RESPONSE TO “DISAVOWING COMMUNITY”

Maureen Stout
University of California, Los Angeles

In his book The Dance with Community Robert Fowler writes: “the strength and…diversity of the appeal of community in contemporary American intellectual life guarantees that no definition of the term, no matter how spacious, will easily enclose or tame it” and that “the meaning of community is elusive, a word without an essence or a text without meaning.”¹ In her essay “Disavowing Community” Professor Stone attempts to give that text meaning, in replacing ‘community’ with ‘heteromity’, a term that she suggests may be more representative of the contradictions and multiplicities of a ‘postmodern’ world.

Professor Stone does not disavow the search for that elusive thing, community, but the meaning of the concept itself, arguing that the western, liberal ideological baggage that ‘community’ carries with it in fact inhibits the possibilities for creating something like ‘community’ in contemporary life. Her argument not only illuminates the contradictions of the norms underlying this concept, but reminds us of the complex relation between the concepts we use and the policies and practices that operate in the name of those concepts. This discussion will focus on these two aspects of Professor Stone’s analysis, specifically, the possibilities and problems of creating a more plastic and inclusive concept ‘heteromity’ that avoids the contradictions of ‘community’ and second, the ‘equalizing’ social functions that she infers this new concept could identify and promote.

Professor Stone identifies as the principal contradiction of ‘community’ an ideology that “sets up individualism, rationality and choice…as central components of community — a collective unit”² while at the same time valuing ‘sameness’ and ‘equality’ as the basis upon which these individuals unite. She has correctly ‘unpacked’, I believe, the contradiction at the center of the term; as long as individual values are held sacrosanct, and the public, or common good is seen as, at best, instrumental in achieving individual interests, and at worst, antithetical to those interests the term ‘community’ will only obscure the complexity of human interaction.

To remedy this apparent conceptual impasse Professor Stone offers a new term: ‘heteromity’, a concept that relies on the poststructural or postmodern notion of ‘difference’ and the decentered subject for its formulation. Under this new conceptualization, association is seen as the temporary and shifting relationships within and between different social groupings. Group/community boundaries are fluid, and their very identities difficult to isolate because they constitute the interactions of numerous subjectivities; thus ‘heteromity’ defines the group as a dynamic coalition of individuals.

Thus far I have no quarrel with Professor Stone’s reconceptualization, until she asserts that “when a base of difference is substituted for one of sameness the contradictions are resolved.”³ She argues that “autonomy and collectivity mutually reinforce when each is defined in a basis of difference”⁴ and rejects Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s assertion that the collective social consequences of ‘difference’ are a matter for the determination of society as a whole.⁵ In fact, where collectivity is seen as derived from the choice of autonomous individuals, as in Professor Stone’s analysis, autonomy may reinforce collectivity or, more specifically, provide the basis for common action, but the inverse — that collectivity will reinforce autonomy — does not necessarily follow.

Thus the statement that “the unity of the group and its identity based on difference is set up to foster the development of individual selves”⁶ conflates the predicated outcome of this reconceptualization with the premises upon which it rests. The premise is offered as a statement intended to prove the resolution of contradictions: that “collective allegiance based in difference is premised on individual rationality.”⁷ It may be, on the contrary, that the transient collectivity that this conceptualization describes is in constant tension with the conflicting identities that constitute it. Curiously, Professor Stone’s efforts to resolve the contradictions of community is antithetical to the postmodern ethos that she invokes, as postmoderism argues that contradictions are an inevitable and necessary condition of contemporary life.

The postmodern embrace of contradictions and discontinuities is the expression of an ideology that argues that in illustrating these in both our concepts and practice we can reveal the ‘hidden’ practices that disenfranchise particular elements of society and thereby offer the possibility for disrupting the hegemony of the dominant (usually white, male) social voice. Postmodernism argues against the construction of any metatheory to explain social inequality and oppression, even some feminist theory, as Professor Stone reminds us. She is thus critical of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s ‘equity’ model, which offers a new conception of community where the realization of the potential of individuals and the needs of society “lies not in the repudiation of difference but in a new understanding of its equitable social consequences.”⁸ Professor Stone argues that not only is it implausible to envision the community as a priori the individual in Western society, but if community is male-dominated a new ordering will not eradicate the “othering” of women.

Professor Stone may be correct: understanding difference in terms of social consequences may not eradicate the alienation and oppression of different social groups — women among them — but neither will a notion of association based in difference. While the emphasis on the different subjectivities that form that association is an important step in understanding postmodern forms of social life, neither this nor any reconceptualization will alter the social practices that inevitably create and sustain privileged forms of social discourse at the expense of others. That is, “othering” as a concept is not a function of ‘community’ based on a notion of sameness, nor a practice that is the sole prerogative of white males, but exists between individuals at all levels and in all forms of social life — we are all someone else’s ‘other’. Simply emphasizing difference will not, I fear, eradicate the ongoing practices of “othering” in which we are all, without exception, implicated.

While Professor Stone has skillfully revealed the contradictions inherent in our conceptualization of ‘community’, her substitution of ‘difference’ for ‘same’ does not free her from the yearning for that elusive thing called ‘community’, ‘heteromity’ notwithstanding. In refusing to disavow the thing community, she continues the same search under a different name; our (collective?) task may be to decide if it is time to call off the search.

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¹ Robert Booth Fowler, The Dance with Community: The Contemporary Debate in American Political Thought (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 3.

² Lynda Stone, “Disavowing Community,” Philosophy of Education, 1992, ed. H. Alexander (Champaign, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1992).

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

⁶ Stone, “Disavowing Community.”

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Fox-Genovese, Feminism Without Illusions, 256.