnam and Coleman share much of the same language and ‘theoretical’ framework. Where Putnam proposes horizontal

Social Capital and New Forms of Trust 41

and vertical axis, Coleman proposes multiflex and simplex association, a polarity in which one stands for looser multi-dimensional ties and the other for monolithic ties around a single social setting. Like Putnam he endorses a preference for the wider, but weaker series of linkages, though, again like Putnam, this preference for the wider world over the more narrow forums of kinship or workplace or family is rather undercut by the notion, which they both endorse, of the social as an arena of homogenous values, sanctions and norms. It should also be added at this point that while Putnam and Coleman as well as others like Michael Woolcook (1998) have utilised the notion of bridging in various forms be it horizontal or vertical – there is a distinct tendency within all Social Capital work to focus their concerns upon joining perceived social divides and bridging social differences, rather than accounting for their continued power and existence. There is also a distinct lack of enthusiasm for more intimate kinship and familial bonds, a preference duplicated by Fukuyana who speaks directly of the social advantages of developing ties of trust and reciprocity as a means for social peace, social mobility and social inclusion. Indeed the notion of trust and the importance placed upon it as the ultimate goal of Social Capital, the ultimate bridge, is what unites Fukuyana and others, with the overt Social Capital agenda. All of them would agree with Krishna when he says that trust and co-operation form the core of Social Capital (Krishna 2002, p. 66). Yet all these commentators share a distinct, modernist preference for the weaker but wide type of ties and many of them express tepid support for the increase in linkages of the bonding variety – kinship and family being the most often cited. Fukuyana for instance observes that ‘The most useful kind of Social Capital is often not the ability to work under the authority of a traditional community or group, but the capacity to form new associations and to co-operate within the terms of reference they establish’ (Fukuyana 1995, p. 27). Krishna is another who privileges institutional and relational capital ties over more amorphous action based on norms and beliefs (Krishna 2002, p. 77); Shglitz (2000) brings the whole concept close to rational choice theory while claiming that state Social Capital might be better than co-operative Social Capital. Indeed even Coleman’s emphasis upon family ties can be seen as an instrumental offshoot of his work on education – that is families are valuable not in themselves, but because they facilitate something else. What is clear is that the value of Social Capital is measured instrumentally by all these commentators. Fukuyana for instance, is

42 Conceptualising Community

ambivalent about increased individualisation and the accompanying breakdown of families, precisely because it furthers the looser, but wider ties which he endorses as enhancing economic prosperity. Finally, it should be noted that various other commentators take a broader brush approach to the question of linkage. For Serageldin and Grootaert, Putnam’s view is far too narrow (2000, p. 45). Instead they propose a wider, more inclusive view which tries to integrate micro and macro concerns in a way that allows norms to develop and shape social relations (p. 46). For them the Social Capital approach is valuable for sustained development, but it must be built upon an integration of all four types of capital and only in these circumstances can Social Capital as a differentiated strand be maximised (p. 49). However, given their final claim that the key measure of integration and interaction are shared values/norms and trust (p. 50), and that this requires recognition, acceptance and legitimacy (p. 51), their approach simply duplicates Putnams. Moreover, it also duplicates the tendency among recent Social Capital work, especially work inaugurated through governmental agencies, to view Social Capital explicitly as a governmental not a community project (Krishna is an example of this). Issues and problems within Social Capital theorising This section touches issues arising in the literature itself, issues pertinent for Coleman, Putnam and others. The first relates to one major thread running though both Coleman and Putnam’s work, which is where to draw the line between individualisation and public good. This is clearly a post 1960s problem for conservatives trapped in the dilemma of encouraging individuality while maintaining social cohesion and the effectiveness of norms and sanctions. Coleman’s 1988 article for instance is replete with discussion of how to balance communal and private interest: Similarly the decision to move from a community so that the father, for example, can take a better job may be entirely correct from the point of view of that family. But, because Social Capital consists of relations among persons, other persons may experience extensive loss by the severance of their relations, a severance over which they have no control. (Coleman 1988, p. 34) Such concerns are prominent through out the Social Capital literature. All of which adds weight to Robert Solow’s characterisation of the process as a sort of societal super ego (Solow, p. 6).

Social Capital and New Forms of Trust 43

There is a second connected problem, which again Putnam, and Coleman as well as other commentators, frequently touch upon, and which they often try to contain by describing it as a terminology issue. For capital, at least within capitalism, refers to something largely under the control of private ownership and which is moreover utilised entirely at the behest and for the benefit of, the particular owner. Social Capital on the other hand is intrinsically communal, by definition something owned by the many. As Putnam himself observes, it may benefit the person who inaugurates it less than other members of the group. Thus, there may be a built in disincentive for people to enact Social Capital. This of course is a variation of the classic liberal ‘free-rider’ argument, though of course it achieves added resonance because of the coopting by Putnam and others of the language of economics. Tempest, McKinley and Starkey refer to this problem when they claim that ‘the extent to which Social Capital can be conceptualised as a public or private good remains contentious’ (Tempest et al. 2004, p. 1526). Despite his apparent awareness Putnam slides around the issue by locating his investigation in predominantly macro terms, thereby avoiding the need to confront the issue. Conversely, because Coleman’s work is concerned with educational outcomes and therefore behaviour on a micro scale, he constantly butts against questions of normative obligations and communal sanctions verses private gain. Thus while Putnam can make statements such as ‘where associations flourish, where citizens attend to community affairs and vote for issues, not patrons, there too we find leaders who believe in democracy not social and political hierarchy (Putnam 2000, p. 102)’, he does so by avoiding the need to distinguish between personal verses the common good, an issue Coleman is constantly forced to confront as we saw from the earlier quote concerning the family who moved (Coleman 1988, p. 34). Unfortunately for Coleman, the fact that he confronts this problem does nothing to help him solve it. Further, while Putnam talks a lot about the micro aspects of social capital, his work remains stubbornly macro. There is little difference between the study he conducts on voter participation for the Trilateral commission – study which ostensible has no Social Capital theorising, and the book, ‘Bowling Alone’ in which the first chapter is devoted to his ‘theoretical stance’. All of which confirms the point that Social Capital as a term, is more a discursive re-packaging of an oldish set of ideas, rather than a coherent theoretical perspective.

44 Conceptualising Community

Something illustrated by the move towards government sponsored Social Capital projects such as the sustained development notions discussed earlier and the recent British government white paper entitled in true Social Capitalise – Respects and Responsibilities – Taking a Stand Against Anti-Social Behaviour (March 2003). Indeed the trend in Social Capital work seems to be away from the micro perspective which informs Coleman’s work, towards a very traditional top-down model of social development.

Trust Trust as a sociological issue derives from the same fears of declining social cohesion (Cook 2001, p. xi) as Social Capital, and indeed there is a clear overlap between the two. Indeed we find much the same language used to describe the two – so Luhman (1979) states that ‘trust accumulates as a kind of capital’, while Arrow (1974, p. 23) and Dasgupta (p. 64) characterise trust as a public good, a commodity. Moreover, there is a conflated overlap between economic discourse and trust in the Hardin’s statement (2001) that trust is encapsulated as interest. Ensminger’s (2001) account concerning trust among the Ormac nomadic pastoralist of East Africa, is permeated with economic language. For Carol Hiener (2001) trust is a determined by two prime determiners – vulnerability and uncertainty and she produces a complex theory of trust related mechanisms to reduce both. Putnam describes trust (Putnam 2000, pp. 171–74) purely as the outcome of rationality and self interest manifested through ‘short term autism’ and ‘long term interest’ (Harre 1999, p. 219). This series of conflations is also clear in Fukuyana for instance, who speaks extensively of new social bonds and trust, as a shared ethical value (Fukuyana 1995, p. 26) capable of reinvigorating and reforming a new moral consensus and creating new communities capable of accommodating new means of productivity and generating new communal wealth, outside of state and government (p. 27). Others consider trust as a ‘social dilemma’ (Messick and Kramer 2001, p. 89), or distinguish between inter-personal trust and generalised trust (Yamagishi 2001; Putnam 2001), while strangely enough economists adopt a more psychological approach, speaking of a pre-disposition to trust (Becker 1996; Jones 1996; Williamson 1993). Trust is defined by effect as result (Mitztal p. 9; Gambetta 1988, pp. 25, 217), as situationally defined (Luhman 1979 Baier 1986, p. 236). Some use Games Theory (Gambetta 1988; Gibbons 2000) some offer no

Social Capital and New Forms of Trust 45

definition, instead presenting a series of examples (O’Hara, K. 2004), additionally of course attempts to discuss Social Capital typically involve some discussion of trust. There is little point discussing ever writer utilising the concept – there are many points of similarities – not the least being a common essentialist formulation and a picture of trust as both cause and effect. Indeed the number of writers who have dealt specifically with trust over the last twenty years attests to the centrality it has assumed as both a problem and an explanation (Gambetta 1988; Gouthier 1986; Luhman 1979; Hogan and Owen 2000; Brehm Rahn and Carlson 1999; Seligman 1997) are just a few.

3 The Third Way and Communitarians

As we have seen in Chapter 2 Social Capitals writers addressed the social from within a narrow pallet of economic terminology and micro concerns. Moreover despite the wider goals which drove their investigation, the traits they sort to identify were, to a large extent, already present within the social. Thus Putnam, when he details his social capital programme at the conclusion of ‘Bowling Alone’ does so in micro terms urging for instance, factories and companies to be more community minded at a local level. Additionally, Social Capital and Trust work steered clear of overt political programmes phrasing its discourse in the perceived neutrality of economics and ethical concerns, in both cases concealing their inherent conservatism beneath the apparent inclusiveness of ethical and structure reform at the local, community level. In contrast, Third Way and Communitarian writers offer macro sized projects, ones safely termed ‘social constructivist’, encompassing, theoretically at least, a much wider societal span. Moreover, these particular projects are both phrased in the language of political philosophy. Additionally, as this chapter also briefly examines, other commentators are concerned with reviving a defunct civil society; work once again presented within the framework of political philosophy.

Third Way This is a generic designation for an approach the prime characteristic of which is an attempt to construct an alternative to both neo-liberal thought and what they term old fashioned social democracy. To this end, Third Way work describes attempts to construct an ontologically favourable, extra political space of human relationships, characteristically 46

The Third Way and Communitarians 47

pictured as a site for government and ethical intervention dedicated to the shaping and re-shaping of human relationships and identity (Rose 1999, p. 172). This search for a new space characterises a spectrum of contemporary commentators (see Castells 2000; Hutton 1998; Mulgan 1997; Rifkin 1995; Wark 1999), all of whom seek, in one form or another, an alternative to the damaging effect of unrestrained neoliberalism and a gridlocked governmental and market process. Of course this attempt to assert and locate a non-political space is a theme historically characteristic of liberal political theory ( Joseph 1988, p. 30). The term ‘Third Way’ has, as its leading proponent acknowledges, been used many times before (Giddens 1998, pp. vii–viii) most commonly to describe work, positioned as an alternative between Marxism/Socialism and untrammelled Liberalism. The attraction of the label is clear: much like the political term ‘independent’, it offers positive and suggestive connotations while remaining ambiguous in regard to its exact meaning. Clearly however this new space is positioned theoretically as well as politically and culturally, as an alternative political philosophy, both humane and pragmatic (Giddens 2000, pp. 32–33), capable of providing a bridge between the new globalised economy and the values of a humane society. To this end, Third Way works are redolent with terms suggesting the opening of a new space: terms like ‘plural networks’, ‘flexible webs’, ‘utility’, ‘active trust’ (Giddens 1994, p. 14) communities of choice ( Wark 1999, p. 269) power networks (Etzioni 1993, p. 121) electronic referenda, (Giddens 1998, p. 75), trust networks (Giddens 1994, p. 78; Putnam 1993, 2000) post-social relationships (Whittle 2001, p. 64) reflexive modernisation (Beck et al., 1994), being just some of them. For all the buzz words and the hazy, ill-fitting conceptualisations, what this work does convey is a strong sense of both closure – upon the old, supposedly disappearing world of pre-globalisation – and the matching necessity for some new discourse capable of confronting and containing what is clearly perceived, as the irreversible march of neoliberal politics. Something indeed which is confirmed as Scanlon notes (Scanlon 2000, pp. 52–53) by the opposition many of these accounts manifest towards traditional communities, which they claim have either been destroyed by globalisation and ‘de-traditionalisation’ (Giddens 1990, p. 117; 1994, p. 84; 1998, p. 74) or represent an impediment to the sort of network society conceived of as the new alternative (Fukuyana 1995, p. 27; Whittle 2001, p. 51). For instance one Third Way writer John Wark (1999, p. 62), characterises traditional community as ‘built upon obedience to cultural authority and sameness’ while Etzioni, who

48 Conceptualising Community

seems to have something to say on all these strands, is another who characterises traditional communities as ‘authoritarian and oppressive’ (quoted in Scanlon 2000, p. 61). Many of these commentators are driven by a perceived collapse of alternatives to the all conquering process of globalisation and the perceived collapse of alternatives from the Left and the Right (Giddens of course titles one of his books in precisely these terms). Additionally, there is a redolent sense in these works that the modern world is a realm of complex and protracted negotiation (Misztal B. 1996; Boswell 1990; Giddens 1998; Beck 1998) where personal existence is fraught with risk and instabilities, not the least of which relate to the question of identity and identity construction. As Giddens notes ‘the world we live in today is not one subject to tight human mastery … Almost to the contrary it is one of dislocation and uncertainty, a ‘runaway world’1 (Giddens 1998, p. 3). As with Social Capital there is, within Third Way work, a strong emphasis upon bonds of trust, reflexivity and normative consensus building. Indeed there is a sense in which the Third Way can be seen as a compilation of all the themes discussed so far. Thus, there are ethical notions underlying these accounts, coupled with a clear commitment to individuality and the rational subject, for the communities envisaged are perceived as the source not only of new political bonding, but also of individual aspiration, asserted to be productive of social cohesion. Interestingly, the differences between the various Third Way writers are very minor, even compared to Social Capital. There are reasons for this, most of which will become apparent in the course of this exegesis. Mark Latham (1998), an Australian Third Way writer, suggests for instance that the term indicates a position which draws from the best aspects of Liberalism and Socialism and identifies it as a centralist position; while Giddens (1998, pp. 37–46) characterises it as a modernised centre left position. In truth these distinctions are meaningless because the project is clearly driven as much by a desire to transcend old fashioned Labourite notions of politics, as it is by a desire to identify a new space for relationships. What can be said is that the Third Way approach is consummate with Social Capital in two important areas: first in the claim that the area being investigated is distinct and new, absent from traditional accounts of politics, government, markets and other institutional forms of modern life. Second, in the importance attached to moral and ethical behaviour especially around the notion of trust as the social ‘cement’ binding together the various disparate elements of the social.

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Ultimately Third Way approaches all contain three key elements: ●

●

●

A shared belief that social networks specifically located outside state and market are discoverable and – given the gridlock of government and the failure of projects from the left and the right – desirable. The centrality of psychologised notions of trust and co-operation both to their explanations for current ‘woes’ and as the foundation for their particular project of reviving or locating alternative spaces of social interaction. A macro perspective, with little demonstrable interest in a micro perspective.

Giddens Anthony Giddens is the name perceived as crucial in this debate and his 1998 book The Third Way is commonly taken to define the notion in general. In fact, given that almost all Third Way literature is very similar in tone and content; such an exemplifying role fits Giddens almost perfectly. For Giddens the term implies a political and social philosophy; a ‘framework to reconcile the exigencies of the new knowledge based globalized economy with the values of human society’ (Giddens 2000, pp. 32–3) – a statement which encapsulates both the flavour of the book and the project, as does the following: The overall aim of the Third Way politics should be to help citizens plot their way through the major revolutions of our time: globalization, transformations in personal life and our relationship with nature. (1998, p. 64) To this end Giddens speaks of discovering a different framework; one which avoids old top-down bureaucratic governance and overcomes the distrust generated by its ‘cumbersome and ineffective air’ (p. 74) while containing and nurturing social linkages and bonding typically disparaged and ignored by the right wing neo-liberal project (pp. 36–7). He calls for the preservation of social justice and describes a world where freedom means autonomy of action. To this end he also calls for a reinvigoration of the notion of rights as something containing obligations (p. 65), something which he claims older fashioned social democracy neglected. He also emphasises the role of Third Way politics in retrieving public space and reconstructing public institutions based upon a manifesto of ‘no authority without democracy’ and ‘cosmopolitan pluralism’.

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Second, Giddens proposes a programme of constitutional reform to try to meet the conjoined issues of voter apathy and political stagnation. He has championed devolved powers for Scotland and Wales – a Greater London Authority – and the appointment of mayors for communities of various shapes and sizes. Coupled with this he argues for experiments in democracy such as electronic referenda and citizen juries (p. 75). All these proposals are built upon Giddens’s explicit belief that civil decline is real and the sense of solidarity within communities is breaking down (p. 78). He thus calls for a partnership between government and civil society to ensure that the public space is ‘re-captured’ (pp. 79–107), though he does not say from whom. These specific recommendations are aspects of a wider programme based around what Giddens terms the ‘renewal of civil society’ which he describes as a basic part of the politics of the Third Way (p. 78). For him civil society functions as a buffer working in conjunction, but separate from, the government and the market economy: a theoretical location through which democratisation can connect directly to community development (p. 84). Concrete proposals to implement this include micro credit schemes, sustained investment, renewal programmes and education and training. In relation to community, Giddens is driven by a perceived need to enhance social cohesion; ‘people who feel themselves members of a national community are likely to acknowledge a commitment to others with it’ (p. 107). To this end he emphasises education and training as part of community rebuilding, while also stressing the role of networks and the construction of social capital. Governments should help repair communities damaged by globalisation and should retain and even increase their interventional strategies, a call which he acknowledges is motivated by the need to restore civil order among damaged and marginalised groups (p. 82) In this regard many of his ideas are based on the premise that institutions and individuals can be encouraged to cooperate with one another in constructive partnerships, rather than compete with one another. What is clear from these proposals, and indeed from his work as a whole, is that despite his centralist and social democratic claims, Giddens’s idea of social democracy is quite conservative, in line indeed with his call for a philosophical conservatism (p. 65). For every proposal which might help communities, there is another which demands something from them – thus, while welfare should remains at European levels rather than American ones, it should be offset with an end to ‘benefit dependency’ and a realigning of benefits towards ‘human capital investment’ (p. 115).

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This sort of linked formulation is typical of his proposals, not only in the sense that it advertises its centralist ambitions by a conjoint stick and carrot approach, but also because the carrot always seems to be given to nebulous, ill-defined groupings like ‘community’, while the stick is always applied directly to individuals, usually of the marginalised variety. Furthermore, there are definite limits to unchecked community power (p. 84) and the entire implementation of these proposals is a state-directed enterprise: provoked by a need to address social dislocation (p. 107) and reconstruct marginalised poorer communities (p. 82) where civic involvement is low and tradition and custom have lapsed (p. 70) – ‘one of the prime concerns of government is to repair the civil order’ (p. 82). A conflated theme to which Giddens constantly returns is the legitimacy claims confronting what he terms a state without enemies (p. 75). This theme, though barely mentioned after the first book (presumably because the state has recently re-discovered some enemies) does seem to have a continuing and underlying relevance to his project. Of course in this regard Giddens’s notion of a crisis in community necessitating new forms of management and new networks is as familiar as Durkheim and Tonnies (Portes 2000); indeed it is openly derived from them. Giddens is clearly committed to the notion of globalisation and a primary role for the neo-liberal market in shaping people’s lives. Within his schema increased social investment from government compliments the market. While this may look good on paper, Giddens provide no historical evidence for the claim that the government and the market have compatible aims and needs, or indeed that the market has any incentive to support the re-allocation of financial resources into programmes of social assistance – programs of course which someone has to pay for. Given that his book is underwritten by a need to redress shortcomings arising specifically from the neo-liberal attitudes of the globalising forces, why they should suddenly work in harmony with either government or under-resourced (read underprivileged) communities is neither proved or examined. This shortcoming is characteristic of Third Way work in general, but is especially marked in Giddens’s case. There is little or no attempt to justify his description of the social as being in a state of crisis; he simply asserts that it is. An assertion which ignores much of the historical evidence, ignores the experience of other countries also affected by globalisation and appears to be framed more in line with popular prejudice than objective fact. All his Third Way books indeed, utilise his

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sociological reputation in support of what is an anecdotal, normative and journalistic approach: one moreover, long on prediction and political style sound-bites, but short on qualitative costing and analysis. Much like the Social Capital advocates, Giddens is more concerned with bridging divides than proving their existence or investigating what creates and perpetuates them. To this end as Scanlon observes (2000, p. 70), Giddens privileges social interconnectedness over the grounds within which these networks are embedded. Again in common with Social Capital, Giddens’s proposals depend upon and propagate an unproblematic relation between community and state, co-operation and hierarchical power (Portes 2000, p. 46). Furthermore, none of the terms which provide the basis for his proposals are ever examined or indeed defined. Community is never defined, nor is action. What do these terms mean? Giddens once again simply presents an assumed common sense view. Given that a project of this sort aims to effect people’s lives, such definitions are crucial. He speaks of an alternative to the sectarian self-interest of neo-liberal practice and the authoritarian dictates of commanding heights socialism, yet without the sort of reflexivity and transparency which definitions attest to, how can his own program be other than narrow or authoritarian? The tone of his work seems to demand agreement rather than encourage participation. For instance, electronic referenda might well encourage increased voter participation, but what is required is some discussion of its virtues and shortcomings, not simply an assertion of their unproblematic worth. How would referenda of this sort be introduced and conducted? Who would run it? What would be done to ensure equal access by all voters? How would voter privacy, functional impartiality and the integrity of results be guaranteed? These are crucial issues in a democracy. Giddens writes as if they were unproblematic administrative tasks. Yet he champions such tools under the claim that they increase democratic involvement. Does it ever occur to him that under certain circumstances they might not or that democratic decisions of this sort require transparency, community participation and most of all discussion? In short his programme appears simplistic, driven by a technological determinism which excludes questions of power, inequality and history as well as the very sort of democracy he claims to be asserting. There are sound historical reasons for the gridlock effecting liberal government. Giddens feels no need to examine any of them. The overall effect of this narrow perspective and omission of detail is that the book reads like a dated collection of buzz-words, rather than a serious programme for political and social reform. The notion of

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community for instance, while it is often utilised by Giddens as a almost subliminal feel-good justification for many of his proposals, actually figures very sparsely in the book, most of which concentrates upon the state which is implicitly positioned as first, the voice of the community and second, as the ‘real’ source of social cohesion and power. Of course as we shall see in Chapter 5, this is a substitution common among all sociologists, but given that Giddens’s professed aim is enhancing communities and empowering individuals, such an overt and persistent substitution does rather undermine his professed intent. The effect is that community in Giddens is once again positioned as a supine object to be experimented upon by experts and government decree. In this regard Paul Commack (Hale et al. 2004) has demonstrated how Giddens’s discourse appropriates key value bearing terms for social democracy and transmutes and inverts them into their neo-liberal opposites, for example, individualism becomes the new solidarity; responsibility becomes the new emancipation; inclusion becomes the new equality and finally, network isolation becomes the new community. This of course supports questions concerning the credibility one can attach to his claims regarding a new space. The sum total of these omissions is that it is difficult to take a totally realist approach to something which is simultaneously so concrete and so nebulous. A characteristic which of course makes it very appealing to politicians, which is why perhaps they have been taken up by AngloSaxon politicians, as varied as Bill Clinton and the former leader of the Australian Labor party, Mark Latham. Given all the issues raised, it is hard to disagree with Rose’s claim (1999) that community for Giddens is simply a signifier, concealing a process of political reinvention, the sum total of which is to allow and validate more governmental intervention into people’s lives by the same old commanding heights system he claims to want to transcend.

Civil society It could be argued that Giddens’s Third Way work, particularly in relation to his notions of a reinvigorated civil society, simply extend and re-package a discussion ongoing within Anglo-Saxon Sociology since the 1980s. Surprisingly, much of this re-awakened interest in civil society has come from the Left, or at least from those locating themselves in the social democratic tradition. I say surprising, because the notion of civil society as a non-political space, had been one of the objects of attack in

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the 1960s, precisely because it concealed from political discussion-areas deemed to be sustaining of oppression, in particular, family, gender, racism and class. Regardless of that history, what is clear is that writers who deemed themselves social democratic, were infected by the same concerns regarding social cohesion as their more conservative colleagues: concerns which are driving the entire ‘debate’ about ‘community’. One of the earliest, most influential books in this renewed 1980s debate was Democracy and Civil Society by John Keene published in 1988. Like many later commentators, Keene’s work was prompted by what he saw as the dangers facing contemporary democratic institutions; institutions which he termed ‘stagnant and orthodox’ (Keene 1988). Furthermore, he pre-empted later Third Way criticism of traditional left parties, accusing them of lacking dynamism, self-confidence and a will to defend democracy. In contrast he proposed a re-examination of what he called the central themes in democratic thought since the eighteenth century, an element of which involved his attempt to reclaim the original designation of civil society as a peaceful political order governed by law. Keene claimed this designation had historically been subsumed beneath the later notion of a demarcated institutional realm separate from state institutions. It is this original meaning of civil society which Keene sort to revive in a living form as an ‘open minded uncompromising pluralist and cosmopolitan concept of democracy’ (p. 10). For Keene then, civil society refers to ‘dynamic webs of inter-related, non government institutions, for example market economies, households, charitable groups, voluntary associations, independent churches and publishing houses’, all of which suggests that his definition is a material one, despite the ambitious idealism of his aim. In a typical mechanistic manoeuvre, he avoids the problem of reconciling the two by referring to his defined civil society as a Weberian ideal type, while proposing on the other hand, to establish it in the real world (p. 11). In pursuit of this ideal his work charts the historical development of civil society, sourcing it in Locke and Hegel, and more particularly in de Tocqueville, whose work, until the late 1980s, had rather slipped from view. Indeed, the rediscovery of de Tocqueville and his notions of association, as well as his prophetic warnings concerning government power and excessive individualism, has become one defining hallmark of this entire debate2. Couching his rhetoric in the language of social democracy, Keene argues for an enlargement of the choices available to citizens and a rethinking of the scope of state action. Both of which, if developed in tandem, would lead, so he claims, to an expansion of civil

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society, a sphere, which on one occasion he terms, ‘autonomous social life (p. 3)’. However this slide between the discursive world of ideal types and the world of material formations and practice – a slide which defines the book as a whole – becomes clear when he states a desire to see his notion of civil society operating as a thorn in the side of political power (ibid). A possibility rather contradicted by his later discussion of the historical fate of earlier civil sociétés, all of which were clearly undone by precisely the same political state and the same market forces which he now summons to redeem them. A paradox heightened by the simple common sense political question of why either a state, or a set of politicians, would want to re-create a thorn in their side in the first place. Moreover, while he justifies his project with claims that civil society would enhance democratic participation and democracy in general, he never once shows how the increasing number of charitable institutions, publishing houses and voluntary associations would work to increase democracy, he simply asserts in a common sense manner that they would, an assertion that more empirical grounded studies have found to be questionable (Encernacion 2003, p. 175; Beman 1997). Yet the link between the two is problematic (Bemes 2000, p. 239). After all civil society flourished in a period which by today’s standards was profoundly undemocratic. Moreover it functioned – and this was precisely the gist of the 1960s attacks – to segregate certain issues from democratic discussion. Keene never answers these doubts; he simply states in an unproblematic tone that more debate is a good thing and that more publishing houses for instance will automatically increase debate. Yet Keene’s underlying assumption – that more debate equals better politics – is itself questionable. Indeed, if one observes the contemporary world one could quite reasonably respond that there has never been as much debate as there is now and that what is lacking is not debate per say, but rather the capacity of this debate to have any real effect upon the governmental process. One of the weaknesses of Keene’s book overall is that while he seeks to create a contemporary version of civil society, he says very little about the contemporary world. In any case Keene’s work launched a flood of interest in civil society which continued throughout the 1990s, spurred on by the 1989 fall of Communism which revealed the transformatory possibilities of civil society (Schecte 2000). While many of these commentators agreed that it was a ‘fuzzy concept’ (Hall 1995), ‘difficult to locate precisely’ (Schecter 2000) and containing ‘a variety of meanings’ (Mouzelis 1995,

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p. 225), they were clearly all driven by a sense of unchecked and overwhelming governmental and market control, as well as the common feeling that new perspectives were required to revitalise a moribund political process. To this end, the concept itself, regardless of its acknowledged incomplete sociological moorings (Hall 1995), and its dual status as both a social value and a set of institutions, seemed to offer some space for non-statist politics. Schecter defines it as ‘an ensemble of institutions, communications and political action not reducible to any single sociological, economic or political action’ (Schecte 2000) a definition which highlights all the problems I mentioned. Schecter implicitly confirms this when he argues that civil society can’t be defined functionally because it doesn’t represent separate systems of independent logics. Mouzelis locates it historically in the sense that he defines it as containing all the usual associations, groups, interests groups and so on, but demands that they be located in ‘a condition of modernity’ (Mouzelis 1995). Seligman appears to define civil society in terms of spirit (Seligman 1992) and thinks the state is required to protect civil society (p. 15). Unfortunately none of the authors mentioned here are capable of describing how this restoration of civil society might occur. And this failure has two clear contributing causes – the first I have mentioned already in relation to Keene’s proposals: proposals which highlight the paradox informing the entire debate. A debate which you might recall has arisen because of the growth of state and corporate power and the success of the neo-liberal project. As such there is a lack of agency within the social capable of exerting social power to offset these two dominant pillars of modern life. None of the authors confront this problem, primarily, I would suggest, because none of them are willing to endorse any form of power or social relationship outside the defining sociological axis of individual and state. Second, theoretically none of these authors can account for what binds civil society together – talk of civic virtue and social spirit are, in this context, tatty idealisms which ignore contemporary social realities. Even in its theoretical space, civil society has no centre – no subjectivity no class consciousness, no materiality, nothing – it is in fact a hollow theoretical space which exists, and I would argue, has always existed principally to satisfy a theoretical necessity within mechanistic social modelling. For much like the mechanistic designation of community, civil society existed to locate theoretically what could not be contained within the demarcated, essentialist designations of state and market.

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To this end I have mentioned the variety of definitions because these attest to the difficulty of even constructing a theoretical space for civil society, much less an actual material space. Furthermore, despite their variety of definitions none of the authors attempt to support their particular approach with any contemporary quantitative economic or social statistics, a shortcoming which has a very obvious explanation. To use the example of publishing houses which Keene himself introduces into the discussion, there simply are no independent publishing houses remaining, all of them were subsumed into various corporations during the merger manias of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, it was accompanied by a similar concentration of economic power throughout the cultural and social industries. Moreover, as we saw in the chapter 2, the number of voluntary associations is in free-fall. There are good economic and social reasons for this, none of which Keene confronts. Against such a backdrop one is quite entitled to ask where he hopes to discover the basis for a renewed civil society. But of course economic discussions of this sort are beyond the institutional boundaries that political scientist erect around themselves. So we are confronted by a ‘debate’ where definitions vary wildly, while desired outcomes are all couched in vague and mundanely similar ‘feelgood’ formulations and the link between the two is so blurred as to be invisible. Typically, there is also the usual ambivalence accorded by these commentators to the notion of community. For when it suits them, all the writers conflate community and associations with civil society and while they all strive for the veneer of historical specificity, none of them really investigate the historical reasons for the coming into being or the disappearance of civil society, preferring instead to concentrate upon philosophical antecedents. Indeed, some recent empirical work, principally that of Encernacion (2003) has cast serious doubt on the unproblematic link between a strong healthy civil society and a thriving democracy, pointing to instances where one has not lead to another (p. 185).

Communitarians Modern-day Communitarianism emerged in the 1970s as a reaction among the upper reaches of Anglo-American academia to John Rawls’ landmark 1971 book A Theory of Justice (1971). Heavily influenced by Aristotle and Hegel, political philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre (1988, 1990), Michael Sandel (1982, 1984), Charles Taylor (1989) and

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Michael Walzer (1983) sort to balance Rawls’s, and by implication Liberalism’s blindness towards social embeddedness. Originally therefore, the communitarian project was fundamentally a reactive and restorative one, conducted upon a philosophical level, sourced within an explicit rejection of contemporary American social life, and an equally explicit belief in the decline of the normative order underpinning its social fabric, Beck terms it nostalgic (1998, p. 130).3 As such the breakdown of social norms is clearly ascribed by Communitarians to a liberal philosophy which prioritises individual rights over the common good, and institutionalises this prioritisation within contemporary social formations. This prioritisation has, according to communitarians, resulted in a weakening of traditional qualities such as thrift, hard work, personal responsibility and etiquette and the commensurate rise of perspectivism, self interest, instrumentalism and value based agendas (Etzioni 2001, pp. 64–5). Individual relationships, communitarians argue, cannot simply be derived from the free agreement of rational individuals, but must, in contrast, refer to our role as citizens and participants within a political community (Sandel 1984, p. 84). According to the Communitarians, Liberalism is incapable of creating, or more importantly valuing social life, and without that valuing whatever social life that does exist cannot provide an adequate grounding for moral judgement. Taylor for instance, has objected to the liberal view that ‘men are self-sufficient outside of society’ (Taylor 1989, 2000) and in contra distinction offered the clearly Aristotelian view that ‘Man is a social animal, indeed a political animal, because he is not selfsufficient alone, and in an important sense is not self-sufficient outside a polis’ (p. 190). For Communitarians, this liberal atomistic self presumes a social context without acknowledging it. Liberalism ignores the extent to which individualism hinges upon a commitment from all its members to a society that promotes particular values such as freedom and individual diversity. In relation to the traditional unitary Cartesian subject, Communitarians are clearly driven by similar concerns to those of Social Capital. To this end their project attempts in much the same manner as the social capitalists – to develop a more rounded, less unitary model of rationality and individuality. Within such a framework identity, at least partially, is an inter-relational construct achieved through dialogic relationships (Taylor 1989, pp. 31–2) and through traditions derived from the individual’s particular community. Thus for Communitarians, voluntaristic assumptions of the sort that underpin liberalism ignore the

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ontological and moral sense in which social bonds are constructive of identity. These social bonds are what construct us as people but most crucially, they inculcate and maintain our social sense, our core virtues: the very virtues productive of any form of community and social cohesion. Perhaps surprisingly, in light of this emphasis upon communal embeddedness, communitarian work is characterised by an absence of ‘any extended analyses of the concept of community’ (Fraser 1999, p. 61). Furthermore, Communitarian accounts of the relationship between the subject and community are heavily qualified – by distance in the case of Sandel (1993), by conflict in the case of MacIntyre and by dilemmatic choice in Taylor’s case (Digeser 1995, p. 76) – and these qualifications are all qualifications in favour of the individual. Sandel, as Digeser observes (p. 73), explicitly renounces voluntaristic choice as the mechanism for identity formation. Yet he also refuses to explain how ‘we choose to draw our boundaries’ and this refusal is because ‘he reserves the notion of choice for an activity performed for a highly abstract, antecedently given Kantian subject’. Honig is quite correct (1993) therefore, when she encapsulates Sandal’s notion of the subject and the construction of subjectivity as a balancing act between the two poles of the unitary rational individual and the self, entirely created within community. Indeed this balancing act is common with Communitarian work, even if, as was the case with Sandel, they simply refuse to acknowledge it. Nor is it helped by a characteristic avoidance of any definition of community (Waldron 1989). In this regard Digeser goes so far as to state in summary that ‘communitarians have qualified the unity of the self and community so heavily that a liberal self … appears an intrinsic part of the project’ (Digeser 1995, p. 94): to the detriment of their capacity to explain, not only the relationship between community and being-ness but also to provide an alternative theoretical platform from which their criticism of liberalism could garner authority. In the end the divide between Communitarians and Liberalism is, as many have noted, more a matter of emphasis than real concrete difference (Alperson 2002). Thus, while the heat of their attacks might suggest that for Communitarians, Liberals are even more dastardly than Marxists, the relatively mild nature of their counter proposals proves that the difference between them is in fact very small, amounting in most cases to nothing more than a change of emphasis. Communitarians are more inclined to argue for instance that individuals have a vital interest in leading decent communal lives, with the political implication that this

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interest may need active intervention to sustain and promote the communal attachments crucial to our sense of well-being. Of course this does not inherently conflict with the liberal view that the state should guarantee the well-being of its citizens. In short, perceived differences often amount to little more than a different perspective: Communitarians argue for the priority of the particular over the universal but only in some circumstances and only as a philosophical dictum. It is simply the communitarian view that the universalist perspective of liberalism does not automatically supersede the claims of community and social specificity. On the continuum between freedom and community, Communitarians therefore, are more inclined to draw the line towards the latter. To remedy what they see as the imbalance between rights and responsibilities in the American political system, Communitarians propose a moratorium on the manufacture of new rights and changes, a shift away from exclusive focus on personal fulfilment and towards concern with bolstering families, schools, neighbourhoods, and national political life with supported public policies. Thus, Communitarians begin by postulating the need for us to experience our lives as intrinsically bound with the good of the communities through which our identity has been constituted. In practice much of the Communitarian project is devoted to establishing terms for the inculcation of civic virtue and the means by which a particular communal tradition that orientates and locates everyone within narratives of identity, can be activated, preserved and enhanced (Etzioni 2001; Tan 1998). It should be also be noted at this point that, at least superficially, the communitarian project is not primarily concerned with a top-down legislative approach, but rather with the inculcation of virtues and values at a micro level, the construction of a moral voice amongst community members and between communities (Rose 1999, p. 184), though in due course we shall see how real this distinction is in practice. Despite the cited author’s reluctance to term themselves a school, certain core arguments recur consistently: ●

●

●

Value claims about the importance of tradition and social context for moral and political reasoning. Ontological or metaphysical claims about the social nature of the self. Normative claims about the value of community (Avineri and de-Shalit 1992; Bell 1993; Berten et al. 1997; Mulhall and Swift 1996, and Rasmussen 1990).

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Clearly a project of this sort can be located in the general concerns about the atomising and fragmentary nature of post sixties culture – concerns listed earlier in relation to Social Capital and Trust. Many Communitarians seem worried by a perception that traditional liberal institutions and practices have contributed to, or at least do not seem up to the task of dealing with precisely these issues, particularly cultural dislocation and the attendant problems of social control which arise in its wake. Thus, in much of their work – work which draws heavily upon Hegel’s critique of Kant and Aristotle’s conception of citizenship – Communitarians attack liberalism for its assumption that universalistic principles can sustain genuine freedom without civic engagement or a government actively engaged in the construction of core virtues (Sandel 1996, p. 24). This stress upon core virtues, common-ness and questions of morality is what gives communitarian discourse its particular taste. For Communitarians the social world one inhabits, provides more than social practices like politeness and norms of dress, behaviour and speech, it provides orientation in moral space. We cannot make sense of our moral experience unless we situate ourselves within this given moral space, within the authoritative moral horizons. What Charles Taylor calls ‘higher, strongly evaluated goods’ (Taylor 1989) – the goods we should feel committed to, those that generate moral obligations on us regardless of our actual preferences are not somehow invented by individuals, but rather they are located within the social world which provides one’s framework for the lower and the higher virtues and evoke a firmly anchored conception of the good – ‘No one can speak of Nazi virtues, I hope’ (Etzioni 2001, p. xiv). A ‘good society fosters a set of core values that define that which it considers good’ (p. xv). Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor argue that moral and political judgment depends conjointly on the language of reason and the interpretive framework within which agents view their world, hence it makes no sense to begin the political enterprise by abstracting the individual from the interpretive dimensions of human beliefs, practices, and institutions (Benhabib 1992, pp. 23–38, 89n4; MacIntyre 1978, chs. 18–22; 1988, ch. 1; Taylor 1985, ch. 1; Walzer 1983, p. 8). Taylor (1989) develops the additional argument that effective social criticism must derive from and resonate with the habits and traditions of actual people living in specific times and places. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre defends the Aristotelian ideal of the intimate, reciprocating local community bounded by shared ends, where people simply assume and fulfil socially given roles (MacIntyre 1984) and his work manifests a

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kind of nostalgic repudiation of modernity and contemporary society (Poole 1991, p. 169). In Spheres of Justice Michael Walzer’s attempts to bypass liberalism, lead to his nomination of the Indian caste system, as a site where ‘social meanings are integrated and hierarchical’ (Walzer 1983, p. 313). How relevant these alternatives are within the complex and conflictridden large-scale world of industrialized societies is for the reader to judge. I am also inclined to agree with Schecter’s observation (Schecter 2000, p. 11) that in relation to Hegal’s theory of the state and civil society, Communitarian accounts of the common good, their notion of political and ethical virtues and their ideas of a community-rooted identity, are unsophisticated and rudimentary. In a similar vein it is clear that Charles Taylor for instance is utterly misplaced when he summons Arendt to support his use of Aristotle. Given his proclaimed opposition to instrumentality (Taylor 1989), Taylor’s reading of Aristotle is clumsy and entirely ignores the fact that Aristotle’s notion of community is clearly grounded in an instrumental approach, something Arendt is well aware of ( Villa 1996). Perhaps with this in mind the second wave of Communitarians, commentators such as Etzioni (1998, 2001) Tan (1998) and Lichterman (1996) have refocused the debate away from the academic terrain towards a more practical political agenda, emphasising social responsibility and promoting policies meant to stem the erosion of communal life in an increasingly fragmented society. This wave of Communitarians calls for interests of localism and social context, particularity in short to over-ride or at least counteract liberalist claims to the universal applicability of notions of justice and so forth. This modified approach is exemplified by Etzioni who has gone so far as to publish a Communitarian Platform (1993) and whose work includes discussion of how to reinvigorate, what he terms the ‘debasement of public holidays’ (p. xviii and pp. 116–140). Indeed Etzioni’s work, which tends to be more practically orientated than earlier Communitarians, clearly reveals the underlying influence of 1950s Functionalism, just as his discussion of the cyber communities touches upon issues prevalent within Third Way accounts (Scanlon 2000, p. 65). Tan is especially interesting in this regard, because not only does he prefer concrete proposals to abstract philosophy, he also reveals a greater social engagement with the problems of globalisation, perhaps because he is writing from a British perspective. As such his work is posed, not so much against 1960s individualism, but specifically as a communitarian alternative to market individualism (Tan 1998). Additionally, he claims

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his work is an attempt to bridge the left–right divide (p. 35), something which of course links him specifically to Giddens and Third Way proponents. He stresses education and what he terms ‘the meaningful empowerment of citizens’ (p. 24) through democratic reform which allows ‘citizens to take part in co-operative enquires determining a wide range of issues’ (ibid). In both phrases of Communitarian work, there remains a strong normative notion of community, as well as what could be regarded as a hidden conflation of state and community. Community is often evoked but rarely described. Sandel’s comment that, ‘as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons or daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic’ (1981, p. 179), is matched by Tan’s notion that ‘all institutions, from playgroups and nurseries to schools and universities need to accept that they have a vital responsibility for the character formation of the young’ (ibid). To this end Sandel also places special emphasis upon the national political community – by which he means the state – all the time arguing for ‘community’ measures that increase civic engagement and publicspiritedness (Sandel 1996). Therefore, the distinctive Communitarian political project is to identify valued forms of community and to devise state policies designed to protect and promote them: a contradiction which appears to pass them by. Politically, this centres Communitarian work within the same in-between space coveted by the Third Way commentators. Thus Tan chastises the Left, first, for supporting economically unsustainable welfare rights and second, for centralising power away from local communities and democratic institutions towards bureaucratic structures interested only in a universal logic of instrumental equality – A move he claims, which positions private help for others and communal obligations as unnecessary and, in most cases, something to be actively discouraged. All of which leads to a growing sense of powerlessness and alienation from the political process. Conversely Neo-Liberal solutions of the sort favoured by the political right, have contributed directly to the erosion of social responsibilities and valued forms of common life. Free-market capitalism undermines the family, ignores and disrupts local communities and corrupts the political process. Moreover, the instrumental rationality which underpins neo-liberalism reduces everything to a money value and inserts new relationships governed only by the market or the law into areas of society previously governed by uncalculated reciprocity and civil

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obligation. While Tan may be a little more radical in the Liberal sense, in truth there is little in his proposals which would offend any political centralist, and his conservatism is evidenced in the fact that the prime mover in implementing his proposals remains the state. On occasion indeed some of his wording seems to derive from the Mussolini school of corporate state-hood – ‘The task demands the embodiment of Communitarian principles in the working of every organisation’ (p. 10). Another element that distinguishes the Communitarian project is its promotion of all forms of communal life. In contrast to Social Capital and particularly the Third Way advocates, most Communitarians do not distinguish between types or communities. However, it should be noted that Tan for one does talk about discarding traditions that fail to sustain vibrant communities (1998, p. 16), a statement which follows on from his earlier claim that ‘a good community is one which allows members to attain fulfilment, is inclusive rather than exclusive, provides an equal share of power in deliberations and does not rely on dogmas and outmodes hierarchies’ (p. 8). Sentiments of the latter nature would certainly be a little difficult for the American Communitarians to swallow and it is difficult to gauge how far Tan himself is inclined to push it (pp. 16–17 reveals certain limits to the project). Nonetheless Tan at least recognises the social implications of the philosophical project: implications which some of the more academic American Communitarians, Macintyre for instance, tend to avoid. Leaving that aside, there is general agreement among Communitarians regarding the need to propagate ideas that protect communities of place including: granting community councils veto power over ugly building projects, implementing laws regulating plant closures so as to protect local communities from the effects of capital relocating off-shore, as well as promoting local-ownership of corporations (Shuman 1999), and imposing restrictions on large-scale discount outlets such as Wal-Mart that threaten to displace small, fragmented, and diverse family shops. In other examples, critics have drawn attention to the anti-social implications of gated communities on the grounds they undermine attachment to the polity at large and erode the social cohesion and trust needed to promote social justice and sustain the democratic process (Bell 1995; McKenzie 1994). In relation to issues of trust and social binding on the micro level, Communitarians tend to favour policies designed to protect and promote ties to the family and family-like groups. This includes supporting marriage as a concept and increasing the difficulty of divorce. Others look to Asiatic models for teaching primary school children about group

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co-operation, where benefits and rewards are assigned to the class as a whole rather than to individual students (Reid 1999). On a larger macro scale, concern has been expressed recently concerning the political rights of minority groups and recent literature has raised issues around citizenship, and multiculturalism (Kymlicka 1995; Macedo 2000; Tamir 1993). Of course all threes issues effect community, but in their micro perspective they rather skirt the issue of what a community is, as well as the issue of how to link normative proscriptions for communal ‘improvement’ with actual face-to-face communal practice – all of which raises issues about application as well as relevance. However this is a common question about much of this literature and more serious discussion concerning this topic must await a later chapter.

4 Foucault and Cultural Discourses

To this point the debate has largely involved an Anglo-American context, reflecting perhaps the political dominance of neo-liberalism and globalization agendas within Anglo-Saxon societies. This chapter engages with commentators heavily influenced by poststructuralism and particularly by the work of Foucault. As such there is a need to present briefly the key ideas underlying Foucault’s work as well as a brief resume of the context in which his work has been taken up, especially among Anglo-Saxon academics.

Foucault Sociological and historical context Foucault’s work is a radical amalgam of Marxism and Nietzsche (Rabinov Paul (ed.) 1986, pp. 247–8). France was one of the first European countries to embrace Nietzsche but while his influence has had an effect all the way from Sorel to Camus, Foucault combined it with Marxism in a manner that represented, in its combination of the material and the discursive, something new and startling. However, the post-1968 context in which his work was taken up tended to obscure the place of Nietzsche within his theory and to overemphasise questions such as resistance and determinism. As such, his work was initially influential among the Left, and within a context profoundly shaped by the failure of 1968 and the 1970s revolutionary projects (Torfing 1999, p. vii). The failure of the working class to perceive the state of their own exploitation and to mobilise on a mass scale in support of the student movements resulted in widespread disenchantment with a Marxist theory in which the social was reducible, ultimately, to economics. In intellectual circles this disenchantment with economic determinism, 66

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provoked a prolonged engagement with questions of ideology and subjectification, particularly the question of how the workers refused to recognise their own alienation and exploitation. In this regard Foucault’s work links with the sustained interrogation (Venn 2000) of the Cartesian subject (Henriques et al. 1984) that has taken place over the last twenty years and which also derives from a similar disillusionment. Foucault himself described his work in such terms citing his focus as the ‘genealogy of the modern subject’ (Faubion 2001, pp. 326–7). This work on the unitary rational subject has touched many facets of the relationship between the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’. Psychoanalysis has focused on the ‘inside’ of the subject and limited the social to the family (Henriques et al. 1984). Social psychology has turned away from essentialist psychology towards discourse/language in its attempt to account for relationship between the ‘individual’ and the ‘subject’. Finally, sociology itself has theorised across multiple boundaries as a means of examining the issue – beginning first with socialisation, role theory, ideology, structuralism in anthropology (Levi-Strauss) and culture (early Barthes, Schutz, Garfinkel), and later with the shift to cultural studies with its emphasis on the constitution of subjectivity, ideology, cultural location, historical specificity, identity/difference and agency. In the process it has borrowed theoretical tools from structuralism and post-structuralism, ethnography and Marxism, utilising thinkers as diverse as Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Lyotard, Adorno and various others of the Frankfurt school as well as Gramsci and the different standpoints afforded by feminist and post-colonial theory. In short, when it comes to the relationship between the ‘individual’ and the ‘social’ it is fair to say that sociology has exploded its boundaries. Within this general political and theoretical context, Foucault’s work found a ready and growing audience. Crucially this work is from an antimetaphysical tradition which links Foucault explicitly to Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as to what Yar (Yar 2001, p. 61) terms, a ‘shared assumption of the objectifying and alienating character of secular intersubjectivity’. This stance characterises much post-war French work on the subject and as Yar demonstrates (pp. 61–2), links Lacan, Althusser, Sartre and others to Foucault, especially in terms of the Hegelian ‘coming into self-consciousness’ and a general belief that the subject is constituted out of modes of mutual subjectification, objectification and instrumental reason (Honneth 2001, p. 161). Within this dual context, Foucault’s great advance was that by basing his approach within the materiality of discursive practice, by anchoring power within micro practices and by approaching structure

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as dependent upon a ‘million small events’ (Faubion 2001, p. 53), he shifts the responsibility for social construction from an institutional focus to the microcosm of daily practice. Simultaneously, his anti-essentialism constructs the subject entirely within discursive practice, thus eliminating any psychologised developmental explanation, and indeed any pre-conceived Cartesian subject. As he makes clear on numerous occasions, Foucault specifically rejects the Cartesian subject (Faubion 2001, pp. 274–5) and for him individual identity is the product of assemblages of power exercised over bodies, an effect of a series of practices and discursive truths (May 1983, pp. 42–50). To this end, Foucault’s work has been ground-breaking in many areas – his enunciation of the subject and power as explicitly bound; his utilization of historical specificity to move beyond structuralism; his refusal to separate knowledge and power; his painstaking examination of the complicity between knowledge, power; ‘truth’ and practice, his genealogy of the modern subject; his eradication of the private/public division that characterised classical sociological accounts; his delineation of distinctly modern forms of political power and his discovery of new areas of power such as discipline, surveillance and bio-politics – in these, and in many other areas, Foucault has redefined and refined the study of power and domination. Viewed however from another perspective, his work can be seen exclusively as a critique of liberalism and Marxism. His attempts to widen the account of power, to remove it from a simplistic totalising focus upon questions of sovereignty (Faubion 2001, p. 117) is obviously directed at liberalism, while his stress upon power as more than simply institutional domination (p. 118) is just as clearly addressed to Marxism (though the question as to whether he succeeds or not is open to debate, (see Stewart 2001, pp. 18–22) for a short but telling counter argument, also Dean (1994) for the claim that power in Foucault is not domination). Foucault tries to take the liberal project apart by showing how its attempts to describe ‘reality’ are actually descriptions of what it, itself produces. This approach marks Foucault’s true radicality and as such has been taken up by radicals in sociology as a way of understanding liberalism and neo-liberalism in the wake of the collapse of Marxism as a political project. Foucault’s method However, – and this is the point I wish to stress here – Foucault’s project is a philosophical one and to achieve his problematising aims he adopts a certain philosophical methodology; a methodology central to his work

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and central indeed to his achievements. Simultaneously however, this methodology serves to circumscribe and define the terms of his focus and the outcome of his investigations, indeed, just as his success springs from his methodology, so the very same methodology defines and limits the applicability of his work, particularly in relation to community. In regard to Foucault’s method, the clearest exposition is given by Todd May (1983) and his account forms the backbone of this description. May argues that the anti-foundational nature of Foucault’s investigation of knowledge becomes coherent philosophically, precisely because it is contained within a particular methodology. That while Foucault himself may have occasionally faltered in his understanding (Fraser 1989, p. 6 agrees, while even a determined defender Dean 1994, p. 152 only allows that he was ‘broadly consistent’), he nonetheless ‘had the deepest grasp’ (May 1983, p. 104) among his contemporaries of the limitations and the foundations of his investigation of knowledge. The key points of his method are as follows. 1. The construction of specific accounts of the social, the veracity of which rests upon ‘the relation of a word or a claim to a justificatory logic contained within the inferential autonomy of a particular discourse’ (p. 102). 2. Specific accounts of the social, containing both empirical investigations and theoretical argument constitutive of a two-way flow in which the two modes function jointly to locate the specific argument in relation to the particular normalised discourse Foucault wishes to problematise. 3. The setting aside of questions of truth in favour of a model of philosophical practice where justification functions as the measure of knowledge, and for the discursive practice to demonstrate this by describing the construction of knowledge and by questioning the relationship within knowledge between what cannot be said and the visible. 4. The refusal to claim either, that the micro-political is the only source of power, or that his work functions as a totalising account (which is why Foucault consistently describes his work as ‘sketches and scraps’ (Faubion 2001, p. 299)). 5. The restricting of his genealogy to an account of the emergence of a specific episteme, and to its links with various practices.1 6. All of this is linked – again as May demonstrates – to a model where power is given primacy over knowledge (May 1983, p. 87) yet power does not function as a determining and explanatory factor.2

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Several points can be drawn from this very brief account. First: attempts to explain Foucault’s notion of power – attempts virtually ubiquitous among sociologists who take-up Foucault’s work – tend, by their resort to generalisation and abstraction, to undermine the antimetaphysical basis of Foucault’s approach by reasserting it into a hierarchy which explicitly privileges universalising abstraction over the local and the particular, precisely the explanatory mode Foucault seeks to avoid. Second: the philosophical method that Foucault adopts is constructive of a situation which must always remain oppositional. It is always tied to what it seeks to problematise – the liberal subject, the hierarchy contained within liberal political theory with its privileging of sovereignty, the notion of power as domination and so forth. What is left out The question in relation to Foucault’s methodology is that a number of issues central to both a description of community and a ‘new’ political project are incapable of being theorised within Foucault’s work. From the perspective of community the most crucial are: Lack of a theory of co-operation Foucault’s concentration on the constructed subject and the constructing power creates the impression that there is no space where other subjectivities can be constructed. We have seen how his particular method situates itself as an oppositional logic within a determining philosophical framework; as such it should come as no surprise that what liberalism lacks so does Foucault. Thus, just as liberalism privileges and concentrates upon the relationship between the unitary rational subject (the individual) and the state, and in doing so, relegates community within its hierarchy of concerns, so Foucault, in his problematising of liberalism, is also unable to escape the subject/state axis and to construct the social in terms other than those established by the liberalism he deconstructs. The micro and the macro are Foucault’s concerns just as they are liberalism, and within his critique both of them define each other just as they do in liberal political philosophy. Within this ‘technical city’ Foucault’s oppositional position cannot disguise this mutual reliance. Thus, despite Foucault’s claim that his work is an ontology of the present, there is no description of contemporary inter-relations, of everyday practice within modernity, nor is there any other offered source for the

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construction of alternative subjectivities or any other sociality outside the subject and the state (Faubion 2001, p. 404 where he conflates society, nation and the state for example). Foucault’s methodology means that he cannot construct a positive alternative to the state/subject axis because to do so would mean that he was privileging some other metaphysical idealism as foundational, thus in short his methodology allows him no counterpart of Arendt’s shared world of appearance. Plurality In tandem with the absence of communal or any other form of non-state co-operation, it could be observed that the person within Foucauldian work, whether it be as a subject, a post-foundational subject, or a unitary rational subject, does not exist within, what Arendt calls, ‘the plurality of being’(Arendt 1958, p. 10). This lack of plurality is clear when Foucault speaks of investigating the knowing subject in a form that, ‘re-examines the status of the knowing subject’ (Rabinov 1997, p. 10), and in the manner in which he identifies ‘the different ensembles that are each bearers of particular knowledge that connects behaviour, rules of conduct, laws, habits or proscriptions: that thus form configurations both stable and capable of transformation’ (p. 9). And it becomes clear because his investigation of these issues is always confined to an exclusive focus upon the individual/subject and governance/state (see also the two lectures in Foucault 1980, Gordon (ed.) p. 98 where the second and third paragraphs posit power exclusively in terms of the individual). That is, even within the historical examples which provide the crux of Foucault’s work, there exists a narrow focus, one appropriate, indeed crucial, to the coherent enunciation of his methodology as a study of specific examples, yet one, which neglects totally the role of other social formations and social pluralities in both constructing other subjectivities and also alleviating the oppressive subjectification of governance. The subject Foucault’s work is specifically aimed at the unitary rational subject, yet claims that he has solved the agency/structure divide and undermined the subject as a source of agency are premature. Rather than bridging the agency/structure divide, it is more accurate to say that Foucault enfolds the subject into his general ontology. The distinction becomes clear if we consider the claim from his middle period work that disciplinary power operating through networks reaches into intimate spaces and produces subjects, yet in conjunction with this he also claims that

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power causes resistance. This produces a problem because he cannot explain why resistance is produced in some subjects and not in others. The same problem arises again in his later work where agency is assigned to those who resist power by means of an aesthetic project of selfauthoring – the question is the same: why some people and not others, how does the resisting subject shape themselves against the grain (Feltham and Clemens in Badiou, 1998 p. 6). On the basis of this, Fraser’s claim (Fraser 1987, p. 59) that he collapses agency into structure seems an accurate assessment. Rose and Foucauldian sociology Having given a necessarily brief description of Foucault’s work, I would like to revert to discussing community directly and in particular to discuss the work of Nikolas Rose, one of the leading group of British sociologists utilising Foucault’s work and insights within a sociological perspective. Given the similarity between Foucauldian approaches, it is fair I believe, to utilise Rose as exemplifying the general Foucauldian mode. In ‘Powers of Freedom’ his 1999 work, Rose tackles community directly; or rather to put it more accurately, he tackles the debate about community directly. Initially, and correctly, he stresses several key points about the use of the word community and the interests it serves. In particular he points to its long history in British liberal political discourse (Rose 1999, pp. 170–1), the thematic resonance attached to the notion of a loss of community (p. 172), as well as the manner in which community functions discursively in current debates to demarcate an emotional space through which individual identities can be constructed (ibid). These criticisms are well taken: community is clearly a word used by government to infuse its methods of social control with a shiny caring veneer. Less clear-cut however is his dismissal of what he terms the epochal approach (ibid, p. 12); that is the approach which attributes the current debate to the notion of social breakdown attendant upon the globalising and post-modern nature of contemporary life. As we have seen this fear certainly drives much of the social science debate, and in any case Rose’s alternative explanation – that the debate is basically a reconstructing of subjectivities as a means of social control – is fundamentally compatible with the epochal explanation he dismisses – it is simply the other side of the coin. Leaving that aside, Rose’s approach is based on the notion that new forms of communal intervention are emerging which seek to enact new subjectivities accessible to capitalism and power. What should be

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noted in passing is that much of Rose’s argument is simple assertion, unsupported by what one would traditionally regard as evidence or specific historical instances, despite Rose’s claim that his work is empirical in intent (p. 13). Unfortunately, Rose’s claim in the introduction that power does not inherently mean state power ( by which he appears to mean direct government decree) is rather undercut by his further claim in the same chapter that these new subjectivities represent a ‘novel’ move by the state to ‘return politics to the society itself’ (p. 174) but ‘no longer in the social form’. How a returning of this sort can be ‘novel’ or not in a ‘social form’ is however not explored. In any case much like Foucault, Rose sees the community debate as an ‘expert discourse and professional vocation’ programmed by various governmental agencies to map, classify and document individual conduct so that community now becomes ‘instituted in its contemporary form as “government by community” ’ (p. 175–76). Furthermore, Rose offers a series of closely placed assertions (by now he’s passed the point of simply describing the current academic debate and has widened his scope to encompasses Communitarians, police PR reports, the activities of social workers, legislators, community safety officers and Third Way proponents melded into an indivisible whole) which claim that the debate simultaneously functions as ‘a government of community’, ‘not a program of social control’, and a ‘re-making of political subjectivity’ (ibid); a combination which seems a trifle incongruous, not to say incompatible. Leaving the untested and unsupported nature of these assertions aside, his basic argument is that this reconfiguration, this new ‘government’ of community is a way of inaugurating a new form of citizenship; one which is ‘multiple, non-cumulative’, ‘in which multiple identities receive equal recognition in a single constitutional form’ (p. 176). A political project created by using the ‘sign of community’ to propose a relation that ‘appears less remote, more direct, one which occurs not in the artificial political spaces of society but in the matrices of affinity that appear more natural’ (p. 177). All of which may be partially true, but the question still looms of the connection between intention and actualisation, questions which Rose never answers. The word ‘appears’ hints at an answer but it is never developed. Nor I would argue is Rose capable of providing an answer and the reason for this incapacity is that like Foucault, and indeed post-structuralism in general, Rose has a problem with agency. In his account there simply is no agency: agency is infolded into his general

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description of a seamless monolithic process whereby subjectivities are constructed without the need for historical analysis of why people respond positively to community or how community transmuted from being a radical term to a pliant weapon for the reconstruction of subjectivities3 – though of course, why such new subjectivities might be required in the first place, in other words the very question of historical change, is never raised.4 The impression created is that ‘techniques and devices’ (p. 189) alone make community real, for all agency is at the bottom the acting out either of new modes of governmentality or new political subjectivities, all aimed at new citizen formation. There are various issues here, not the least being Rose’s conflation of discourse and everyday being-ness, a move which Foucault very carefully avoided (Torfing 1999, p. 90) but which has reasserted itself in a deal of this Foucouldian sociology, to the extent that it sometimes seems as if these sociologists are simply re-inventing Foucault as a Marxist. In any case leaving that aside, the notion that subjectivities, other than those of governmentality, are possible, is conspicuously absent from Rose’s account of community. Given all of this, his hopeful assertions regarding ‘insurgent communities building’ (Rose 1999, p. 193) literally beg the question of how, and indeed, why. Further, the claim appears out of nowhere, and within Rose’s paradigm that description is literally true, for he offers no account of where or how it might originate. As for his notion of a ‘politics of equality and justice based on solidarity amongst all citizens of a common political community’ it simply seems a warm cuddly discursive formulation, denied as it is any explanation of precisely how and indeed why, a community of this sort might appear. Ultimately this is the problem with his further notion of ‘non-individuated subjectivity’. Perhaps this is why his concluding remarks about ‘each person’s life to have its own telos’ appear so weak and are so hedged around with disclaimers – “its not an anthropology”, “its not an essentialism, there’s no essence here” – disclaimers, the intent of which appears to have more to do with Rose’s need to protect his theoretical perspective than any consideration of how and why a person might desire his or her own telos. After all, undertaking such a task in a society where constructed subjectivities are in the majority, would certainly be a thankless, not to say lonely undertaking. Finally, one further example from this chapter should alert us to the problems associated with subservience to any form of pre-investigative position. On pages 192 and 193 Rose, who for the previous three pages had been discussing what he terms ‘ethico-politics’, cites a proposed

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parent reading pledge as a particular mode of what he terms governing through ‘micro-management of the self steering practices of citizens’ (p. 193). Now the notion of ‘ethico-politics’ is clearly derived from Foucault’s notions of bio-power which in Rose’s definition serves to ‘collectivise and socialise’ (p. 188). As such Rose’s introduced notion of ethico-politics refers to ‘self techniques necessary for responsible self government and the relations between one’s obligation to oneself and one’s obligations to others’ (p. 188 his italics).Clearly this is meant to chime with Foucault’s notion of governmentality which Rose defines in the introduction as “all endeavours to shape, guide and direct the conduct of others” along with the further conjoined statement that such a activity ‘also embraces the ways in which one might be urged and educated to bridle one’s passions, to control one’s own instincts , to govern oneself’ (p. 6). Now there are two ways of taking this, either, it’s a simple claim that governments initiate laws to govern the conduct of its citizens. Nothing new here then. If this is the interpretation then what Foucault’s and Rose’s work amounts to (at least according to Rose) is the discussion of how governments over the course of the twentieth century, came to interfere more and more in people’s lives at increasingly micro levels with the intent of teaching and encouraging people to civilise themselves, a position little in advance of Norbert Elias. The second interpretation is more radical and far reaching – it is that govermentality is creative of a subject who produce themselves as subjects believing that they are – in the case of Western individuality – governing themselves. This is the certainly the interpretation suggested by the notion of ‘self-management’. The main problem here is the question of intention verses actualisation, an issue which many authors have questioned under various guises – Agamben (1999), Fraser (1987) and Butler (1997) being three examples. In short, is this what government wants or what it achieves – Rose slides back and forth between these two options whenever it suits him and the example of the reading pledge is a good instance of this. The term ethico-politics when applied to this example – precisely what Rose does – openly suggests that this is an example of ‘self management’ and ‘self-government’, yet he offers no proof of any connection between a central government decree and subject self management. Rather, he writes as if one, by magic, is creative of the other – the naturalised truth of discourse produces the self-subjectification of individuals. I’m sure governments of all stripes would like it to be so, but clearly, for everyone bar Rose, it is not the case. Indeed the necessity for such a

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pledge attests to the fact that self-management, the conduct of conduct, is not working. Yet he claims this as evidence of the veracity of Foucault’s notion of govermentality, something which may be true if Foucault’s notions are confined to the first interpretation mentioned earlier, but in that case one is driven to ask, what the fuss is about. Certainly if that is the limit of Foucault’s contribution then Rose’s claims about changing political thought and so on (Rose 1999, pp. 1–14) are at the very least, overblown. There are two further issues here, the first is that compliance does not equate with the willing self-construction of one’s self as a subject. That is a political value attached to being-ness by Rose prior to investigation. Simply because people do not rise in endless rebellion and revolution does not mean they are self-created subjects. There is a question here about what non-subjecthood entails. Rose is inscribing an essentialised value that is, subjectification to something and like all essentialised values it is measurable only by effect, something which, as we shall see in Chapter 6, is a typical mechanistic formulation. Moreover, it can only be sustained if one excludes – or in Rose’s case refuses to engage with – the possibility of non-state sites where other subjectivities might exist and be created, something which, as we saw, is implicit in Rose’s statement that ‘a whole array of little devices and techniques have been invented to make community’ (p. 189). An assertion I would argue, which suggests strongly that community and hence other sources for the construction of alternative subjectivities are non-existent. Again there’s a conflation of aim and result – these devices produce something termed community which people then believe in to the extent that they recreate themselves (or are recreated) as the self-managing subjects of ethico-politics. There is a crucial point here for if people believe they are acting communally and they believe they inhabit communities, then why are they wrong? To decide that these beliefs are misplaced, or concealed, or are not what they appear to be or are serving other interests is something Rose can only do by ascribing a prior value to their activity and his beliefs. Of course Marxists used to do this with the notion of false consciousness, but Rose claims to have transcended that sort of crude determinism. In any case a notion of this sort is clearly Cartesian, underpinned as it is both by a privileged and foundational idealism and an Archimedean point. Finally, there is an ahistorical aspect to Rose’s analysis, an aspect which manifests itself in the notion of the constructed subject. For if the subject is self-constructed as a subject, where are the limits of this

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self-construction and if there are no limits to its self-construction how is change and historical specificity accounted for? If Rose does not establish limits to the self-management project, the subject simply floats in the timeless mist of a 400 hundred modernist project, connected to govermentality not by the historically specific terms of its production, but simply by the normative assertion of Professor Rose himself. Indeed in his entire chapter there is no account or even evidence that Rose believes that subjectivities change except through govermentality, which of course begs the question of why new governmentalities are ever required in the first place. The problem once again is that Rose wants to have to have it both ways – he wants to claim which he often does (pp. 12,74), that this is just another reading, while allowing his normative language and his claims for Foucault’s work to suggest an exclusive and totalising view of modern govermentality. What we see then is that, despite his claims not to be exclusively a Foucauldian scholar (p. 4–5), Rose’s attachment to a particular methodology severely curtails his capacity to discuss community. In conclusion it is fair to say that like many of the approaches presented here, Rose’s work is more effective in its criticisms than it is redolent of any original or constructive approach to what exactly community, sociality or human being-ness within community might consist of. Typically, Foucauldian sociological work contains an introduction outlining the working methodology and asserting certain claims regarding its capacities, yet typically the works themselves routinely fail to measure up to these claims. Moreover the attachment to Foucauldian methodology produces works of mind-numbing similarity as if the result of the investigation has been decided prior to investigation taking place a trait typical of the Marxism they claim to have transcended. In short, Foucauldian approaches to community and Foucauldian methodology in general, leaves many questions unanswered and promises far more than it delivers.

Cultural theory The next perspective on community stems from a mix of cultural theory and the European philosophical projects of deconstruction and post-structuralism. Intellectual debates within this milieu, as they have developed over the last thirty years, have tended to move away from a modernist concentration upon the effacing of difference – differences of class, race and gender – towards the ethical imperatice to recognise and address difference. Given the recent predominance attached to

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community it is not surprising that notions of recognition and in particular the recognition of difference should have entered the debate and it is this focus that clearly distinguishes them from the more traditional philosophical orientation of Communitarians and the more contained sociological and quasi-political project of the Third Way. In comparison however, this perspective tends to be more fragmented, lacking the internal group coherency of the Communitarians or the prestige ascribed by the political establishment to Third Way and Social Capital (see Rose 1999, chapter 5 and Frasier 1999 for the relationship between these strands and contemporary politicians). Cultural theorists begin from the position that recognition ‘is taken as the instantiation of an economy of power which produces objectified and subjugated subjects (subjection) as the sine qua non of an ontology which reduces alterity, otherness and difference to the identitarian totality of the same’ (Yar 2001, p. 57). Thus this approach is engaged in asking a particular set of philosophical questions regarding what form of community and ethical activity can safeguard and promote alterity and difference. Borrowing notions of hybridity from post-colonial theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha (1994) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999) in conjunction with the anti-Hegelian projects of Levinas and Derrida, this approach asks, not how community can be reconstructed, but rather, in a situation where western societies are increasingly societies of hybridity, how is it possible to construct a community founded on difference, an issue grounded in the context of an ongoing refugee influx into continental Europe.5 The perspective of this approach is therefore utterly different from the first two accounts which locate their work within concerns about de-traditionalization and neo-liberalism. Occasionally indeed, this project appears founded on an almost wilful opposition to traditional notions of community as the unity of the ‘same’, hence the stress on conflict as the inevitable outcome of relations and sociality, often predicated as the inevitably repressive denial of difference (Bauman 2001b, p. 138–9). This approach claims to avoid universalist agendas concerned with human rights or economic redistribution, in favour of questions about the particular recognitions of dignity and respect (Honneth 2001, p. 43), especially the means by which recognition claims can be given concrete form within what is termed ‘everyday intersubjectivity’ (Lash and Featherstone 2001, p. 5). What is at stake is the construction of a framework for the ‘reciprocal respect for both the unique and equal respect for others’ (Honneth 2000, p. 145). Clearly these questions are becoming more pressing in an era where the terms for the production of national identity, politics and the

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separation of the real and the virtual are increasingly subject to a perceived ‘fragmentation of the symbolic and institutional meltdown’ (Lash and Featherstone 2001, p. 16). Thus, as the same authors assert, the questions underlying this approach are similar to those gripping the other theorists, albeit in different formulations – ‘How can we pose the question of recognition in an era of the breakdown of the social bond’ (ibid). There are two aspects of this debate which concern us here – the first relates to the manner and extent to which multiculturalism challenges the perceived universalisms of western liberal societies. The form in which this question is posed identifies it as a question about social cohesion, but social cohesion conceived of in the state’s terms; as such this is a debate which has aroused interest in a number of theorists – Giddens to name one – who mentions it in the Third Way. Fundamentally this aspect of the cultural debate originates with Charles Taylor’s (1992). Stemming out of that came a series of debates which took the opposite line of trying to understand how difference and multiculturalism counter the arguments of universal humanism. Additionally there have been contributions by Nancy Fraser (1995) which assert the primacy of redistribution over recognition and Kelly Oliver (2001) who argues against Hegel’s account of subject formation and attempts to replace recognition by reconfiguring accounts of the constitution of subjectivity as a means of paving the way for alternative forms of subjectivity (Oliver 2001, p. 153). No doubt this debate is patchy and of probably less weight and import than its proponents and contributors would like to imagine. They are mentioned here because while the debate has been largely philosophical, it is motivated by an attempt to reconfigure radical politics after the supposed deconstruction of the subject and moreover to do so in a philosophical context which seeks a basis on which the rights of other communities can be justified philosophically. Thus, central to these debates are several entwined questions hovering around the general notion of how communities come together and what the notion of a societal moral order might mean in an ‘era of the breakdown of the social bond’ (Lash and Featherstone 2001, p. 16). Some of the commentators – Honneth (2000), Taylor (1992) and Yar (2001) seek to understand how community and cultural cohesion can emerge from inter-subjective recognition of the individual subject. This merges with Honneth’s long-standing concern with the normative principles of a just social order (2000, p. 8) a task in which he utilises Hegal’s idea of the experience of friendship to arrive at a community of ‘being with oneself in another’ (p. 41).

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Oliver for one has argued against Taylor’s and Honneth’s notion of recognition, claiming that it is something dictated by the dominant ‘other’ and as such can only repeat the hierarchical structures and logic of oppression (Oliver 2001, p. 153). Others see this debate as a means of counteracting the Third-Way discourses of active modernisation, something they view as entailing a substitution of the European universal safety net with a market driven American programme of residual poverty relief (Lash and Featherstone 2001, p. 7). To this end someone like Ruth Lister (Lister, 1979) utilises the debate about recognition in a political framework by defending the universal safety net of benefits as a positive contributor to social cohesion. Given the manner in which groups at both ends of the social scale are either opting out of the social through gated estates and personalised welfare or through being marginalised by neo-liberal policies, she views the question of recognition as fundamentally entwined with political practices which – and this is the nub of her claim – enhance, social cohesion and the maintenance of an inclusive social bond. Recognition, grounded in reciprocity and unity of purpose has historically been not only the source of self, but also the basis for the social bond in the condition of modernity, what does it mean then when recognition becomes problematic? How can inter-subjectivity be described and indeed activated to preserve social bonds, when recognition indeed individualisation itself, becomes increasingly virtual, less grounded in materiality and culture as the expression of place? When making sense of the world and of your world human-beingness, requires a delicate picking through the myriad noise of informational and communication flows, what are the repercussions for the social bond and indeed for our capacity for inter-subjective recognition itself? These are reasonable questions, even if a little overheated, too eurocentric and perhaps to hypnotised by globalization’s self-aggrandising and self-serving reconfiguration of the modernist notion of inevitable linear progress. Indeed one of the difficulties of the current debate is that, despite stated differences, many strands of apparently differing approaches, share certain implicit attitudes. Giddens for instance configures globalisation as a process we have to adapt to and so – albeit in oppositional ways – does this debate. There are in truth many globalisations (Baker, Epstein, Pollin (eds) 1998) and there are still less telephones in the whole of Africa than there are in California, so perhaps there is less ‘global’ in globalization than Europeans might routinely believe.

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Moreover the history of the last two centuries teaches us that globalisation is a process which waxes and wanes, while finally, it is also true that the rise of globalisation seems itself to have been accompanied, at least in part, by an equal rise in various nationalisms and emerging ethnic identities coupled with an awakened desire for community: none of which points to a diminishing of the capacity for recognition.

The end of the social In Chapter 1, I discussed the pseudo-theological notions of community. As was stated previously this ‘other worldly’ divinization of society, in which community is not just a sui generis reality but an actual existent invested with a moral authority, ‘immanent and transcendent to the individual’ (Wernick 2000, p. 59) has underwritten sociology’s notions of the social for the last hundred and fifty years. It is the theoretical challenge to this notion which interest us here, and not surprisingly that challenge occurred at a time – post 1968 – when the unitary subject was being dismantled as well. In this context the starting figure is the French philosopher Baudrillard (1983) who propagated what has been termed ‘the end of the social arguments’. Baudrillard’s argument wanders a little between an attack on the theoretical concept of the social and his further argument, constructed around the notion of the simulacrum, which advances the notion that the social as such, does not exit in the contemporary world. In Baudrillard’s eyes the word ‘social’ is an intrinsically ambiguous term impervious to theoretical formulation, something illustrated by the three entwined hypotheses which he advances in his 1983 text – 1. The social has basically never existed; the social relation and the social is simply a simulation (ibid, pp. 70–1). 2. The social has always existed indeed it is becoming universal (ibid, p. 72). 3. The social has existed but doesn’t now; it has been replaced by a simulacrum of the social (ibid, p. 82). Wernick shows how these apparently conflicting hypotheses can be reconciled, however, ultimately I tend to view them as mutually incompatible or reconcilable perhaps, only within a very narrow and rationalist reading of French social theory (Fish 2003, p. 261). In this reading hypotheses two and three should not therefore be viewed as descriptions of the ‘real’, but rather comments and extension of the debate

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with sociological theory that Baudrillard is conducting in hypotheses one. Indeed they can be seen as attacks on Durkheim and Parsons for their notion of the social as a realm open to scientific investigation. In this context his statement that ‘there has never been any “social relation” ’ (Baudrillard 1983, pp. 70–1) and the following statement ‘nothing has ever functioned socially’ should be seen not as judgement (which in any case is impossible) upon the ‘reality’ of face-to-face-beingness, but rather a comment upon the godlike ambitions of a century of sociological endeavour. Once this has been grasped then the second hypothesis makes more sense in that the social here is seen as a mystery which has always evaded sociological imagining. Of course Baudrillard – schooled as he is in the French tradition of non-recognition as well as unknowingly contained within the state/subject axis that defines so much work on the social – arbitrarily deems that nowadays contemporary anonymity has reduced everybody to marginalised others, though whether he means this theoretically or in terms of face-to-face-interaction he never reveals. Maffesoli Somebody who serves as an antidote to this rather clichéd Archimedean pessimism is Michel Maffesoli work, in particular his 1996 Time of the Tribes, which represents a rare attempt to transcend, not only the dry scholastic deconstruction of much French post-structuralism, but also the same state/subject axis which contains and regulates so many of his contemporaries; it also manages to write about sociality in the present – all in all a rare flower. Indeed Fish’s rebuke that Maffesoli refuses to trade in moral outcomes (Fish 2003, pp. 262–9) or describe the ‘importance of social wholes’ (p. 267) only emphasises how great is the shift that Maffesoli makes from the typical sociological paradigm. His work can be seen as an investigation into small-scale socialities within the contemporary, based around the notion of tribes as people coming together as ‘heterogeneous fragments’ around ‘distinctive qualities and points of reference that are traceable back to the wider-multi form of the people themselves’ (p. 273). Moreover his model of how these small groups construct themselves and their linkages back and forth to the wider social formation not only serves to rebuke Baudrillard’s temerity in dismissing what contains, protects and nurtures him everyday, but also goes some way to undermining, in a much more innovative and interesting fashion than Baudrillard’s, the grandiose theorising of Comte, Durkheim and Parsons et al.

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Maffesoli’s notion of the social as a series of multi-layered and infinite actions and his attempts to link the construction of communal subjectivity with a myriad of small practices of sociality (Maffesoli 1996, p. 25) as well as his attempt to combine subjectivity and materiality, effectively locates sociality as something definable within a space of appearance: a place, where, in Arendt’s words, we appear to others as they appear to us (Arendt 1958). This is an important step and should not be underestimated. It is this perspective which marks Maffesoli’s work as a rare and radical attempt to move beyond the rather dismal history of sociology’s engagement with the communal. By displaying community as the outcome of a myriad of ‘little’ socialities, and by refusing to conceptualise community in the state’s terms as an homogenous abstraction, Maffesoli stands out a someone truly attempting to transcend the Cartesian conceptualisations, which, as we shall see in Chapter 6, contain virtually all the other commentators on community and the social, whether they be modernists or post-structuralists. Additionally, and finally, I would add to this grouping the rather detached and random figures of Giorgio Agamben (1993) and Nancy (1991), both of whom pose questions concerning whether community is possible beyond a community of essence or religion or location and what form such communities might take. Thus in this vein Agamben can write, These pure singularities communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by their identity. They are expropriated of all identities, so as to appropriate belonging itself, the sign. Trickster or fakes, associates or ‘toons, they are the exemplars of the coming community’. (Agamben 1993, p. 10.1) A statement defined more by its own fantasy rather than by its engagement with the world of human being-ness. Strangely enough, despite its post-structural affectations of style, Agamben’s community is as removed from the nitty gritty of contemporary face to face sociality as the equally futurist fantasies of Giddens and Etzioni, though he wouldn’t like the company. Indeed just like Bauman, he ostentatiously denies that anything like community exists in the contemporary world (Bauman 2001). Thus, again like Bauman and Etzioni, Agamben’s community is every bit as essentialised, every bit as ideal. Though of course any commentary on his exact intentions via community does come with the caveat that in a book

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ostensibly devoted to the coming community, he only mentions the word five times. Yet he does have this to say, Only those who succeed in carrying it to completion – without allowing what reveals to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals, but bringing language itself to language – will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a State where the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified and where the Shekinah will have stopped sucking the evil milk of its own separation. (82.3) Quite a mouthful, and as the Continental Op says in one of Dashell Hammett’s short stories, ‘skip the philosophy, do you want him arrested or not?’ in short what is he trying to say about the ostensible topic of his work?

Conclusion The introduction briefly noted that all these accounts, in one form or another, specifically present themselves as radically different from previous notions of community. Scanlon (2000, p. 59) for instance argues just that, claiming that these notions of community6 differ from traditional accounts by their opposition to community as personified entirely in ‘face-to face’ interaction, as well as in their notion of community as something beyond class or work place. Such a claim of difference is also implicit within Communitarian accounts with their attack upon classical and modern liberalism and their explicit attempts to distinguish communal relationships from the socially disengaged forms of community, the ‘thin community’, they ascribe to liberalism. Clearly this attempt to distinguish themselves from traditional accounts of community is also implicit within the cultural studies approach. Conversely, I maintain in Chapter 5 that all these contemporary accounts remain fundamentally grounded in a traditional social science perspective and a homogenous conceptual framework and that, leaving various superficial differences aside, the presence of these modernist conceptualisations and perspectives represents an inherent limitation, both in terms of the political and social possibilities that can arise from these accounts, and in their simple capacity to accurately model community and the social.

Part II Current Conceptions – Problems with Method

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5 The Individual/State Axis

At this point the reader has hopefully garnered an understanding of the image of community informing contemporary social science engagement with the topic. In relation to particular authors, some objections have been raised as to aspects of their approach. As Fraser observes (Fraser 1999, p. 60), ‘community’ is a tricky concept, ambiguous, incapable of agreement, permeated with value judgements, contradictorily, emotionally powerful yet somehow incapable of social science encapsulation’. Like most commentators however, Fraser notes the problem without appearing to be interested in why. In contrast this chapter – in conjunction with the next – deals with the two major stumbling blocks which prevent the social sciences from discussing community as an outcome of multiplicity, hybridity and action. The chapter claims that modernist social scientific conceptualisation situates community within a pre-given but unacknowledged framework (Bauman 2001, p. 35), which from the outset constrains its capacity to explain, or even adequately engage with the social, because as a group, their accounts conform to a model, both of what Sociology is and what social science investigation amounts to. Hence, this chapter moves beyond particular approaches and towards an examination of the question of why community is such a tricky concept for the social sciences. Clearly then this section claims that despite perceived differences and variations of approach – indeed despite the claim to radicality stressed in all current accounts – all the accounts share basic foundational similarities.1 These similarities arise because accounts are shaped around two foundational and self-imposed theoretical straight jackets; constraints which ultimately block any coherent attempt to model or describe community. 87

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In particular this chapter argues that the weak conceptualisation of community within these accounts is a direct outcome of their articulation of community as subservient to the defining modernist axis of liberal individual and liberal state, and that, in varied ways, this conceptual subservience is reductive of the theoretical space rightly belonging to community. This is the first of the self-imposed restraints. Within such a subservient theoretical-landscape, community can function as little more than a metaphor, incapable of adequately explaining either the historical sedimentation of social institutions or the micro manifestations of sociality in action. The second major constraint is the constant presence in all accounts of the mechanistic model and its mode of thought and that is the topic of Chapter 6. Ultimately, what these chapters demonstrate is that any attempt to theoretically elaborate sociality and contemporary community requires a clean break with the terms of the modernist and post-modernist investigation of community. In this regard they aim to clear the path for the later development (see Chapter 7) of an approach which theoretically empowers sociality as the outcome of hybridity, inter-relationality, action and multiplicity.

Modernity and community At this point I want to briefly remind the reader of the traditional modernist approach to community: Sociological theories of modernity … concentrated on … homogenization and conflict-resolution in a relentless search for a solution to the ‘Hobbesian problem’. This cognitive perspective … a priori disqualified all ‘uncertified’ agency; unpatterned and unregulated spontaneity of the autonomous agent was pre-defined as a de-stabilizing and indeed, anti-social factor marked for taming and extinction in the continuous struggle for societal survival. By the same token, prime importance was assigned to the mechanisms and weapons of orderpromotion and pattern maintenance – the state and the legitimation of its authority, power, socialization, culture, ideology – all selected for the role they played in the promotion of patterns, monotony, predictability and thus also manageability of conduct. (Bauman 2001, p. 176) Here we can also acknowledge Lash’s point that, for modernity, value in a sphere depends on how well objects or the sphere itself measure up to

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the norms proper to that sphere, and that the value of these propositions rely less on their capacity to reproduce reality and more on their capacity to support theoretical discourse (Lash 1989, p. 9). We are all familiar with the genealogy of the linkage societymodernity-state (Tournier 1988). The abstract space modernity inaugurates is christened society; society which marks the demise of community, which is ‘vanished’, disappeared, transcended (Locke 1975, pp. 1–5, 89; Nancy 1991). Ties derived previously from the social embedded-ness of the person, ties constituting, autonomous centres in contradiction to the state (Spruyt 1994; Heers 1977) are thus delimited and expelled from the theoretical frame. In tandem with the abstraction termed society and its mirror – the abstract individual – there appears the abstract relationship termed ‘freedom’ or ‘citizenship’ (Lefort 1986). Finally the ‘science’ of Sociology, which is also an abstracted space, translates the jumbled, chaotic immediacy of relationships of blood, affection, location, habit and task into language which props up the great hall and bathes the government buildings in floodlights (Auge 1995, p. 70 ff). And these non-spaces of government are matched by the empty space into which the individual calls out to his representative, as a conscious act. ‘Thus within the social sciences, the knowledge produced besides being inscribed in definite pre-existing power relations, or having definite effects for the exercise of power, is the result of processes that are in part contingent and in part structured-structuralizing, tied to calculations and intentions that are reflexively relayed through agents and agencies within the context of the institution of particular socialities’ (Venn 2000, p. 37). All of this bears on the question ‘what kind of social is given expression in intellectual practice’? I would argue that within this paradigm, any attempt to theoretically describe co-operative, communal sociality as pre-eminent, as foundational to the state, as politically and socially powerful, simply becomes invalid. The remainder of this chapter shows how the social science and cultural studies’ elaborations of community are constrained by the need to empower and grant primacy to the state/subject axis. At this juncture I claim that sociology and political science, whether modernist or post-modernist, manifest this general privileging in the following ways. The naturalisation of the individual within social theory Community within modernity is, and continues to be, proposed as an instrumental means for individual self realization. This is the direct result of the prior primacy granted the individual who is, by this slight of

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hand, established as a construct over and prior to sociality. This privileging clearly sourced in Descartes and Locke (Arendt 1958, p. 73; Latour 1993, p. 31) achieves two things: first, it confirms the derivative role ascribed to community; second it constructs community as the outcome of the temporary union of pre-constructed individuals thus depriving community of any role as the source of social being-ness. Within this mode of thought, community is a hollow shell, a ‘theoretical and performative stage’ for the enactment of a rational unitary individualism, rather than a space of relational plurality, constitutive of all forms of social being-ness, including individualism. Within this picture, community ‘grants real existence only to individualism and not to relations’ (Dumont 1986, p. 1). The fully formed individual enters into community by socialisation and all relations are volunteer and rationalist relations. Sociality and community are the stages for the unfolding and enacting of rationality, not its source. The naturalisation of the state within social theory This is one aspect of the particular perspective Bauman describes: indeed looking at the social in strictly political terms has a lineage traceable to Hobbes (Dumont 1986, p. 84; King 1974, p. 198). In consequence community within theoretical social science has always been, and continues to be, implicitly theorized as an effect of the state. This distorted ordering is maintained within the social sciences by three characteristic, overlapping, interacting discursive and theoretical formulations: ● Language evoked to theoretically elaborate community –‘society’, ‘interest’, ‘conflict’, ‘power’, ‘capital’, ‘cohesion’ and others – is permeated with the instrumental interest of state power. This vocabulary thus continually reproduces a disempowered, conflict-ridden schismatic community while implicitly and endlessly, reconfirming the development, status and validity of the state as the necessary arbitrator, the impartial, natural and most elevated form for the organisation of sociality. Within such a ‘truth-regime’, the language and conceptual formations utilized by the social sciences remain inadequate to conceptualise a self-sufficient description of communal human being-ness in its inter-relationality. ● The naturalised usage of terms such as ‘market’, ‘society’, ‘association’, ‘group’ and ‘civil society’ splinters the social into a series of mutually exclusive, essentialist entities united only in the working of the mechanistic whole (Featherstone 1995, p. 134). Given that the terms of this division and the relationships it constructs are never interrogated,

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community is reduced to one narrow disempowered form and located within a hierarchy where its macro primacy as the fundamental source of human being-ness is brushed aside, and co-opted by the state, which naturalises itself implicitly by this act of theoretical displacement. ● The adoption of an analytical, theoretical hierarchy which privileges abstraction2. The problem is that abstraction begins with an instrumental and therefore artificial link between the micro and macro; the large can be explained by the small – the small contains the large, but how – that is the question which is never tackled coherently. The result is the denial of hybridity (Latour 1993, p. 37), multiplicity and complexity of sociality and the community. Complexities and multiplicities which are inherently never pure and as a result can never be contained within the theoretical hierarchy of abstraction are ignored because they contaminate the abstraction. Once again, what is excluded tacitly endorses what is included – in this case the oppressive and totalising idealisms sustaining of the state’s universalising project. Community as the discursive ‘Other’ Theoretically the social scientific version of community functions as an ‘object of knowledge’ constructed by a ‘specific mode of distinguishing between the real and the imaginary, the true and the false’ (Lefort 1993, p. 11). Community and the state are discursively produced within this theoretical paradigm as objects of knowledge based upon a series of truth claims articulated in a double movement by which an ideologically constructed state and community are both defined as natural, while the principle that generates the overall configuration is concealed (ibid). The effect is to conceal the historical truth of community power (for discussion of the historical antecedents of such power, see Heers 1977; Spruyt 1994), privilege conflict and hierarchy over co-operation, validate the state as the sole space for political action and deny the space of appearance necessary for social inter-relationship and political plurality. Community as instrumental object The modernist methodology of community is such that investigation always proceeds on the basis of instrumentality (Bauman 2000, p. 167). Thus, community is never modelled unto itself or as a being-ness that has value in itself, rather it is simply and continually investigated for what it can provide, what it can produce or what political aim it might serve or exemplify. Furthermore, and I want to stress this at the outset, these characteristics underlie accounts, even when the authors explicitly claim they don’t.

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For instance Sandel (1982) and the Communitarians in general have an openly anti-instrumental attitude to community, yet their accounts are inherently instrumental in the sense that they investigate and indeed value community for what it can produce that is, social cohesion and social embedding. An examination of these four points reveals how, through a series of circular justifications and through the abstract language utilised to describe community, the social sciences, implicitly and explicitly, confirm the primacy of the state/subject axis as the pre-eminent social relationship even while its focus is apparently fixed upon community. The conflation of all these elements – given individual strength and emphasis in particular accounts, results in the ‘Cartesian community’, a construction thin, single stranded, narrow angled to our lives, to the communities we live in and the socialities we enact. This chapter argues that all characteristics are present within the contemporary accounts discussed earlier, and their presence effectively serves to invalidate any meaningful claim regarding their supposed difference.

Community after the liberal individual The liberal individual The argument to this point has claimed that the Cartesian community as a theoretical defining ‘technical city’ (Bachelard in Venn 2000, p. 36), contains a concealed privileging of the liberal axis of state and subject. This section points to certain grounds which establish the liberal individual as privileged within the theoretical modelling of community. Principally, it examines the question of inter-relationality between micro sociality and the described community. It argues that in modernist and post-modernist approaches to community, explanations of inter-relationality are confined to a simplistic and sterile series of repetitive formulae and that the dogmatic adherence to these formulae is a direct outcome of the need to maintain the primacy granted to forces constructed outside and prior to the theoretical community being described. In relation to the Cartesian individual, the section on Descartes discussed the manner in which Modernity performs what it termed a double theoretical disappearance, for just as the community as an independent, sustaining source of identity is abolished, so any form of referential social validation is also made impossible by the disappearance of the wider social world as a source of identity for individuals (Villa 1996,

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pp. 189, 194), leaving the solitary individuals to look into themselves for their identity and their values (Auge 1995, p. 92). Discussing Descartes we saw how the essentialised individual was only the visible element in a much wider world view. Yet – apart from Arendt – not much attention has been paid to the implications for the theoretical modelling of community, arising from the primacy granted to thought over action which the figure of the rational unitary subject embodies.3 In short, and for various reasons, the subject within modernity, and the subject within community remains the creation of entwining knowledge and power which theoretically, politically and socially, sever the individual from the communal world. A severing referred to by Arendt when she notes that people ‘are all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times’ (Arendt 1958, p. 58), or when Dumont describes each individual as a complete and solitary whole (Dumont 1986, p. 90). Therefore while the social sciences act as if the connection between the pre-formed coherent subject and community remains unproblematic, this claim is only sustained by reducing community to a performative space for the individual choice of an already formed individual, who, over and above the problems he personifies through his prior inscribed rationality, also represents the hierarchical privileging of thought over action and the primacy of the entire mechanistic tradition which represents the culmination of this hierarchical ordering.4 Micro socialities Now of course this prior privileging of the rational subject must automatically have some effect upon how micro linkages within communities are described. Clearly it is difficult to pose subjectivity as exclusively an inter-relational construct when the individual is already constructed with an inherent rationality. Of course rationality is, in this context, subjectivity and, given that such subjectivity is pre-formed, any interrelationality must be reduced to simply the acting out of individual rational interest. Communal inter-relationality becomes simply a product, an effect of such acting out, rather than something produced by sociality and community. There are many shades of this granted primacy. In the last twenty years, sociologists have taken to referring to agency, ability and such others as means of avoiding the crasser manifestations of the notion. One of the more subtle aspects through which the privileged status of the rational subject is maintained theoretically is by the pre-eminence

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granted within all these accounts to psychology as the favoured mode of explanation for inter-relationality and micro socialities. Psychology, as is well known, is intrinsically connected with the development of individualism as a social form and indeed the loss of the individual within the mass (Auge 1998, p. 92), indeed psychology has been described as the science of the individual (Rose 1985). As Arendt observes, ‘motives and aims … are never unique; like psychological qualities they are typical’ (Arendt 1958, p. 206 ), as such, psychology functions to explain the individual. It does not function, and cannot explain, either micro socialities which are always unique (in the sense that action is always unique Arendt 1958), or the community which is the sum of all these particular micro socialities. Inherently psychological explanations reduce the uniqueness of action to normative discursive descriptions of individuality. Because of this, psychology is crucial to a Cartesian model that both privileges interiority over exteriority and offers no way of bridging the two (May 1983, p. 60). Additionally, this privileging of psychology also dictates that community be elaborated within a voluntaristic framework. It is the acting out of interior forces, constructed without social reference. The result is a narrow watered down version of community which has, as its implicit basis, the notion that community can be consciously tacked onto other aspects of lives to which it is otherwise alien, as if community were not prior, were not everywhere, didn’t permeate everything, as if there were only one community – a community of choice, narrow, mono causal, mono faceted, ahistorical, consumerist and diluted; as if community and the social wasn’t foundational to all other forms of social organisation but rather dragged itself behind. So as someone firmly located in that tradition, Putnam describes trust (Putnam 1993, pp. 171–4) purely as the outcome of rationality and selfinterest (Harre 1999, p. 219). This typical liberal formulation represents the extent of his linkage of the micro and the macro though this deficiency is of course concealed beneath generalised terminology like ‘moral resources’ (Putnam 2000/1993) ‘uncivil motivations’ (Putnam 1993) and ‘stocks of social capital’ (1993: 2000); terms that serve simply to foreclose debate about linkage rather than explain it. Indeed it is noticeable that within Social Capital writing, the existence of social capital as a thing is asserted rather than demonstrated. Its claims that we are embedded in social networks are justified by resort to common sense, rather than examination of linkages in particular socialities. Description in Social Capital, despite its claims to micro analysis remains entirely macro. It thus leaves open the question of how embedded we are or

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what the nature of this embeddedness is, and it must do so as a result of its prior privileging of the rational individual. I suspect this is why Putnam and Coleman shy away from describing these networks as communal, while at the same time trying to distinguish themselves from any notion of community. Indeed the adoption of the language of economics – a language permeated with self interest and individual rationality – perfectly suits this evasion because it allows investigation of what are in effect communal relationships, without having to admit that such a search is fatally compromised by their prior privileging of the Cartesian individual. Indeed the problems mentioned by Coleman and Putnam in relation to ‘free-riding’ can only be noted, never resolved or even in truth, ever examined, primarily because in their accounts social interactions are always subservient to individuality; indeed Putnam defines the task of Social Capital as activating the ‘latent human capital’ of individuals. In truth this ‘problem’ is self-imposed as an outcome of their defining paradigm. Community/social capital in these accounts is confined to social ties chosen by individuals, in short the typical thin community of liberalism. The notion of community and social links as a drawing fund which individuals can access confirms Putnam’s priorities and highlights the primacy he allocates to the unitary rational individual. Giddens describes his communities in identical terms: as communities of choice (1998, p. 37), a basic voluntarist formulation which inherently renders such communities as the powerless stage for the rational choices of individuals, while concealing the terms for the construction or linkage within these communities. In Giddens indeed, this concealment is barely skin deep: for all his talk about communities as an abstraction, there is little examination of any existing communities and little attempt to conceal that what we are talking about is a future community as the outcome of the random choice of individuals and technological process. It is rather difficult however, to claim that caring sharing authentic communities can be constructed entirely from self-interest. As Scanlon observes (2000, p. 73) the notion of communities of choice does disguise the truth that community life is constructed through multiplicities of engagement and within a variety of communities. In fact all Giddens offers by way of an explanation for the relationship between macro-community and micro being-ness is vague, negatively couched statements that society is more than the individual (1998, p. 61). Instead he relies upon a simple voluntarist notion of choice (Giddens 1993, pp. 29–132; 1998) something which does open him to

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the criticism that his envisaged communities lack depth or commitment (Scanlon 2000, p. 63). Yet this voluntarism is dictated to Giddens by his reliance upon the unitary subject. It is no surprise then that he locates his entire analysis around the notion that traditional communities are breaking down and being replaced by what he terms ‘social reflexivity’ (Giddens 1998, p. 86), which neatly enough is creative of a ‘reflexive society’ characterised by ‘high levels of self organisation’ (Giddens 1998, p. 80), statements which confirm – albeit in a disguised and psychologised form – the primacy he allocates the rational pre-constructed individual (Outhwaite 1998, p. 26). This reliance has become more explicit in recent works. Is reflexivity a cause or an effect? In truth Giddens postulates it as both without once having to explain how it is communally sourced or what it amounts to in terms of micro sociality. In such circumstances ‘reflexivity’ becomes simply a discursive device; mere repetition does nothing to explain how a ‘reflexive’ or a ‘non-reflexive’ community produces ‘reflexive being-ness’. Clearly however he is not interested in questions of this sort; reflexivity simply is, and as such is a perfect double for a unitary rationality, a substitution which is implicit through Giddens later work. The problem of the relationship between community and micro sociality is of course made more difficult in Giddens’s case, and indeed in the case of commentators like Fukuyama (Fukuyama 1995, p. 27), by their opposition to any form of embedded affinity to place. Yet Scanlon’s criticism of Third Way accounts on the grounds that they are insufficiently embedded (Scanlon 2000, pp. 75–6) only touches the surface of the problem, for while they are certainly insufficiently embedded within traditional modernist determiners of community such as location and habit, they are deeply embedded in the unacknowledged but more powerful sociological primacy allocated to the preconceived non-communal rational subject, and it is this silently anointed primacy which centres the entire account (Giddens 1993, pp. 86–8). As such, Scanlon’s other claim that these accounts privilege relation over place and habit (Scanlon 2000, p. 70) is also questionable in the same terms: for what relations are ever privileged, except that of the rational individual with other rational unitary individuals? The picture of community as a voluntarist choice is also duplicated in the majority of Communitarians; their inability to describe any sort of linkage or indeed any sort of mode of micro interaction as a necessity of being, deprives them of any other linkage except voluntarist choice. Etzioni (2001) for instance has a simple conflation of rational individual and community which causes him to rely upon psychologised

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explanations in his attempt to explain why it is that people may be prepared to surrender their holidays for some renewed sense of communal being-ness (2001, p. 187). In due course we shall see where this takes him. What needs to be noted here is that his explanation, which posits people as being in favour of renewed community because they fear the result of social fragmentation, is a typically normative and psychological one. One should also ask the question: ‘is this all that Etzioni thinks community is?’ Other Communitarians have the same problem. Indeed it is frequently remarked how poor their alternatives are (Digeser 1995, p. 57; Rose 1999; Scanlon 2000) and the predominant reason for this seems to be a simple lack of desire to theoretically engage with community, coupled with their refusal to abandon the rational individual. As Elizabeth Fraser observes (1999, p. 45) Communitarians talk about everything but community and when they do mention it they ‘offer examples in the stead of analysis’ Indeed, the great paradox of Communitarian work is that despite the clear implication of their name, their work contains very little direct discussion of what community might be, how it might be manifested on the level of sociality, or how linkage might be affected within communities. While Community is clearly central to the entire Communitarian position, how it is foundational to the construction of subjectivity and sociality as an action is all but ignored. Indeed their descriptions of the formation of subjectivity or being-ness, are characteristically and constantly, phrased in terms of the individual. Sandel for instance claims that his desired community ‘would engage the identity as well as the interest of the participants and so implicate its members in a citizenship more thorough-going than the unencumbered self can know’ (Sandel 1992, pp. 84–85). This makes community sound like a circus whose job is to entertain. Certainly it suggests community as something outside the individual in a manner that implicitly posits linkage as precisely the sort of voluntarist choice enunciated by Giddens, Putnam and others. Indeed as we saw in Chapter 3 there are clearly notions of volunteerism built into Sandel’s normative idea of agency just as there is a marked fear of an entirely ‘radically situated self’, that is, a self entirely created within community (Digeser 1995, p. 69). It is this rejection of the idea of a self created entirely by community which reveals clearly the narrow nature of the Communitarian project and which suggests that community, for both Taylor and Sandel, is only of interest in so far as it serves individual self-realisation. Taylor for his part, barely touches on communal or inter-relational micro sociality within communities. ‘Sources of the Self’(1989) has an array of relationships but they all involve an individual, an ‘I’ with a

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‘We’, an ‘I’ with history, a fragmented with a unified self, ‘nature as a moral internal voice’ (Taylor 1989, p. 390). Indeed Taylor’s entire project, rather than dealing with community, seeks to identify what it means to be a moral agent (p. 9) in the singular, and while his work describes autonomy and self-exploration, his vision of the good life remains framed in exclusively personal terms (1989, pp. 65, 73, 92). He speaks endlessly of a social moral sphere, but seems unable or unwilling to describe – except in a macro historical form – how an agent might be linked within such a sphere. He is content to leave this relationship at the level of moral interest and psychological needs, an inherently voluntarist position, while his entire notion of rights establishes them not as community rights but as the quasi-possession of singular agents (1989 pp. 11, 73). Indeed his historical exegesis on identity has been described as flawed (Honneth 2001, pp. 52–5). Nor is this atypical: throughout Communitarian literature notions of the impoverished, unreflective self characteristic of modernity as well as prescriptions for how to restore value and meaning to modern life, are all couched in terms of a diminished or enhanced rational individual; an irony which none of them seem to appreciate. Given that Communitarians strive to correct perceived social inbalances through grounding in the particular standards of a specific community (Sandel 1998; Taylor 1994), this question of how community functions at the level of micro sociality would seem crucial. Taylor tries to offer some explanation by proposing a notion of ‘dialogic webs of interlocution’ (Taylor 1994, p. 35), webs which are linguistic in nature and through which he claims ‘we understand ourselves in actual practice’ (1994, p. 99). Yet it is difficult first, to see how a fragmented modernist liberal self can be productive of the sort of narrative unity Taylor endorses and second, the phrase itself is under-theorised and never modelled in a micro form. As such it presents a weak tool for analysing an ongoing set of human activities (Digeser 1995, p. 87) a claim which also applies to the similar notions of Elizebeth Fraser (1999). For all Taylor’s discussion of ‘temporal depths’ (Taylor 1989, p. 50), ‘incorporating narrative’ and his claim that life can be seen as a narrative (1989, p. 54) or even indeed his claim that there is a common ‘set of ends; demands which allow us to judge others’ (1989, p. 63), there remains a permanent and ultimately unanswered question, as to how this grounding might be established, and what indeed it might represent other than the normative choice of an individual philosopher. This question of how being-ness is formed and expressed at a micro level constantly haunts these accounts. Yet it is consistently avoided in

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favour of some version of a normative Archimedean viewpoint. This particular perspective is of course inherent within the mechanistic model (Arendt 1958). However the absence of any form of micro sociality does mean that in these accounts, community functions just like the state – that is as a macro engine to which people have no relationship other than the one between themselves, as free floating individuals, and the overriding, overarching community. One simply joins community, the way one joins Hobbes’ commonwealth; voluntarily, with the question of a Locke style renunciation, hovering in the background. Giddens for instance, has an implicit subtext that reflexivity derives from reflexivity, thus any affiliation to prior modes of understanding or to previous communities of location and work is a hindrance, not a help. Fukuyama exhibits precisely the same hidden affiliation with Hobbes’ voluntary denunciation as a condition of membership (1995, p. 27 ‘people who have ‘transcended’ previous community ties’). Similarly within Putnam’s reckoning social capital rich and social capital poor communities are for the populations concerned, psychological states, hence mutually exclusive (Harre 1999). Thus ipso facto, one cannot become social-capital-rich without renouncing all previous ties – or whatever it is that Putnam believes socially poor areas have instead of community! Of course if any of these three authors could explain how ‘reflexivity’, ‘trust’ and ‘social capital’ were created communally they would perhaps have no need for essentialised, mutually exclusive forms. Yet, locating their explanation as the outcome of communal interaction is precisely what their prior privileging of the individual/state axis disbars them from doing. All of which leads inevitably to the obvious question of what these commentators perceive a community as being, and what a community within their model actually does, in short, where does commonality come from and what does it amount to? This, of course, is the issue addressed directly by some in the cultural studies debate, yet for all the focus they place on the issue, the question of commonality within communal relationships remains remarkably under-theorised. In part this is because the debate itself seems largely philosophical, tending to take place around the polarised relationship of equality and recognition, sameness and difference, all of which confront each other in a purity of absolute abstraction. As Walby observes (2001, p. 81) there is less opposition between these terms than one might think from the tone of the debates. Yet the construction of the other as the opposite of the same – an abstract distinction which many find untenable on a philosophical level (Honneth 2001, p. 56;

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O’Neil 2001, p. l86; Yar 2001, p. 57) and which others, unconnected with the debate, such as anthropologists Marc Auge, also dispute (Auge 1998, p. 82), where he says that the other is present at all levels of identity; (1998, pp. 10–12) – effectively closes the door on questions of how these mutually exclusive polarities are constructed communally. Indeed it rather suggests that they are not. Additionally, their normative inscription of the ‘We’ as authoritarian, essentialist and colonising (O’Neill 2001, pp. 87–8) simply reasserts a standard modernist conflict between the individual and the community (Walby 2001, p. 115) without allowing any glimpse into how, under such circumstances, communal linkage is possible (Yar 2001, p. 72). What it suggests is that despite their radicality, recognition theorists simply re-construct the essentialised individual in an alternative form more palatable with their normative values – ‘any community of work, leisure or opinion tends to constitute itself as a universe of recognition’ (Augé 1998, p. 84). That is, that the individual in this instance is not essentialised with rationality but is essentialised with difference, and that this alternative individual, normatively inscribed with an ethical foundation prior to community, serves only to hinder the capacity of these accounts to engage with the question of intra-communal relationship. This is why I maintain that the entire debate as a debate about community is still-born, first by its grounding in Levinas (Levinas 1998) and his notion of the fundamental character of non-relation to the other (Featherstone and Lash 2001, p. 5; Yar 2001, p. 62), and second in its endorsement of an individual who manifests recognition, alterity and so forth, prior to the formation of community and who therefore only enters community with a series of voluntarist choices, precisely in the same manner as the Third Way commentators. Within this project therefore we find the same characteristic modes to evade the question of linkage as were observed in Third Way and Communitarian accounts: psychological (Honneth 1995; Taylor 1994) and normative (Honneth 1995, p. 6, 54) accounts of community enacted from a narrow normative perspective (Gilroy 2000), as well as a conflation of community and state (Featherstone Mike 1995, p. 133; Taylor 1986) which is examined later. The primacy given within all these accounts to some form of preexisting subject constructed prior to community, simply leaves no room for a community. Indeed, while I disagree with Rose’s argument that ‘community’ as a term is just a discursive construct (Rose 1999, p. 179), it is – in relation to these accounts – hard to disagree with; for without a description of inter-relationality as a micro event what else can it be?

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Indeed one could ask the further question – if the described relations are simply that of one rational individual to another, why describe them as communal at all? After all, no one feels the need to say that atoms commune, they just collide. In fact this question lurks at the edge of all these accounts in their separate forms. It lurks in Giddens’s claim that these new communities will follow emerging networks of information technology and in the manner in which Putnam distinguishes the deeper bonds of community from the shallower ones of the market, something he does ultimately for the purpose of aiding new formations of state and government by measuring the determiners of social cohesion and production. Indeed, this is the entire basis for the distinctions he draws between various regions and various communities (Putnam 1993; Sullivan 1990, p. 28). As such it could be argued that for Putnam a developed community is one which most closely resembles the state/ individual axis. Among the cultural studies grouping, the stress upon recognition and difference and its parallel philosophical normative-ism, run the risk of ‘disappearing’ the inter-subjectivity necessary for community, something to which others have also alluded (O’Neill 2001, p. 77). Indeed it could be argued that a lot of the debate on recognition and difference is only about community in a peripheral way, and that the only community unequivocally endorsed is the idealistic deferred one, against which modern community is always located as deficient. So the question here – for all accounts – concerns the linkage between micro sociality and macro communality. What is it that makes communities communal? What makes them worthy of the name community? The privileged presence within these accounts of an a priori individual defines what happens in that ontological space designated as community, prior to investigation. Once the unitary subject is included as a thing unto itself, there is only one possible answer to questions concerning inter-relationality and the type of community to be ‘discovered’. The liberal state/subject axis compresses the social into a Cartesian formation while foreclosing the possibility of an alternative answer or deeper investigation. Narrow community The primacy allotted to the unitary rational subject and the subsequent restrictions it imposes upon any form of explanation about what community is, does not, of course, restrain the social sciences from theoretically discussing community with an unproblematic and naturalised air.

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It does however, force offered explanations to follow familiar and well-worn tramlines. Voluntarist choice within an abstract and context free vacuum constitutes virtually the only possibility of describing communal activity. Indeed, in all the described strands there is no preexisting community to exert any influence prior to the simple coming together of individuals, or the discursive construction of a collective identification (Featherstone 1992, p. 47). In other words, communities simply come into being through a simple conjunction of individual interest, much in the same way mushrooms appear after rain. Nor is it a surprise that community is described in these accounts as the cockpit and outcome of a single particular interest or activity. Let me list a few to give the flavour, though of course those not nominated should not feel aggrieved, a comprehensive list would fill a book: trust (Misztal 1996, p. 7; Putnam 1993) information and exchange networks (Giddens 1994, 1998; Boswell 1990, pp. 190ff) communities of choice (Wark 1999 p. 270) communities of commercial benefit (Putnam 1993), balance between individual and social responsibility (Etzioni 1993) aesthetic and future communities (Agamben 1993 cit), resistance (De Certeau 1984), govermentality (Rose 1999) deviance or compliance measured normatively (Chicago school) feelings of friendship (Weber) moral dictums and philosophical projects (Sandel, Macintyre, Taylor), moral order, cottage networks, recognition, internet chat rooms (wittel 2001, p. 62), simplistic historical fantasy (Torriens, Macintyre) creative imagining (Anderson 1993), routine and habit (Giddens 1994, 1998) solidarity (Durkheim and Giddens 1994, p. 124) not real (Rose 1999, p. 189) discourses of power (Rose 1999) an object in crisis (Giddens 1998, pp. 2–7) a bedrock against relativism (Macintyre 1988) TV soap watchers (Geraghty), resistance (Foster 1995; Fiske 1995), politics (Sullivan 1994, p. 20), ‘flexible generative structure’ (Featherstone 1995). While for others the question of what community is becomes simply subsumed and avoided by recourse to notions of everyday life as in Lefebvre (1991) or the everyday world as in Schutz (1962) or Heller (1984), all of whom, as Featherstone points out (1995, pp. 58–9), postulate everyday life as a simple replacement for civil society5. For others it is ‘the sacred stripped of the sacred’ (Nancy 1991, p. 35). All of this reveals that the isolated individual, who constructs these thin communities by a single voluntary and rational choice, is matched by the theoretical commentator who does precisely the same thing. Indeed the more one reads single-strand sociological accounts of community; the more one is reminded of Camus’ pithy putdown (Camus 1955) about middle class intellectuals wanting to fill the world

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with statues of their own creation. The result is that ‘communing’ as a multiple activity, a being-in common, a being-ness which happens (Nancy 1991, p. 149) an inter-relational, ongoing multiplicity of micro socialities is replaced by community as a thin category centred around the theoretical interests of a commentator expressed through the postdiluvial choices of a subject already conceived of as rational. In such a theoretical approach any modelling of social inter-relationality becomes simply impossible for the only relation that can exist is between a person and an object, a person and an idea. Yet narrow, abstracted, extracted and powerless as community is within these accounts, they are the only models of community possible as long as the state/individual axis claims sociological precedence over community as being-ness. However there is one way in which these thin communities attempt to at least provide a veneer of linkage and that is through ethics. Ethics The limitations which are the formulating templates of the Cartesian community force ethical considerations to the fore primarily because ethical choice is voluntarist and individual. In post-structuralist and contemporary sociology, ethics is a simple and direct replacement for the notions of moral community advanced by the early modernists such as Durkheim. Once again this is no accident, for the necessity is inherent in the terms of sociology itself and the emphasis on ethics is at the bottom simply a re-formulation of something which in its bald, earliest form, is now discredited and impossible to sustain. Specifically, the popularity of ‘trust’ as an explanatory tool is not simply because the commentators have all independently decided that this is what contemporary society lacks6, but rather, because, as Lash says (1994), it is sustaining of a theoretical picture of what community actually is. As such it creates a certain space where commentators can insert their own agendas (Harre 1999, pp. 217–21). Harre notes the manner in which Putnam defines trust very narrowly (p. 220) but then extrapolates it as the sole source of social capital (p. 219) the sum total of social capital being what Putnam calls community (Sullivan 1996, p. 28). Fukuyama is another who spends exactly one paragraph defining ‘trust’ (1995, p. 26 though the footnote is important) and three sentences defining social capital (ibid) though these constitute the ostensible foundation of his project. He then embarks on a series of racial stereotypes (1995 note 19; p. 408 and chapter 25) and atrociously footnoted historical assertions (pp. 28, 30, though it occurs throughout the book. The sentence p. 28 starting ‘France at the end of the middle

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ages had …’ reveals all these faults in full glory) intended to legitimise his concealed functionalist agenda (ibid, p. 27) without once justifying his claim that trust derives from these examples; it is simply asserted that they do. As Rose notes (1999), reliance upon ethics allows terms like ‘trust’ to function both as cause and explanation (Misztal 1996, p. 8 also makes this point). The necessity for ethical diagnosis and prescriptive designations is once again a direct consequence of the closure affected within these accounts by the primacy allocated to forms theoretically enunciated as extra-communal – the individual and the state. Indeed, it is because community within these accounts is something which can never be explained and can never function as the explanatory source of social being-ness or trust, and because all forms of social explanation or prescription must therefore be extra-communal, that ethics fits the bill perfectly.7 Clearly the Communitarian project is also a generalised, normative ethical one and we have seen how this obscures the question of what community is within their account. In such circumstances, ethics functions both to explain community and to seal community from examination. As Honig notes (Honig 1993, p. 10) in an insightful comment that applies to all communitarians, Sandal’s emphasis on identity as generated by community, seeks the displacement of politics – something which might explain the demonisation of the sixties implicit in much communitarian writing, for above all it is politics which the 1960s exemplifies. Perhaps this is the reason for the widely remarked claim that communitarians are weak on what is to be done about the problems they identify. (Beck 1998, p. 14 also Boucher and Kelly 1994, who claim that what communitarians have to say about a positive nature of the ideal community is small in quality and either disappointing or implausible p. 25). Etzioni, for example, can never provide a positive non-ethical reason why a pre-constructed asocial rational individual would abandon the wanton satisfaction of their personalised post-60s desires and choose community, or in concrete terms, why they would choose to waste his holidays over flag-raising ceremonies when he could be at the beach. (Etzioni 2001). In the end, he resorts to negative ‘free-rider’ notions that people will make the correct choice out of fear for the perceived personal consequences of social dislocation. In both these instances, ethics and the proclaimed need for a ‘revitalisation’ of ethical concerns masks an unwillingness to tackle issues in any depth. They serve a normative function explaining something it is doubtful commentators want examined in any case. What explanations

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do citizens offer for their declining interest in flag-waving ceremonies? Etzioni never bothers to ask. Perhaps because asking risks entering the multiplicity and subjectivity of sociality, a step which, given his inherently normative and Archimedean notions of social decline, might threaten his entire narrative of community. What I hope this examination has made clear is that the self-imposed theoretical limitations imposed by modernist theoretical subservience to the subject/state axis, serves to maintain theoretical formulations creative of isolated and static articulations of community. These are articulations which deny the embedded nature of social life, the process of communing, and finally, any form of contextuality or inter-relationality within community. Nor can it be any different, for community – as theoretically prescribed by social science theory – must be subservient to the individual and the state. It must function in a limited and constrained manner, incapable, ultimately, of ‘healing itself’. Indeed, what is clear from all three accounts is the manner in which the presented version of community functions as little more than an instrumental cockpit for the enactment of objectified and rational ‘means and ends’, as a fabricated object for the enactment of individual subjectivities and pre-conceived projects. What is more, if temporality and ephemerality are – as Venn demonstrates a ‘fundamental dimension of being’ (2000, p. 41) then another instrumental union stands in the way of attempts to model community. This is the manner in which the essential individual functions as a double for the unity constructed by the state, and it is this – the second half of individual/state axis – which is the focus of the next section.

Community subservient to the state Within the social sciences the state exists as a unified object of singularity which mirrors precisely the essential subject over which it rules, for as the subject is grounded in autonomy, so is the state similarly spatialized politically and theoretically, as something unto itself (King 1974, p. 182 in ref to Hobbes). Within that theoretical framework, the state can never be a community nor can community ever represent anything more than a dependant, secondary object, an arena (a meaning) for what is left over after the state has assumed its rightful place as the anointed sovereign.8 The one dimensional accounts of social life (Scanlon 2000) characteristic of all approaches, are therefore an inevitable outcome of theoretical attempts to preserve the centrality of the only form deemed appropriate

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for the marshalling of sociality – the state – and additionally the primacy allocated to the state implicitly frames the manner in which community can be examined. Within the considered accounts, the initial effect of the primacy allocated to the state is that all the examined versions of community are presented and justified, in one form or another, entirely in terms of the state and state problems of social cohesion. For instance where can the ‘new normative patterns of trust’ that Mitzel (1996, p. 4) Offe (1992) Fukuyama (1995) Giddens (1994, p. 128) and Boswell (1990, p. 190 ff) desire come from except through state action of one sort or another? The entire Communitarian project is constructed upon a notion of rescuing public and political life (Sandel is just one example), while the recognition theorists explicitly evoke state help in constructing their community of recognition and respect. Of course the Third Way project, while conducted in the name of community, is specifically a state-driven project and Giddens confirms this by the limitations he places on unchecked communal power. In fact within these projects the normative and ethical components are two sides of the same coin – the normative is specifically about forcing the compliance of communal creativity to a norm established outside community that is, by the state, while the proposed ethical elements are individualistic and therefore do not establish a separate source of authority from the state, which of course is, in such exchanges, validated as the ethical font of all morality and finer moral feeling. It is my argument that all these normative, ethical projects can only be inaugurated through the dictates of the state, in part because the accounts themselves have little idea how else to implement them. So the entire debate, pitched as a debate about community, becomes in actuality a political struggle about the behaviour of the state which is implicitly confirmed in its self appointed role as independent arbitrator. This conflation is quite clear in Sullivan (1990, pp. 320–22; 32). Fraser is another who openly seeks to utilise the state to enforce norms of recognition (Fraser 2000). Her debate indeed is largely couched in terms of the liberal state/subject axis, as is O’Neill’s (2000, p. 87), while others such as Honneth have an openly normative presupposition (2000, p. 46) requiring state intervention. Indeed, any normative picture of community – that is any approach to community which avoids the question of linkages between human being-ness and the community – implicitly relies on the state to implement whatever prescriptive solutions are proposed. So, despite the Communitarian claim to prioritise the social over the atomised liberal individual, their failure to problematise the idealism

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inherent in state power and the manner in which the state displaces community, as well as their reluctance to describe how a fully functioning community can operate to resist state encroachment, means that theirs is a project that demands of the devil that he do the work. All of which is amply illustrated if one reads Sandel’s account of America’s discontent. Indeed the entire account in Chapter 7 (1996), entitled ‘Community, Self-Government and Progressive Reform’, only mentions one form of community and that is the traditional community eroded by concentration of power and the forces of progress – a typical liberal modernist formulation. Not only is Sandel content to simply present community as a given, requiring no explanation, linkage or definition whatsoever, but all subsequent discussion is centred entirely on political forms as configured and announced through the state. Sandel could for instance have discussed the San Francisco diggers who traversed Haight-Ashbury during 1966, handing out free food to homeless newcomers (Marwick 1998, pp. 483–90) precisely the sort of volunteer social capital, trust building and social embeddedness one might assume the Communitarians and social capitalists like Putnam would normally endorse. Historically, the American experience contains a vast array of attempts to assert social and community power extraneous to the state, all of which Sandel chooses to ignore, despite the fact that they are precisely the sort of volunteer and self-rule in the service of the ‘common good’ he routinely claims to endorse (1996, pp. 3, 4). One can only assume his state-centred and normative account of community is unable to encompass communal power functioning independent of the state. Sometimes of course the primacy of the state within discussion of community disguises itself by referring to entities supposedly distinct from the state: civil society (Keane 1988, p. 19), civil association (Giddens 1994, p. 120ff), the market (Misztal 1996), new technology (Etzioni 2001; Wark 1999; Giddens 1998), ‘vigorous civic community’ (Sullivan 1990, p. 23) or strengthening civil society (Offe 1996, p. 15). All of which are validated as the forum for ‘reclaiming’ or ‘recreating’ community. Yet these prescriptions simply skirt the issue, because it is the state which sponsors, undermines, underwrites and sustains these forms (Burchell 1991). Indeed the utter unwillingness of these accounts to establish contextual, or historically specific meanings for terms like ‘civil society’ or ‘the market’ is the other side of their refusal to interrogate the word ‘community’ (Keane 1998, p. 26) and attests to the sensitivity and centrality surrounding the implicit place of the state within their theoretical analysis.

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Hirst (1994) is another speaks of new associations as the means of reviving social interaction, yet he also specifically calls upon the state to fund them, as if the state somehow was not intimately involved in their destruction in the first place: a formulation which as we saw typifies people like Keene and others who champion civil society as a space independent and distinct from the state. What does independence and distinctiveness mean in these circumstances? Calling on the state to inaugurate and sustain these supposedly independent spaces of alternative power shows that the author(s) have a naturalised conflation of the social and the state as an asserted pre-given, independent of history or practice. Thus, while concerns expressed are always framed in terms of community, the accounts are entirely preoccupied with remaking a space appropriate to state-sponsored modernising projects or indeed, in the cultural studies mode, constructing practices and spaces in opposition to the state. Indeed, what characterises all of these accounts is the implicit decision not to model any means by which communities could achieve these ends without state intervention. It is precisely this reliance upon the state which links contemporary debates regarding community, to Durkheim’s programme of moral reconstruction (Misztal 1996, p. 43; Portes 2000, p. 44). The conflation of the state and community in this manner is a staple of sociology and always has been. Sociology is replete with accounts in which the chaos of sociality constantly appears as a problem for hierarchical power: precisely the issue addressed by Bauman’s opening quote (2000, p. 176). In such accounts community always functions as either the palliative for the perceived lack of a normative framework, or as a solution for the unruly destructive effects arising from state endorsed projects of modernity (Misztal 1996, p. 16). To this end it is no surprise that the interest in social networks claimed by advocates of Social Capital (Putnam 2000; Coleman 1988; Gambetta 1988) is clearly instrumental and clearly formulated to serve state aims not communal ones (Putnam 2002, p. 3 quotes with clear approval an openly instrumental appraisal of social capital framed entirely in terms of increased state intervention). It needs to be understood that in all these cases the problems of social cohesion is always a state problem not a communal one, and in all these cases the source of the problem is always concealed by an unproblematic and unexamined conflation of state and community. For instance Putnam clearly values the broad horizon of social custom and communal networks only to the extent that they enhance overall economic performance and enable individuals to ‘activate the

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wealth-producing capacities of physical capital’ (Putnam 1993). For Putnam, social capital is more embedded than economic capital, yet I would argue that reasons why this may be true, – what embedded might mean in such circumstances – is implicitly closed to anything other than normative assertion, precisely because of the pre-emptive privileging of the state and the essentialised individual. The result is a conflation of civic community, association and social capital, as well as a narrowly defined, static and reductionist picture of community (Putnam 2002, p. 6). Fukuyana explicitly links trust and productivity, while more empirically minded modes of social capital measure performance in government departments as a means of strengthening and extending ‘delivery’ networks through enhanced community involvement in provision of public goods, something which is claimed to be possible through studying networks of social relations. Typically these accounts avoid any examination of whether the community desires these services. Indeed Fukuyana’s priorities are perfectly expressed in the statement (Fukuyana 1995, p. 27) that spontaneous sociability constitutes a subset of Social Capital. Once again there is a naturalised conflation of community and state, where community is reduced to informal networks instrumentally formulated as a means for more efficient delivery of state-sponsored services. All these projects describe an unproblematic relation between community and state, co-operation and hierarchical power (Portes 2000, p. 46). Rose is therefore quite correct when he locates this debate within the gambit of government (Rose 1999, p. 188) and describes the interest in community as motivated not by anything to do with community per se, but rather with the discursive significance of community as a signifier denoting an apparent naturalness and nonpolitical status (ibid). Hence, community, having been denied its pre-eminent being-ness, its independent power, its sense of growth and its embedded knowledges, becomes a noun, a pathologised, dis-empowered ‘other’, a rag bag for what remains – after the state, society, civil society and the market have been painstakingly mapped, quantified and naturalised. It remerges in the post-enlightenment world as the Cartesian community framed within a ‘technical city’ (Venn 2000, p. 36), in which the adoptive privileging of the language of universalisation and abstraction, rights, interests and so on allows correct scientific questions to be raised and investigation to make sense, and in which the only form of linkage to the major formations of social decision and practice is through the crudest form of social science instrumentality. All built upon a simple

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but unexamined claim that community and the state are identical; that one is simply the willing and supine object of another’s mapping and surveillance and finally, that community desires are always and everywhere, identical with the interests of state power.

Community as context free repository If Rose is correct in drawing attention to the role of community as a discursive construction enacted as a naturalised, non-political space for the enactment of political ends, then there is another discursive function for the term and that is as a repository for the undesirable, for the traditions to be overcome (Beck 1994, p. 19; Featherstone 1995, p. 72). Of course this legitimizing resort to an essentialist categorisation of one as traditional and the other as reason – which is what the demonisation of traditional community amounts to – is perhaps the quintessential modernist discursive formulation (Descombes 1993, p. 146). To this end, this context-free status of community allows for multiple usages. Beck for one opposes calls to renew community on the basis that such a desire also produced the Nazis! (1994, p. 14), and while Giddens characterises the breakdown of traditional communities as unfortunate, the implication throughout is that it is almost a cause for celebration. Primarily because it releases and justifies the new attributes Giddens champions, attributes which in truth are simply the old modernist virtues of individualism, choice, flexibility and so on (see Bauman 1992, p. 166 who shows how typical these claims by Giddens are of modernity in general). In his account Giddens bridges the seeming incompatibility of simultaneous sorrow and celebration by the use of the demonising sociological term, ‘traditional’. This argument is slightly tangential to the main argument, but it does provide one more example of the continuity between modernist and post-modernist attitudes to community and it illustrates the flexibility that ‘community’ as an empty signifier provides for critics and commentators. Thus, in the debates over recognition the term serves to demarcate good social formations, potentially welcoming and open to the other and also bad social formations. Even Rose falls into this trap when he argues that ‘in contrast to community as an essence, origin, fixity; one can thus counter pose community as a constructed form for the un-working of identities and moralities (1999, p. 195)’ All of them! What it is about the word ‘community’ that attracts these sociological fantasies – fantasies as unreal as any in Borges’ ‘Library of Babel’ – but

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this has already been answered: it is its dual status as real and unreal, acknowledged and concealed, naturalised and disempowered. It can also be noted that Harre for instance dismisses notions that civicness is in decline (Harre 2000, p. 225) while pointing out that the evidence Putnam utilises both to prove his claims and to measure it, are old fashioned normative standards which may be declining simply because they represent decaying forms of social participation (ibid, pp. 5, 224). Indeed we saw how Putnam dismissed modern forms of communal interaction like Greenpeace in terms that combined his own prejudice with recourse to a normative picture of a supposedly lost, multi stranded community; the very community which of course he is unable to model; both because of his subservience to the notion of the Cartesian individual, his firm adoption of economic language and finally, for the very simple reason that a lost community of this sort has never existed. But such recourse to historical fact is irrelevant to sociology; a discipline which requires for theoretical coherence that a traditional community of that sort must have existed. Clearly any debunking of this claim is a task sociology is unable to countenance. All of which returns us to the claim that the last thing the social sciences would like to do is to approach community as a micro being-ness of sociality and further that the lost ahistorical mist in which they have located older communities is very useful. So Putnam can locate a multi-stranded, a lost community, in the 1950s even while he cannot model it, while Bauman (2001a) conversely, can locate this traditional community in some preindustrial idyllic timelessness (ibid, pp. 12–31), can then decide it has disappeared and resurrect it in another, a reduced but nonetheless potent form (ibid, pp. 46, 47), when he wants to criticise gated communities or ‘TV-idol’ communities (ibid, p. 70). Agamben (1993) shows similar flexibility decrying current sociality as lower middle class and proposing a future community which reproduces the revolutionary fervour of times gone by. Rose is right – community as a discursive signifier is a very powerful and useful tool indeed.

Community instrumentally measured In the last chapter of ‘Sources of the Self’ (1989) Taylor exhaustively examines how instrumentality is vital to modernity, something which is also central to Arendt’s more consistent account of modernity contained in ‘The Human Condition’ (Villa 1996, p. 83). Hopefully the foregoing has demonstrated why instrumentality is the only mode for the social

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science descriptions of community, and why measurement by effect is the only means by which the duality of concealment and co-option can be maintained (Bauman 2000, pp. 156–68). Indeed it is highly ironic that the Communitarians both source their communal perspective in Aristotle and appear keen to claim Arendt and utilise her work (Taylor in particular: see chapter 13) because it is precisely Aristotle’s instrumental version of community that Arendt so succinctly critiques and rejects (Villa 1996, p. 42ff), and which the Communitarians (Sandel 1982, 1996, p. 5) have so enthusiastically adopted and reproduced in all its dimmed down, instrumentally driven form. In fact, all the accounts in one form or another seek to refigure community as the instrumental resource for the creation of something – networks of information, economic exchange and refugee integration which functions – or to, in one form or another, directly or indirectly – marshal sociality in the service of some exterior purpose whether it be social cohesion, some ill-defined vaguely leftist politics, abstract social justice or the needs of ‘Hyper-Modernity’ and as such these claims clearly seek to control and marshal sociality, its being-ness, its creative action, and an inherent power (Auge 1995, p. 79; Scanlon 2000, p. 59) – all of which is quite in keeping with the modernist view of society from the vantage point of the managerial office (Bauman 2000, p. 63).

Conclusion This chapter has argued that in one form or another, all the discussed accounts of community are encased and constrained within the defining modernist axis of individual and state. As a result in these accounts, community is a passive, apolitical object, defined from an unacknowledged Archimedean point, intrinsically beset with problems or potential, characterised by a foundational utility; open to penetration and instrumental usage by one project or another; powerless, transparent, narrow, left-over that is, contestable, essentialist, containing either virtues, an ethical sense, or deficiencies, the existence of which no one ever feels the need to establish as more than assertions; and finally, never theorized as either a inter-relational being-ness, or as a being-ness without agendas attached. What typifies these debates is the exclusive question of what community as a presumed unity requires and what interest it can serve. A question which personifies a refusal to ask questions relating to what community as an independent social formation does, or to engage with the inter-relational aspects of beingness as an self-sufficient activity. And this absence is the one primary

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reason why these debates about community appear so lifeless to the outsider and indeed so devoid of any recognisable aspects of our own community. The state/individual axis has become so naturalised within the social sciences that community – within its terms – can never be a relation unto itself, but only exists to serve something else, some wider plan, some other power, some higher ideal: a higher ideal which in modernity is exclusively signalled by the political expressed through the state (Lefort 1986). Indeed everything recorded in this section serves only to confirm Dumont’s point that the social in great measure is reduced to the political, and we can pass from the individual to the social group only in terms of a conscious design (Dumont 1983, p. 84).

6 Mechanistic Theory and the Social

To this point, our examination of community and sociality has concentrated first, upon the historical basis of sociology’s engagement with community, second upon the contemporary debate and finally upon one aspect of the regime of articulation through which sociology engages theoretically with the notion of community and sociality. To this end, Chapter 5 examined the liberal axis of state and subject. This chapter will widen and conclude our analysis by discussing the other major constraining mode of the social science regime of articulation – the mechanistic theory. It will claim that, like the primacy allocated to the state/subject axis, the privileging of the mechanistic mode of investigation effectively pre-empts, curtails and defines the investigation of sociality and community. To this end, the chapter interrogates the sustaining principles of mechanistic thinking – power, fragmentation, conflict, instrumentality and abstraction – the principles which permeate sociology’s articulation of the social. Utilising the various contemporary strands described earlier, it will show how attempts to model community and sociality are constrained by their continued subservience to mechanistic modes of investigation. All of which will complete the argument that the social can never be theoretically empowered within the mechanistic mode and that for such an investigation to fully grasp the multiplicity, action and hybridity of community, what is required is a post-mechanistic approach which locates an inter-relational view of the social as the necessary starting point for all social science investigation. 114

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What is mechanistic thinking Mechanistic theory is characterised by a far-reaching, pervasive fragmentation; parts are demarcated from each other, from the whole, from the social world of human being-ness, as well as from the subjective world of human consciousness (Bohm 1980, p. 16; Arendt 1958; Latour 1993). The world is reduced – through a process of ‘discovery’ which in reality is just as much a process of construction – to a set of basic elements which function external to each other, interact mechanically, are separated in space and are each inscribed with an essentialist nature, entirely distinct from either the whole or any other fundamental units (Bohm 1985, p. 3). Elements are constituted as parts of an impersonal and universal machine, the basic order of which is constructed from the impersonal interaction of demarcated and independent parts. Thinking in a mechanistic manner permeates every aspect of our lives: one example is the relation of the state to its citizens. For the configured state is precisely such an impersonal machine and in liberal political theory at least, is composed of millions of free citizens – all essentialised as possessing rationality, all fragmented into their individuality, denied (at least theoretically) other forms of inter-relationship and who, by their individual voting, construct and maintain the state as the outcome of their supposed intentions. The commonly held neo-liberal picture of the market is another obvious practical example. This dual establishment of elements as both parts of a machine and as essentialised unto themselves is creative of a world in which objects and the social become available only through representation and effect (Dumont 1980, pp. 229–30). To take the example once again of rationality: rationality is ‘proved’ and represented by actions, that is effect, and not by examination of what rationality is, because what rationality is cannot be examined and it cannot be examined, because of course it is inherent. Thus, underlying mechanistic thinking is a ‘double ontological distinction’ (Latour 1993, p. 13) through which demarcated areas are established as open to investigation, that is godless, but also as all powerful entities eluding our control (p. 31). So rationality can be investigated but never defined, except as effect, as representation. Nature – to give another example – becomes a huge impersonal, godless machine, open to legitimate investigation, but far too large for any human to comprehend, much less control (p. 37). The more one delves into the four hundred year history of modernity, the more one is constantly confronted by modernity as a process

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of fragmentation, separation and finally, reunification through representation and symbolisation – a chain in which every assemblage of things is transformed into a mere multitude; a society in which, just like mathematics, each individual is defined in the likeness of others, but cannot see it (Lefort 1993, p. 167); and in which social being-ness possesses ‘the same validity and no more significance than the mathematical curve’ (Arendt 1958, p. 267). Moreover, the manner in which these essentialised elements are revealed, that is through effect, results in the glorification and elevation of the concept of process, precisely because their essential nature is hidden from us; it is the property of a removed god, as Latour sardonically observes (pp. 33–4). That is, all objects including the social become available only as effects – effects available through certain practices which resolve the separation but can never bridge it (Lefort 1986, p. 31). For this reason, measurement by effect is fundamental to mechanistic theory and represents the substitution of the concept of process for the concept of being (Villa 1996, p. 196), because ‘whereas it is in the nature of Being to appear and thus disclose itself, it is in the nature of Process to remain invisible, to be something whose existence can only be inferred from the presence of certain phenomena’ (Arendt 1958, pp. 296–7). So for instance, when commentators say that we must adapt to change, what they are really saying is that the process of change, invisible, unmeasurable is more important than our being-ness – our likes, our dislikes, what we want, what we don’t want. Needless to say, the result of this societal acquiescence to effect and process is to deprive human beings of any feeling that they can play any part in the social that surrounds, creates and contains them. This is something which is clearly personified in the very notion of the subject/state axis and the liberal individual both of which are constructed upon the modern divide between the natural world and the social world (p. 174). In that sense then, the individual of modernity is enunciated and defined through rationality which is constructed as an interior, subjective point of truth, separated from the objectified world which human sense cannot explain; a separation foundational to the formation of the Cartesian individual (p. 283). In total what this mechanistic model represents is nothing less than the expulsion of socialbeing-ness-in-the-world from the constructed picture of the individual. And this worldly being-ness can be anything – community which the state replaces with the abstract relationship of citizenship, or viable knowledge of the world which is rendered invalid because sense perception cannot explain the world. Historically, mechanistic theory and

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political science were entwined from the very first; Hobbes, who invented the modern concept of power, politics and interest, is described by Latour as a ‘fervent subscriber to mechanistic philosophy’ (Latour, p. 17) and he clearly personifies this collusion of mechanistic theory and political science (King 1974, pp. 163–97). Liberalism of course, characteristically fragments the social into mutually and essentially differentiated forms – civil society, the market, the state, community – each of them grinding away to restore some form of objective harmony to the social machine, while conflated conceptions, such as the institutional separation of parliamentary, judicial and bureaucratic powers, also derives directly from mechanistic modelling. Of course, various post-modernist works have attempted to overturn elements of this Cartesian and liberal world view, principally through their attacks upon the Cartesian subject, yet it could be argued that the essentialist subject is the tip of the ice berg with regard to mechanistic theorising – an effect rather than a cause. On the basis of this reading, post-modernist work has simply scratched the surface, in part I would argue because of the oppositional logic in which almost all post-modern investigation is enmeshed. Indeed, given that this anti-Cartesian, anti-Hegelian strand of postmodernism (Lash 1990, p. 37) rests upon a simple oppositional displacement whereby fragmentation, chaos and the local are privileged over structure, order and universality, and that, in addition, it stems (as a generalisation) from a political position which itself privileges abstraction, conflict and thought over action, I would contend that it is highly unlikely that this strand of post-modernism can ever totally extricate itself from the pervasive legacy of mechanistic thought. After all, division and separation are constant themes in the theoretical discourse of modernity and post-modernity as Bauman notes (2000, p. 167), and the stress placed on the maker and effect as elements over and above the product itself (Arendt 1958, p. 140/88) is clearly still present in all the examined contemporary versions of community, just as it was three hundred years ago in Locke’s emphasis upon labour (ibid, p. 70). Yet, there are other factors traceable to this Cartesian and mechanistic view; factors not specifically mentioned by either Latour or Bohm. There is the separation of the doer and the deed which provides the basis for Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the subject within language, famously and succinctly summed up in his criticism of our notion of lightning as something which strikes (Nietzsche 1989, section 13, p. 45). This distinction between the subject and the action – personified of course

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in the linguistic distinction between noun and verb (Bohm 1980, p. 5) – places mechanistic thought at the very heart of modern understanding, though the subject-verb distinction of course pre-dates modernism as such. All of which of course, shows that mechanistic thought stems ultimately from the privileging of thought over action which, as Chapter 1 makes clear, is endemic in the Western philosophical tradition. So, from this brief survey, what becomes clear is that the subject/state axis is simply the node point, if you like, for the expression of a complete theoretical model – a model for which it serves as a validating proof. What is of more interest here is the manner in which the characteristic props of the mechanistic model continues to order conceptualisations vital to the social sciences and, in the process, exclude elements vital to the empowering of sociality and community as fundamental forms for the enunciation of human being-ness. There are a number of these props – fragmentation, essentialism, conflict – but the most important (and often the least discussed) of them is power, and it is the mechanistic notion of power in its widest form which I want to briefly examine, primarily because it shows how certain themes, characteristic of the social science regime of articulation, are elevated to primacy, not because they help understand the object being investigated, but because they maintain the veracity of the mechanistic model itself. The fact that they are then presented as if they were the ‘natural’ mode for the investigation of that object simply shows the extent to which investigation of community, sociality and indeed any topic within the range of the social sciences is as much a process of construction as it is of discovery.

The mechanistic notion of power Overview Of course, the primacy of the mechanistic model and its categories of thought has always been an incomplete project. As Latour observes, the modern world has never existed in this theoretical way and the practice of translation has always been different from its practice of purification (Latour 1993, p. 39). To this extent then, post-modernism is a task of problematisation in which the practice of modernism becomes visible beneath the ideological claims made on its behalf (Bauman 2000; Latour 1993). Within that framework, this discussion of power does not purport to be an exhaustive examination of individual accounts of power, the fundamentals of which, in many cases, are already well known (the best

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anthology is Lukes, Stephan (ed.) 1986). It simply aims to highlight commonalities foundational within modernist and post-modernist work and as such establish the claim that these similarities represent the pervasive naturalisation of mechanistic theory throughout the social sciences. It argues that the supposedly contested nature surrounding the question of power conceals a fundamental homogeneous conceptual regime ( Joseph 1988, p. 2/13) and that power, as enunciated within these models, primarily serves a particular discursive and methodological function; that is, it functions in an unacknowledged manner to link other formulations which the mechanistic theory postulates as fragmented and essentially independent and in addition, it serves as a discursive epistemological principle to explain, manage and confirm the mechanistic working of the system as a whole. As we shall see, all the characteristics of the mechanistic model are present in the various accounts of power, as are the proceduralist principles which preserve the validity of mechanistic descriptions of the social. Similarities ● Characteristically, social science accounts of power measure power instrumentally, that is in terms of material outcomes and effects – power as achievement; power as action engendering material results, power as oppression measured materially and so on. Power is defined teleologically, that is in hindsight, principally by what it produces, and this represents a substitution of power as constitutive and self sufficient within being-ness for one which privileges the maker and the effect. Power within these discursive formulations is thus constructed as a noun (it is sometimes described as ‘capacity’ (Helliwell and Hindess 1999, p. 95)) – a formulation which essentialises the concept of ‘power’ as something above investigation, as a fundamental unit, as some sort of qualitative entity like wealth (p. 82), while maintaining the fiction that effects are not linkages and establishing a discursive closure upon the exact question of what power is (Stewart 2001, p. 16). Thus the description of effect marks the limits of investigation, a limit which actually functions (though it is never acknowledged) to establish the veracity of the entire mechanistic account of power. As Hindess and Helliwell observe, sociological writing on power focuses on distribution and production (1999, p. 75) – a distinction subsumed under the heading of effect. The problem of what power is becomes a simple account of how power operates. This displacement originates conceptually in Hobbes and Locke (‘Power and cause are the same thing’ Hobbes quoted in

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Torfing 1999, p. 156), however its perspective is pervasive throughout a variety of theorists separated by time, space and inclination: Weber ‘power is the chance of a man or a number of men to realise their own will even against the resistance of others’ (quoted in Halliwell and Hindess, p. 75); Foucault ‘one should study power at the point where its intention … is completely invested in its real and effective practice’ (Gordon (ed.) 1980, p. 97); all the empirically based behaviourist accounts, for example the Chicago school, the American Community power debates of the 1950’s (Torfing 1999, p. 157; Dahl 1957); and Polsby ‘The participant with the greatest proportion of successes out of the total number of successes was then considered to be the most successful’ (quoted in Lukes 1974, p. 12). In addition, the idea that power exists as the effect/enunciation of objective material structure and outcome underlies accounts of power as the product of: systemic formation for example Althusser, Galbraith, Poulantzas (‘by power we shall designate the capacity of a social class to realize its specific, objective interests’ (Poulantzas 1973, p. 104, his italics); ‘Rational Choice theory’, for instance Downes, Rilker, Harsanyi, Dowding and forms of analysis involving ‘prisoners dilemma’ and models of that sort; and Functionalist/system theorists, especially Parsons in both his versions of power – the zero-sum and the later structuralist version ( Joseph 1988, p. 34; Halliwell and Hindess 1999, p. 79). In early and later Parsons, power exists as transformative capacity – the ability to alter physical and social worlds, to create material and instrumental outcomes, that is rule adherence, pattern maintenance, goal attainment and integration. In this formulation, power follows a series of epistemological manoeuvrers typical of mechanistic theory, in the sense that power is represented by effect, in the same manner as democracy represents the individual, and the state is deemed to represent the social. This representation – and these are conflated manoeuvrers – both objectifies power as a force of nature (and thus subject to the process of separation which is mentioned by Latour as typical of modernist conceptualisation (Latour 1993, p. 13)) and also removes it from the control of the immediate sociality by establishing it as a noun which does things. Thus, it serves as a discursive formulation to combine random actions beneath a discursive rubric centred upon a process of removed entities that express power as a naturalised result. A process of transcendental anointment revealed clearly and typical in standard social science formulations that phrase their accounts of power in terms of ‘A achieving power over B’: a formulation claimed to model social interaction. Of course, in common with all modernist modes of measuring and conceptualising power, this

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one formulates process as central; as Arendt notes (1958, p. 296) process is the typical method by which the integrity of objectification and the subject/object /deed separation is sustained. In terms of linkage, this conceptualisation of power provides the means by which agency, as the inherent property of a unitary individual, can be linked to the abstracted and otherwise unconnected social. In cases where power is defined as systemic, power is what explains and activates the abstract forces that function as causative explanations within the mechanistic model. With regard to cases where the individual is anointed with rationality, power again provides the means by which the abstraction of ‘rationality’ is animated within the social as defining and creative; additionally of course, ‘power’ establishes the veracity of rationality itself. The notion of power defined by effect allows for the disempowering of action as a defining characteristic of human plurality, and the empowering of abstract essential forces which the social and the individual are claimed to personify, but never entirely own. The abstraction of power as an essence outside sociality creates a mechanism by which anointed abstractions function to explain sociality. To be fair to Foucault, this essentialist separation is precisely what he seeks to avoid with his refusal to describe power as a ‘thing’ (see May 1983, p. 51 where Foucault has the honesty to admit that he has no idea what power is and can only judge it by effect). Yet, all this does is to inaugurate the typical post-modernist turn which shifts the emphasis from power as causation to power as strategy. By admitting his ignorance, Foucault is only making explicit what has always been implicit in mechanistic accounts that power as an essentialist demarcation can only be proved by effect. In this regard, the shift from causation to strategy is typically post-modern in suggesting more than it delivers. ● In mechanistic accounts, power is undifferentiated or only partially differentiated. Hindess for one (Halliwell and Hindess 1999) argues that there is an endemic conflation of various forms of power within the social sciences. Of course, further differentiation once the foundational mechanistic demarcation of object and effect has been established is difficult. The introduction of an array of powers brings with it notions of linkage, hybridity and context; notions that attack the essentialised quality assigned to power. Theoretically, power within mechanistic models explains, activates and links essentialised but hidden forces to other utterly separated elements and to the overall machine. So for example, in the case of rationality, if power was differentiated into many different and perhaps contextually specific forms, the conceptual

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integrity of rationality as a single driving and essentialised power that did things would simply be impossible to sustain theoretically. Notions of context and qualification cannot be introduced into models that depend upon the integrity of essentialised forms and on the suppression of context, hybridity and linkage. For these reasons, the only differentiations routinely acknowledged within mechanistic accounts are the minimum exclusions of power from strength and from violence – differentiations which do not amount to much, especially when they leave power to represent a multitude of social instances ranging, as we shall see, from three men pushing a car to the creation of identity (Lukes 1974, p. 15) to totalitarianism; a sweeping panorama – something which is precisely Hindess’ point. In the most extreme case, for example Weber, Giddens, as well as behaviourist accounts, power as a discursive category stands for a variety of manifestations including, but not exhausted by – authority, domination, structural power, personal power, power in sexual relations and so on. Similarly, Lyotard describes power uniformly as terror (Haber, Honi Fern 1994); Giddens defines it uniformly as capacity or domination, explicitly labelling forms of inter-relational power as simply domination (Giddens 1985, p. 11; Stewart 2001, pp. 14–17). This undifferentiated viewpoint is inherent within games such as ‘prisoner’s dilemma’, the outcomes of which are then transposed to entirely differing situations, something possible because power is an undifferentiated essential quality with no historical or contextual specificity (Argyle 1991, pp. 25–31). Additionally, even when differentiation is attempted, the differentiation is marginal; characteristically ‘achieved’ by a simple dismissal of personal strength. Poulantzas, separates power from ‘might’ (Poulantzas 1974, p. 146); once having performed this minor exclusion, he then theorises power as one all embracing entity – domination. At first glance Foucault might be seen to differentiate power entirely, both through his notion of micro circuits of power and through his opposition to any abstract notion of power. Clearly however, he does speak of it as an abstract entity and when he does, he also offers some form of differentiation of power into pastoral, judicial, positive/negative and other forms (Foucault in Faubion 2001, pp. 326–48). Additionally, he also excludes violence (Foucault 1980, p. 83). Yet within his account, there is an easy movement between micro instances and macro formations of power, so that power in sexual relationships cannot be distinguished from power within bureaucracy – an ambiguity which Agamben refers to when he says that the point where the two faces of power meet ‘remains strangely unclear’ (Agamben 1999, p. 5).

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Mann (1986, p. 7) is another who, while distinguishing between types of ‘social power’ (the quotation marks indicate that I find his notion of the social rather problematic) as ‘authoritarian’, ‘dispersed’, ‘intensive’ actually situates this power within an historical context as simply differing modes of one power, that is power personified organizationally (compare, p. 3 and p. 7). Others, while attempting a distinction between, say, individual strength and the power of the collective, still confuse varieties of power, for instance violence and authority. Alvin I. Goldman uses two examples to illustrate his notion of collective power – one describing the relative power of two members of a legislature and another describing the inter-reactions of two men in a room with a third man holding a loaded gun – yet he does not distinguish the differences between the types of power involved, or indeed the differing perspectives involved (Goldman Alvin I 1986).1 In the same Chapter, Goldman disproves notions of elitist social influence with reference to variations in individual capacity to close a door (pp. 176–7), all of which seems rather removed from any notion of power as a quality of social beingness. Even Weber, who distinguishes different types of leadership – charismatic, traditional, bureaucratic etc. – and different sources of power – economic, cultural etc – does not distinguish the different types of power wielded. Parsons conceptualises power as either a zero-sum game, a limited ‘object’ or as a generalised integrative capacity. Even someone who attempts to problematise power as the forgetting of its origins as an ability, as Dyrberg does (1997, p. 10), still explicitly refuses to differentiate forms of power, one from another (p. 11). All of which confirms the difficulty of escaping mechanistic theory in any piecemeal fashion, as well as the limitations on differentiation that mechanistic theory inevitably brings. ● Mechanistic accounts of power demand that accounts of power posit power as derived from and established within conflict. One could perhaps argue that this is an inevitable outcome of the foundational fragmentation which creates the mechanistic order. This conflict can be objective or subjective, that is a process of external control or of selfdiscipline. In the case of ‘power over’, the social sciences openly source power as the outcome of conflicting interests. Power secures control, compliance, a relational dependency, hierarchical subordination or domination. However, the claim that the concept of conflictual interest is characteristic only of what Oliga (1996, p. 70) calls ‘objectivist conceptions of power’ is simply mechanistic sophisms. With the exception of Habermas and Arendt, all accounts of power explicitly or implicitly are conflict based. In agency-based models, power is implicitly measured

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by the ability of the individual to achieve his or her aims against resistance. While the word ‘ability’ puts a dinner jacket on the argument, it does not disguise the fact that ability is then measured by capacity to achieve results and that capacity in this context refers to an overcoming of some sort. In these descriptions, conflict is simply hidden not removed. In Foucault, the notion of power as the outcome of conflict stems directly from his claim that resistance is inscribed within power, and humanity progresses from domination to domination and from violence to violence (Rabinov 1986, p. 85). Within Marxism, the idea of power as conflict is too obvious to need elaboration. Weber specifically establishes power as the carrying out of one’s will despite resistance and power, in an amorphous sense, giving one person control over another (Hindess and Helliwell). The privileging of conflict (Rosenvallon 1988, p. 211) when it occurs in a model based on essentialism and mechanistic formulations is – as Hobbes understood (King 1974, p. 197) – coterminous with a diminished role ascribed to co-operation. The chapter argues that the privileging of conflict shaped as it is within a Hegelian idealism constructed upon the impossibility of recognition is intrinsic to a view of the political as the intractable and ultimately unresolvable interaction of competing interests – a formulation which defines interest as the essentialist possession of rational individuals or social formations. Thus, the primacy granted to conflict as an essential human quality or as something sourced in objective material difference or relations serves to validate the separation and fragmentation characteristic of mechanistic theory. ● Accounts of power are uniformly underpinned by some sort of psychologised model of human nature – a situation which is both initiated in Hobbes (King 1974, p. 197) and which simply repeats and confirms the essentialistic constructions that Bohm locates (Bohm 1980) as a typical mechanistic paradigm. This is true whether power is sourced within agency or structure. Often the use of this psychology in this manner is unacknowledged (Walkerdine; Blackman 2001). Theories that stress individual agency – behaviourist, functionalist and Rational Choice – all depend upon the construction of a historically specific form of rationality, as well as ideas about the supposed natural desires of agents or the proclivity of agents for certain behaviour. Despite later attempts to overcome the crudity of earlier manifestations, Giddens for instance still relies upon psychological explanations (Cassells (ed.) 1993, p. 92/125). Even within systemic accounts, psychological models underpin concepts of power. Indeed, all accounts based

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upon Descartes have inherited a model that privileges interiority over exteriority (May 1983, p. 60) – a step which has created a ‘gradual reliance on the transcendental given of psychology in order to seek the foundation, not of this or that knowledge, but of knowledge in general’ (p. 58). Indeed this is one of the privileged modes of ‘knowing’ that this work – following on from Arendt – seeks to overturn. ● Finally and crucially, all mechanistic models posit power as central to analysis. The reason for this in the light of what has been said is surely obvious. Power provides linkage within the mechanistic model between the demarcated and essentialist forms which could not otherwise be linked and furthermore, in conjunction with conflict, power explains the animating of the mechanistic model as a whole. Finally the centrality of power turns action into process and preserves the primacy of thought over action. Thus, the centrality of power is necessary to establish the veracity of the mechanistic model and to sustain the simplification which is the hallmark of the mechanistic system as a whole (Dussel 1998, p. 16). So power links rationality and structure; it also links abstraction, structure and class; in Foucault it links the rationality of government with practices of government. Indeed, Dussel claims that the will to power as developed by Nietzsche and Foucault represents a continuation of the simplifying suppression of the organic complexity of life characteristic of Eurocentric modernity (p. 17). Certainly the will to power and the permeations to which it has been subjected by Foucault, represents precisely the sort of mechanistic centring of power to which I am referring. These are the areas of commonality that are inscribed within apparently differing accounts of power. While naturally occurring in varying guises, with varying degrees of emphasis, they nonetheless constitute what it means and what it has meant to write about power. Crucially for the argument enunciated here, it is clear that modernist and postmodernist accounts of power share a similar sourcing in the mechanistic paradigm (1983, p. 30, note 81). It is this common sourcing within a mode inherently constructed to disempower the foundational status of sociality which render it impossible for modernist and post-modernist accounts to describe community in anything other than the narrow, disembodied form discussed in the previous chapters. To transcend the closure inaugurated by mechanistic liberalism it therefore requires that mechanistic thought itself be transcended (the post-colonial theorist Dussel also endorses this view 1998, p. 17 ff).

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Examples This examination will be completed by a few examples specific to the contemporary debate. The Third Way accounts of Giddens’ for instance are clearly underwritten by just such a mechanistic notion of process, one that demands individual compliance to the naturalised objectified world ‘out-there’ (Giddens 1988, p. 13 second paragraph is simply one example, also pp. 130–31 bottom paragraph contains another example, but the assumption permeates everything he writes); a formulation which is typically mechanistic in the sense that the world is rendered available for the scientific processes of calculation, duplication and community building, but is also presented as omnipotent, ultimately measurable only through the impersonal workings of the machine as a whole and incapable of being altered by individual human action. Trust in all the accounts is presented as an essentalised quality, measurable purely as the outcome of rationality and self-interest manifested through ‘short term autism’ and ‘long term interest’ (Harre 1999, p. 219). Fukuyama also measures trust instrumentally as the construction of new social bonds (Fukuyama 1995, p. 26) capable of reinvigorating and reforming a new moral consensus, capable of creating new communities, new productivity and new communal wealth (ibid, p. 27). So trust here clearly functions in the manner of power. Indeed, in these accounts it serves as a substitute for power – it is an essentialised quality impervious to contextual specificity; it functions as both cause and effect; it links various parts of the social to allow the overall working of the social; and finally its presence or absence drives or hinders the working of the great machine. I would argue that it is precisely for this reason that Putnam defines trust so narrowly (Harre 1999, p. 220) because trust is then extrapolated as the sole source of Social Capital (p. 219). Harre is quite right to point to this narrow defining, but there is more to this than he perhaps appreciates. For, if trust does function as a discursive substitute for power then of course it has to be defined narrowly, just as power is so defined. Thus it follows the tramlines of mechanistic thought – it can only be defined by effect which is precisely what Putnam does, and just as with power, Putnam cannot evoke a contextual specificity for trust, because contextual specificity is the tiny jarring stone that brings the entire machine to a grinding halt. Some sociologists have traditionally avoided this conundrum of how to define something which can only be defined by effect by not defining

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it at all, instead acting as if everybody understood exactly what it was and proceeding full steam ahead on the basis of a normative, unproven common sense assumption. Crucially, however – and this exactly proves the point I am making – whether one defines it or not is irrelevant as long as its discursive function in the argument remains the same. Evidence for this can be seen in O’Hara’s work. For, O’Hara, despite his claim not to be interested in a general definition of trust (O’Hara 2004, pp. 21–2), constantly acts as if he has one. He continues using the word, usually in some truism or other, as if what was meant was entirely understood. His book is replete with instances – ‘trust is the big issue of the twenty-first century’ (p. 23), ‘trust is certainly one of those hard to measure things’ (p. 253), ‘trust doesn’t seem to function as its supposed to’ (p. 266), ‘trust isn’t always rational’ (p. 269), ‘trust is an odd thing’ (p. 273), ‘Establishing trust is never a trivial matter’ (p. 276), ‘Trust is a habit we’re getting out of’ (p. 279), ‘trust is easy to loose and hard to win back’ (p. 280), ‘trust is often based on one’s personal experiences’ (p. 75) and my personal favourite, ‘Trust has many forms and many different interpretations’ (p. 23). All of which makes his decision not to define trust a redundant exercise: additionally, he claims to examine trust (undefined) in what he terms ‘various forms and relationships’ (p. 24) by which he appears to means contextual specific experiences. I say ‘appears’, because in fact, while he has an inkling of the shadow of the problem with essentialised definitions and mechanistic theorising, he is a long, long way from understanding the issues involved.2 For, while his words suggests contextual specificity, his investigation consists of a series of badly researched chapters describing various contemporary affairs – his chapter on Enron for instance is replete with errors and omissions, his description of the internet is superficial to say the least, while his chapter on Putnam utterly misrepresents Putnam’s arguments – and in none of them is he able to account for trust as a contextually specific form arising or absent from his accounts. So Enron is a problem of lack of trust. What sort of trust are we talking about? Well, trust in financial dealings; and what might that sort of trust be specifically? Well, it is the attitude of business leaders, their unaccountability etc. In short, it is trust defined as an effect and in fact, it pretty much looks like, well, trust and everyone knows what that is – it’s trust. In short, his argument is inherently circular, his conclusions never show how trust is particular in these situations or how particular trust(s) are created in any specific context and I would argue, that these failings arise, from the mechanistic regime of articulation which underpins his entire work.

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For instance ‘local trust worked extremely well on the net when there was a relatively small number of users and they more or less shared the same set of values’ (p. 118). Well, this is true for trust everywhere as many sociologists have pointed out. In short, he never answers the question – what is the unique form of trust that the web creates? The reason he cannot answer of course is that whether he defines it or not, trust itself functions in his narrative as an essentialised quality and as such cannot be defined except by effect; it cannot be created and recreated in differing contextually specific forms. So he can discuss lack of trust, he can dispute the figures for surveys measuring trust, but that is the limit of his investigative capacity. Indeed in this light his decision not to define trust is strategic, not fundamental. Trust still functions in his account as the glue which defines and activates the machine. We can find a similar paradigm underlying Communitarian work. Indeed the notion that the values of society must be rebuilt – whether via governmental action or from the bottom up – is constantly offered as the means to restore the social machine to rude good health. In this regard, values and ethics in Communitarian accounts function once again as a substitute for power, that is within the accounts they are offered as linkage between essentialised and fragmentary individuals to explain first, why the machine is stuttering and second, how to restore it. Indeed Rose has a point (Rose 1999, p. 182) when he notes that the question of what constitutes values, and what and whose ethics are being touted is never examined by Communitarians. There are lots of reasons for this – some immediate and superficial, some of greater magnitude. However, it is clear that ethics and values function in these descriptions in an undifferentiated manner which encompasses all forms of behaviour from helping old ladies cross the road to political corruption. Of course, in doing so they duplicate the undifferentiated essentialised notion of power which as we saw could not be differentiated precisely because such differentiation would endanger the notion that ethics and values were the oil that drove the machine. Furthermore, Communitarians typical substitute for a definition of community, lists of the kinds of communities that they envisage (MacIntyre 1985, p. 221; Walzer 1983, p. 71). A displacement of this sort is typically mechanistic because of course it defines an essentialised quality by effect. Moreover, we have seen how their notions of community are typically ‘emotional’ which of course given their refusal to discuss linkages can’t help but mean that they function typically as mechanistic idealism in precisely the same manner as ‘power’.

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Etzioni, who because of his lack of theoretical reflexivity and his grounding in Functionism is a bit of a sitting target for this sort of task, again runs true to form when he conflates flag-raising ceremonies, public holidays, people going to the beach and restoring national pride, all in one breathtaking page (2001). Of course typically, Etzioni links them together by recourse to ethics – the glue, the fuel, the cause and the effect, not only of the socially fragmented machine, but also of the new improved, shiny promised model. Criticising Eztioni for mechanistic thinking indeed is rather like telling mother-in-law jokes; it’s all a bit too easy. Indeed, providing an endless array of examples from the current debate will not really illustrate anything aside from the obvious, which is that mechanistic thinking utterly underlies all current forms of investigation. So, finally, let us take a difficult example – Nikolas Rose. Now Rose would undoubtedly claim that Foucault transcends the mechanistic model. Clearly, as the discussion of power shows I disagree. Foucault has an understanding of the mechanistic model and the centrality of power to it, but as we saw power in his work continues to be modelled as effect, it continues to be central to the working of the social machine and it largely remains undifferentiated. The early chapters discussed two reasons for this: his exclusive concentration – as part of his oppositional methodology – upon the state, and his lack of a space of plurality and co-operation. I would argue that these two issues override and problematise any notion of the micro and macro or indeed the rather trite truism – in which Rose and others invest endless pages – that power has good and bad effects. Perhaps some more detail will make the issue clearer. First, his studies of the local: clearly the word ‘local’ in Foucault’s work functions not as a geographical referent that is as the opposite of ‘central’ (Faubion 2001, p. 286), rather it refers to specific and limited domains formed by the relations of power (Foucault 1980, p. 82)3 – domains where power is enacted in its particularities as opposed to descriptions of one universalised power stemming exclusively from a centralised point. Of course, the creation of these arenas as arenas of localised power is not the work of Foucault, but rather of liberal political theory itself. What Foucault has done on one level is to simply draw attention to the fact. While this is admirable, it falls a long way short of the claims of his supporters. Certainly Foucault’s work concentrates upon the specific practices of power, but this, as we have seen, is a necessary element in the sustaining of the veracity of his methodology (in any case, the most he grants to these techniques is ‘relative autonomy’ in Faubion 2001, p. 293).

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Second, these micro instances are not described in any detail (Fraser 1987, p. 23), nor are they, at least historically, contextually specific and given that everything is constructed and riddled with power, one would be forgiven for seeing in his notion of the local a ‘normative one dimensionality’ (p. 32) sufficient to undermine his claim that these local instances are not simply part of a single conjoined project (see also Rabinov 1986, pp. 192 and 201). To prove they were not a single conjoined project, Foucault would have to show how these local circuits of power undermine, subvert or contest power emanating from the state; yet, this is almost impossible to do, for not only would it subvert his anti-foundational stance but there is, within Foucault’s account, virtually no room for such opposition.4 Thus one is forced to ask the inevitable question, how micro is Foucault’s micro? Certainly, in relation to liberalism and indeed totalising Marxist accounts, it does locate power at points where this power is exercised, points long neglected within traditional social science discourse; yet, I would argue even this advance is undermined by the explicit linking of these examples to a general normative idea of subjectification (Faubion 2001, p. 282; Rabinov 1986, pp. 192, 195–204). Simply because it transcends previous models does not of itself make it micro in itself; something May acknowledges when he terms Foucault’s work as a ‘de-centralised critique’ (May 1983, p. 10) – a much more measured statement. Indeed, Foucault does not go so far as to argue that power is not centralised, rather he simply states that it is not of an ideal type (Faubion 2001, p. 240) – a formulation aimed at liberalism and Marxism as theories of the political, and not at the centrality of the state. Furthermore in the same quote, he clearly positions these local formulations of power as interconnected and generalised. This brings us to the second point, which is that Foucault’s work is a study of the historical modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects (Faubion 2001, p. 327), his work is a study of subjectification, the ‘conduct of conduct’; The form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes the individual marks him by his own individuality, attaches himself to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognise in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: … Both forms suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to. (Faubion 2001, p. 331) This suggests a totalizing, indeed a mechanistic perspective and certainly touches on the implicit confusion within Foucault’s work

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between his methodology and the normative mode of his writing. Yet crucially, for my argument, it suggests that while the social may be composed of circuits of power, all these circuits do not imply a model of a free floating centre-less power at all; quite the opposite, for I would contend that in fact what these capillaries of power approximate is something closer to the New South Wales rail system, where lots of tracks lead and emanate from one central point, where state power begins like trains at different points and bounces back and forth between the subject and state, but which nonetheless is still determined, sanctioned and enunciated by the state as the point of final resort. In truth, without plurality and without social co-operation, Foucault’s analytics of power can only been centred in the state, a state moreover which confirms itself as an effect, albeit implicit of power and which also works because micro power (never differentiated) links everything together. Moreover this must be the outcome, for all Foucault is doing is problematising what liberalism naturalises; it is the mirror image in every regard. Given this, it is difficult to argue against the assessment that Foucault’s work remains highly mechanistic, though of course one should in fairness record that he does at least have an acute awareness of the problem. As for Rose, if anything he exaggerates it is the mechanistic tendencies in Foucault. The example of the reading test is ample evidence of this, as are his normative notions of ‘a government of community’ and a ‘remaking of political subjectivity’ (Rose 1999, pp. 11–12). There is clearly a machine at work here, a machine ‘in which multiple identities receive equal recognition in a single constitutional form’ (p. 174), but the question is how much Rose’s own account conforms to the foundational terms of the mechanistic regime of articulation. I would argue that Rose’s account is reductive of community to the workings of this machine, not only because of the elements listed in reference to Foucault which of course re-appear in Rose’s account, but also because unlike Foucault he conflates the discursive and the everyday; a move which further reduces both the capacity for contextual specificity and actually undoes the careful distinguishing into judicial, temporal and so on that Foucault enunciates. Moreover, Rose’s entire account of why power is utilising community as a discursive form for the construction of these new subjectivities depends on a hidden psychological explanation, and within his accounts this psychology links various essentialised subjects into a totalising account. The inability, already noted, of Rose to provide any means for the construction of the alternative subjectivity derives directly from

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the totalising nature of the account as does his strong suggestion that there is nothing else to community except this project of govermentality. Thus, albeit in a roundabout manner, Rose’s account of community, precisely because it remains mechanistic in its foundation articulation, cannot describe community in any form other than as a machine, one in which essentialised and demarcated elements interact through power to make the machine function. Rose of course may retort that this is precisely his function, yet I argue that there are two ways in which the mechanistic methodology underwrites his approach – one as overt topic and the second as implicit, guiding principle for his own approach. It is the latter of these which concerns me because it effectively disbars Rose from investigating community in any manner other than that enunciated by the state. So instead of such an investigation, what we get is the usual conflation of government and community, the usual linkages, the usual lack of differentiation and contextual specificity and the total lack of any notion of community as multiplicity, action and hybridity, indeed the total lack of community as anything except the discourse of governance. So the mechanistic approach is the second stumbling block for the investigation of community and it is precisely the same stumbling block for Giddens and Rose that it was for Durkheim and Comte. In short, their investigation of community investigates everything but community. Historically and contemporaneously then, these two conflated issues have curtailed and pre-empted social science investigation of community, and effectively, they work in tandem for the primacy of the state/individual axis is clearly sustained by the mechanistic regime of articulation – sustaining which has always been specifically positioned against the possibilities of counter forms of articulation which might describe, and in the process empower sociality and community.

Part III New Conceptions – Community through Sociality

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7 Arendt: Sociality and Community on its Own Terms

Introduction Up to this point, the topic of community and sociality has been approached through the work of other academics, aspects of their work having been described and located both within the current debate and within the tradition typifying social science ‘investigation’ of community. It is now time for me to lay my cards on the table and to suggest a non-mechanistic approach capable of understanding sociality and community without reference to any pre-empting idealism or abstraction. The first step involves a radical reading of the work of Hannah Arendt, in particular, her most important work, The Human Condition (1958, hereafter referred to as THC). It is argued that this work offers the theoretical perspective for precisely the anti-mechanistic and anti-metaphysical reordering of community and sociality which is the aim of this book. Arendt’s work is central to this search, firstly, because she provides a deconstructive reading of metaphysical and mechanistic constructions of the social and secondly, because her work suggests a way beyond the inherently oppositional post-modernist accounts. Arendt achieves this because her attacks upon the Cartesian and mechanistic viewpoint are not confined simply to the essential subject,1 but specifically address the disempowering of the social and social being-ness. Furthermore, through various methods which we will briefly examine, she explicitly positions her work outside traditional philosophical confines, refusing a simple reversal of values and constructing instead an inter-relational picture of the social, where the safeguarding of an open and communal social space is the highest priority.2 135

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A close reading of THC reveals the following: ●

●

A skeletal outline of a multi faceted – that is a constructive as well as an oppositional – approach to a de-centred human being-ness. The basis for an anti-metaphysical and anti-mechanistic approach to sociality in both its micro and macro manifestations.

And this is what – in the interest of the overriding aim – this chapter intends to illustrate. Mainstream readings The reading of Arendt that this chapter develops goes against the grain of the vast majority of work on Arendt. In part, this is because I concentrate upon one book but primarily, it is because I view THC as a coherent anti-metaphysical project. It is my claim that much of what passes for work on Arendt misunderstands her overall purpose, in part because of the strangeness of her work and in part because many commentators ‘pick and choose’ from a partial appreciation of her work (Villa 1996, p. 4). As a result academics complain her work is difficult (Villa 1996, p. 4) and that she is obtuse and contradictory. This has led some commentators to suggest quite strongly that the problems lies with Arendt herself (Kaleb 2000, p. 134; Zaretsky Eli 1997, p. 207; Pitkin HF 1998, p. 11). As such, while many commentators pay lip service to her influence, especially in relation to her famous discussions on power, the sum of this lip service rarely amounts to more than a few lines (Torfing 1999, p. 166 is typical of this); all of which I would like to demonstrate but unfortunately there are word limits. What needs to be said however is that contrary to many critics (Benhabib 1996; Pitkin 1998; Moruzzi Norma Clare 2000; Zaretsky Eli 1997) I feel there is a cohesive wholeness and foundation to THC as a work and that the structure and ordering of THC perfectly mirror Arendt’s thematic purpose. As such, this chapter intends to engage with Arendtian concerns principally connected with her approach to community and sociality. The sum of these topics supports the claim that Arendt provides the fundamental cornerstone for a de-centred modelling of sociality and community. Arendt’s radicality: her anti-metaphysical and anti-mechanistic project ‘I have clearly joined the ranks of those who … have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics and philosophy with all its categories as we have

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known them from their beginnings in Greece until today’ (quoted in Villa 1996, p. 163). In these terms, Arendt announces the focus of her lifetime project. Given that THC was published in 1958, this aim linked her specifically to the then still highly suspect work of isolated thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. She is thus contained within a European, and not an American philosophical tradition. So what can be said generally about Arendt’s anti-metaphysical and anti-mechanistic project? Initially, it can be noted that in contrast to Foucault who attacks metaphysics by studying its effects and revealing their political nature and origins, Arendt attacks it by overturning the Platonic privileging of thought over action (1958, p. 222), the privileging of the ‘cosmic and the universal, as distinguished from the terrestrial and the “natural” ’ (p. 268 also pp. 263–5). Indeed, THC can be read as an historical investigation of the means through which action is conceptually transformed into a mode of making, how it is theoretically established within the western tradition as secondary to thought and furthermore, how this privileging of idealism and abstraction (pp. 263–4, 267, 272), has separated human beings from their own social being-ness. THC describes how the terminology of political theory and political thought (229) sustains the primacy allocated to thought over action3 through a regime of articulation built upon mechanistic and metaphysical privileging. It also allows Arendt to make clear that these regimes of articulation are not simply sustained by the separation of noun and verb, object and acting, but also by the privileging of abstraction over being-in-the world as a means of explaining the world (p. 321). This abstraction – which Arendt terms process (pp. 296–7) – sustains the privileging of idealism and thought over worldly and social existence (pp. 276, 318), constructs and maintains the ‘Cartesian community’ and regulates and ‘disappears’ the social. This is what Arendt means when she says that she is interested in the relation of human beings and the earth, not Man and life (p. 318). For Man, and indeed life, in this latter sense, are abstractions. Against the primacy of abstraction and the privileging of essences and process, Arendt asserts the inter-relational plural being-ness of the world (p. 321). Essences and universalism are creations of the mind (p. 268 ff); they are the manifestations of the elevation of labouring which creates a ‘dimmed downed world’ (Villa 1996, p. 138); they dull and remove the world from us, just as they remove us from the world (Arendt 1958, p. 321); they are the single truth of the household that denies the plurality of ‘truths’ and the possibility of agreement and co-operation

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(p. 45); they are the notion of fabrication which constructs and values everything entirely from an instrumental perspective and which concurrently elevates the maker and the final product above the actual lived experience and act of making. It is the Platonic philosophical tradition which by constructing action as secondary to thought has reduced action to an unproblematic, instrumental making facility (Villa 1996, p. 109), a transcendental ideal beyond a realm of human affairs (Arendt 1958, p. 292; Villa Dana 1996, p. 116). By her choice of the vita activa, the activities in the world, activities open to all humans as a condition of their being-ness, Arendt asserts the primacy of being-ness – the ‘who we are’ (Arendt 1958, p. 10) – over the metaphysical idealised explanations of ‘What we are’. For this reason, Arendt refuses the comfort of any abstraction, be it psychologism (see her attack on urges p. 321 and subjectivism p. 284), philosophy (p. 292) or indeed any form of metaphysics (ibid, pp. 262–3); and she does this because nothing entitles us to believe that man has a nature, an essence (p. 10) or a psychology, and because all of these idealisms (‘products of thought’) are reductive of worldly experience to thought – all of which explains her opposition to the primacy of cognitivism, rationality, and Cartesian doubt (See pp. 267/297 and p. 318 for examples of this, though it permeates everything she wrote). Of course Arendt does not oppose thought per se, simply the manner in which Platonic and Cartesian thought pre-constructs the social for us; a construct which, as it were, refuses human being-ness and the action that creates being-ness access to it. Against this, Arendt continually asserts the primacy of lived experience, the individuality of experience, the social being of existence and crucially the inter-relationality of experience (p. 321 where the two sit side by side). But this represents only the oppositional half of her project. By posing the question ‘who we are rather “what we are” ’, Arendt reverses the traditional western philosophical standard which inscribes thought with prescriptive power over action (Villa 1996, p. 160) and overturns the traditional decoupling of thought from action. Yet this reversal represents more than a simple theoretical re-privileging: quite the contrary, for even action is contained and expressed through other interlinked conditions such as labour, work and plurality. It is the inter-relational perspectives within which her picture of the social is expressed, rather than simply her stress on action alone, which enunciates Arendt’s work as truly radical. So this reading disputes the many critics who describe Arendt as simply privileging action in a direct substitution with thought (D’Entreves,

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Maurizio Passerin 1994) indeed such a reading simply recreates the primacy of abstraction that Arendt is seeking to overturn. I believe a more accurate reading of THC would describe it not as a privileging of action, but rather as describing a theory of inter-relationality. Arendt’s world is a social world, a common relational world where human beings are a conditioned and conditioning force; where action, freedom and identity are all limited and conditioned by the world and by their own location within a web of relationships; where if action endows the world with meaning, it does so as an outcome of the fundamental conditionality of all human being-ness. Where whatever truth is established is established by the presence of other people, who confirm the reality of ourselves to ourselves (Arendt 1958, p. 95; Hill Melvyn (ed.) 1979, pp. 293–4). Thus the intellectual philosophical game where one abstraction replaces another and absolute truth is maintained is precisely what Arendt’s project avoids. So as Villa observes (Villa Dana (ed.) 2000, p. 8), her criticism is aimed not at work as such, or the social as such, or labouring or even thought, but rather at the universalisation of a particular set of attitudes as well as the manner in which the Western tradition’s elevation of thought has blurred the distinctions and articulations within the vita activa (Arendt 1958, p. 17). The result is that far from simply reconstructing a new piece of solid ground through which the frailty and relativity of human existence can be concealed anew, Arendt actually performs quite the contrary act, and elevates the frailty, relativity, open-ended, relational and uncontrollable nature of being-ness against the entire Platonic philosophical tradition and the abstraction it champions – a step which is vital to maintain the dual status of her antimetaphysical and anti-mechanistic project, for of course in ‘privileging’ inter-relationality she brings to light precisely those linkages and hybrids which Latour claims mechanistic theory suppresses (Latour 1993, p. 37). Explicit within Arendt’s inter-relation project is a concurrent ontological shift from the privatised self towards a self constituted by disclosure, action, and co-operation and this shift is also creative of a new form of power, a form not simply based on conflictual imperatives; a move which by-passes the simply monocausal linkage of the subject/state axis examined in Chapter 5 in which the individual and the state are established as the exclusive mode of political being. Having established the terms of her project, what is needed now is to detail its creative and particular manifestation within specific categories. Naturally, it is the argument that these categories are reflective of and

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contained within an overriding set of principles, and that as such the distinction and separation performed is entirely procedural. A good place to commence is with a simple description of the structure of THC, beginning with the prologue. The prologue opens with a discussion of reactions to the contemporaneous launching of the Sputnik, immediately locating the work as concerned with the modern world. In discussing this event, Arendt singles out what she terms a general feeling of relief that man can finally remove his earthly chains. Crucially however, Arendt does not say that the material reality produces these reactions, but rather that this ‘new condition of being’ is an outcome of man’s anticipation (Arendt 1958, p. 2). Thus the Sputnik and the possibilities it presents to leave the being-ness of life on earth are manifestations of a culture whose deepest desire is to escape the human condition. Arendt immediately presents us therefore with a world where experience has been reduced to two mutually exclusive modes of being – subjective experience and the objective constructions of modern science. Each of these modes is based upon different versions of speech and politics; what is more they are mutually exclusive. Arendt locates both these themes within an historical perspective (p. 2) and establishes them as ‘political questions’ (p. 3). By doing so, she announces that her criticism does not derive from any simple foundational nostalgia. Nor does she have the answer. This immediate disavowal of an Archimedean point, of any claim to ultimate truth, also very subtly enunciates her perspective as inherently anti-mechanistic, as does the statement that whatever the answer to these problems, it can only be decided by the ‘agreement of many’ and not by either theoretical considerations or on the basis of individual opinion (p. 5). Thus the work is immediately announced as an inter-relational project, positioned in the social and opposed to the primacy of abstraction and individual subjectivism as the means for explaining the social. In this context what follows immediately is an explicit statement positioning her work as concerned with contemporaneous being-in-the-world. ‘what I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. “What we are doing” is indeed the central theme of this book’ (p. 5) – a statement which almost irresistibly recalls Foucault’s famous and often quoted statement of his purpose. While I do not intend to examine the differences and similarities between the two, I would suggest a comparison is instructive and revealing. Arendt then spells out the proposed topics of the book. These topics – ‘a discussion of labour, work and action – (the Vita activa)’ – have been

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chosen so Arendt makes clear, because they ‘are within the range of every human being’. What is important is the explicit positioning of the work as an investigation into, and contained by, the lived actuality of all human being-ness.4

Inter-relationality It is these three conflated steps: her location of her project outside philosophical boundaries; her stress upon plurality and the social as over and above the individual; and finally her stress on the inter-relationality of the social, that distinguish THC from the apparently similar work of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault. This is a giant step and it allows Arendt not only to escape the trap of extreme subjectivism and aestheticism which imprisons Nietzsche for instance (Villa 1996, p. 103 ff), but also allows her project to be more than simply oppositional. That this is intentional becomes clear in a passage pregnant with more than simple philosophical generalities. Academic philosophy … has … been dominated by the never ending reversals of idealism and materialism, of transcendentalism and immanentism, of realism and nominalism, of hedonism and asceticism and so on. What matters here is the reversibility of all these systems, that they can be turned ‘upside down’ or ‘downside up’ without requiring for such reversals either historical events or changes in the structural elements involved. … It is still the same tradition the same intellectual game with paired antitheses that rules, to an extent, the famous modern reversals of spiritual hierarchies, such as Marx’s turning Hegelian dialectic upside down, or Nietzsche’s revaluation of the sensual and natural as against the supernatural. (Arendt 1958, p. 293 also p. 17 where she says the same thing) Furthermore, in a passage at the end of the chapter she explicitly states that her ‘use of the term vita activa presupposes that the concerns underlying all its activities … is neither superior or inferior to the central concerns of the Vita contemplativa’ (p. 17). This is vital, for if Arendt was to postulate one as superior to the other, then a simple reversal would be the limits of what she does perform. And the fact that she does not perform a simple reversal is why I claim Arendt’s project is superior to Nietzsche’s, and indeed any other anti-metaphysical project. Therefore, while Arendt may oppose the Cartesian individual (p. 279), her target is much wider than one philosophical totem. Thus, what I

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seek to establish, is the means by which Arendt’s inter-relationality establishes the basis for an empowered reading of community, in clear contradistinction to the currently articulated regimes of knowledge utilised by the human sciences. Following the introduction, Chapters 1–2 map the terms of our human being-ness, the human condition and the activities of the vita activa which personify human being-ness within the conditioning frame of the world. Thus the vita activa is discussed initially in relation to life (pp. 7–11), then in relation to philosophy (pp. 12–17), and finally in relation to space (Chapter two). The dual effect of this examination is firstly to locate the trinity of labour, work and action as simultaneously conjoined activities and conditions of existence, and second, to elevate doing and being as the fulcrum of Arendt’s investigation. Examining the first point in more detail, it can be seen that Chapter 1 is devoted to establishing the components of the vita activa both as activities and as conditions of being. Within this examination, labour, work and action while they are distinguished are not presented as separate, ideal categories, rather they are painstakingly, mutually interlinked. They are shown as having, what I will term, a passive and an active form. The passive form situates them as present prior to birth; we are born into them and agreement is demanded as a condition of our being-ness. The active meaning is the meaning created by some degree of our own human input. Therefore, while initially, Arendt links each of them with a condition of life (p. 7), a closer reading of the relevant section (pp. 7–11) shows that they are positioned and established inter-relationally. So the activities labour, work and action-are alongside natality, mortality, worldliness, life itself and plurality, all implicated as conditions of life in the conditioned existence of men (p. 9). They are present at birth. For instance, all men have to provide in some form or other, through some means or other, for their biological needs. Men must either labour themselves or have someone else do it (p. 176). Labour as the satisfaction of biological needs, is thus, just as much a condition of human being-ness, as natality, plurality, or mortality. Labour is not simply, or exclusively, a materially enunciated set of activities, rather labour is whatever is done predominantly to satisfy biological needs (p. 84). Thus, at one level, any activity could potentially qualify as labouring, if it is undertaken principally to serve these ends. If this were not the case then Arendt’s classification of modernity as a society where principles of labouring have permeated every activity would simply have no meaning. Similarly,

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while Arendt initially states that action belongs to the human condition of plurality (p. 175), she also says that action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality (p. 9). Natality is, it should be noted, also present in politics which has as its specific condition, plurality (p. 7). Furthermore, action would be unnecessary without plurality (p. 8). While ‘action is inherent in all human activities’ (p. 9), it is also a condition of being which man cannot escape (p. 208). This configuration, of course, postulates action as contained within an inter-relational web, and thus impervious to mechanistic essentialisms, polarities and demarcations such as conscious/unconscious, structure/agency and so forth. In this vein, Arendt does not say that plurality is the exclusive condition of politics, but rather that it is the specific condition, just as the difference between labour and work is based on a contextual judgment and, not an essentialist definition. Thus Chapter 1 establishes the vita activa as implicated within all practices – discursive and material – and all activities, subjective and objective. Chapter 1 also locates the vita activa in the history of western philosophy. Thus the insertion of the vita activa into the Platonic philosophical framework establishes it as a means by which western philosophy and the human sciences, as regimes of articulation for the organisation of sociality and social power, can be examined in a historically specific manner. Chapter 2 introduces the spatial placement of labour, work and action through its introduction of public and private space and by the mapping of this social space as the manifestation and spatialisation of these three fundamental practices. Here for the first time the twin focus of Arendt’s work becomes clear. For labour, work and action exist within the world of human being-ness, they are conditions of human being-ness, which condition, and are conditioned in turn by the world; that is the stress in her account falls upon the linkages which are described as mutually constituting. They are activities and actions through which systems of thought become concrete, but which also exist as particular action(s) prior to systems of thought. In turn as action and as speech as action, the vita activa illuminates the conditions under which the social human being-ness is theoretically enunciated. Each of these human conditions has a conjoint positioning within thought, practice and space, which is in relation both to the world of men and to the world of nature (p. 23). What is more, this positioning is subjective and objective, as well as historically specific. This historical placement is crucial in establishing the nonessential status of Arendt’s examination.

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The next three chapters deal individually with each of the three components of Arendt’s focus, charting the historical movement and positioning of each practice within the contemporaneous social and within the philosophical hierarchy. Finally, the last chapter serves to answer Arendt’s initial question by placing the vita activa within a contemporary perspective.

The elements of Arendit’s approach to the social Introduction I have argued throughout that Arendt attempts to reunite what she herself describes as the ‘curious discrepancy between the world orientated, “objective” language we speak and the man orientated, subjective theories we use in our attempts at understanding’ (p. 94). Having, hopefully established the general terms for Arendt’s project in THC, what is needed now is to turn to the possibilities she offers for a theoretically elaborated, post-mechanistic articulation of community. Arendt is clearly trying to think of being-ness in a non-sovereign, worldly way (Villa Dana 1996, p. 118) and as such she wants, not simply to construct an oppositional logic, but to reconfigure the social world (Curtis 1999, p. 16). The task of this section then is to draw from Arendt’s work the elements useful for a theoretically empowered articulation of the social. I would argue that there are three elements within the THC crucial to any attempt to establish a post-mechanistic model of the social. These three elements are 1. Plurality 2. Certain elements from her description of action 3. Most importantly the entire notion of the web of relations. The sum total of these three elements when viewed inter-relationally is creative of a de-centred, social being-ness termed by Arendt, the ‘who’. These three elements and the ‘who’ which they create, are the centre of this section. I will in due course provide some explanation for various delimitations and omissions; however, it is not my intention to fully treat every part of the rich fabric that is THC. I have divided the three elements into two categories for the purpose of explanation. The first of these is The activities of being The first activity crucial to an empowered sociality is the fundamental human condition that Arendt refers to as plurality: ‘plurality’ claims

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Arendt ‘is the law of the earth’ (1958, p. 19). Indeed more than any other element, it is Arendt’s embrace of plurality which undercuts the entire Platonic philosophical tradition (for a good discussion of this in relation to Heidegger see Benhabib 1996, pp. 104–7). Plurality in common with each condition had two conjoined modes – passive and active. The passive mode establishes plurality as a condition of human life and the active mode relates to plurality as it is contained within the active inter-relationality of human lived-ness.5 Moreover, inherent within these two-fold meanings are the dual qualities of equality and distinction (Arendt 1958, p. 175). In the first sense plurality exists ‘because men not Man inhabit the earth’ (p. 7) and because as human beings we are always both the same and unique (p. 8). It is ‘passive’ because it is a condition of being a human being, enacted and operative at the moment of our natality. As a ‘passive’ condition, it does of course still exist inter-relationally, but this inter-relationality is something which the infant has played no part in shaping; it is not an active force, rather it simply is. It is a condition of the world and as such is related to ‘work’ as the construction of objects that endure within the world and which provides both, an objective location for our subjectivity and an enduring aspect that renders the world as something over and above any single human existence. In these terms, it is something we ‘know’ without knowing it; it is there by virtue of the simple presence of others. In the second sense, plurality needs to be understood inter-relationally, not as a simple condition of our birth, but as a reality of our human being-ness. The first meaning offers plurality as ‘given’, whereas the second speaks of our ‘responsiveness’ (Curtis 1997, p. 25) and our interrelational engagement with it. In the second sense what is at stake is the status of plurality, not its existence. What Arendt is claiming here is that plurality as an active condition needs to be accepted, nurtured, validated and most importantly recognised. However in this regard there is an option, and if the choice is not to recognise it then lives will shape differently and the social will become ‘dimmed down’; however plurality itself will not disappear, rather it will simply become potential ignored, potential concealed. Arendt occasionally implies this second, ‘active’ sense of plurality when she speaks about multiple perspectives. Thus when speaking of the public world, she explicitly links perspectives to plurality: the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no

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common measurement or denominator has been devised. For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than can the location of two objects. (p. 57) For the common world to exist therefore, plurality must be acknowledged actively: a simple statement but one with vast ramifications. Later in the same passage, she states that this common world is destroyed by the ‘destruction of the many aspects in which it presents itself to human plurality’ (p. 58). Interestingly, Arendt does not explicitly provide a definition of this second meaning of plurality, rather she locates it relationally – as inherent within action (p. 7), as necessary for politics (pp. 7–8), as implicated in forgiveness and promising, faculties dependent on ‘plurality, on the presence and acting of others’ (p. 237), and in relation to otherness (p. 176) as the basic sine qua non for the space of appearance (p. 220). On one occasion, plurality is defined in opposition to ‘sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self sufficiency and mastership is contradictory to the very conditions of plurality’ (p. 234, my italics). The common thread in these descriptions is that plurality functions both as a condition and as a conditioning activity. Thus, when plurality is not recognised and validated, when it becomes disguised, the common world is lost. Existence becomes exclusively subjective, isolated, mono-tonal and thin, precisely because there is no common world in which we can see ourselves or be recognised. At which point, we have become a mass. ‘If the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned, no common nature of man, least of all the unnatural conformism of mass society, can prevent the destruction of the common world, which is usually preceded by the destruction of the many aspects in which it presents itself to human plurality (ibid, p. 58).’ Such a situation Arendt says is typical of tyranny or mass society, and in a passage that prefigures Foucault – and which is absolutely commensurate with our contemporary neoliberal world of sovereign instrumentality and ‘all lifestyle no life’ – she notes that the common world has come to an end when it is ‘seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective’ (p. 58). So in summary, plurality functions both as a condition and a conditioning element in human being-ness. As a condition of life, plurality represents the infinite variety of locational perspectives ‘given’ to, and

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occupied by every being and object within our inherited common world. As a condition, its status and its validity function to establish the ontological basis of our human being-ness. The implication of this is that plurality can be ‘lost’ or it can be acknowledged. Crucially, for plurality to be the basis for the highest form of our human being-ness it must be lived openly. Thus plurality is not a concept but an integral part of our being-ness dependent for its ‘visibility’ on human activity. The recognition of plurality allows – in contrast to Habermas and his ideal social space (Calhoune Craig 1997, p. 232)6 – for the social to be permanently ‘open’: ‘open’ moreover to both the creation of new identities and the play of perspectives which construct the ‘who’ as an interrelational and social being. Thus everywhere we look, our identity is a worldly identity, subject to the prerogative of the world and to the recognition of plurality. As such our freedom and our identity can never be an abstract ideal but is always conditional, constrained, but most crucially always created. We not only need other people to provide our ‘reality’ by their presence, we also – as we shall see – need the objects of the world to objectify our subjectivity (Arendt 1958, p. 137). As such the simple primacy afforded by Arendt to plurality utterly abolishes the isolated humanist subject. Action ‘Action is the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other inanimate things but make their appearance explicit (ibid, pp. 198–9).’ Some quotes, small though they are, can encapsulate an entire work. Many of Arendt’s themes are contained in this quote; some have been suggested previously. My description of Arendtian action however, focuses upon the inter-relationality of action, the duality of meanings surrounding the term and the paradoxes that arise as a condition of this interrelationality. It allocates primacy and interest to a certain form of action over that generally valued by liberal critics of Arendt, a valuing which from the perspective of community is less useful than the mode of action I intend to stress. The importance of action is noted in Arendt’s claim that action is ‘the exclusive prerogative of man’, ‘the single quality which cannot be imagined outside the society of men’ (p. 22). In fact, Arendt asserts the uniqueness of action as the means by which man becomes distinctly human (p. 176). Yet the first paradox is that something so central to human being-ness is also the most conditioned, most inter-relational and most constrained of Arendt’s nominated activities (p. 178). Arendt

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insists that for political action (her ‘highest’ form of action) to exist, it must contain as its fundamental conditions, in no particular order: the shiny brightness of glory (p. 180), a revelatory quality, non-violence (p. 179), speech (ibid), disclosure of the ‘who’ (p. 180), plurality (p. 175), ‘the web of acts and words of other men’(p. 188), initiative (ibid, p. 177), no specific motive (p. 179/206), and finally, that it take place in a visible, public space (p. 180). In all a rare flower and not without the odd problem as shall be shown, yet for all of that action is crucial, ‘for trusting in action and speech as a mode of being establishes the reality of one’s self, one’s own identity and the reality of the world’ (p. 208). As such people must act; they have no choice in the matter (p. 8). It is impossible to resist acting for human being-ness demands that people actualise their being and this can only be done in action (p. 208). Something that, given the conditional nature of action outlined above, would, one assumes, be rather difficult. So this is the second paradox. For how is action in the form outlined, both the most fragile (p. 196) of all human activities, and the most crucial? Indeed, given its constrained condition, we might wonder how can it exist at all? Fortunately, there are three meanings of action within THC, yet the third paradox is that Arendt devotes the bulk of the book to only one – the most fragile and most futile (p. 195) and from the perspective of community the most problematic. What is important to understand at this juncture, is that unlike the other conditions, the condition of action has not two, but three meanings. First, in company with all other activities and conditions (pp. 7–9), it is a simple passive condition established at birth and forever linked to the capacity of beginning that natality embodies (p. 177). Second, as an actualising activity, it is creative, as we shall see of man’s unique identity, human relationships and the bridging of the objective and subjective worlds (p. 196). This is the wider meaning of action; the action which is present to some degree in all activity (p. 9), where ‘the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the same boundlessness because one deed and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation’ (p. 190). However there is another meaning, a much more limited meaning, though conversely for Arendt a much more potent one. In this third meaning, action creates a specific public space, and enunciates a true politics (p. 179) and furthermore, this political action is instituted historically in the polis, the French and American revolutions, as well as in certain twentieth century instances of direct democracy. It is this final form of action that Arendt enunciates as the highest form of action (p. 205) and which, in its fullest manifestation, is

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surrounded by the plethora of conditions outlined earlier. And that is the problem. For given that in its fullest glory, it is the product of rare moments of history, one wonders how useful it can be for an attempt to construct an approach to everyday human being-ness? Indeed, given the rare appearance of genuine political action, at least as Arendt tells it, it is fair to ask why fabrication and work are so demeaned, after all opportunities for genuine action – historically speaking – appear rather light on the ground. Yet this cannot be true either, for the possibility to create political action is always there as potential (p. 199). To arrive at an answer to these questions, and to demarcate clearly the manner in which the second meaning of action can serve both as a model of Arendtian action and function within an empowered and everyday sociality, this section intends to examine action exclusively in its ‘active’ modes; an examination which hopefully will allow an answer to emerge. In due course it shall also be seen that part of the answer is contained in the notion of the web of relations. Thus action as an activity ‘is never possible in isolation, to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act’ (p. 188). Action for Arendt is worldly, it precedes being and thought. Thus action restores the social relationship because it generates relationships across boundaries (p. 189); it is the common world. Thought does not initiate action and action is not a product of will or motive, nor does it come from any form of individualised psychological model (Arendt 1961, p. 155); action unlike motives and aims which are always typical (Arendt 1958, p. 206) is unique. This is precisely what accounts for its miraculous and revelatory quality. For Arendt, freedom is not found in the choice to act, or in the idea that precedes action, but only in the action itself (Arendt 1961, p. 153). Action exists therefore as an end in itself, not for instrumental purpose or for a higher truth or the good of man (Villa Dana 1996, p. 52), and as such action is the opposite of the sameness and isolation that characterises labour and the dimmed down world of instrumental reason (p. 210). Finally, action is intrinsically linked to speech; indeed for Arendt they are almost conflated terms (Arendt 1958, p. 176). What is clear however is that by speech she does not mean discourse, nor does she mean a situation where discursive modes are privileged over action, rather speech for Arendt is ‘speaking’. In this sense it is clear that speech must accompany action, because action requires communication to be social (p. 178), and most importantly because, given that action is revelatory of identity within the social and this identity can only be agreed through speaking. Given that Arendt thinks that a person in isolation is

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not a person (pp. 176–80), it is also clear that a person talking to themselves is also not a person; speech for Arendt is action; it personifies action. Certainly when she describes the relationship between them, she does so in terms which stress their inter-relationality as conjoined terms, and also in conjunction with other conditions as evoked and conjoined within the matrix that action creates (p. 178). Therefore action is the most inter-relational of all the conditions and activities, and unlike labour which submerges our identity, action reveals our particular qualities as human beings (p. 176). Yet – and this is the fourth paradox – action is also the most fragile of human activities (p. 198). For action is the only means of revealing our being and yet, not only is this revealed identity uncertain (p. 182), it always carries with it a dual status that constructs us both as doer and sufferer (p. 189). That is one reason why action requires plurality and trust, just as much as it is creative of sharing and trust (for an example of this see p. 189, where in words obviously aimed at Nietzsche, she speaks of the brilliant man who fails to enlist help). So some form of equal interpersonal relationships is vital for the enunciation of action, and every form of action establishes some form of relationship. While action has two parts and needs an initiator (p. 189), it never remains under their control, it is unfinalisable and unknowable, inherently open-ended, requiring the presence of others as a condition of its existence. This is why Arendt equates action with freedom, for human beings are free as long as they act, and not before or after (Hansen 1993, p. 54). Yet it is a constrained freedom, a conditioned freedom, and it is conditioned precisely because both freedom and action are worldly matters, not inner, subjective or lonely pursuits, they must take place in a constrained social arena. Another paradox: for not only does action require the presence of others, it also creates a space for others (Arendt 1958, p. 198). And it does so as a condition of its actualisation, a space moreover where equal relationships can come into being. Yet the great paradox is that action is also conditioned, ‘ridden with many frustrations’ (p. 182), the first and most important of which is the congenital unpredictability of action itself (p. 244). This is why for Arendt the highest form of action is politics, for the political is the conscious recognition of the nature of action as a condition of being. Freedom is not something conferred upon human beings; it is something that needs to be created within the conditioned nature of their existence in the world.

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Clearly then, Arendt’s notion of action is an overturning of the epistemological division of thought and action. It is a reassertion of the human as an inter-relational social being. This is why I have stressed the paradoxes within Arendtian action because inter-relationality creates paradox in a manner that essentialist ‘truth’ and the idealist formulations of metaphysics and mechanistic theory cannot. However, I have concentrated here upon a general description of action as an activity. If Arendt is to assist the project of establishing a de-centred model of community and sociality, action itself must be located in some realm other than the narrowly political realm highlighted by Arendt.

The location of being Web of relations7 Having delineated the general defining conditions of action, I now want to discuss the two areas for its enactment. In the previous section I said action embodied a space, a space creative of relationships. The most recognisable Arendtian space is the political; metaphorically represented by the polis. However, just as Arendt’s has two ‘active’ meanings for action – a wider one and a narrow political one – she also presents two equivalent spaces for each of these active meanings. It is the wider of these, the web of relations, which is the focus here, because it alone establishes the means by which an empowered version of the social can be articulated on an everyday basis. Arendt defines the ‘web of relations’ as ‘the in-between (p. 182)’ by which she means the space that ‘exists whereever men live together (p. 184).’ This space is ‘concerned with the matter of the world of things in which men move, which physically lies between them and out of which arise their specific worldly interests’ (p. 182). In short, this world is the common world (p. 52), and unlike the narrow political space of the polis, the web of relations as the common world, contains everyone and every interest (p. 50). It is the world of absolute plurality – acknowledged and unacknowledged – the world where the subjective and the objective intersect. Arendt’s description is sufficient here: These interests constitute … something … which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that the words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent. Since this disclosure of the subject is an integral part

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of all, even the most ‘objective’ intercourse, the physical worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and … overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deed and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another. This second, subjective in-between is not tangible, since there are no tangible objects into which it could solidify; the process of acting and speaking can leave behind no such results and end products. But for all its intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common. We call this reality the ‘web’ of human relationships, indicating by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality. (p. 182–3) There are several key issues I want to stress about this ‘intangible web’. First, because this is the space where persons disclose themselves as subjects even when they are speaking of other worldly matters, their disclosure is both as complete as any that takes place within the political space (pp. 50–2). Additionally, and precisely because this disclosure unites the subjective and the objective within the world, it is possibly more complete (though less dramatic) that similar disclosures within the polis. Second, the disclosive action that takes place in the context of this web retains all the qualities of action. What it lacks – a lack that Arendt only implies – is the ‘tangibility of glory’; without the framework of the polis, the process of acting and speaking in the common world can leave behind no results. Third, this disclosure of the ‘who’ falls into an already existing web of relations, that is it is conditioned action and a conditioned being that is created. It should be noted that the ‘web of relations’ stands as a reductio ad absurdum to those critics of Arendt who chaff at what they perceive as the stark and strict demarcation of the household and the polis, even if it is a problem they largely create for themselves. (Benhabib 1996; Kaleb 2000; D’Entreves Maurizio Passerin 1994, p. 8; Moruzzi Norma Clare 2000, p. 6; Villa rebuts them, pp. 12–18, also Lefort C 1988 specifically rebuts Benhabib, p. 49). However, given that the polis and the household are obviously contained within the ‘web of relations’ and that the capacity to construct a space of politics is clearly available to everyone, it is not too much to presume that the polis and the household are exemplary for Arendt, rather than essentialised (Hansen 1993 shares this opinion). Indeed the use of the term ‘household’ in relation to the rise of economics (Arendt 1958, pp. 28–9) reinforces the view that what

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is being referred to here is an attitude, rather than an essentialised material or social demarcation. Finally, there is another manifestation of Arendt’s stress upon the worldly nature of human being-ness, for the web of relations is more than simply human centred. Arendt specifically includes objects as equally constitutive elements within the web of relations. And she does this because as she states in the first chapter, ‘whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence’ (p. 9) and furthermore ‘The things of the world have the function of stabilising human life and their objectivity lies’ (p. 137 see also p. 95). In contradiction to mechanistic philosophy, Arendt thus has a world-centred approach not a human-centred approach, and her inter-relationality is never confined exclusively to human inter-relationality. For just as action discloses the world to us, so action is preserved outside the cyclical arc of birth and death by the world that work creates – ‘for what humans, through action and work create, outlives them, and has no concern for them’ (Arendt 1961, p. 156). And this applies to our objects just as it does to our stories, for ‘the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things that gather men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence’ (Arendt 1958, p. 55). And this is how it should be for the world is over and above all and every individual (Arendt 1961, p. 156). Objects therefore locate us and ground our human being-ness within the web of relations, just as action does. They objectify our subjectivity (Arendt 1958, p. 37) and stabilise our fragile existence; a dual process that bridges the gap between the subjective and the objective and means that no material analysis ever fully accounts for our being (p. 183). The web of relations therefore is the totality of everything that we are born into, as well as being the ‘force’ conditioning the terms within which our being can be enunciated. So in short the ‘web of relations’ is sociality, the most inclusive sociality possible; the very sociality needless to say, which this argument seeks to theoretically elaborate.

Space of appearance Having established the web of relations as Arendt’s inclusive, generic term for human sociality, it is now possible to examine the second of her generic spaces – the space of appearance – which in contrast to the web of relations, represents a much more delineated more contained notion. It is also clear that the space of appearance is not something outside

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or separate from the web of relations; such a mistaken theoretical abstraction would undercut Arendt’s intentions. Rather it is better to see it as a specific reconfiguration of the web of relations in the particular instance. For Arendt, the space of appearance is the everyday arena where human being-ness and sociality take place on an ongoing and daily basis. Unlike the web it is not something we simply assume by birth; it requires our action and the plurality of our existence. It is the gate through which we enter into the common world; the arena of momentary sociality, the space for the specific objectifying act of ‘being-creation’. Thus the space of appearance, not the polis, is the true generic term for the Arendtian political space, a distinction most critics seem reluctant to acknowledge (though Arendt herself sometimes creates this confusion (p. 199)). Moreover, it should also be noted, against those intensely literal American critics, that Arendt does not exclude women or indeed anyone else from the space of appearance. ‘Wherever people gather together’ says Arendt, ‘it (the polis) is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever’ (p. 199): a statement which indeed shows that for Arendt, the polis is nothing but the political manifestation of the space of appearance. This is why the space of appearance is enacted as a ‘specifically human achievement’ (p. 207). This is also clear from Arendt’s insistence that such a space is an informal, directly democratic space – ‘it predates all formal constitutions … and even government’ (p. 199). Indeed Arendt is very careful to specifically state that this ‘true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be’ (ibid, p. 198). Thus the true condition for the existence and preservation of the space of appearance is plurality as a conditional form of action. For what upholds and preserves this space is the specific quality of the care brought to it and the specific degree of human being-ness acknowledged within it.

Finally the ‘Who’ ‘If men wish to be free it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce’ (Arendt 1961, p. 165). Arendt could also have said that, if people wish to be fully alive they must renounce the illusion of sovereignty (one could say the virtuality of sovereignty), as that is the clear message of her work. As such, and given that Arendt’s clear aim is to overturn the sovereign individual from his liberal, enlightenment perch as the lord, master and

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centre of all the worlds (Arendt 1958, p. 254), a deal of THC is devoted to the historical development of this fallacy of omnipotence designed in Arendt’s view with the idea of escaping the fragility of action, and the conditional nature of life in the world (pp. 185, 221–4, 275, 279. Also p. 75 for the Christian contribution of the essentialised ‘good’ person and p. 254 for Descartes). Moreover the creation of the Cartesian individual erects two mutually antagonistic and separate states – the inner truth of the individual and the objective world accessible only to materialistic interpretation (p. 293). For Arendt, the results of this split have been devastating; the individual has abandoned all sense of a common world (pp. 52–3) and sacrificed the uniqueness and freedom for the disempowering uniformity of psychological qualities (p. 293 also quoted in Villa Dana 1996, p. 52) where man encounters only himself (Arendt 1958, p. 46/261). Nor can this loss be redeemed by private happiness (p. 50/112), for a life without action or speech is ‘literally dead to the world’ (p. 176). Instead of disclosive action, we are now presented with a mass of data and statistics inherently reductive of human being-ness (ibid, p. 322), precisely because it erects human being-ness as the articulation of an average plan (ibid, pp. 40–2). In this regard, Arendt’s criticism is every bit as vitriolic as Foucault’s. Moreover, there is nothing particularly strange or radical about Arendt’s criticism in this regard (though Pitkin 1998 seems to think so). Given her stinging criticism of the unitary rational subject, it is clear that Arendt’s model of human being-ness must be a jointly constructed and conditioned one. It is implicit in the discussions to this point – first, in her claim that the world is over and above us; second, in the primacy she allots to plurality, and the multiple perspectives which are its constituting reality (Arendt 1958, p. 57); and finally, in the actualisation of human being-ness through action. Where Arendt differs from other structural-based accounts is that her account contains no single Archimedean point from which the ‘common-created-being’ can be seen as a whole, for plurality is the soil of our conditioned human beingness; the sheer human togetherness which constructs the arena for the de-centred subject to appear (p. 180). As Kristeva says, ‘being in a way disseminated among human plurality and in the infinite temporality of mankind’s narratives, “who” manifests itself as being, as a dynamic actuality, an energeia that transcends deeds and actions and is in opposition to any attempt at reification or objectification’ (Kristeva 2001, p. 58). Thus the ‘who’ can never be fully known, for to know the ‘who’ is precisely to reify and objectify it; rather it is always plural, always open,

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always problematic. For no matter what we do, we can never fully know either our own identity or the identity of others (Arendt 1958, p. 58). So Arendt’s approach allows her to simply by-pass the sterile debates between agency and structure. Thus, she does not say that the ‘outside’ is simply infolded into the subject as do some Foucauldians (Rose 1999, p. 142). Nor does she say that individuality is the outcome of abilities (Giddens) or any other form of inherent capacity, including rationality. Rather, she shifts the entire debate from a question of ‘what we are’ – a statement seeking a definitive answer – to ‘who we are’, a relational conception (Arendt 1958, p. 10) which renders identity open, conditional and ephemeral. For Arendt, our knowledge concerning what a person is limited to their physical characteristics – the sound of their voice, their physical bearing and so on (p. 179). As such ‘what a person is’, is a question that can never be answered (pp. 10–11). So our identity formed in action and speech has a life of its own, and its effects go far beyond anything we can either contain or conceive. Identity is conditioned by the nature of action and by the need to appear (p. 176) something which requires action and speech, which are the form for such an appearing (p. 208). Thus this ‘appearing’ is something ‘from which no human being can refrain and still be human’. Yet action and speech are inherently boundless and unpredictable; action has no author and no definitive finalisation (p. 184): it can never be fully known, either by the one who acts or the many who observe it for the being-ness which acts can neither control the action, nor contain, marshal or conceal what the action discloses (p. 192) and similarly those who observe are also blind as to motive or consequence (p. 179). Therefore, given that every action requires plurality and always falls into a web of relations, no single, definitive perspective is possible concerning what precisely it is that action or speech means or the ‘who’ which says it. The ‘who’ is then as it were seen from a multitude of perspectives, and the ‘who’ the ‘who are you’ (p. 178) is created interrelationally as a temporary conjunction of all the perspectives, including that of the person involved. Clearly therefore, this creation of the ‘who’ is something that goes on eternally, whereever men meet each other (ibid, p. 182), and our beingness can at best be only a created narrative, sourced from the partial and unfinalisable view that our actions present to ourselves and to those around us. The ‘person’ is as Arendt says clearly just a provisional ‘collection of signs’ (p. 182) never to be closed or finalised (Kristeva, p. 59).

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It is on this basis that I have labelled Arendt’s project, inter-relational and coherent, for her privileging of the social and the inter-relationality which sustains the social is a fully enunciated working out of the implications of this privileging. For Arendt, ‘a community, a shared world, a common sense of appearance is the fundamental condition for the achievement of self hood’ (Villa Dana 1999, p. 7) and action, identity and plurality assume their particular Arendtian meaning from the elevation of fragility of being and sociality over and above the stability of thought and abstraction. So the establishment of the ‘who’ represents the culmination of Arendt’s entire re-figuring of the social. As such, her re-configuring also destroys the naturalisation of the mechanistic model through which modernity has articulated its regime of knowledge for 300 years. Truly it can be said that Arendt appropriates Heidegger’s essential ontological approach, eliminates its subjectivism and uses it to overturn western thought (Villa Dana 1996, p. 114). Yet this ‘culmination’ occupies less than five pages while the bulk of the book is devoted largely to the things that obstruct the development of the ‘who’ and obscure the true inter-relationality which underpins Arendt’s version of the social. More importantly, Arendt appears to enunciate this ‘who’ as the product of an extremely constrained space. Thus for the purpose of developing a new approach to community, her account of a de-centred being-ness needs to be extended.

8 Community through Sociality

This chapter aims to utilise the Arendtian elements outlined in the previous chapter to develop theoretically a coherent anti-mechanistic approach to sociality and community. Such an approach requires: ● ●

●

●

The linking of the elements outlined in the previous chapter. An understanding of the way in which sociality, as the web of relations, is composed within the space of appearance.1 A discussion which illustrates how community is created, composed, and sustained by inter-relational groupings of particular spaces of appearance. A charting of the way in which inter-relational groupings increase in size within the web of relations.

Thus the task of this chapter is to outline the terms under which the conceptual unity of this approach can be established.

The space of appearance and the web of relations Fundamental to an establishing of such terms is a delineation of the relationship between the wider web of relations, the common world, and any specific space of appearance. The web of relations As we saw in Chapter 7, Arendt positions the web of relations as the general overarching location of all human being-ness, the common ‘world of human affairs which exists wherever humans live together’ (Arendt 1958, p. 184). 158

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Everything coming into contact with human being-ness enters into this common world, this web of relations (p. 9): everything that relates and ties human being-ness together; everything, every interest objects, relationships we establish with objects, all manifestations of culture, language, law, custom, habits, the materiality of buildings, discourse, idealisms, spiritualities and ultimately what is often termed species consciousness. The two key points to understand about the web of relations are: first, it can never be seen in its totality but rather it exists as a multitude of perspectives2 enacted within the space of appearance; and second, it is only available through action and speech between human beings, because the action and speech of men are in constant contact with the acts and words of other human beings (p. 188) and there is no other way to activate the web of relations except through the acts and speech of human being-ness – it does not exist as thought. Looking at this web ‘spatially’, it is possible to see that components of the common world appear at various distances from the immediate space of appearance and further, this positioning is established by the immediate interests which constitute the sociality taking place within the space of appearance. So in any given instance of sociality, there are elements which frame and ‘ground’ the sociality, but which are not the object of the sociality taking place within the space of appearance – which is why they can, in this instance, be termed ‘passive’. Thus the term ‘passive’ can encompass something as nebulous as a person’s reputation as well as obviously, laws, the materiality of objects, the behaviour of institutions, as well as strangers and people with no direct concern in the particular business. These positionings are dictated by the space of appearance itself. What is general, objective and passive in one space of appearance can be immediate, active and subjective in another. The unique aspects are always being re-incorporated into the common world just as aspects of the common world are always being reconfigured by the unique action of the space of appearance. In short, what defines their status is their variable positioning inside the space of appearance, and not any essential characteristic. The passive elements are those that exist either as bridges between acts of sociality or which have no particular relevance to the matter at hand. They are all, to one degree or another, stabilising forces for our being-ness – even if they are only our other interests. What should be remembered however is that all meanings need ultimately to be charged and recharged: they need to be lived as being-ness, created and recreated

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in the action of sociality and no meaning, even the widest and the most totalizing, can escape this need. Conjointly the space of appearance also contains the active aspects of a particular being-ness – action, speech, physicality, personal interests and so on. So the common world contains objects, subjectivities, histories and practices, some of which appear to be ‘objective’ or general, and some which are more immediate in the sense that they are invested with the specific interests of the particular sociality. From this perspective, the terms ‘passive’ and ‘active’ refer only to their positioning within the immediate space of appearance; they are never an essentialised designation. Thus any ‘truth’ within the common world and the web of relations can only be an agreed perspective, and as an agreed perspective, such a ‘truth’ always remains at the mercy of the un-containable nature of action, ultimately dependant upon ‘creation’ and ‘re-creation’ within each act of sociality. This description establishes the web of relations as the fundamental condition of human being-ness. The key phrase here being nonessentialist, a status it enjoys because the web of relations is never finalised, never seen in its totality, never coherent, always plural and yet, it is the fundamental condition of our being-ness, entered into at birth, pre-dating and surviving us. The space of appearance Similarly the last chapter established the space of appearance as the location of unique interactions of sociality. ‘It comes into being wherever men (sic) are together in the manner of speech and action’ (p. 199), yet ‘it does not survive the actuality of the moment which brought it into being’ (ibid). On the basis of these two descriptions, the following statements can be offered as the basis for any potential ‘Arendtian’ approach: ●

●

The web of relations is contained in its totality entirely within each space of appearance and yet, each space of appearance offers only a particular view into the totality of the web of relations as the common world. The space of appearance is not the micro instance of some larger macro formation, rather it is the coming into being of the whole within a particular guise. A whole which does not exist except within and as that particular space of appearance. Therefore the space of appearance is not an exemplary instance of a wider abstraction

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●

termed the ‘web of relations’ (however much the elements are separated for the purpose of theoretical exposition), but rather the exclusive source for the appearance of the web of relations and the common world in the ‘actuality of the moment’ (p. 199). Or to put it in another form, sociality – the sociality that occurs in a space of appearance – is not a micro manifestation of some wider, independent self-sufficient abstract coherency termed community, but rather it is community. Thus community can only ever be in the ‘actuality of the moment’. Thus community is a living thing, a permanent coming into being, not an abstract macro formation with laws unto itself outside of the sociality of the space of appearance. Community is a set of perspectives just like the ‘who’. Therefore, there is no community outside of its continual enactment, re-enactment, creation and recreation within every instance of sociality. This applies as much to the state as one form of community, as it does to whatever the social sciences typically refer to as community. Of course this does not mean that community cannot have a meaning or a materiality, but it does mean that these meanings and this materiality needs to be constantly validated within the space of appearance and only ‘function’ communally within the space of appearance.

To fully grasp the implications of how this might be described theoretically, we need to reintroduce certain elements of Arendt’s approach. From Chapter 7, it was understood how elements of the vita activa were all established inter-relationally and moreover, how they all had a passive and active status. The web of relations functions within the space of appearance in precisely the same way, that is the web of relations is present, in its entirety in each space of appearance, in both passive and active form. The active element will be discussed shortly but can here be designated as ‘interest’, while the passive form is the very commonality, expressed through multiplicity and hybridity – diverse, heterogeneous and contradictory – which locates us within the infinity of the generalised common world of human being-ness. This is clear in Arendt’s account (pp. 182–3). The web of relations is the common world and as such it enters into (is evoked) within each space of appearance. Each space of appearance is unique because it is an action and yet, simultaneously each action is derived from and enters back into the common world of being-ness. Furthermore, precisely because sociality requires speech and action, no space of appearance can ever be entirely composed of simply passive elements of the web of relations.

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Finally, Arendt’s account makes it clear that there is a constant movement between the space of appearance and the web of relations – ‘Action … acts in a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction’ (p. 190, my italics), or where she says that action falls into the web of relations where its immediate effect can be felt (p. 184). Thus the web of relations is inherently constructive of all being-ness, inherently plural and always open; it can never be visible in its entirety or finalised and closed. In passing, it should be acknowledged that this constant movement within the space of appearance between the particularity of action and the common world is why Arendt’s designation of them as ‘conditioned’ is inadequate, simply because it tends to imply a fixed state, while the constant characteristic of the conjoined nature of the web within the space of appearance is the fluidity which establishes each element as potentially in movement between passivity and activity. One implication of this account indeed, is that what is passive in one space of appearance may be active in another; the designation is itself one of the results disclosed in the action of sociality. Ultimately, the relationship between the web of relations and the space allows Arendt to formally dissolve all generalised mechanistic polarities such as abstract/concrete, general/particular, micro/macro and so on, without privileging one over the other or dissolving one into a general ontology. Further, the establishment of the web of relations as a common world, accessible only through particular spaces of appearance, links the small and the large interactions of sociality, in the sense that the web of relations is contained within the action and speech of every person and it precedes our being and survives our death; something which of course allows us to understand materiality, be they customs, objects, practices, discourse or any other, not as essentialised forms, but rather as action-ed elements within the space of sociality, because as action and speech each space of appearance includes all forms of the common world, large and small, and all forms for the organisation of sociality.3

The subjective-in-between and objective-in-between As a theoretical approach, we can further develop these propositions by enlisting two other conjoined distinctions not fully discussed in Chapter 8, that is Arendt’s notion of the objective-in-between and the subjective-in-between.

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Given that action and speech are derived from the web of relations, Arendt asserts that what lies between people in each act of sociality, that is in each space of appearance, are their interests, and these interests – here defined non-essentially as their own temporary perspectives – relate and bind people together. According to Arendt, these interests – and the words and deeds, reflective and creative of the binding that sociality temporarily creates – takes two forms. First, and most commonly, the words and deeds concern ‘some worldly objective reality’ (p. 182), that is the wider web of relations (in the portion where this description occurs she refers to this as the ‘physical’, worldly in-between). Clearly here, Arendt is not using the word ‘objective’ in an empirical sense to refer to an epistemic subject of knowledge or a Cartesian subject, rather she clearly states that this ‘objective’ world is the world of common interest, the web of relations, ‘the world of things in which men move, and out of which arise their specific worldly objective interests’ (p. 182). Furthermore, in a manner appropriate to a non-Cartesian view, this world ‘varies with each group of people’, and is ‘overlaid’ (p. 183) with the second of Arendt’s anointed spaces – the subjective-in-between, which is the area concerned with the actual speaking and acting that people direct to one another (p. 183). What this suggests is that on every occasion of sociality, what appears is something simultaneously both common and unique. This new distinction is crucial because it continues and harmonises with Arendt’s notion discussed earlier, that our human being-ness is both conditioned and unique and that the space of appearance contains the web of relations in both its passive and unique manifestations. So, the web of relations in this sense is an element that cannot be ignored by sociality, and further the web of relations is not simply a personal construct – it has ‘objectivity’. Yet, the crucial point for this discussion is that this ‘objectivity’ is itself the construct of an overlaying set of perspectives, materiality, practices and language, and not the outcome of an essentialised truth. Thus, while all aspects of the common web are present, particular actions evoke only some of them; earlier we termed these interests. Thus, it is more useful to see the objective-in-between (as distinct from passive elements within the common world which are also present, but passively) as that part of the common web which is action-ed, and by action-ed I mean a two-fold aspect in which it is both brought into the space and comes into existence as the outcome of the disclosive action itself.

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It should be noted here in passing that the subjective-in-between does not refer to psychological states, rather it refers to the physicality of the person, the distinguishing elements of character composed as they are by physicality, habits, impulses, manner of speech and so on, all of which are unique for each person and thus it is, as it where, the stained glass window through which the light of the common world is viewed and expressed. Thus, the objective and the subjective-in-between, both deal with entwined but differing aspects of the action-ing of the web of relations within the particular space of appearance. Here, I am developing Arendt’s notion of interest to acknowledge that the objective nature of the web of relations appears in particular guises, yet in this form, it still presents another ‘face’ which is that of a general agreed ‘truth’, a truth arising entirely out of agreement between the participants within the space of appearance. Now, the most logical extension of this is that, not only are these dual aspects brought to the act of sociality, but they are then created anew in their aspects through each act of sociality. I believe this extension of Arendt’s work has validity, precisely because the subjective and the objective-in-between(s) both take place is the area concerned with the actual speaking and acting that people direct to one another (p. 183); thus they are both altered, no matter how slightly, by the web of relations, just as the web of relations is altered by the particular sociality. So the distinction Arendt establishes here with this new terminology is one that allows us to see two aspects engaging conjointly within the same space and the same series of actions. Moreover, this distinction allows us to separate them, both as potential – prior to the act of sociality – and as outcome of that sociality. This is valuable theoretically, because it allows us a more refined tool for approaching the comparative study of sociality and community as the outcome of particular spaces of appearances. The two keywords within Arendt’s account – ‘overlaid’ and ‘overgrown’ (p. 183) – of course also stress a continual interchange, one which dissolves any mechanistic distinctions, precisely because there is no general, no particular, no subjective or objective in the sense commonly ascribed to these terms by the social sciences. The two are present in every action precisely because in the first instance the particular would never be recognised without the common, and in the second instance, because action is unique. There must always be a continual movement back and forth with each overlaying and overgrowing of one over the other. When we see the common world in each manifestation, we thus see one side, one perspective, of it as well. Thus,

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the common web is disclosed in a particular manifestation to each person, just as the ‘who’ is. Given that this overlaying and overlapping is a conflated and ongoing activity, the separation of the ‘objectified’-in-between, the ‘subjective’in-between and the disclosive identity can never be definitive or essentialist. There is no ‘true’ separation: the different in-betweens ‘overgrow’ and ‘overlay’ each other. Our distinguishing is for the purpose of investigation only, and what it represents is simply the turning of a light onto a space of appearance and through that space, onto the web of relations. Nor does this ‘light’ reveal a set of hierarchically established and coherently ordered steps or stages in which one necessarily leads to the other through logical progression – something typical of mechanistic approaches. Rather, movement is discontinuous. Sociality as action can and does pass into varied spaces of appearance utterly unconnected to each other, without necessarily passing through states in-between. There are no ‘logical’ steps; there is simply the wider frame of the web of relations itself – a wider frame, which, as was said previously, can only be known partially. This is clearly implied in the terms ‘overlaid’ and ‘overgrown’; terms which also, of course, establish that the micro and the macro as inseparable within the space of appearance itself – a move of fundamental implication. A helpful metaphor which might allow us to visualise this movement is one where a series of stones are thrown continually and simultaneously into a pond, producing an overlapping and intersecting series of circles, each of which of course remains in the pond but also assumes its own particularity, its own shape. Swimming in this pond at eye level we could see the effect, but we can’t see either the source or the entire pond. We can trace certain parts of each spreading line as we encounter them, and perhaps the changes caused as these lines encounter other spreading lines, but each piece of a line we observe never allows us to see the entire pond. I don’t want to stretch this metaphor too far, but it does give some of the flavour of the Arendtian notions being developed here. So the overall effect of the words ‘overlaid’ and ‘overgrown’ is that observation itself is constructed as part of the flux, and there is no static point from which a version of the whole is possible. This of course corresponds closely to Arendt’s notion of the construction of the ‘who’. Indeed, given that the ‘who’ is a conjoint outcome of all the elements within the space of appearance, it could be argued that there is very little to distinguish the ‘who’ from sociality itself. After all, the variety of perspectives which the sociality creates includes the ‘who’ which is then constructed and reconstructed by the intersection of further interests

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and overlapping configurations of the common world as these enter or recede from the objective-in-between back into the common world. Sociality is then a space of eternal flux and as such, the ‘who’ is also (at least to some degree) similarly shifting perpetually from the common world back and forth into the subjective-in-between. Clearly then, an act of sociality itself is productive of a number of any number of ‘meanings’, all of which can be seen as a ‘who’ of one sort or another, including but not exhausted by the meaning of community, identity and so on. Finally and briefly, there is one problematic element with the notion of in-between, which can most simply be expressed in the question, inbetween what? Here I seek to avoid any taint of a pre-existing subject.4 To avoid any misconceptions, I assert clearly at this point, that the inbetween is everything, inter-relationality is everything, and the creation of the subject is a temporary and ephemeral creation which itself functions as part of the ‘in between’.

Disclosive action and the creation of the ‘who’ The stress in Arendt’s account of disclosive action falls upon the human being-ness, constructed as an outcome of action – the ‘who’. I am more interested here however in the disclosive action itself. Logically, disclosive action is never closed or finalised, simply because action itself is never closed. For this reason, disclosive action must be cumulative and continuous (p. 233), so in these terms, even the notion of the ‘who’ as a fixed point becomes problematic. Indeed, this is acknowledged by Arendt when she discusses the forms through which human being-ness attempts to contain the otherwise uncontainable nature of action (pp. 233–47). This requires that something be added to the description of the characteristics of the space of appearance, which is that each space of appearance is conjointly an arena of creation and containment. As such the ‘who’ which is created is an expression of both such tendencies. An exposition of what community might be draws heavily upon these dual notions.

Creation and containment within disclosive action What is the created who? In Arendt’s account, action has several characteristics – it is inherently boundless (p. 190), it establishes relationships, simultaneously however it is unpredictable in both meaning and effect (p. 191). Arendt makes it

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clear that because human being-ness is trapped in the impossibility of not acting, the task of containing the effects of action is an ongoing and permanent activity for all generations. In this regard, Arendt mentions laws, the polis, forgiveness and the value attached to promises as examples of this sort of containment (pp. 190–247). If we think about this need then we can see that containment as a task is inherent within the space of appearance, simply because action always falls into a common conditioned world. From this perspective, the common world is the major forum of containment, and of course this containment will take multiple, as well as passive and active forms. So whatever ‘who’ is constructed in a particular space of appearance, it is also the outcome of the common world and its variable forms of containment just as much, as it is a result of unique action. So, common sense, language, identity, materiality, physicality in terms of walls and fences, laws, in short any number of practise and objects existing within the common world and thus within the space of appearance support this task by restraining the effect of untrammelled action and in the process, of course sustain commonality. Thus being-ness can retrieve identity from the grip of contingent action by relating to material objects, to common sense and to all the elements of commonality within the common world (p. 137); a retrieval of identity which allows us to gauge the reality of the world, even while the very same common sense is being conjointly reshaped and altered by the inter-relational action that constructs the space of appearance (pp. 205,208). The space of appearance is therefore not just a space of unique action. It is also, because it contains the entire web in the fashion outlined earlier, a common meeting ground where everyone has a different location (p. 57), a common ground which relates and separates simultaneously (p. 52), while also of course functioning to contain action. It is this commonness of being indeed which allows the particularity of action (p. 57) while simultaneously allowing for its containment; a conjoint status which is the basis for our existence as both ‘conditioned’ and ‘free’. It is a world in common; the common reality guaranteed by multiple perspectives, all focused on one object (pp. 57–8). Yet this common world – at least in its passive form – is not enough to cope on its own with the revelatory nature of action which cannot inherently be contained (p. 192) because within the space of appearance people disclose themselves as distinct identities regardless of the immediate content of their speech or deeds. For this reason, the containment of action is an ongoing activity which each generation must confront

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over and over again (p. 191). So entwined is this process that action itself can almost be seen as both creative and containing. It is also clear that under the terms of action itself, whatever disclosure occurs is openended, both in the sense that it cannot be controlled in the space of appearance or in the web of relations. ‘Action and reaction among men [sic] never move in a closed circle and can never be reliably confined to two partners’ (p. 190). It is precisely because action cannot be contained by the passive form of the common world that being-ness makes the containment of action an intentional activity. Indeed, social forms exist as part of the ongoing activity of containment. (Containment in this form is precisely the role which Hobbes, Locke and all subsequent liberal theorists sought from the state, and when they refer to the discarding of other linkages, they are in truth seeking to first, exclude other elements in the creation of the ‘who’ and second, to establish the state as the sole means of containing nasty brutish action.) The sum of this is that inherently there are a series of open-ended simultaneous disclosures in every act of sociality; the most crucial of which is community(s). Further, each of these disclosures is inherently creative and containing; thus each disclosure is both a releasing of action and its simultaneous containment and marshalling. Of course, each action does not have an ending and each act of conjoined creativity and containment is in itself creative of another action and so on. Thus, all forms of sociality, all spaces of appearance and all action are creative of community because all are conjointly creative and containing of the common world. On this basis, I claim that the state is one form of community and not a form separate from community. Let us be precise here – all spaces of appearance contain the web of relations in its entirety and as such all spaces read back to the commonality derived from web of relations; as such the web of relations contains all forms of the common world to one degree or another, so the state as predominantly an act of hierarchy is contained within every space and ‘read back’, just as what the social sciences currently term community, that is sociality as predominately an action of co-operation is also always present and also ‘read back’. This raises the issue of how to distinguish between communities, and this question then becomes a question of the terms under which disclosive action takes place. This task is made easier when it is seen that all commonalities, all forms or the containment of action appear simultaneously within each

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space of appearance, either as passive elements within the disclosed common world or as elements within the objective-in-between. Thus all commonalities, including the state and what is usually termed community, must always appear as aspects within each space of appearance, and each action of sociality as elements capable of being acted upon within the space of appearance by the subjective-in-between; and this ‘acting-upon’ is an ongoing inherent act, not simply a conscious decision. This is what is partially meant when it is claimed that each action of sociality and each space of appearance itself creates modes of containment and creation, and the ‘who’ which results is therefore a product of both. It is the relation between the mutual and independent aspects of the two as they manifest within the space of appearance which allows the mapping of community and the state, the relationship between the two, the forms in which one is created and contained, the ‘bridges’ which sustain it, the sub-groupings and so on. But here, we are beginning the final stage of establishing this approach, which is the development of the capacity to map, compare and contrast different particular spaces of appearance. Before we can do that we should pause and recap what the outline of this approach looks like.

Recapping Community is co-operative being-ness – a ‘who’ created by disclosive action. This being-ness is a configuration of the objective- and subjectivein-betweens as they are created endlessly by the action-ed space and linked and re-linked back and forth between the space of appearance and the web of relations. In contrast to Arendt’s stress on the personal ‘who’, I would argue that community is the most important outcome of disclosive action, more so even than the individual ‘who’. Indeed in the context of Arendt’s description it is hard to separate the two, for the individual ‘who’ emerges as an outcome of varied perspectives – perspectives which also conjointly define a common world. Disclosive action thus produces common being-ness as well as unique being-ness. It locates unique being-ness and confirms it by locating and verifying that being-ness within a common world. Of course like the individual ‘who’, the community derived from disclosive action is not a single truth, nor is it stable, indeed it follows all the rules of formation that condition and confirm the individual ‘who’, yet there is clearly some degree of

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unconscious/conscious commonality among the participants and as such what emerges from this recognition is community. Each space therefore creates multiple commonalities as an outcome of action, all of which to some degree verify communities. Yet this verification is also a simultaneous action of creation because the community is charged and recharged. Clearly many communities – small and large – are located within particular spaces of appearance as elements within either the common world or within the objective-in-between and are thus understood by the sociality as conditions of being. This is what is meant by the statement that communities are defined and defining, creative and creating within individualised spaces of appearance. Thus this approach offered here provides a framework for the investigation of community as a source of being-ness within each space of appearance. As a summary, the framework developed is composed of the following: Web of relations/common world ---------------- space of appearance Continuous inter-relational flow between the two Space of appearance (the particular sociality) divided into subjective-in-between/objective-in-between Continuous movement between the two All of the above mediated by the conflated action of creation and containment Hopefully what has been established is an approach for discussing each space of appearance in its particularity; an approach moreover established philosophically as non-mechanistic and non-essentialist. So this approach does not tell you prior to investigation what is in the space of appearance, or therefore what are in the communities which are disclosed, or indeed what is the relationship between the disclosed communal commonalities within each space of appearance; it simply provides a means, a method to discover what they are. Indeed inherent in this approach is that lots of communities will be revealed, not just one single essentialised one. Yet, this is exactly why Arendt’s approach marks a massive improvement over current approach, because: ●

It actually allows us to model commonality/community as multiple and hybrid forms (something which we saw was impossible under existing paradigms).

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It avoids the imposition of privileged idealisms onto the space of appearance. It does not privilege the state prior to investigation. In this approach the state is simply another form of commonality/community which is always present in one degree or another within every space of appearance. It does not attempt to finalise elements in their essential singularity which is precisely the mistake that mechanistic thinking constantly makes. It allows multiple communities to exist. It views all commonality as an outcome of hybrid interaction and inter-relation.

Yet, having established a framework through which we can investigate the space of appearance are we really any closer to understanding community, because after all if a multiplicity of communities are inherent within every space of appearance aren’t we simply swamped by particularity? This is a reasonable question and certainly if one is attempting to isolate one community, say a community based on work or location – a step typical of mechanistic models – then the existence of a myriad of particularities is precisely the sort of justification utilised by mechanistic proponents when defending both abstraction and the mechanistic model. However, there is no need to run away from multiplicity. Consider the fact that all of us belong to any number of communities, which are after all simply forms for the communal containment of action and the construction of relational identities. Belonging to a number of communities is what multiplicity means. Our ties are always multiple and this is as true for Redfield’s Yucatan villagers as it is for us, though of course for us the multiplicity is – at least potentially – more complex. Nor is there any inherent need to reconcile multiplicity theoretically; such reconciliation is simply a necessity imposed by the mechanistic approach. The capacity to resolve and reconcile multiplicities is common place quality in our daily being-ness. The problems multiplicity presents for academic sociologists are not inherent within multiplicity itself, rather they are a by-product of the perceived necessity to preserve the veracity of a certain model. Indeed, the multiple communities that all of us inhabit are for the most part compatible with one another – they fit into each other like Russian dolls: the small is contained within one slightly larger, which in turn is contained within another slightly larger and so on.

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In our world – the world of so-called advanced countries – the final doll is of course the state, and it is precisely because this approach allows us to see how we exist concurrently within a multiplicity of communities – of which the state is one – that it represents a vast development over the mechanistic models we examined in the opening chapters of this book. What it means however is that having defined an approach capable of describing the space of appearance, we now require to extend the account to develop the capacity to distinguish, map, compare and contrast different elements within each space of appearance, and by this means reduce particularity and provide a means for sorting and classifying the various communities active within the space of appearance.

Major underlying principals of arendtian investigation First step to mapping the space First, this section offers a set of guiding principles for the Arendtian antimechanistic and anti essentialist investigation – the outline of which has been described to this point. Second, given that comparing and contrasting anything requires a common gauge, the section nominates co-operation as precisely that gauge and justifies that nomination. Third, there is a short example which presents this approach in a concrete situation. Finally, the section identifies and reconfigures certain issues such as power, agency and identity, which because of their centrality within mechanistic modelling tend to ‘hypnotise’ sociologists whenever a new approach is proposed. Taken together, these tasks establish the coherency of this proposed anti-mechanistic and anti-essentialist approach. Terms of investigation The crucial point to grasp prior to investigation is that an anti-mechanistic approach is not looking for pure forms. Hybridity is the key. There is never any single determining factor or essentialised element capable of explaining every instance of sociality. Within this approach, the task of investigation is to map spaces of appearance and to account for the balance of elements within them, not to isolate essential forms. Thus, open essentialisms such as rationality are avoided, as are hidden but prior privileged idealisms and abstractions such as those contained within the word ‘subjectification’. It is inherent within this approach that nothing can be privileged prior to investigation; the status of

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elements is defined by their position in the inter-relational flow, not by inherent characteristics. What Arendt’s desires for her political space – exemplified in her case by the polis – is openness. The key to the theoretical approach proposed here is to similarly establish an open space in which the inter-relational plurality, action and hybridity of sociality can be mapped. We can therefore ask a series of questions such as what is the degree of inter-relationality? How is inter-relationality sustained and what form does it take? What is the balance of elements within any particular disclosive action? How much weight in disclosive action can one ascribe to the objective-in-between, the subjective-in-between and the common world? What communities are disclosed? What are the symbolic forms that contain them? What are the perspectives which overlap as elements in the disclosive action? These questions are not offered as an exhaustive list, rather they offered as the basic framework for investigation. Co-operation as a gauge Within this approach, co-operation in a particular formulation is the major non-essentialist determiner capable of allowing disclosive action within particular spaces of appearance to be contrasted and compared across multiple spaces of appearance. Of course, to those raised on Marxism and Parsonian Functionalism, such a statement, even before it is defined and established, is like a red rag to a bull. So in the interests of clarity, let me give a number of major order reasons5 for why this notion of co-operation differs from Functionalism and why indeed it offers a fruitful approach to alternative political configurations.6 ●

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Co-operation is the best measure of inter-relationality and plurality because it exists in every part of the space of appearance and at every level of the action of sociality. In the Arendtian approach co-operation unlike conflict is seen as one of the conditions of being-ness; our being-ness demands we cooperate with the web of relations which pre-dates and survives us. However this co-operation is not posited as foundational; the form it takes is dependant upon the space of appearance and therefore co-operation is different in every instance. Co-operation has passive and active aspects while conflict only has an active aspect. Therefore there is always some degree of cooperation occurring, even if it is only passive co-operation with the common world.

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All forms of co-operation contain some element of conflict. This is inherent in the notion that there are no pure forms, but it is also inherent in the idea of the ‘who’ as the outcome of differing perspectives located in different positions within the space of appearance. Co-operation cannot be an essentialist value because elements are determined by their location within the space of appearance, not by prior privileging. They are not essential states. There are degrees of co-operation, just as there are similarly degrees of conflict. No situation is ever essentially, or totally, one thing or another. Hierarchy for instance always contains entwined elements of co-operation as well as conflict or order (something which organisational theorists have belatedly discovered (Williamson 1975, Popkin William 1979, Granovetter 1986), just as situations of co-operation always contain elements of conditioned obedience and indeed conflict. Co-operation in this approach is not configured as a pure form or in a dichotomous and oppositional mode to conflict. Rather, it is positioned in relation to hierarchy, but this positioning can never be absolute because of the prior point. Co-operation is configured here as the active mode of interrelationality. Co-operation in its active mode can be seen as the recognition of the being-ness necessity to live within plurality.

For these reasons, co-operation is a more encompassing yardstick than conflict for gauging the balance of elements within each space of appearance and within disclosive action. By establishing co-operation as the yardstick to measure spaces of appearance, we can maintain the stress on multiplicity, hybridity and pluralities, while avoiding any hierarchical privileging of elements within the web of relations or enfolding conflict into co-operation. However, it should also be noted that there is nothing inherent within this approach which stops anything being utilised as a gauge – conflict, trust, discourse. The crucial point is that they not be constructed as idealism prior to investigation and that they not be enunciated as pure forms. However within this framework, investigating the terms of particular co-operations does allow us to understand the particular elements constructive of particular disclosive action, and as such also allows us to compare and contrast these terms between various spaces of appearance. Example All the issues discussed to this point are prefigured in Arendt’s discussion of the household and the polis. In her account, the polis is where the

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openness of the space is preserved and the effects of action are contained by common agreement, while the household is a space to which human being-ness accommodates itself as the ‘reduction of every type of society to conformism’ and the ‘rule of one interest and one opinion’ (Arendt 1958, p. 46). It therefore exists to exclude the possibility of spontaneous action and unique achievement (p. 40); by its denial of plurality it imposes instead certain kinds of behaviour arising from the imposition of normalising rules (p. 40). This description of the household does not exclude co-operation, it simply reshapes it. The point here is not to see the household and the polis as mutually exclusive (a ‘mistake’ Arendt occasionally seems to make) but rather to view each as composed of a series of spaces of appearance constructed from predominate elements of one mode or another. Of course, because hierarchy and authority can never achieve its aim exclusively by violence, some form of co-operation must always be present. Now, clearly in contrast to the polis, the ‘who’7 that emerges from the household is a limited and curtailed ‘who’, not the product of equal agreement, but rather the product of an imposition upon the space of appearance of a single perspective. Yet this imposition can never be final or indeed totalising, for it is still responsive to sociality as action. And while this single voice sets and conditions the world, contains and controls the disclosive action, it cannot do this without some co-operative input. This is why Arendt links this single voice with the totalising demands of the biological process to which everything must be subservient. It is the biological process which presents itself as the hierarchical demand to forgo the equality and action-ing of plurality and inter-relationality. This is why, for Arendt, the terms of the household and the modern state are interchangeable, and why for Arendt the problem of the household is not its existence per se, but rather the manner in which its thinking dominates modern society and presents itself as the exclusive and naturalised form of sociality. The household therefore represents an exemplary situation where the capacity for creation within the space of appearance is curtailed in the interests of the objectified world, represented here by the exclusively conditioned interests of labour and the biological process. Or, to put it another way, the space of appearance as the site of the unique disclosure of action as the outcome of the plurality and inter-relationality of the objective- and the subjective-in-between has been usurped and closed, so that unique action as the expression of co-operative particularity is given no space and as such cannot produce anything except the

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conditioned behaviour of the naturalised common world. Thus, the fundamental status of our existence as both conditioned and free has been reduced predominately to a conditioned status. Yet, the crucial point here is that co-operation is still manifest to some degree and in some form and that the conditioned status can never be absolute. So politically, this theoretical approach is concerned with how open the space of appearance is to the unique action of disclosure. At one extreme is the state, which of course always requires some input of co-operation/community and at the other is community/ agreement which always contains some degree of hierarchy, wittingly or unwittingly. In other words, the fundamental question becomes – is disclosive action the result of the untrammelled inter-relation of a plurality of elements within the space of appearance, or is it predominantly imposed upon the space from outside? Now of course, the former does not necessarily have to result in a ‘who’ of revolt, or creativity or any other distinguishing mode. All space of appearance must to some degree conform to the requirements of the common world, the question concerns how this is arrived at. What the ‘who’ derives from is the point of focus, not the value attached after the fact to the ‘who’ itself – it is crucial not to gauge by effect. All of which can be illustrated in a brief, concrete form, utilising the state as one community. The state has been chosen in this instance because in Western society it represents the most fully developed community. The example chosen is centred on what in Australia is termed a motor registry, a dedicated site run by the Roads and Transport Authority, a statutory government body. Here people are required to attend either every year or every three years to renew their driver’s licences and every year to re-register their car. It is where people undertake their drivers test, or have their vehicle inspected if a defect notice have been issued. Sometimes the registry is located in its own building often with a compound attached or otherwise above shopping malls. When re-registering your vehicle you are required to prove your identity, to present evidence of insurance as well as a road-worthiness certificate procured at a nominated garage. If we take bureaucracy as our object of investigation we can see (of course in a sketchy form) how the space of appearance, constituted by a person’s attendance at a motor registry, is composed primarily from passive elements drawn from the common world – law, habit, regulation, police action, economic necessity, lack of public transport and so on.

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We can then discuss how the immediate aspects of the common world – the restrictions on time, the money required, the shape, furnishings and colour of the registry, the time, how the person is required to present himself, the particular forms for taking one’s place in the queue – tickets and the like, what identification is required and so on, intersects with the subjective-in-between – the needs of the person, the restriction of income, the needs of his family, the other things occurring in their lives, the state of his car, his other interests and so on. What we are observing are three inter-relational perspectives which create a ‘who’ as a result of the disclosive action of the sociality within the motor registry. On the one hand, there are the perspectives of the other people waiting, there is the perspective of the state, there is also the perspective of the employee of the state and there is of course, the perspective of the customer who wants to re-register his car. If we then study how co-operation manifests itself in this example we can see that the co-operation demanded and itself enunciated by the state is largely constructed as hierarchical obedience. We can also see that in comparison with the other perspectives, the perspective of the state carries much more weight, indeed it dominates the other perspectives both within the common world, the wider space of appearance which is clearly the entire registry office, and within the particular space of appearance involving the person and the clerk. In this sense indeed it sits within the common world, the wider web of relations and also within the objective-in-between. This allows us to see that the objectivein-between constitutes the largest, most determining element within the space of appearance and the sociality. In fact the subjective-inbetween really has no part to play in the action of sociality – it has been made passive and the constituting factors in its creation – particularities of experience, character and being-ness have been dismissed as irrelevant factors in any disclosive action. Clearly then the immediate interests of the state are expressed in a number of ways – the nature of the transaction, the presence of security guards within the ‘public’ space, the clerk’s demeanour, the call to the counter, the glass barrier, the nature of the communication – perhaps via a microphone, and that the subjective-in-between of neither the clerk nor indeed the customer are involved in the creation of the ‘who’. The terms of the disclosive action have in short been constructed outside the space of appearance, and for this pre-emptive construction to be overturned, it requires something major to occur. What is more, if such an overturning did take place, at least on an individual level, the state would take a meaning

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from its self-assumed identity as the common world to shape an identity for the perpetuator. What this method has done immediately therefore is to provide us with a means of comparison with other much less formal and more co-operative spaces of appearance. In terms of what we are studying – which in this case is the state as a community manifest through bureaucracy – it has also allowed us to understand how bureaucracy as a part of the state demands everyday compliance from its citizens as a price for allowing access to the common world. For in this case the state is denying the motorist access to the highways unless s/he acknowledges the state’s right to control this space. It also reveals how the state and citizenship need to be charged and recharged constantly by obedience enacted within infinite spaces of appearance and moreover how each space of appearance remains crucially important to the state. For in both cases and regardless of differing perspectives, the state enunciated ‘who’ created from this sociality falls back into the common world (the world in common) as a ‘who’ created hierarchically, and this hierarchical construction of the space and the ‘who’ that emerges is then naturalised through this commonality as part of the web of relations. Indeed it could be argued that the customer is dealing not with the state per se, but rather with the state as the self-assumed representative of the common world. A fine distinction but nonetheless a vital one. For the state achieves compliance and co-operation by its assumed role as the common world. Thus the state cleanses itself of political connotations by this naturalised and self-assumed role. From the perspective of the one getting his/her registration this may well be a co-operative act: from the state’s perspective, the ‘who’ creation is a hierarchical outcome and the ‘who’ resulting from disclosive action is created exactly in the manner dictated by the state in its idealised thought. All these hierarchically constructed ‘who-s’ fall back into the common world as idealisations, where they join all the other million such ideal socialities enacted within similar spaces of appearance. By constructing such an ideal space of appearance, the state establishes the stage for their ideal sociality and demands a ‘performative’ co-operation from the citizen in which the ‘who’ disclosed lacks any element either of individual action or plurality. When the meaning ‘falls’ back into the common world it becomes creative, first of power (albeit in small amounts) and second of meaning. It becomes an element in what Auge terms a ‘universe of recognition’ (1998). Auge also claims that all communities construct themselves in the form of such a universe.

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This meaning which falls into the common world/the web of relations as speech and action validates hierarchy as the naturalised form of sociality (when in fact it is simply one form of sociality), denies the co-operative element in the act of sociality (even the ‘performative’ co-operation), sustains the state by the conjoining of hierarchy and co-operation, and finally, uses this particular action along with all the other actions of sociality to add ‘weight’ to its material presence, to its buildings, its structure and so on. At this point recall Foucault’s notion of power as having positive and negative effects. Unfortunately Foucault’s does not take this much further. However we can begin to see concretely that what the state offers in the widest sense, as its positive contribution, is the containment of unfinalisable action. So, for the person who approves of the state and regards paying registration as a social act, the state provides clear lines of authority, clean, friendly, available space, accurate record keeping, clearly enunciated times and conditions and some form of re-dress in the case of a problem – all of which comes to the person concerned, through the state’s locating of her/him in a fixed position within, what the person concerned, views as the common world; as well as protecting the person from any future unforeseeable ramifications of action; the positioning ascribed to her/him by the state also marshals action to effect within the world. So the state serves the willing individual by making the common world available to that individual, and this role locates the state both as the common world and as the gatekeeper to the common world. In return, the power created in the individual’s willing action of sociality sustains and increases, in a small way, the power of the state. Now of course, other social forms fulfil the same function, though not all communities can construct such an all-embracing universe; indeed, the state will not tolerate any other such all-encompassing social formations as its history amply illustrates. Furthermore, as was noted earlier, this is precisely what liberal theorists’ want from the state and why they opposed communities and other forms of social linkages. Indeed when theorists discuss the manner in which the modern state allows only a relationship of citizen and state, this is exactly what they mean – the ‘who’ must be formed in a simple and direct engagement with hierarchical power. But creation of a ‘who’ outside the space of appearance and the control of disclosive action which this creation requires is also of course a marshalling of sociality, achievable in its final form only by the denial of plurality inherent within the space of appearance. For, the state is afraid

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of the ‘who’ constructed as an outcome of the unfettered inter-relational plurality within the space of appearance, and their fear has a very real basis for the outcome of such a ‘who’ construction is – albeit to a minor degree – power. So what this method has allowed us to see in a skeletal form is how the state constructs and presents itself as the ‘who’ of the common world, the web of relations. Yet the state is a community with a specific claim built upon its inherent denial and subjugation of other communities. It presents itself as the community and its marshalling of sociality contains the effects of action only by a simultaneous denial of the possibilities for alternative forms of creative action within the space of appearance. For all of this however, the state can never despite its best efforts replace the common world, nor can it ever entirely control sociality, the space of appearance and disclosive action, and this is because its power exists as an outcome not of repression but of co-operation with the common world. Thus the state must always present itself as the common world and remain, ultimately therefore, secondary to the disclosive outcome of action enunciated within the space of appearance. This can be seen clearly if one examines countries where the state is in a lesser stage of development. We don’t need historical examples; Africa is replete with instances of tribal and other communal loyalties undercutting state power precisely because these linkages offer equally coherent, but separate versions of a common world. In these circumstances, the state is but one competing community and ‘who’ creations in these other communities are inherently an act of opposition – at least to the state – and a draining of power away from the state. So the locating of the state as a community allows us to view it within the overall sphere of sociality; something which allows for an examination of community as an ongoing series of socialities – ‘who-s’ – constructed as the outcome of action and of both containment and creativity, co-operation and hierarchy. In these circumstances the state becomes simply one community within a range of communities – some big some small, some containing economic as well as cultural and social power – and in this they duplicate of course the situation in every country including our own, where while the state is the largest community, there clearly also exist multiple communities of different sizes, power and depth. Of course, this method can be used for such groups of all sizes precisely because it is built around a micro approach. By studying the sociality of football fans for instance, we can ask questions regarding how deep their community is, how it constructs identity, what agency it

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has, how it connects with, sustains and is sustained by wider social groupings, what it is that constructs the ‘who’ of this community as a community, what symbols, language history and so on. Issues around what holds and interprets these socialities – is it a legal entity, what is the balance between hierarchy and co-operation – these are questions which can under this approach can be studied within any number of spaces of appearance. In summary, this approach because it bypasses the theoretical purity of idealisms and essentialisms as well as mechanistic demarcations allows us to transcend the static ideal polarities of recognition and nonrecognition that have defined post-Althusserian work on the social, and move towards a perspective grounded in an inter-relational conflation of recognition and difference, co-operation and conflict. Furthermore, it does so in a manner which is more than simply oppositional; a capacity which stems from its acknowledgement that all culture is erected first on a foundation of similarity and difference (Auge 1998, p. 63) and second, on the terms of our being-ness as both conditioned and free. To end this chapter, I want to address the following frequently asked questions – ‘what happens to agency?’, ‘what happens with identity?’, or ‘where is power in this?’ What is identity? Everyone, as Arendt notes (Arendt 1958), is born into a web of already existing relations and identities. Each ‘who’ encompasses a variety of possibilities of being, spread among a variety of people, none of whom see the entire picture. In this account, identity is a collection of perspectives sewn together over time. These perspectives and identit(ies) are sustained to varying degrees depending upon the familiarity of the social that ‘collects them and holds them’. So with our friends and family, in situations where people are familiar, our identity is more firmly fixed, more highly nuanced and known in its particularity. In these circumstances, identity is part of the co-operatively constructed common world while retaining the capacity for the intervention of action. In some other circumstances, identity is very fixed in the ‘objectivein-between’, for example enemies in battle. Additionally, the common world contains many examples of degrees of variation between these two ‘extremes’ – strangers, state employees, priests, strangers in our hometown, strangers from another country. In these circumstances identity is not institutionally contained and can be, to various degrees, negotiated, something which of course can also happen – in extreme

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situations – even between those in battle. In all these situations, identity is always provisional, never utterly conditioned and always subject to the particularity of action. Yet, despite this fundamental contingency, there are many social incentives working to maintain identity, something that reveals its co-operative basis. Thus, in every instance of the in-between, identity is always and simultaneously presented as both unique and common. It remains always conditioned (in an Arendtian sense) and yet always personalised as a unique being-ness. Further, this movement between the two elements – the ‘objectified’ common world and the ‘subjectified’ unique world – is marked by, and enacted through, speech, deeds and interests that are themselves both common and unique and which are also subject to creation and re-creation. Power What separates Arendt’s configuring of power from mechanistic approaches is that first, power does not have the centrality it occupies in mechanistic model; second, she explains what power is, rather than explaining it simply by effect; finally, as a result, power in her account is contextually specific. To summarise: ● ●

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Power can never be stored but can exist only in actualisation (p. 200). Truth exists not as a product of the mind (p. 293) but as the outcome of co-operation (pp. 282–3), a claim which of course entirely exonerates her from the charge of perspectivism. This speaks of ‘truth’ as being intrinsically involved within the ongoing movement between the space of appearance and the common world, something which confirms Arendt’s central location of the common world as the only gauge of the world’s reality (p. 208). The space of appearance produces power and requires power to sustain it (p. 200). Power functions – like co-operation, plurality and every other elements – inter-relationally. ‘The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people’ (p. 201). ‘Power like action is boundless; it has no physical limitation in human nature, in the bodily existence, like strength. Its only limitation is the existence of other people but this limitation is not accidental, because human power corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin with.’ Power, for Arendt, exists as an outcome of certain forms of cooperation. Power is acting between equals on the basis of agreement

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and being-ness. It is not force in the mechanistic sense, but rather is exists as a product of the creation of the ‘who’ within the space of appearance, and as a product of this creation it manifests in the common world as a conditioning focus for a multitude of perspectives which exist in agreement as truth. It is not something that material objects can manifest and it is not an ability or something an individual can express. ‘Power is always … a power potential and not an unchangeable measurable and reliable entity like force or strength’ (p. 200). It is a potential because it is an outcome of groupings of the ‘who’ within the common world and as such it requires a constant double movement between the space of appearance and the common world. Thus the walls of the polis are power only as long as they remain linked to the plurality, co-operation, creation and re-creation of the ‘who’ as the outcome of an unfettered and open space of appearance. So in the sense that ‘truth’ rests entirely within the social and that the social alone can sustain truth, the truth as a co-operative agreement is sustained and endorsed entirely through power as the outcome of unique action and co-operation. In this regard, power is manifest as an outcome of sociality and is a product of the co-operative creation of the ‘who’.

When we consider these statements we need to bear in mind the very nuanced form that power takes for Arendt, as well as the manner in which she carefully distinguishes power from force (p. 202), authority (Arendt 1961, pp. 93–5), violence (Arendt 1958, pp. 200–2), strength (p. 201) and tyranny (p. 202). There are two consequences of the last ninth point, which require some brief discussion because they impact on the notion of disclosive community power that I am trying to develop here. The first consequence is that this is an instance where Arendt’s account needs some broadening. Arendt is referring to a tightly defined version of power linked to her notion of disclosive action as originating from the polis. In her account, power can only be the outcome of an utterly unfettered and totally open, double movement between the common world and the space of appearance. One consequence of this is that, it suggests that this form of power – let us term it unique power in recognition of its foundation in a unfettered, and hence unique space of appearance – can only exist in a pure state. Moreover, under this designation the vast majority of instances, instances that occur in their millions on a daily basis, are all simply subsumed under Arendt’s other

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heading of tyranny. This is far too normative and broad a classification. Power as the outcome of disclosive action must have gradations just as disclosive actions does. So I want to modify her account here, to adopt her notion of power as the outcome of action in concert within the space, but to allow for the array of circumstances where power as the communal outcome of the space of appearance works to sustain the state or to disrupt it or to do something which is a combination of the two – like in the majority of instances. Clearly, there are prolonged periods where community as the outcome of disclosive action works in harmony with the state – albeit within differing perspectives, particular hitches, glitches and so on. Clearly, there are also much rarer periods when the subjective- and objective-in-between are at odds, periods indeed where they are irreconcilable and these are periods of great communal power, often designated as revolution, social unrest and ‘mob rule’. In all cases however, power is the outcome of agreed truth and as such this allows us to say the state ultimately relies upon this agreed truth as the basis for its own ‘power’. This is why community is always prior to the state and why, because of this positioning, the state is a form of community, rather than the notion typically implicit in the social sciences, that community is an outcome of the state. Agency Enough has been said to give a good idea of what Agency is. Arendt walks the line between humanism and anti-humanism and her account allows for a certain degree of constrained agency which is an accurate approximation of what common sense tells us are the terms of our own existence.

Conclusion This approach reconfigures many of the totems of sociology; in relation to power for instance it rather lowers power and agency down the table of concerns even while it elevates co-operation and action. Clearly it also impacts on the terms under which community and sociality are to be investigated. What I want to draw attention to in this regard is the issue of subjectivity and objectivity. Traditionally this has been an issue couched in terms of individual perspective. Under these terms of the Arendtian approach however there is no difference between claims of objectivity and subjectivity because both are grounded in the Cartesian primacy afforded to the individual, when of course no individual can create a

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space of appearance or any of the outcomes from that space as an act of their own individual will. How under these terms, how one can investigate plurality and inter-relationality is a question we need to address. Clearly there is a deal of research that has been sensitive to these issues – feminist researchers have spoken about the power relationship in investigation and Action Research has always involved the people being investigated in the investigation. The important point here is to see the investigation and the meaning as conjointly belonging to the sociality being investigated. We need to see ourselves as implicated in the creation of the ‘who’ and to break down the distinction between the investigator and the investigated. Now of course, as Arendt says this is a question that has to be decided not by one person but by the agreement of many, all I offer here is the starting point that traditionally conceived notions of subjectivity and objectivity in themselves will not leave open the space which is required for a thorough investigation of community as the outcome of the sociality. What I do know however is that naturalising political intent behind a sheen of assumed scientific objectivity or declared subjectivity, while simultaneously imposing either implicit methodological idealisms or the primacy of one perspective (in whatever disguise) upon socialites and communities is not investigation, nor can it ever discover the means by which all subjectivities including the subjectivities of objectivity and value are created and sustained communally.

Conclusion: Looking Forward

The introduction spoke of a need to transcend what Latour called the dysfunction between the way our knowledge is understood and the issues currently pressing upon us – primary among which is the nature of our communal being-ness. I trust that in the course of this book the reasons for this discrepancy at least in relation to community have become apparent. The inter-relational approach developed here has the following theoretical advantages over the mechanistic models currently prevailing within the social sciences: ●

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Abolishes the Cartesian distinction between the objective and the subjective, not by collapsing one side into another, but by showing how the objective and subjectivity are both dependant upon the space of appearance, the common world and the movement between them. Locates all social forms including the state as communities. Locates the web of relations as fundamental to our being-ness and as the bedrock of any investigation into community and sociality. Creates a space of appearance for the investigation of sociality clear of any prior theoretical or philosophical privileging. The approach is inherently anti-foundational and given that the space of appearance contains the entire common world in a particular formation, it remains impervious to any preconceived idealisms. It is therefore creative of an approach where the plurality, inter-relationality and hybridity inherent within sociality as an action can be clearly seen. As an extension of this, an inter-relational approach posits all elements within sociality as definable only through hybridity and linkage. Indeed, it goes so far as to inscribe plurality as the hallmark 186

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of the web of relations and the care and maintenance of this plurality in its micro manifestation as the primary task of sociality itself. Describes a route by which the groupings of ‘who-s’ derived from momentary sociality can be explicitly linked back and forth from the particular spaces of appearance to more complex social forms. Inter-relationality is capable of doing this because it recognises no distinction between the general and particular, given that both are contained within each space of appearance. Locates the disclosive creation of the ‘who’ at the centre of this approach, therefore allowing for comparison between spaces of appearance to be made on the basis of the particular terms under which disclosive action and the ‘who’ are created within that particular space of appearance. It is through this investigation of the double movement of particular spaces of appearance that the inter-relational approach is capable of describing communities as activities in progress. Redefines notion of power, identity and agency to reflect our beingness as both free and conditioned. Pictures community and sociality as a series of actions flowing through the web of relations. It does this by totally dismantling the demarcated essentialism which characterise mechanistic models and which exist as the product of the mechanistic privileging of thought over action. This dismantling allows elements to be studied as entwined forms; co-operation and conflict for instance are not seen within this approach as opposites but rather as present to some degree in every action. This allows for comparison between various spaces of appearance, because the balance of these elements is the yardstick by which comparison can be made. By shifting the emphasis to an inter-relational notion of action, the closed systems of meaning can be opened to the unexpected and unique qualities which action manifests, because action is not – as previously – crudely reduced to process and prior ascribed meaning. Action, because it has unique qualities, not only establishes relationships but also denaturalises all the meanings which modernity has attached to sociality, including, as we have seen, the very notion of inside and outside, subjective and objective.

Under the terms of this approach, sociality and communing are understood in their own terms as constructive of our common world, as prior to the state and as creative of being-ness. This positioning reverses the two Hobbesian props underlying the theoretical approach of the social sciences – the state/individual axis and the mechanistic method.

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Implications for sociology and politics Sociology describes a space termed community and sociality – a space simultaneously absent and congested, evoked and ‘disappeared’. It describes a sociality denied as action, concealed by the primacy allocated to thought. It pictures community as the other, the expelled shadow both to modernity’s political reconfiguring and its own theoretical paradigm. It dispatches both of them, community and sociality, into a timeless mist where they are never defined, where they are caricatured, deformed, ignored, utilised as the justification for state agendas of social cohesion. Community is denied contemporary being-ness, always deferred, lost, and projected into the future and the past; sociality is always exemplifying something else – hidden forces, abstract laws – never seen for itself and never acknowledged in its space. And the result has been a complete hall of mirrors where lines of enquiry are worn into grooves revealing what? Nothing but the imaginings of sociologists, the myths of a lost community, the needs and anxieties of power, the fantasies of a network community or a revolutionary community or a coming community or a community constructed entirely by power – everything and indeed anything other than the messy, sloppy, furry-edged communities we all live in, the ones which create, contain and validate all social thought including the thought which denies its own origins. Elements of this have been recognised before – sociologists as this book shows have always complained about how amorphous the term community is, but as we have seen from the examples old habits die-hard. Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pata Physics’ – the science of imaginary solutions – remains the secret pole of all sociological descriptions of community as a topic. The implications of this in a wider world can be seen in four contemporary examples. The first concerns Korean car manufacturer Daewoo, who hired 2000 American college students on 200 campuses to talk up Daewoo cars to their friends (Klein 2001, p. 88), part of an increasing trend to hire young people – ‘street promoters’ – to sell or hype products to their friends. The second is an attempt by the Bush administration to recruit United States citizens under the Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS) to ‘report “suspicious activities” ’: primarily repairmen, utility employees, truck drivers and letter carriers – people whose work takes them into other people’s homes. The program was scheduled to begin in ten cities with one million informants, a figure set to rise ultimately to one in twenty-four American citizens (Sydney Morning Herald, 15/7/02).

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The third example concerns the scripts Disney provided its employees concerning modern customer service practices (Kraft 1998 in Kistov Peter). These specify, on pain of dismissal, that ‘when you are greeting a customer the exact script is “hi welcome to Disney store”. There are to be no variations from this script ever’. This as Kraft makes clear was the forerunner of those entirely inappropriate greetings that rain down on one’s head the moment one enters a store everywhere and anywhere nowadays – greetings which are inappropriate precisely because they attempt (as an outcome of individuality) to construct a contained space of appearance, one assuming a degree of intimacy usually reserved for close friends, neighbours or people one sees every day. This particular Disney space of appearance is based on language substitutions characteristic of neo-liberalism in which passengers and students become customers; inmates and unemployed become clients; teachers become providers; technicians become service consultants and so on – all of them curtailing and closing the space of appearance in the name of some defining idealism. The fourth example is a quote described by Robert Putnam as ‘usefully synthesizing much of the recent literature’ on social capital (Putnam (ed.) 2002). ‘The basic idea of social capital is that a person’s family, friends, and associates constitute an important asset, one that can be called on in a crisis, enjoyed for its own and leveraged for material gain. What is true for individuals, moreover, also holds for groups’ (Woodcock and Narayan 1996, pp. 6). These examples exemplify a number of issues discussed in this book. One is the mundane disregard for the value of human sociality that permeates all facets of our being-ness on every level, be it political, theoretical or social. Another is the utter lack of knowledge, even contempt, for the importance and responsibilities we owe the web of relations. All the institutions mentioned depend upon the web of relations for every aspect of their lives – the government depends on the co-operation of sociality to maintain the order which they claim to maintain on their own, while Putnam discovers what, in fact, has always been there and fails to see the long-term effects of attaching to familial ties, an instrumentally driven rationality undermining of the very thing he claims to be supporting. Daewoo depends upon sociality to maintain the security and peace of the social, without which, their capacity to do business would be undermined absolutely and this dependency exists and continues to exist even while they blithely corrupt it. All of which reveals an absolute lack of self knowledge about the fundamental terms of our existence as human beings. A lack of self knowledge intrinsically tied to

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the defining and reductive role played by idealisms and mechanistic conceptualisations within all aspects of out thought. For as we have seen western thought, hierarchical power and sociology has always exhibited a dislike and disregard for linkage, action, multiplicity and hybridity, and for the social that contains them. Indeed, western thought and increasingly the material reality it partially creates, exist precisely to ward off sociality, its unpredictability, its collectivist demands, its chaotic disorderly unhygienic nature, its cardinality of loose ends and public obligation, the conditions and restrictions it demands as a price of being, the risk that acting imposes on one, and it is this logic of refusal, inaugurated by Hobbes, which attains its apotheosis within the mechanistic model and through that model, the Cartesian community and political system it creates and sustains. The gated estates, the rush to virtuality, the obsession with hygiene, the endless filmic enactments of destruction, chaos and disaster, the destruction of the natural, the genetic manipulation of the food chain – all represent the working out of a poisonous logic of idealisms, mechanistic thinking and disregard for the communal, all underpinned by the claim that being-ness should adapt to an invisible process confirmed mystically by laws and commandments. A logic that systematically and consciously excludes human being-ness from the social world in favour of an ‘objective’ world where only Man reigns, where care for the web of relations, acknowledgment of the plurality and primacy of sociality as an interrelational activity, is effectively discouraged and suppressed. So the ‘age of ideology’ is dead, but the habits of ideological thinking – the primacy allocated to thought, abstractions, idealism, normativism, instrumental reason and glorification of process – remain. For just as the death of god did not signal the loss of the habit of deification – as anyone who lived through the neo-liberal positioning of the market as some all-seeing ‘divinity’, judging and dispensing rewards and punishment with impunity, can attest – so human-beingness is still governed in the widest sense by our ingrained habits of obedience to abstraction and disguised idealisms while the action of sociality and the community it produces are still subject to the tyranny of instrumental reason, ‘good’ idealisms and process. Something starkly illustrated by the current US administration who routinely make democracy sound like a punishment and freedom sound like a threat. While of course enlisting both in their destruction of communities, their demonisation of religions, their restriction of liberties and sociality, their denial of plurality and inter-relationality and their closure of the space of appearance in every corner of the planet.

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Which is precisely Arendt’s point, as the introduction to the ‘Human Condition’ makes clear. For the voice that protests the mechanistic world on behalf of abstraction, idealism, ethics and individual values, is an exclusively oppositional voice, of the same ilk as the thing it attacks. As Zizek comments (1989/1999), global capitalism has no problem with multi-culturalism, anti-sexism or anti-racism, they are all gist for the mill, nor indeed does it have any real problem with the de-essentialised subject, especially when it itself is busy destroying all reference to humanist idealisms, place or culture, and substituting an ephemeral neo-liberal subject eternally bound to projects of self-creation and re-creation. In this view, both modernist and post-modernist modes, whatever difference may arise from their historical specificity, remain conjoint projects because they continue to privilege abstractions and hidden idealisms over community and the space of appearance. The last century was full of such abstractions, whether they be the Jewish conspiracy, the dialectic, class conflict, market forces, discursive overflows, identity politics, microcircuits of power, subjectification – the list is endless. Typically these struggles (struggles couched in terms of ‘liberation’ another idealism) produce – and this is the same for all twentieth century struggles, modernist or post-modernist – a new formalised language of signs interwoven into procedure, or crystallised into an undifferentiated mass of partial governments and constructed identities which, as the product of their positioning as typical Cartesian and mechanistic forms, always remain outside the social from which they claim authority. The result is a paradox familiar to the nineteenth and twentieth century where increased individual ‘freedom’, ‘liberation’ and ‘progress’ has always resulted in increased social control, a narrowing of the space of appearance and an increased disdain for the web of relations, sociality and human being-ness. It is because she understands this, that Arendt, along among the current crop of western theorists, is able to grasp that the de-centring of the individual is simply one small element in a much larger anti-mechanistic and anti-humanist project, beginning, I would argue, with the Cartesian community and its reduction of being-ness, sociality and action to an instrumental process. Furthermore, Arendt’s inter-relational version of the social stands in absolute contradistinction to the outlook of all mechanistic theorists, whether liberal, Marxist or deconstructionist, because it poses a direct challenge to their vision of the state, the primacy they allocated to abstraction over being-ness and their concurrent version of the social as essentially chaotic, fragmented, conflictual, abstract and threatening. Claims, of course, which are underpinned and

192 Conceptualising Community

imposed onto the social through the imposition of power/knowledge and the confusion – vital to that imposition – of the theoretical and the normative. So where do we go from here? How do we defend the space of sociality and community? What this book discovered is that neither humanist nor deconstuctionist-based projects can provide what we need to think differently. This is why I claim only Arendt speaks for community and sociality, for only Arendt fully transcends the crippling divisions inaugurated by Cartesian thought. As a result she shows us that our political action need not be defined by liberalism or any ‘ism’ for that matter. We don’t need naturalisations, utopias, scientific justifications, Archimedean points, ‘our own telos’, abstractions, problematisations, the politics of representation or jargon laden discussions. All we need is what we live in everyday, what surrounds us contains and protects us, what pre-dates and survives us. For community and our spaces of appearance are our web of relations and no matter how minor, how reduced, my social and your social appears in this modern age, no matter how superfluous it seems at any moment in relation to the power of the state, it can never be destroyed for it is our fundamental necessity, our fundamental condition, our being-ness. The most the state can ever do is imitate it and feed it back to us as the virtual community, the replacement community, where its single notion of acceptable sociality becomes naturalised as the only form of sociality. So through Arendt we can see a politics finally free of liberalism or reductive oppositional politics, not a platform, an object or a programme, not a clash of irreconcilable interests, but the active assertion of plurality and inter-relationality understood as the concrete sustaining of an open space of appearance the place of our sociality, our community. Human being-ness can never achieve freedom, says Arendt, until it recognises its own conditioned nature (1958). The recognition of that conditioned nature and the recognition and protection of the space of appearance as the source of our common world and our conditioned being-ness is the key to real change. The real issue therefore, is recognition not of essentialised selves, or morals or ethics or ‘what tomorrow promises’, but simply ‘who’ being-ness as the outcome of our web of relations in the here and now, and a concurrent willingness to protect and nurture the common world as the web of relations in a manner which publicly strengthens plurality and the open-ness of the immediate space of appearance. So this is why, because sociology is the ideology of modernism, process and state power, it can never bring itself to mention the linkages

Conclusion 193

and multiple communities we live in now, why it can only speak of dead communities, dying communities, future communities or community in the singular as a substitution for the state, and why, the smallest insight into the continuing centrality of the web of relations in all our lives, the smallest steps towards active participation and support for the objective-in-between as the creative source for our disclosive being-ness, is the most radical form of politics any present inhabitant of the contemporary world can ever take. As such, what mechanistic theory and the state separates – the theoretical and the political, the subjective and the objective, the individual and the social – are the things that this book in a small form, has sort to reunite. And the first step in this direction is for us to live our communities, our power to create, sustain and nurture the web of relations to which each of us belong, in any form the ‘who’ deems proper.

Notes

1 The Social Science Approach to Sociality and Community 1. For instance in 1998 ‘the spirit of the times is community’ Tony Blair and there are many others. 2. Moreover ‘Foucoudian sociologists often act as if sociology had no antecedents. Deane’s claim (1985) that there is Foucault and then there is everyone else, is just one, albeit the most extreme example, of this trend. 3. In this context Giddens is a classic example of the dis-engagement to which I referring. For he appears utterly uninterested in engaging in debate with sociology as a discipline, his books rarely refer to the work of any other sociologists and his writing on Foucault – sparse as it is – must go down as one of the worst and most incompetent commentaries on the work of one major figure by another, ever committed to print (Cassells (ed.) 1993, see also his chapter on structuralism and post-structuralism in A Giddens and J H Turner 1987). Yet for all of this, it is rarely – to my knowledge – ever commented upon by either his supporters or his defenders. 4. Instrumental reason-the measuring of everything exclusively in terms of some final outcome, what it produces. 5. I define essentialism here in line with Derrida’s definition (1978 pp. 278–9) 6. In this conxt it is interesting that a contemporary liberal commentator like King (1974, pp. 165–6) explicitly defends Hobbes continued philosophical relevance on the basis that he is making universal points while dismissing his ‘exaggerations’ as ‘local’; a polarity which evokes Plato and his hierarchical idealisms just as much as it continues the severing of the individual and the social inaugurated by Descartes. 7. Including discursive work. A point I will take up at the appropriate time. 8. Interested readers can find more developed histories of community as a sociological concept (with of course the caveats about the Cartesian community) in ‘The Sociology of Community’ ed. Colin Bell/Howard Newby 1974, or ‘Communities’ a survey of theories and methods of research”, Denis E. Poplin 1979. or ‘The Symbolic Construction of Community’, Anthony P. Cohen 1985. 9. Weber for instance clearly draws on Tonnies’ work in the discussion of communal and associative relationships in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). 10. A piece of nonsense augmented in Bauman’s case by his pathogisation of anyone interested in contemporary community as losers (Bauman 2001, p. 101) authors indeed of their own misfortune (14), driven by a ‘desperate desire to mitigate the pain (43)’ of their modern condition. 11. I have refrained from detailing a history of the usage of the word primarily because such a history is easily available see Schatzki Theodore R 1996 or Rosenthal B 1996 for good descriptions of it linage and usage. 194

Notes 195 12. Not always however. The term itself is still rather in a state of flux, Andreas Whittle (2001, p. 51) for instance contrasts sociality – or at least ‘network sociality’ to community. 13. Mead’s theory is described by one commentator as moving ‘radically beyond the notion of the self as a fixed essentialised coherent unity’ and positing the subject as always in “a state of becoming in relation to the social” (Walby 2001, p. 124). Others see Mead as presenting a sociological model for an inter-actional self (Rosenthal 1996, p. 107). I maintain however, that the method Mead utilises to create this inter-actional self are flawed and are achieved by inscribing the social with a normative, universalised, rational essence (Mead 1962, p. 247). This essence is then re-integrated back into the individual, who suddenly appears both as essentialised and social because he is following the dictates of the normative ‘generalised other’ (ibid, p. 226). Nor is Mead’s theory as fluid as Walby suggests (Walby 2001)-in terms of linkage there is little within Mead to suggest the ‘becoming’ that Walby attributes to him. Rather, the relationship is described in normative, static and macro terms that lack a sense of nuance or individual difference and are not located as an activity. 14. In truth, Mead maintains a account in which two fragmented forms, the individual and the community, are understood as separate entities (see Mead 1962, pp. 236–239) needing to be joined, and it is precisely the terms of this ‘joining’ that mark the limitations of his theory. Mead entertains two methods to explain linkage – the first of these is that famous standby of mechanistic theory, the psychological (i.e. normative descriptions couched in individual terms) and the second is his notion of sociality. The normative and reductive tendencies of psychology are adequately addressed by Arendt (Arendt 1958, p. 206), while the problems I have described with his model come to a head in his notion of sociality. Sociality for Mead is the capacity for “being in two systems with the adjustments of each that this brings about” (Rosenthal 1996, p. 108). The self is an ongoing process of mutual and reciprocal adjustment between two poles (ibid, pp. 108–9). Thus, sociality is used by Mead to explain how a deeper process occurs on an individual basis and through which, the theoretical union of a rationalised social is united with a rational individual. Sociality, in this account, is simply another word for socialisation, the problems of which are well known (Henriques et al. 1984, pp. 19–24). As a theory in the end Mead’s work lacks the coherency and vigour of Arendt’s inter-relationality, even while the two of them share commonality in many respects (see his idea of perspectivism (Mead 1962, pp. 247–48) and his notion of the incomplete act (p. 250)).

2 Social Capital and New Forms of Trust 1. His eventual indictment of television as the prime cause of the decline in civic participation and civic virtue (Putnam 2000, 1993, pp. 244–6) also has an old fashioned, small town ring to it. 2. Perhaps it is this highly focussed economic perspective that prompts some commentators to chide Putnam for a narrow and incomplete view of Social Capital (Turner 2001, p. 94). However it should be noted that for some of his

196 Notes critics the narrowness refers to the lack of linkage between micro and macro concerns rather than any queries which might attach to the prevalence of economic language and conceptualisation. 3. In this regard see (Turner 2001, p. 94) who claims that Social Capital is, in many ways, simply ‘old sociological wine poured in the new and smaller bottles of economics’.

3 The Third Way and Communitarians 1. Given that humans currently are interfering with genetic makeup, cloning sheep, destroying the environment at will, over fishing the oceans, conducting wars on three continents, growing genetic crops, and so on, one does wonder what Giddens might regard as ‘tight human mastery’. One can construct a case here that the notion of risk is entirely overblown and that we are no more at the mercy of random and uncontrollable forces than we ever were. Indeed the notion of ‘risk’ itself rather operates to excuse and conceal questions of social inequality and unbalanced relations of power. 2. Though see Encarnacion (2003) who claims (p. 171) that many of these commentators misread De Tocqueville. 3. Fundamentally I believe this remains true despite a rapprochement with liberalism over recent years and a shift in recent communitarian writing away from such a totalising and backward looking glance.

4 Foucault and Cultural Discourses 1. This statement is true of course for the majority of Foucault’s work however I am aware that some claim this specificity is missing in vols 2 and 3 of the History of Sex, the last two books he wrote. 2. This view that Foucault allocates primacy to power over knowledge is a contested one. Clearly Foucault sets himself consciously to avoid discussing ‘Power’ as an abstraction, yet he does not avoid this whatever his intention. Moreover, his fundamental proposition that what counts as knowledge is determined by relations of power, does suggest that at a basic level, power has precedence over knowledge. To that extent I agree with May, however this is clearly one of the many areas where there are ‘blurrings’ within Foucault’s work; blurrings which, I would argue, stem directly from the uneasy match between his method, his rhetoric, his ambitions and the philosophical status of his entire anti-metaphysical project. 3. In this regard I would argue that the word ‘appears’ functions not as a qualifier which might suggest agency or the problematic nature of the totalising intent of this ‘program’, but rather as a nod and wink to a reading audience raised on Marxist notions of false consciousness. It also of course elevates Rose into a select Parthenon of those who can ‘see through’ these projects which is why the work ultimately offers itself as a cure, because it draws the reader into a small circle of privileged knowing where knowing serves a curative function. 4. Thus for Rose problemitisation of the word ‘community’ serves simultaneously both as a diagnosis, in the sense that it explains the ‘real’ agenda and as

Notes 197 a curative for the reasons listed in the previous note – a conflation which Rose claims is typical of all the other accounts of community (p. 173). 5. Concerns about social cohesion in a age of migrating influxes into western societies is something also discussed, obviously from a more conservative perspective, by Giddens and the Communitarian, Charles Taylor. 6. He specifically alludes to the Third Way and Social Capital models but it is a criticism applicable for obvious reasons to the third of the described options.

5 The Individual/State Axis 1. Two things here: first one could note in this regard that the very claim to difference and radicality in which these approaches shroud themselves, is itself a modernist affectation (Descombes 1993, p. 126). Second I regard this observation about their self-proclaimed radicality as being true even of the communitarian approach which is specifically located as a radical restorative project. 2. Some commentators defend abstraction by explicitly linking it to concrete examples and by explaining it as an attempt to describe the ‘social process’ ( Johnson 1979, p. 41). 3. It is no accident that the rise of the notion of state sovereignty is coupled with the rise of an essentialised normative view of human nature and that both are contained within the work of Hobbes. (King 1974, p. 165). 4. Dumont notes the consequences of this for the study of society when he terms western ideas of society ‘superficial’ (Dumont 1986, p. 5). 5. It is also true that the notions of everyday life within these accounts are always less than total, being undercut or confined within a personal perspective, often based – as in Heller’s (p. 15) and Lefebvre’s (p. 133) case – upon a prior abstraction, a higher order which itself shapes and limits what can be classified a everyday life. 6. Though see Rengger (1995, p. 23) where he states that all contemporary politics is in part, constituted by the dilemmas generated by ‘trust’. 7. Of course it also allows problems of uneven resource allocation and exploitation to be simply redefined as moral issues which is precisely what Fukuyan and Putnam do. 8. One telling indicator of the secondary status of community is that it, alone among western social forms, has no legal status, which of course means that wealth produced by the community over generations is not recognised legally and is not protected. The state therefore can sell of utilities as if it alone had sole rights to the product of many years of community input. I am indebted to Venn for this observation.

6 Mechanistic Theory and the Social 1. Similar unwittingly humorous, almost surrealist juxtapositions are commonplace in relation to discussions of power. Hindess and Helliwell (1996, p. 83) for instance, utilise at one point an example of a rapist and the U.S defeat in Vietnam, both of which serve (on the same page) to illustrate problems with power in general.

198 Notes 2. Something confirmed by another piece of naive theorising, for he claims that he is not going to attempt a universal definition of trust but rather confine himself to only European and First World examples: a statement which acts as if the philosophical notion of universalisation is simply a geographical construct and therefore Eurocentricity and universalisation are utterly different (22). This is not even an undergraduate mistake. 3. Thus in one interview he states that he has always analysed ‘precise and locally delimited phenomena, for example the formation of disciplinary systems in eighteenth century Europe’ (Foucault in Faubion 2001, p. 292, ‘power’, my italics). 4. This is not to say of course that Foucault’s work is not useful in investigating local oppositions/resistances. Rather, that on its own it has limited value in such a task and that there is no investigation of such resistance within Foucault’s work.

7 Arendt: Sociality and Community on its Own Terms 1. There is also an issue about generic designation in relation to the appropriate term for human beings, both in the singular and the general. Because the term ‘subject’ is implicated in the Althusserian, post-Althusserian, structuralist and post-structuralist turn to discourse, and because I desire to make a break with the focus and form of that mode of analysis, human beings will be referred to in their singular form as ‘person’, and in their generality simply as ‘human beings’. Arendt herself uses the words ‘man’ and ‘men’ as a generic term for human beings, but in 2002, this cannot be sustained. I will continue to use the word men where Arendt contrasts it to Man, because this has a specific sense within Arendt’s text, a sense I wish to maintain. The non-essentialised Arendtian person is referred to as the ‘who’; and once again for similar reasons, this is a usage I will abide by. 2. Clearly, it is beyond the scope of this book’s purpose to investigate fully, either the vast scope of Arendt’s work or to examine in any depth the entire gamut of the philosophical underpinnings of her anti-metaphysical project. Villa (1994) and Studdert (2003 thesis unpublished) provide more detail regarding this aspect. 3. I will discuss the implications of formal and theoretical implications of Arendt’s choice of the vita activa in the next major section. 4. That is why thought as a particular category is specifically excluded from the list of topics that THC will focus upon (p. 5); it is not a fundamental condition of human life. 5. By human lived-ness, I mean the act and existence of living. 6. In contrast, without a concrete recognition of plurality, Habermas is forced to turn to the state and its inherently fragmenting and mechanistic model of idealism to guarantee the same thing; a guarantee that the history of the twentieth century state can only convince us will never be given or honoured. What Calhoune also stresses in his account (1997, p. 232) is the manner in which Habermas’ notion of the public space is so much more restricted, unitary, bounded, instrumental and liberal than Arendt’s. Calhoune shows Habermas’ public space relies on transcending difference rather than recognising

Notes 199 inter-relationships (Calhoune, p. 248). Moreover because identity is for Habermas formed outside public space, public disclosure is denied (ibid, p. 246). The effect of this is to fundamentally constrain the possibilities of action, identity and plurality as democratic ingredients, and to constrain the necessary porous nature of the public space. As was shown in the discussion of Cartesian community, such an approach fundamentally constrains community because it constructs it as a servant of some abstraction, some outside force. 7. In the process of examining Arendt’s use of the term ‘web’, there is a slightly tangential issue to address regarding other social science usage of the metaphor of a web. Principal among these is the work of Richard Rorty, who describes the subject as a ‘tissue of contingent relations, a web that stretches backward and forward through past and future times’ (Rorty 1989, p. 41). Rosenthal questions the lack of creative agency within Rorty’s web (Rosenthal 1996), while Featherstone (1995, p. 45) argues that while Rorty endorses a de-centred approach, he fails to explain questions of linkage or what key terms mean. Indeed, one could argue that Rorty’s aversion to detailed explanation of the web is what allows him to both escape liberalism and the rational subject, while retaining the capacity to make such normative statements as ‘the selves created by modern liberal society are better that the selves earlier societies created’ (Rorty 1989, p. 63). In any case, while, as we have seen, he is not alone in this privileging of abstraction and the axis of subject and state, Rorty’s particular lack of detail makes his work little more than a normative discursive tissue. Certainly without more details, what he provides is of little use in developing an approach to an empowered sociality.

8 Community through Sociality 1. What some inadequately term the ‘local’; a term which is often utilised to suggest the opposite of macro but which in practise – say in Rose – tends to refer to the specific generalised application of macro technologies rather than to particular acts of sociality. In short, the term characteristically takes its bearings from its oppositional stance to liberal ideas of the macro and as such the claims made for it are overblown. 2. I hesitate to use such a loaded word primarily because in its current poststructuralist usage it implies the absence of a single ‘truth’. I would prefer the word ‘view’, but there is a limit to how much new terminology I am willing to inflict upon the reader, and as long as the reader grasps that Arendt does believe in a truth, that is in her work, truth is a notion derived as the outcome of common agreement, and does not confuse the term with the school of perspectivism, then the use of the word seems , at least tentatively, better than inflicting yet more jargon on the reader. Arendt’s notion that truth and perspectivism can exist conjointly and not as oppositional polarities is yet another of her small but tellingly departures from Heidegger and Nietzsche. 3. At this point, I want to acknowledge the work of the English physicist David Bohm, which I discovered has many sympathies with the inter-relational accounts I have derived from Arendt’s work. Bohm’s work provided me with many ideas, however his work is specifically located within a scientific field

200 Notes

4.

5.

6.

7.

and I did not want to simply extrapolate from a scientific model to a social and cultural approach for obvious historical reasons. Yet I feel that there is a sympathetic correspondence between my approach, Arendt’s ideas and Bohm’s notion of the implicate order. This is the same sort of issue which affects the notion of subject position(s) – a favourite term within discourse theory – a term which does however suggest positions occupied by a subject. Given that discourse theories in general lack any explanation of or relational linkage between discourse and action in excess of the sign and for that matter seems, intrinsically at least, to privilege thought over action, the phrase ‘subject position’ could be seen as introducing through the back door the same unitary subject ejected through the front door. There are also a number of second order reasons why this positioning of co-operation is not simply a re-visiting of Parson’s. Firstly, Parson’s functionalism, while offering itself as an account of co-operation is in truth, rather an account of conformity and how it is created. He does not for instance, engage with or indeed even acknowledge co-operation outside the state or indeed against the state, nor does it engage with power as an off-shot of co-operation; instead it is clear that Parson’s idea of co-operation is a hierarchically endorsed, normative one. Co-operation between delinquents registers simply as delinquent behaviour. Further, co-operation is often inscribed by Parsons to the working of two people together to dominate a third person for normatively approved reasons. Thus, cooperation has no value in itself, unless it serves normative cohesion. Indeed I would argue that Parson is a clear example of the centrality of conflict, despite the frequent claims that his work concerns co-operation (Mann 1986, p. 6). Fears among theorists of an ‘oppositional’ inclination, that an inter-relational approach runs the risk of disappearing conflict from the system are misplaced, Primarily because the privileging of conflict over co-operation is not just a ‘left’ interest – conflict is intrinsic to the entire process of modernisation and indeed to the maintenance of state supremacy over the social. Thus, modernity and the state as the sponsor of modernity have always had a vested interest in social fragmentation and conflict. From the left perspective the almost totemic privileging of conflict over co-operation not only disappears co-operation from the left agenda, thus forcing the left into a position of permanent opposition, also it traps the left into the mechanistic assumptions and perspectives of social fragmentation, which ultimately means that the left is unable to understand conflict properly because conflict (in common with all other aspects of sociality) cannot be understood in an essentialised and isolated form. Of course Arendt denies the title of ‘who’ to the product of any space of appearance that approximates the household. Yet I intend to utilise the term ‘who’ for both the products of the household and the product of the polis. Not because they are the same, but rather because the same designation indicates the commonality of all social forms and because being-ness is clearly actioned in both. Additionally, on occasions Arendt’s description of the two is of two pure forms, a mechanistic formulation (hang-over) within an anti-mechanistic project. It should be noted also that I propose the web of relations not the

Notes 201 polis as the source of my inter-relational project, and finally because within all common worlds the forms of the household and the polis (or their equivalents) are constructed inter-relationally as an outcome of the interaction between the two different modes of being-ness, something which on occasions Arendt agrees with herself (ibid, pp. 37, 40, Arendt 1961, pp. 116–17).

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Index action 147–51 disclosive action 166–9 ‘active trust’ term 29, 47 activities of being 144–7 Adorno (thinker) 67 After Virtue 61 Agamben G 29, 75, 83, 111, 122 agency 56, 67, 74, 88, 93, 181, 184, 196n3(Chap.4) as the inherent property 121 and materiality 36 models based on 123 Sandel’s idea of 97 and structure 37, 71–3, 124, 143, 156 within Rorty’s web 199n7 Althusser B 67, 120, 181, 198n1 Anglo-Saxon sociology 53 anti-mechanistic project 136–41, 200n7 anti-metaphysical project 135–41, 196n2(Chap.4), 198n2(Chap.7) Archimedean point 10, 14, 76, 82, 99, 105, 112, 140, 155, 192 Arendt, Hannah 4–5, 11, 83, 111–12, 185, 191–2, 198nn2, 3, 6, 199–200nn2, 3 and agency 184 anti-metaphysical and antimechanistic project of 136–41 approach to social by 144–51 and the Archimedean point 14 and Charles Taylor 62 and generic designation 198n1 and identity 181–2 investigations by, principals of 172–84 and the plurality of being’ 71 and power 121, 123, 125 power configuring by 182–4 and psychology 94, 195n14 radicality of 136–41

on sociality and community 135–57 and theoretical modeling of community 93 and ‘web’ term 199n7 and ‘who’ title 200n7 Arendtian investigation 172–84 Arensberg (thinker) 26 Aristotle (philosopher) 57, 61–2, 112 Arrow, Kenneth 34, 44 ‘association’ term 90 Augé, Marc 99, 178 Barthes (thinker) 67 Baudrillard, Jean 81–2 Bauman, Zygmunt 26, 83, 90, 108, 117, 194n10 Becker, Gary S 33, 36 Bell, Daniel 26 Bhabha, Homi K 78 Bohm, David 117, 124, 199–200n3 Bourdieu P 32, 38 ‘Bowling Alone’ book 33, 43, 46 Butler, Judith 75 California 80 Camus, Albert 66, 102 Cartesian community 13–15, 37–8, 67–8, 76, 190–2, 199n6 creation of 92, 101, 116, 137, 194n8 description of 2–3 and ethics 103 objective and subjective, distinction by 186 and social capital 58 within a ‘technical city’ 109 within sociology, historical development of 24–6 Cartesianism 13, 15 civil society 18, 24, 29, 50–57, 107–9, 117 and everyday life 102 217

218 Index civil society – continued and government 50 revival of 32, 46 and state 62 ‘civil society’ term 50, 90 Clinton, Bill 53 Cohen A P 26–7, 29, 32, 194n8 Coleman J S 31–44, 95 Commack, Paul 53 Communitarians 73, 78, 96–8, 104, 107, 112 and community 92, 128 and the Third Way 46–65 community after the liberal individual 92–105 Cartesian community, see separate entry as context free repository 110–11 as the discursive ‘other’ 91 as instrumental object 91–2 instrumentally measured 111–12 liberal approach to 18 and modernity 88–92 narrow community 101–3 and sociality 7–84 and sociality, in Arendt’s views 135–57 and sociality, social science approach to 9–30 in sociology, concept of 19–21 subservient to the state 105–10 through sociality 158–85 through sociality, new conceptions about 133–85 ‘community care’ term 9 ‘community health’ term 9 ‘community policing’ term 9 Comte (sociologist) 19–21, 29, 82, 132 context free repository, community as 110–11 co-operation as a gauge 173–81 cultural discourses, and Foucault 66–84 cultural theory 77–84 current conceptions 85–132 ‘cycle of ideas’ 31

Daewoo (car manufacturer) 188–9 Dasgupta 35, 44 De Tocqueville 33, 54, 196n2(Chap.3) Dean, Michell 68–9, 194n2 Democracy and Civil Society 54 Descartes (Philosopher) 12–18, 29, 90, 92–3, 125, 155, 194n6 disclosive action 152, 155, 163, 173–80, 183–4, 187 and the creation of ‘who’ 166 creation and containment within 166–72 Disney 189 Dowding (theorist) 120 Downes (theorist) 120 Dumont, Louis 93, 113, 197n4 Durkheim (sociologist) 10, 19, 22, 24–6, 28, 51, 82, 103, 108, 132 Dussel, Enrique 14, 125 Dyrberg, Torben 123 Eclipse of Community, The 25 Elias, Norbert 25–6, 75 Encernacion 196n2(Chap.3) Ensminger, Jean 44 ethics 103–5 Etzioni, Amitai 32, 47, 62, 83, 96–7, 104–5, 129 ‘everyday life’ notion 30, 102, 130, 197n5 finally the ‘Who’ 154–6 Fish, Jonathan 82 ‘flexible webs’ term 29, 47 Foucault, Michel 10, 66–8, 120–5, 129–31, 179, 194nn2, 3, 196nn1, 2(Chap.4), 198n4(Chap.6) and Ardent 137, 140–1, 146, 155 and cultural discourses 66–84 method of 68–70 and Rose 72–7 Frasier, Elizabeth 97 Fraser, Nancy 72, 75, 79, 87, 98, 106 Fukuyana, Francis 32, 37, 41, 44, 109 Galbraith J K 120 Games Theory 44 Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft 21 Gemeinschaft 21–2

Index 219 Gesellschaft 21–3 Giddens, Anthony 11, 48–53, 63, 79–80, 95–9, 101, 110, 132, 194n3, 196n1(Chap.3), 197n5(Chap.5) and Etzioni 83 and power 122, 124 and Tan 63 and Third Way project 106, 126 Gierke, Otto von 21 Goldman, Alvin I 123 Granovetter, Mark 33, 35, 40 ‘group’ term 90 Habermas J 123, 147, 198–9n6 Haight-Ashbury 107 Hammett, Dashell 84 Hammett, Ian 24 Hardin, Russell 44 Harre, Rom 103, 111, 126 Harsanyi J C 120 Hegel G W F 17, 54, 57, 61, 67, 78–9, 117, 124, 141 Heidegger, Martin 15, 67, 137, 141, 145, 157, 199n2 Heller, Agnes 102, 197n5(Chap.5) Helliwell, Christine 119, 197n1(Chap.6) Hiener, Carol 44 Hillery R 25–6 Hindess B 119, 121–2, 197n1 Hirst, Paul 108 History of Sex 196n1(Chap.1) Hobbes, Thomas 20, 29, 88, 90, 99, 168, 187, 190, 197n3 King defending 194n6 and the mechanistic method 15–18, 124 and power, modern concept of 117, 119 Honig, Bonnie 29, 59, 104 Honneth, Axel 79–80, 106 Human Condition, The 125 hybridity 2–3, 78, 87–8, 91, 114, 121–2, 132, 161, 172–4, 186, 190 ‘hyper-modernity’ 112 identity 181–2 individual/state axis

87–113

inter-relationality 88, 90, 92–4, 100–1, 103, 105, 138–45, 147, 150–3, 157, 166, 173, 175, 185–92, 195n14 Japan

35

Kafka F 28 Kant I 17, 59, 61 Keene, John 54–7, 108 Kimball Chris 26 King, Preston 16, 194n6 Kraft R 189 Krishna, Anirudh 41 Kristeva, Julia 155 Lacan J 67 Lash, Scott 88, 103 Latham, Mark 48, 53 Latour, Bruno 5, 116–18, 120, 139, 186 Levinas, Emmanual 78, 100 Lewis, Oscar 25 l’Humanite 20 liberal approach, to community 18 liberal individual, community after the 92–103 ‘Library of Babel’ 110 Lichterman, Paul 62 Lister, Ruth 80 location of being 151–3 Locke J 16–17, 54, 90, 99, 117, 119, 168 Luhmann, Niklas 37 Lukes S 119 Lynd, Helen 25 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 67, 122 MacIntyre, Alasdair 57, 59, 61, 64 McIver (Commentator) 25 McKinley, Alan 43 Maffesoli M 82–4 mainstream readings 136–41 ‘Making Democracy Work’ 33 Mann, Michael 123 mapping the space 172 ‘market’ 24, 90 Marx, Karl 10, 19, 24, 47, 59, 66–8, 74, 76–7, 124, 130, 141, 173, 191, 196n3(Chap.4)

220 Index material outcomes and effects, term 119 May, Todd 69, 130, 196n2(Chap.4) Mead, George Herbert 26–7, 195nn13, 14 mechanistic theory 17, 19, 195n14 and the social 114–33 mechanistic thinking 114–18, 129, 171, 190 Merton (thinker) 26 micro socialities 93–101 Mitzel B 106 modernity, and community 88–92 Mouzelis, Nico 56 narrow community 101–3 neo-liberalism 9, 63, 66, 68, 78, 189 ‘network society’notion 30 new conceptions 133–85 ‘new space’ notion 30 Newby, Howard 26 Nietzsche, Friedrich 66–7, 117, 125, 137, 141, 150, 199n3 O’Hara K 127 O’Neill 106 objective-in-between Offe, Claus 106 Oliga, John C 123 Oliver, Kelly 79–80

162–6

Parks, Robert 25 Parsonian functionalism 32–3, 173 Parsons 32–3, 82, 120, 123, 173, 200n5 Plato (philosopher) 14, 17, 21, 29, 137–9, 143, 145, 194n6 and the primacy of thought 11–12 ‘plural networks’ term 29, 47 plurality 71, 90–1, 129, 138, 141–51, 155–7, 174–92, 198n6, 199n6 and action 154, 173 co-operation as a measure of 173 and diversity 39 and power 121 of the social 17 and truth 12, 131, 137 politics and sociology, implications for 188–93

Polsby states 120 Poplin, Denis E 194n8 Poulantzas 120, 122 Power, mechanistic notion of 118–125 ‘Powers of Freedom’ 72 Prusak Larry 32 Putnam Robert D 11, 101, 103, 108, 111, 127, 197n7 and social capital 31–44, 46, 99, 107, 189, 195n2 and trust 94–7, 126 ‘Rational Choice theory’ 41, 120 Rawls, John 57–8 recapping 169–72 Redfield, Robert 25–6, 28, 171 Rees, Alwyn 26 Rengger N J 197n6(Chap.5) Rilker 120 Rorty, Richard 199n7 Rose, Nikolas 104, 109–11, 128–9, 131–2, 196–7nn3, 4, 199n1 and Foucauldian sociology 72–7 Rosenthal Sandra B 194n11, 199n7 San Francisco 107 Sandel, Michael J 57–9, 63, 92, 97, 107 Sartre 67 Scanlon, Chris 47, 52, 84, 95–6 Schatzki, Theodore R 27, 194n11 Schutz Thomas 102 Seligman, Adam B 56 Sennet, Richard 32 social capital 29, 31–8, 46–52, 64, 94–5, 99, 103, 107–9, 196n3(Chap.2) and communitarians 58 description of 34–8 and new forms of trust 31–45, 195n2 sole source of 126 theorising, issues and problems within 42–4 and Third Way 78, 197n6(Chap.4) and trust 61 types of 39–42 social capital theorising 37, 42–4

Index 221 social science approach, to sociality and community 9–30 sociality community through, new conceptions of 133–85 and community, on its own terms 135–57 community through 158–85 and conceiving community 7–84 as a concept 26–7 and community, social science approach to 9–30 social theory naturalization of the individual within 89–90 naturalization of the state within 90–1 ‘society’ term 90 Solow, Robert 42 Sorel Georges 66 space of appearance 153–4, 160–2, 163–92, 200n7 and the web of relations 158–62 Spheres of Justice 62 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 78 Sputnik 140 ‘stagnant and orthodox’ term 54 Starkey, Ken 43 state axis 87–113 Stein (writer) 125 subjective-in-between 162–6, 169, 173, 175, 177 Sullivan W 106 Tam, Henry 63–4 Taylor, Charles 58–62, 79–80, 97–8, 111, 197n5(Chap.5) ‘technical city’ 21, 70, 92, 109 Tempest, Sue 43 terms of investigation 172–3 Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS) 188 theory of co-operation 70–1

Theory of Justice, A 57 The Third Way, and Communitarians 46–65 Time of the Tribes 82 tonnies 21–6 Tonnies, Ferdinand 21 trust 126–8, 197n6(Chap.5), 198n2(Chap.6) new forms of, and social capital 31–45 ‘trust’ notion 30, 99, 103–4, 197n6(Chap.5) Uslander 32 ‘utility’ term 47 Venn, Couze 105 Vietnam 197 Villa, Dana R 139, 198n2(Chap.7) Walby, Sylvia 99, 195n13 Walzer, Michael 58, 62 Warner (commentator) 25 web of relations 151–3 Weber, Max 10, 22, 24, 54, 120, 122–4, 194n9 Wernick, Andrew 20, 81 Whittle, Andreas 195n12 ‘who’ term/concept 174–81, 183, 185, 187, 192–3 Arendt’s views of 144, 147, 198n1, 200n7 created who, description about 166–9 creation of 166 disclosure of the 148, 152 finally the ‘who’ 154–7 Williams W M 26 Woolcook, Michael 41 Yar, Majid 67, 79 Yucatan peninsula

25, 171

Zimmerman (commentator) Zizek, Slavoj 191

25