The political and media worlds are full of myths – taken for granted received wisdom dished out by commentators or observers or the politically interested and rarely backed up by any evidence. One is that community is dead, individualisation everywhere, social ties destroyed. What this usually means on the left is that a critique of neoliberalism or the market wants to take a social angle (and the spectre of the missing class subject of history usually hovers in the background). From Third Way types and the conservative right usually all that is bemoaned is that things are just different and conventional verities called into question.
Marx was no doubt right to say that in modernity “all fixed, fast-frozen relationships are swept away”, but he says that like it’s a bad thing. Of course that’s vulgar Marxism – the real Marx also celebrated the creative destruction of feudal and patriarchal ties as liberating both the human spirit and human energies. And what social analyses that are politically inspired often miss is the complexity of social identities and relationships in today’s late modernity (a point powerfully made by Amartya Sen in his excellent recent book Identity and Violence). And also the power of heterarchy or self-association to create real communities. We can see this in multiple sites. For instance, music subcultures and the different types of family created by same sex attracted people. We can see it in communities intermediated by the internets.
But we can also often see this in localities. What exists now is often a complex mixture of the global and the local which transcends verities about multiculturalism as well as supplanting the imagined pasts of either (for instance) working class mining towns bound together by class and union solidarities or mythical perfect villages in the country where everyone has their place, and knows it. The distasteful moralism of much social policy and the insult given to those who are really working to build community or just living it by the proponents of authoritarian politics of both left and right is just that. It’s also often driven by false nostalgia and a desire to re-inscribe an imagined sameness of the past onto a confusing and fast changing multiplicity of present day realities.
It’s no basis for social policy or political action. Going with the grain of the self-organising communities that actually exist, and respecting their autonomy, is.
Note: I’ve been tossing around a few ideas inspired in part by some reading on self-organisation and heterarchy in economic sociology, and in teaching a course at ACU this semester on the sociology of culture. But the prompts for these musings are the recent series of posts on unemployment here and at Troppo and Catallaxy, and an excellent article in Prospect on Hidden Solidarities. Go read it!
Self-organising communities can be sights for conservative heirarchy and exclusionism. What happens for those who are unable to access the
is that they are further isolated then suffer the consequences of deterioration on, not only a social or physical level, but also on a psychological level, placing a further burden on society as a whole.
Gunns Tasmania
What’s wrong with self-organising communities, jl? In fact, let’s be honest, what other kind of viable communities exist?
I know that none of the various communities with which I interact came about through somebody else’s fiat, and it’s a total conflation to compare, say, ‘gated’ communities with simple organic networks, ethnic, religious, political, social, whatever.
The confusion over the tremendous freedom of people to socialise or not to socialise is really the core of the British inability to define and understand their own national identity (in the Prospect article), as well as the anxiety over the Australian so-called ‘failure’ of multiculturalism. British society does quite fine without a monolithic identity, and Australian multiculturalism survives healthily despite all challenges. It’s simply impossible to tell other people what their identities are and with whom they should spend their time and energy.
Simple.
You are right that phony nostalgia for ‘community’ is a weak base for social criticism. But it seems that the opposite trap is at least as much a danger – overplaying the extent to which people (as agents, or as subjects, to use the sociological terms) create their communities, and consequently assuming them to be beyond critique.
Of course the critic needs to pay attention to the “complexity of social identities and relationships” in society. But they are imposed on us as much as we make them. That’s the classic sociological dilemma I suppose.
It’s partly this desire to find something positive to say that has driven so much sociology to focus on things like music subcultures and internet communities – but we shouldn’t forget that these are basically hobbies that people do in their spare time. No reason to abandon social critique.
Wasn’t British society subject to a series of race riots in the recent past by those in self-organised communities? And certainly, self organised communities can be very constructive social entities. But what about those living alone, the elderly, disabled physically or mentally, those living with poverty or addictions, or caring for the elderly or disabled? Do they have the same “freedoms” to organise communities? How are they able to access post-modern resources to initiate organised communities? Although, is a group of the same people travelling regularly on the same bus, a community?
There was an independant community group in Brisbane, that has been, once again, swallowed up by a larger right wing national organisation. Easier to manipulate possible radicals if an organisation is governed by federal funding. The popularity of the group is likely to wane given the changed environment, leaving many once again isolated.
They are not likely to have the energy or resources to self organize another group. So where do they go? or how are they to participate in “community”?
I’m trying not to set up “good-bad” binary oppositions here. Of course some communities can have pathological elements, and others can be used by more formal organisations. My point rather goes to whether the basis of social policy should be what exists, and what is largely positive under most circumstances, or on attempts to impose authoritarian straightjackets on reality and make reality conform to them.
Very true!
OK, Mark, I’m not having a go but I am a little puzzled about what it is exactly you’re trying to say.
One is that community is dead, individualisation everywhere, social ties destroyed.
I agree: this is more of a Thatcherite wish-list than any kind of analysis.
And what social analyses that are politically inspired often miss is the complexity of social identities and relationships in today’s late modernity … And also the power of heterarchy or self-association to create real communities. We can see this in multiple sites. For instance, music subcultures and the different types of family created by same sex attracted people. We can see it in communities intermediated by the internets.
Yes, there are various sub-cultures and social groupings but they are to a degree marginalised by the main socio-economic power-base. Can I look to my musical cultural ties to help me get a well-paid job hopefully related to my university training? No. Do these sub-cultures have much political power? No, or if they do it is of a very attenuated form.
And yes, how about all those other socially imposed (ie. by those with power) social relations such as master/servant, manager/clerk etc?
Are these not worthy of critique and the ambition of creating fairer social relations, be they decentralised or not?
I completely agree Christo. Concentrating on subcultures, online communities etc. emphasises spaces of freedom in our society. But it doesn’t have much to say about the world of work, where most of us have to spend most of our time, and around which the rest of our time is organised. At work most people have very little control over what they do. (This links back to Gummo’s posts yesterday.)
I’m not saying that kind of analysis is irrelevant. But you have to consider it along with people’s whole experience of life. Stuart Hall and the Birmingham group, in many ways the originators of that kind of cultural studies in the 1970s, were acutely aware of that. They were interested in asking why these things – fashion and soap operas and musical subcultures – took on such importance in people’s lives and consciousness. It was sympathetic, but still critical, and was driven by a desire for fundamental social change.
I guess it comes down to whether we do in fact see what exists as “largely positive under most circumstances” (Mark’s comment above). I’m a little more pessimistic. Clearly things could be much worse, but I think the danger for the left these days comes more from lowered expectations than “authoritarian straitjackets”.
The CIS’s project is to reengineer society by the construction/constitution of markets by the state, so that market exchange relations permeate every aspect of life.
It is an ambitious project, but somebody’s got to do it.
The widespread anxiety and deep suspicion of all things ‘political’ derives in part, from people’s proper understanding of the ‘reconstruction’ that is being undertaken in the name of ‘public choice’ theories, ‘flexibility’ ‘self reliance’ risk management’ and the rest of the guff that has been deployed for the last twenty years.
Third Way guff is an attempt to leave the ongoing commodification of everything strictly alone, whilst commencing the big project of reengineering a socialisation appropiate to the new dispensation.
The latter option for politicaly correct social democrats has just been seriously narrowed by the now serious desire on the part of his party and the whole country, that Blair just go, preferably yesterday.
Serious problems are opening up in the cultural and social field for the cheerful creative destroyers in the new world of turbo charged enrichment of the few, and serious economic problems seem unable to be solved by post modern discursive deployment alone. The cheerful creatives are searching ever more desperately for ways to enculturate an obdurate and stubborn populace, into a love of interminable economic risk, by a huge working over and reintroduction of the Protestant work ethic, aka ‘mutual obligation’, as the solution to the lumpy bump problem of actually existing people and their interractions with actually existing labour markets.
The discursive brigade are finding that politics concieved of as ‘speech acts’, leaves something to be desired in the contest between ‘speech acts’,the US Marines and the lure of retail in markets where over prodcution has lowered the price of everything except the necessities of life. In the world of actually exisitng power relations, you can say anything you like, because real speech ain’t free. It costs around 1.5 Bill to buy a voice as loud as Rupe’s.
Race and ethnicity once again take centre stage as a mobilising strategy for a frightened political elite, and the working class is hysterically disabused of any idea they might have had, that an alternative anything is possible, largely by being constantly reminded that we are all ‘capitlaists now-look at our ‘super accounts’ and the way our wealth just grew like topsy in the latest real estate scam, oops, I mean soundly based rising real estate market. So far, so 1920s.
The neo libs have done every-one a favour. Attachment to the new dispensation is wafer thin-and they know it, hence the hysterical courting of the new evangelism. But it won’t work-if it doesn’t deliver, there will be more than tears before bedtime, and clue-ier capos know it.
That’s a highly entertaining polemic there, Linda.
Mark, I found the article in Prospect to be interesting, but in many ways the findings are not particular or peculiar to Britain or indeed to many other countries, I suspect. For example, the claim:
Hardly! Australia could just as equally be substituted for Britain. Also:
Surely, any such inquiry in Oz would find the same. As for:
We might be talking State of Origin, Cairns versus Townsville, Sydney versus Melbourne or whatever.
For me, the real issue is the ‘theories’or ‘concepts’ that the researchers are bringing to bear. Theory effects and affects the methodologies employed which effects and affects the facts identified and the meanings which are subsequently attributed.
Put simply, I have no issues with their findings and that’s because I am on the same relative wavelength. These insights are, in many ways, self-fullfilling prophecies. What they started with is what they got???
I wish that researchers would have an early introductory chapter, or whatever, on their theoretcial assumptions. Good books I read do that. And not just in sociology; a discipline that does it much better than most.
,
I’ll come back to some of the other comments when and if I get a chance tomorrow.
wpd -
Agreed!
See if you can find Ray Pahl’s book (it’s a short one – in a Routledge series where all the titles start with
“On” – as in “On Immigration” and “On the Political”) – “On Friendship” – and he spells all that out in an introductory chapter
Ah, I read ‘on immigration’ once and it was great!