DISAVOWING COMMUNITY
Lynda Stone
University of Hawaii at Manoa
In a recent analysis entitled Dance With Community,1 political
theorist, Robert Booth Fowler posits the centrality of the concept
of community in American life. Few would disagree as references
to community swirl through our daily lives with nearly self-evident
significances for education. However important, a central contention
from Fowler is that the concept of community is contested
in the current intellectual era, precisely because it signifies
a “[nearly] mystical and perhaps…romantic…human
longing for a union that inevitably lies beyond…reach.”2
In this paper I want neither to challenge this search for community, nor to seek its causes and consequences. Such important tasks have been taken up by others, notably among them philosophers of education.3 Here I attempt something else, that is, to set out a present dissatisfaction I have with the meaning of community and to undertake a purposeful disruption. This is to disavow the concept of ‘community’, to break away from the modernist term and to suggest a postmodern replacement, ‘heteromity.’4 This effort is both paradoxical and ironic, because I, too, long for community but find it elusive. But, I have come to believe that the search is hampered by a naming that has outlived its usefulness. Moreover, it is a naming that evokes more harm than benefit because it no longer encapsulates in our times postmodern, multicultural life.
Impetus for this exploration comes not only from my own dissatisfaction, but also from recent reading of Fowler, and from the attention to community by neo-pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty and historian, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.5 Their writings represent a pertinent segment of the scholarly left, first in a late-modern redescription of liberal community as solidarity, and second, in a “curious brand of cultural conservatism” as an a priori collectivity.6 Both begin where I must with a heuristic sense of the central term: community, as a “state of being shared or held in common…a group based on merging…on shared attributes.”7 However, to my mind, both proposals fall short even in their critiques of what Iris Marion Young calls, “the individualistic social ontology.”8 This is because they retain the historically modernist meaning of community. I will return to these two projects briefly at the close.
Philosophic considerations of community begin with shared meaning of the western modern concept. One starts with descriptive elements: senses of locale, of persons joined together under common banner for common pursuit, of private and public affiliation of informal rather than formal institutional organization, of entities that extend outward in general groupings from the particular individual. Historically, community connotes tradition and familial membership, senses of survival and of the spiritual, and the added idea of formation and reformation over time.9 Underlying these descriptors are two core ideas, one is of positive valuing and the other is of commonality or sameness. What is valued, indeed often prized and strongly defended, is the unifying sameness of community identity and membership.
Added to a descriptive understanding of community that has its roots in traditional life and its development in modernity is a liberal democratic ideology, that itself has a long and deeply embedded history in the western psyche. Its analytic components are individualism, autonomy and choice.10 These are implied in a salient statement from John Rawls:
There is no reason why a well-ordered society should encourage…[only individualistic interest and] no concern for the interest of others…. Normally one would expect most people to belong to one or more associations and to have at least some collective ends in this sense. The basic liberties are not intended to keep persons in isolation from one another…but to secure the right of free movement between associations and smaller communities.11The point, as Michael Sandel continues, is that “communitarian values, like any other values individuals might choose to pursue, would likely exist, and possibly even flourish in a…[liberal democratic] society”.12 What Rawls realizes, as is well-known and is critiqued brilliantly by Sandel, is that the added principle of a modified, utilitarian conception of justice is needed to insure that the choices of individuals for their own good lives extend to others. Rawls’ addition is individual, disinterested choice for all, including oneself. Sandel’s correction is to alter the moral problematic in a vision of the modern self, in an epistemology. The latter writes, “In consulting my preferences, I have not only to weigh their intensity but also to assess their suitability to the person I (already) am.” Part of character and identity is that one’s history is “less strictly private,” and at the least defined by a certain kind of friendship, one of “mutual insight as well as sentiment.”13
For Sandel, this friendship — and what herein can be interpreted as a sense of community — is a way of knowing. Justice and goodness arise out of this knowing and through friendship. The correction for a just liberal politics, the politics of community, is to conceive of human agency not an as “article of faith…[but] rather…[as] an object of continuing attention and concern.” Such concern, concludes Sandel, opens fully the possibility that “we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.”14
However compelling, Sandel’s reliance on friendship and its attendant elements of mutuality, affiliation, and self-goodness,15 offers a modernist ethic that retains a core of sameness. This sameness is apparent when each of us considers who we most often choose as friends and the basis for this choice: the same backgrounds, the same interests, often the same basic beliefs and values. It is (to emphasize the point) this sameness that constitutes community. Indeed networks of overlapping friendships often make up community membership, and within them, the core element of liberal ideology remains intact.
The key point is expressed well in Young’s insight that “the attributes of a person…[are] coeval with the…[community] in which he or she lives.”16 All of this seems well and good for community until one is reminded of two factors, first that friendship of like persons does not comprise all of the possible relationships of society — others are less direct and across differences; and second, that the ideology valuing community also values individualism, in identification and in action. The problem here is that mutually beneficial association based on sameness rather than difference is to emerge out of components that separate one from another. This is because of the founding meaning of community itself.
Perhaps unrecognized in the above definition of modern, western, liberal, democratic community is a significant contradiction, one that sets up individualism, rationality and choice — in themselves atomistic units — as central components of community. Two aspects of the contradiction are apparent. First is the readily seen separateness and singularity of contributing factors in a unity that is singular also, and in some sense more than the sum of its parts. Second is the less evident valuing of sameness and equality as integral both to the constituent elements of a community and their resulting union.
One might claim that this contradiction has been around for a long time, at least, arguably, since the beginnings of modern society in the west. We live with it, for example in justifications stating that “this is the way things just are,” or that “things really are getting better, albeit sometimes slowly.” My contention, however, is that “this living with” has not been sufficiently successful for all or nearly all persons, both in past eras and in the present. Such lack of success is itself a contradiction to the meanings inherent in liberalism and democracy. It belies the millenial progress inherent in the aims of modernity. Thus an opposing claim emerges: that a first logical step toward making life better for more persons is to attend to the general contradiction.
One approach to unpacking this contradiction is to envision the community and its components as a set of relations, relations that is, that are constituted by sets of antinomies (or by their near analogues). Recall that an antinomy is an opposition between two parts that are each non-conflicting. In what follows, two kinds of antinomies are proposed: According to the first, one part of a paired element is meant to be identical with a second part and they are not the same. According to the other, the first part of an assumed “cause-effect” connection does not necessarily lead to the second.17 Various antimonies are possible in relations of sameness as they relate to individualism and community, rationality and community, and choice and community. In each of the following statements and in their elaborations, the statement is “read” and followed by the implication “but this logically, conceptually or necessarily cannot be.”
Statement one. Western modern community is established on the basis of individual membership. Inherent are the following antinomies: A unity (the group) is composed of a priori separate parts (the individuals). A group that entails dependent association is composed of independent elements. States of independence are constitutive of conditions of dependence. The unity of the group and its mutual identity is set up to foster the development of individual selves.18
Statement two. Western modern community is established on the basis of individual rationality. Inherent are the following antinomies: Free-willed and independent thought is basic to dependent allegiance and action. Thinking for oneself is to lead to thinking with or as others. Thinking as others, or the collective will, is predicated on the will of all individual parts. Collective allegiance is premised on an individual rationality.
Statement three. Western modern community is established on the basis of same and equal individual choice. Inherent are the following antinomies: Individual and rational choice is the same for all persons.19 Individual and rational choice is equal for all persons. Sameness of choice and equality of choice are the same. Sameness of thought and choice fosters both autonomy and collectivity. Equality in thought and choice fosters both autonomy and collectivity. Autonomy and collectivity mutually reinforce each other.
Setting out the antinomies of community results in recognition of the underlying contradiction of sameness as the basis for community, an association that by definition is composed of separate and distinct, rationally-choosing individuals. In addition, the problematic of the relationship of the individual to others, of the self to the collective is also exposed. This is a central problem in modernist theorizing; one in which there is a desired reconciliation of the two components that effects communication and understanding, construction of knowledge, and mutually-agreed morality. This problem in standard philosophic treatment is less acute (even non-existent) between like persons because an analogy has been proposed for their common thoughts and actions. Likewise in earlier modern essentialist theory, cognitive, structural and cultural universals offered a solution for persons thinking, living and acting alike. Such speculation, however, has never accounted for relationships across difference, or in the case of the solution of friendship, for less direct relations and associations. Iris Marion Young sees the problem as one of community itself. She writes,
The ideal of community…privileges unity over difference, immediacy over mediation, sympathy over recognition of the limits of one’s understanding of others from their point of view…. [Moreover this] desire for unity or wholeness…generates borders, dichotomies, and exclusions…. [It reproduces] homogeneity.20Elaboration of Young’s central point is needed here. Community bounds in a way that simultaneously includes and excludes, including on the basis of sameness and excluding on the basis of difference. Communities are separate from each other and deny difference not only as they relate to other communities but as they interact internally as well. Of the former, especially devalued are wholes temporally and spatially distant. For the latter, the denial of difference is bolstered by individualism, since the individual is also a unity, “not in need of anything or anyone other than itself,” but paradoxically one leveled relative to every other one with equal communal rights.21 Moreover the denial of difference results in the creation of “others” and their alienation from “we.” Even “equal rights” talk is just that, talk. What is created are authentic and valuable groups over and against inauthentic and less or nonvaluable ones.
Two points to underscore are the desire for unity and the establishment of hierarchical oppositions.22 Both are essential foundations of theoretical and practical life, both tied in formal and more commonsense terms to needs for certainty and truth. As is well known, feminists have written a great deal about both of these essentials and about the evil that comes with enculturated exclusion and otherness.23 Initially feminist writing attempted to redefine the oppositional hierarchies by valuing the excluded and other component; for example, nature as related to culture, the private as related to the public, the reproductive as related to the productive, and the emotional as related to the rational. Likewise there has been a turn to community itself, in a project to valorize the distinctiveness of female and feminist communities. Early on, this turn was based in a psychoanalytic explanation of the gendered relational aspect of women’s upbringing in contrast to the separational aspect of that of men. Community was proposed out of the bonding that women have with their mothers and, by analogy, with each other. The historical reliance of women on their own communal associations — their sisterhoods — is well-documented.
More recent writing has recognized the dangers of an essentializing sisterhood, coming primarily from feminists of color and post-colonial identities who reminded white feminists of the contradictions of a western, Euro-centric, middle-class oppression. This has been an important lesson, one that affirms once again and in yet another way, the valuing of difference. Similarly, the writings of feminist and more general post-structuralists have attempted to disrupt the idea of the unified self. These authors dispense with the idea that any subject can know herself or express that knowledge to herself or to others. The shift from subject-unity to subject-multiplicity is to recognize that such reflections, interactions and understandings are always ambiguous and decentered and dispersed in meaning. Thus transparent comprehension and expression is simply not possible.24
Young relates these changes in a postmodern reanalysis of community to overcoming denial of difference. Her position retains “the ideal,” but institutes a new politics in the public association of an “unoppressive city.” The claim is that such an organization
instantiates social relations as difference…[with] groups and cultures… exchanging and overlapping interactions that do not issue in community, yet which prevent them from being outside one another…. [What can exist is]…a positive inexhaustibility of human relations…[that is, of] openness to unassimilated otherness…[and] the possibility…for new groups to form and emerge around specific interests.25This proposal goes a long way toward recognizing and valuing difference instead of denying it, yet it still leaves me dissatisfied. This is because retaining the community ideal also retains the basic norm of community and therein the foundation of sameness.
I think the time has come to disavow community because the concept itself carries the historical and ideological baggage of the failures of western liberal association. As stated above, progress aside toward a “best world” and a good life for increased numbers of persons, the society in which we live still houses many, many people in conditions of poverty, potential destruction and death, and plenty of physical and psychological pain. Myths aside also, most recent years have “made things worse,” not better. One of the central reasons for this world condition has been the persisting reliance on the solutions inherent in community that privilege the face-to face relations of sameness. Rather, we must undertake interactions across difference in direct encounters, and simultaneously, reorder societal structures that perpetuate the hierarchical inequalities of power and their concomitant evils.
I propose a new, non-fixed postmodern “ideal”26 in a concept that replaces community. This is `heteromity.’27 Initially this concept must be understood in terms of its own fluidity, changing condition, and tendencies toward dispersed and deferred meaning. This fluidity is an analogue to the experience of different persons the concept attempts to (but never quite can) encapsulate. ‘Heteromity’ is derived from the suffix ‘ity’, denoting human association, and the root ‘hetero’, denoting difference. In heteromity, as I see it, different persons join together for different purposes, for different time periods, with at the very least the acknowledgement and valuing of their difference. Because of their “joining,” of course, some agreement to come together must also exist, but (to emphasize) just for a time. In addition, a significant aspect of this joining is that totalities of nihilism, fragmentation and anarchy are themselves denied. It is a tentative and even fleeting association, but an association nonetheless.
Several conceptual components seem crucial to a heteromity The first is a basic inclusion of difference rather than an exclusion on the basis of sameness. A second is a multiple and changing sub-group interior and an ever-regrouping exterior in which members move in and out of groups because their boundaries are easily permeable. A third is that members identities are themselves multiple and non-privileged and therefore are “differing” in themselves. A fourth is that group identity is conceived of as itself decentered in the differentiated and disrupted marginality of all of its members.
As is evident, heteromity is a term with much in common with heterogeneity. What is not so evident is its ties to ‘heteronomy’. The latter has been culturally devalued as the opposite of autonomy, as dependent and thus thought that is not free-willed. A more appropriate redefinition in the fluid association of the postmodern world is heteronomous as positive dependence, that is, of persons needing each other and `thinking’ jointly for a time. Most appropriate is heteronomous thought and activity within heteromity. Finally something must be said about the efficacy of creating a new concept. First, it is clear that calling something (like temporary human association) by a new name “sounds strange.” Someone will surely remark that `community’ is what is meant. But, present times are filled with new terms that become commonplace and the point need not be belabored.
To conclude the present discussion a return to two previous aspects is necessary. The first is to reconsider the proposals of Rorty for solidarity and Fox-Genovese for a priori community. In her argument, the latter recognizes “difference” as I have here and has critiqued male-centered individualism as well. However, her concluding claim is that “the recognition of difference does not dictate the social consequences of difference…consequences…[that must be] a matter for the collective determinism of society as a whole.”28 I find her solution untenable precisely because it seems even more difficult to reverse the a priori positions of the individual and the community in western society. That is, it is harder to envisage the individual as derivative of the collective than it is to define the collectivity in a new way. Historically, if the community is male-dominated, a new ordering will not change this and Fox-Genovese’s “equity” model will thus retain the bias against women and their experience — against the different “other” that she wishes to eradicate.
For the present project, Rorty’s solidarity accomplishes only a little more. There is value, clearly, in a proposed association understood as “contingent” and not natural, God-given, or based on human essence. There is some value also in proposing reform through “the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices”29 and through mutual commitment to reduce our cruelty to each other because it is this potentiality that is shared. The problem here, as with Fox-Genovese, is first that `community’ is retained with all of its inherent and previously described limitations.30 Second, the problem is that the contradiction of sameness is not addressed and the dilemma of difference not considered. Rorty acknowledges that solidarity is strongest among “one of us.”31
Lastly, the disavowing of community and the subsequent positing of heteromity overcomes the contradictory antimonies previously set out. Now, their meaning is reexamined and refigured. Recall the formula: to read the statement and understand that the second of a two-part assertion does not follow from the first part. When a base of difference is substituted for one of sameness, the contradictions are resolved. Here the general point is made with three illustrations from the sets of antinomies offered above. One: The unity of the group and its identity based on difference is set up to foster the development of individual selves. Two: Collective allegiance based in difference is premised on individual rationality. Three: Autonomy and collectivity mutually reinforce one another when each is defined on a basis of difference.
In sum, what is desirable for these postmodern times is a new concept that replaces community. Such a concept, indeed, such an entity — a human association on the basis of difference — is a heteromity, in which selves are understood as different and as forming a group characterized by difference. Here at the last, individualism, rationality and choice are not neutralized away in sameness but equate in their difference to the group formation. Here the logical contradictions of western modern community are overcome. This is a significant step that begins to pave the way for “better” life for more persons. Such an aim, surely, is central for educational philosophy and educational life.32
For a response to
this essay, see Stout.
1 Robert Booth Fowler, The Dance With Community (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991).
2 Fowler, The Dance With Community, 3, 2.
3 See particularly the Presidential Address and Response at the annual meeting of The Philosophy of Education Society, 1988; Mary Anne Raywid, “Community and Schools: A Prolegomenon,” Philosophy of Education 1988, ed. James Giarelli (Normal, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1989), 2-17; Kenneth D. Benne, “If Schools Are to Help Build Communities,” Philosophy of Education 1988, ed. James Giarelli (Normal, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1989), 18-23.
4 The process of analysis and replacement is a kind of “deconstruction” in which meanings are fluid and temporary.
5 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
6 Thanks to David Green for this clarification. One notes also that Rorty has denied the “postmodern” label.
7 Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions, 33.
8 Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” in Feminism/postmodernism, ed. L. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 302. Thanks to Anne Phelan for this key reference.
9 Community is distinguished from both society which is larger and more decentered and state which is more institutional.
10 Choice is constituted of self-interest and free-will, both of which are part of conceptions of individualism and autonomy.
11 John Rawls, “Fairness to Goodness,” Philosophical Review 84 (1975): 500, as cited by Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 61.
12 Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 61.
13 Sandel, 180-181.
14 Ibid., 183.
15 See Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
16 Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” 305.
17 My intent is to employ the “Kantian” term in a non-technical way, and I hope that this is appropriate.
18 For an account of this central aim of modernist life, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
19 Of course, this does not make the empirical point that all persons might choose to think alike, but rather the logical claim that there is no necessity to their doing so.
20 Young, Ibid., 300.
21 Ibid., 309.
22 As these relate to teaching, see Lynda Stone, “Essentialist Tensions in Reflective Teaching,” in Reflective Teacher Education: Case Studies and Critiques, ed. L. Valli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992 [in press]); and “Toward a Transformational Theory of Teaching,” Philosophy of Education 1988, ed. James Giarelli (Normal, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1989) 186-195.
23 See particularly Nel Noddings, Women and Evil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
24 See in general the writings of Julia Kristeva and other French feminist poststructural theorists.
25 Young, Ibid., 319.
26 There is a contradiction in proposing a postmodern “ideal,” as a unitary, fixed end. Here it must be defined merely as a social construction enduring across time.
27 Joan Wallach Scott poses her own term, “partage” in a similar vein. See her interesting article and sources from the French, in Change 23 (1991): 43.
28 Fox-Genovese, Ibid.,.244.
29 Rorty, Ibid., 60.
30 Rorty turns to solidarity for the community but does not relinquish the modern concept.
31 Ibid., 191. Rorty’s private ironist also values his difference from traditionalists but the group norm is still “sameness.”
32 I want to thank Mary Lynn Hamilton, Marilyn Johnston and Royal Fruehling for their initial encouragement, Henry Alexander for particular assistance, and the reviewers for a helpful critique.