Frank Kelleter, Yvonne Albers. ‘Community’. In ‘Community’, ed. Yvonne Albers, Frank Kelleter. Articulations (August 2024): https://doi.org/10.60949/s5py-2465.

Curated Collection

Community

by
  • Published August 2024
Abstract

When we speak of “Temporal Communities” and “Competing Communities” (the titles, respectively, of Freie Universität’s Cluster of Excellence and its Research Area 1), what do we mean by community? This terminology advances a methodological claim. Abstractly put, to study community according to the praxis-centred model proposed by the Cluster means to tap into the historical reflexivity of temporal communities. It means to ask if and how specific literary collectives thought and wrote about themselves as communities. It means to reconstruct how they conceived of their collectivity, how they imagined a sense of cohesion for themselves, and how they kept doing so over time, developing competing identities and serialised intelligibilities (rather than expressing a unified communal essence). Communities are dependent on praxis—a dimension of their existence that needs to be studied for each case anew, before offering a definition on one’s own terms, but also without relinquishing the possibility of a generalising perspective as it emerges from a dialogue of historical-praxeological projects. In fact, the projective integration of bottom-up approaches may be a particularly appropriate method for the study of literary communities, because it acknowledges that the term community is itself a literary one: a term inflected by stories, fantasies, and all kinds of mental constructs.

When we speak of “Temporal Communities” and “Competing Communities” (the titles, respectively, of Freie Universität’s Cluster of Excellence and its Research Area 1), what do we mean by community? This terminology advances a methodological claim. Abstractly put, to study community according to the praxis-centred model proposed by the Cluster means to tap into the historical reflexivity of temporal communities. It means to ask if and how specific literary collectives thought and wrote about themselves as communities. It means to reconstruct how they conceived of their collectivity, how they imagined a sense of cohesion for themselves, and how they kept doing so over time, developing competing identities and serialised intelligibilities (rather than expressing a unified communal essence). Communities are dependent on praxis—a dimension of their existence that needs to be studied for each case anew, before offering a definition on one’s own terms, but also without relinquishing the possibility of a generalising perspective as it emerges from a dialogue of historical-praxeological projects. In fact, the projective integration of bottom-up approaches may be a particularly appropriate method for the study of literary communities, because it acknowledges that the term community is itself a literary one: a term inflected by stories, fantasies, and all kinds of mental constructs.

Community / Society

Put differently, the literature of community imagines worlds of reciprocity as it theorises them. This is also true for its scholarly and scientific manifestations. Some semantic patterns can be observed. As an analytical category in Western/Northern discourses, the term community has been shaped since at least the 1880s by competing canonised usages in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities. With astounding regularity, these fields have employed the term as a utopian, nostalgic, or contrarian concept (Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library). There are widely different usages across disciplinary cultures, but what connects them is how often they speak of community as a counter-model to strongly mediated, highly formalised, or abstractly depersonalised forms of association. The community-concept has regularly offered itself as an alternative of sorts—of many sorts—to social structures that describe or theorise themselves as “Western,” “liberal,” “urban,” “capitalist,” or otherwise “modern”. Apparently, the community-concept fulfills a function, and responds to a desire, within such social structures. Time and again it has communicated modern self-concern and modern self-critique. This is why Ferdinand Tönnies’s classical distinction between society and community (Gesellschaft und Gemeinschaft) remains historically significant, even if it has long ceased to model sociological research. Tönnies’s binary has been criticised, modified, or paralleled by other social theories soon after it was introduced in 1887 (see Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library), but it is no coincidence that the code of society vs. community has remained attractive to times and places marked by strong anxieties of modernisation. Its shadow stretches all the way to the momentous philosophical standoff between liberalism and communitarianism in the 1980/90s (Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library) and beyond. Without detracting from the sophistication of this debate and similar ones, one can perceive their recurrence with a sense of recognition. It seems unsurprising that large collectivities organised by state bureaucracies and/or anonymous market relations express interest in other forms of socialisation below or outside of or prior to or above their own institutional realities. In fact, these are the typical conceptual planes on which (Western/Northern) theories of community have repeatedly situated themselves:

Immediacy / Mediation

According to this model, community is a term that complex social entities reach for when they want to reduce their complexity. Or in the words of Gerard Delanty (paraphrasing Raymond Williams): the term community has always been about something ‘more immediate’ Full reference in Zotero Library. This explains why the relationship of immediacy and mediation stands at the centre of many Cluster projects. Exploring the reflexivity of the community-concept, these projects ask (among other things): Do communal agents (texts, institutions, people, etc.) distinguish between immediate and mediated forms of reciprocity? How do they do so? Which types of mediation are still felt to be community-based, i.e., in the service of something “more immediate”? And which mediations are thought to distort the possibility of an immediate community?

To name a few examples from Research Area 1: Questions of mediation and immediacy stand at the centre of the interdisciplinary project ‘Enlightened Medialities’ (Kelleter/Pechlivanos/Traninger), which conceives of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century enlightened literatures as self-aware communities of mediated action. Focussing on the North American, Hispanic, and modern-Greek Enlightenments and their interactions, this project investigates how “enlightened” texts reflect on their own dependence on communication technologies; that is, how they think about their own rhetoricity as letters, pamphlets, newspapers, but also declarations, constitutions, novels, and so on. Rather than studying enlightened writing as a container of world-transformative ideas, this approach holds that one cannot separate the intellectual content of Enlightenment thought—its alleged philosophical universalism—from a rhetorical community’s self-reflexivity about its own communicative conditions. This idea also guides the project ‘Chronotopias: Revolution and the Cultural Magazine in the Arab Long Sixties’ (Albers): What is involved in “doing magazines” in the Middle East between the 1950s and 1970s? The project investigates self-reflexive media practices that enabled Arab literati and intellectuals to conceive of themselves as (literary) communities and, in the same breath, as part of a transtemporal, imagined community of Arab modernisers. Their reflections on commonality were conducted through decolonial readings of modernist debates, but also through debates about the nature and conditions of the magazine as a modern medium and competing ideas about  how to “do” magazines.

Function vs. Praxis / Self-Concern

It becomes clear that any study of community is confronted with a semantic conflict: As a self-description, the community-concept tends to communicate organic cohesion and intrinsic belonging, but its praxeological analysis, if not already its self-reflection, discloses paradoxical mediations of immediacy. Literary communities, in particular, like to characterise themselves as held together by shared origins, shared ideas, shared ideals, or shared values: held together by consensus. But claims of intrinsic commonality typically depend on elaborate communicative arrangements: They are afforded by technologies and institutions that do not require consensus but that can thrive on dissent, as long as communal conflicts are channelled through shared technological infrastructures. This is the core meaning of Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of “imagined” communities.

The deliberately (or self-reflexively) oxymoronic structure of Anderson’s expression needs stressing. Similar to other self-descriptions of modernity, such as “the public sphere”—insofar as the public sphere is imagined as a congregation of strangers Full reference in Zotero Library—this trope provocatively places two levels of observation side-by-side: one which thinks of community as a matter of sensual immediacy and one which discerns community as a matter of technological mediation. Once this conceptual move has been made (which happens as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), it is only a small step from claiming that community can be artificially arranged to recognising that this may be the only way for communities to exist and maintain themselves: that they are never ontologically given, never “expressive” of something that precedes them, but always mediated, always serialised, always a matter of variation Full reference in Zotero Library. No wonder such costly simulations are interested in—and fascinated by—scenarios of immediacy, producing narratives of community as something beneath, or away from, or prior to hegemonic social structures and technologies.

Tracing the (Western/Northern) semantic history of the term community since the 1880s, we therefore find theories and imaginations of modernity that are not only self-reflexive but often also self-discontented, unfolding in conflictive multiplicity (Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library). The difficulties and paradoxes of this situation have exposed talk of community to critical objections that seek to disenchant the term, especially in literary studies. As a category of literary (self-)evaluation, the community-concept often appears to be hopelessly out of touch with sociological or media-historical accounts of literature, which find conflictive fields Full reference in Zotero Library and autopoietic systems Full reference in Zotero Library and pragmatic networks Full reference in Zotero Library or assemblages (Full reference in Zotero Library, Full reference in Zotero Library) where the actors themselves see common values and identities and ontologies.

A key intervention of the present theory of community is that this conflict between function and praxis should not be avoided or resolved, but embraced, explored, and continued. While it is important to distinguish between self-descriptions and their scholarly re-descriptions, the term community has something crucial to offer to the study of literature as an analytical category. Almost inevitably, this term shifts attention to a number of literary practices that deserve closer scrutiny. This is not to deny that the study of communities is necessarily the study of networks (Full reference in Zotero Library; for interaction rituals, see Full reference in Zotero Library), understood in a praxeological sense as action-structures which involve people, but also institutions, such as libraries and academies (central to the project ‘Translating the Relics of Byzanthium’, Leivadiotis), and nonhuman actors, such as media, technologies, rhetorical techniques (central to the project ‘Arts of Memory’, Traninger/Kodera) as well as stylistic habits and all kinds of objects (such as fashion, central to the project ‘The Cultural Work of Competing Fashion Literatures in Nineteenth-Century America’, Spatzek).

But something important becomes visible when we address such groupings as communities, because their networked (inter)actions are usually animated by more than a desire for further connectivity. No doubt, any given literary community—say, the Petrarchan “world” or the Soviet “Cosmopolis” or the international writers’ scene in 1960s Berlin (to name a few more of the Cluster’s projects; see Huss, Frank, Müller-Tamm)—is engaged in networking: all sorts of connections are being established and maintained all the time. But equally remarkable is the fact that these networks have an interest in their own existence and persistence. This axiological self-concern, unaccounted for in any merely strategic notion of social distinction Full reference in Zotero Library, is captured profusely in the vocabulary of community, despite the organic baggage that comes with the term. By contrast, sociological categories such as ‘the field’ and ‘the network’ seem less well equipped to register this consciousness of literary practice about literary practice.

The task, then, is to honour and utilise a community’s historical reflexivity without confusing a community with its evolving self-descriptions. Communities tend to produce performative habits. They generate more or less formalised commitments (for instance, commitments to aesthetic styles). They produce infrastructural obligations, such as media protocols and certain modes of self-study, sometimes entire academic disciplines with their professional instruments of custodianship and reproduction. These acts of ongoing self-constitution should not be misunderstood as expressions of holistic cohesion; they never embody “true” communion. Hence the programmatic linkage of the community-concept with a concept of competition in the title of Research Area 1: This combination highlights the internal and external conflicts of a modern analytical concept that always also reaches beyond (or beneath or above) modernity.

Situated Meta-Reflexivity

Ultimately, then, the study of community leads from reflexivity to self-reflexivity. Students of community, as modern (self-)observers, can reflect on reflexivities without forgetting or denying their own historical and geopolitical contexts, their own “communal” commitments, obligations, and constraints. This analytical stance of situated meta-reflexivity (for lack of a better term) starts with the self-knowledge of historical actors but can never stop there, especially not if its institutional home is in a Western/Northern metropolis. Overarching historical arguments, spoken from a position of considered contemporariness and situatedness, remain possible, perhaps unavoidable. Critique, understood as the ongoing attempt at reliable description in a damaged world, remains necessary, also in the form of geopolitical self-observation. Meta-reflexive inquiry may thus be our best option to bypass the idealism and the pathos of the community-concept without betraying its political provocations and its continued imaginative urgency. The sociologist Steven Brint asks community studies not to get ‘bogged down in a conflict of romanticizing and debunking portraits of communities’ Full reference in Zotero Library—and we concur. But rather than championing a mode of typological generalisation, implying an impossible view from nowhere, we suggest that the situated modes of cultural history and literary studies may be particularly well positioned to do justice both to the socio-political conditions and the imaginative energies with which historical collectives have named and narrated themselves as communities.

Our plea for meta-reflexive inquiry also raises questions about the “we” invoked by it (for example, in the preceding paragraph). Who does this “we” stand for? Who does it name? The pronoun establishes, in the blink of one syllable, the idea of a group of people speaking in a unified voice, perhaps even unanimously. There is almost something sleight-of-hand in this pronoun, because the standpoint it claims to define has a history—a history effectively concealed by the sheer simplicity of saying “we,” as if the position we claim to occupy at the present moment was fully “ours.” What this way of speaking (and writing) obscures are the disputes that were waged to get there, as well as the politics that structure(d) those disputes. It obscures the story of how this community of people came to be what it proclaims to stand for—the story of who joined (for whichever reasons), who left, who participated without even formally joining. Our “we” thus moves and navigates in a field that, just as the literary field itself, all too often functions according to the “logic of permanent revolution” Full reference in Zotero Library, which is ultimately a competitive logic: in this case, that of academic competition. Far from speaking unanimously, then, this “we” draws on competing traditions of thought in gestures of critical affirmation and rejection; it mediates itself in established or newly tried forms of communication—such as this digital platform—to reach its peers and critics, and to ensure its persistence in time.

When we say “we” here, we therefore speak in an institutional voice: as members of Research Area 1 (RA1), called “Competing Communities,” within the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities. The members of RA1 share an interest in diverse forms of literary communities in time and space. Trying to problematize the phantasma of community as an organic entity, they highlight questions of connectivity, mediality, and communicative technologies, programmatically linking the community-concept with the concept of competition. Each member in our group of scholars contributes to this joint conceptual work from a different disciplinary, historical or local perspective and from different positions in the academic field. The group’s inherent and shifting diversity forces us to constantly reconsider our own positionalities as scholars in a global context. The notoriously overmediated concept of community lends itself perfectly to this task: It imposes self-reflection because it is itself deeply reflexive and, at the same time, often employed in an unreflected manner. Some of the perspectives gained in this work-in-progress have already been outlined in the course of this text. Three of them have found their way into this keyword entry as contributions.

On Our Insights

The first contribution is an insight co-authored by Bernhard Huss and Nicholas Longinotti. This contribution emerged from the project ‘Petrarchan Worlds’, which aims to reconstruct Petrarchism as a transnational and transtemporal community. The project challenges the notion of Petrarchism as a homogeneous style and school of thought in the tradition of Francesco Petrarch (Petrarca) (1304–1374), suggesting instead that the Italian renaissance scholar actively prepared the ground for competing future readings of his work. A reading of Petrarch’s collection of poems Il Canzoniere (The Song Book) as well as his collection of dialogues De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Fortune) demonstrates (1) how Petrarch fashioned himself as a highly contradicting personality, and (2) how he took ambivalent positions within one and the same body of texts, deliberately encouraging conflicting interpretations. Huss and Longinotti outline these interpretations on the basis of early Petrarchan vitae, fifteenth-century Petrarchan commentaries, and the reception of his moral philosophy, taking into account translations and illustrations. As much as these communities of Petrarchism might compete among themselves and over the course of time, they all reach back to the same point of reference, which is Petrarch as the author of a tremendously large body of texts and as a historical figure. For all these communities, Petrarch serves as a prism through which literature, history, and the course of civilisations are seen and re-read.

The second contribution, ‘Competing Communities, Renaissance Style’, takes another point of departure. It illustrates how the act of affiliating oneself with a specific community can serve as a claim to one’s own globality in time, constructing a concrete universal, similar perhaps to Oliver Marchart’s post-Marxist notion of ‘partial totality’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Anita Traninger thus considers a partial globality in time, turning to a striking example of how the desire for an immediate community requires complex practices of mediation. Her contribution outlines the community that emerged in an exchange of letters between the Dutch philosopher and theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) and his Italian friend Fausto Andrelini (1462–1518), which took place at the University of Paris around 1500. This exchange consisted of scraps of paper inscribed with ancient Latin proverbs, which Erasmus and Fausto secretly slipped to each other during lectures. In language and style, their correspondence asserts a transtemporal connection to ancient society and its cultural and linguistic heritage. It becomes a reference point for a community of like-minded spirits that transcends time and space. At the same time, it operates as a communicative vehicle that allows the two young humanist scholars to escape the scholastic dispositif of their university. Traninger’s reading of Erasmus and Andrelini’s letters argues that what has traditionally been received in the Western hemisphere as the normalised cultural universal of Greek and Latin antiquity is in fact a concrete, embedded, and situated universalism that emerged in discursive self-assignments to an imagined community in deep time.

Erasmus’s elective affinity with an ancient society also draws attention to the role played by affect in any collective sense of belonging among individuals, groups, or even institutions. The traditional notion of community as an immediate organic entity resonates with the idea that members of a community are bound together by emotional bonds, shared values, loyalties, and mutual personal involvement in each other’s lives Full reference in Zotero Library. But what happens to a community when it is confronted with the affecting physicality of a stranger? Our third contribution, a theoretical insight by Apostolos Lampropoulos, engages with intimacy as an instrument of social criticism. Lampropoulos asks to what extent (literary) representations of intimacy threaten communities, although or precisely because they might offer us an alternative concept of commonality. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s writings on hospitality and Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of sexuality against the backdrop of their theories of community, this contribution asks: How do representations of intimacy challenge our understanding of togetherness? Under what conditions can practices of intimacy lead to convergence or conflict between communities? ‘Critical intimacy’, as the author suggests, can trigger reflection on why, and under which conditions, some communities are enabled by intimacy while others are not. In other words, the notion of critical intimacy encourages a ‘systematic rethinking of separation’ (Lampropoulos), which confronts our guiding question in research area 1—the question of competing communities—with something like its mirror image.

Insights

The Transtemporal Community of Francis Petrarch

Petrarch (1304–1374) aimed to establish a transnational and transtemporal community that could bring together authors from different epochs and regions by imitating the idealised ancient Greek and Roman world, overcoming the supposedly obscure Middle Ages. The first part of this case study shows how Petrarch’s vernacular lyric poems Rerum vulgarium fragmenta were employed to foster…

Read more
Competing Communities, Renaissance Style

This case study discusses competing communities as transtemporal networks that may manifest in contemporary constellations but that are not sufficiently described in the vocabulary of social groups and shared values. It takes a claim from the Cluster proposal as its starting point, namely that ‘communities based in mediated communication (and more specifically in writing/reading) inevitably…

Read more
Critical Intimacy

Critical intimacy is a notion aimed at addressing commonality from within some of the things that matter most in life: theory, sex, and art. It draws on the momentum of the strong presence of theory in the humanities along with the demand for social justice, the momentum of the emergence of intimacy as a political…

Read more

Selected Bibliography

Citation

Frank Kelleter, Yvonne Albers. ‘Community’. In ‘Community’, ed. Yvonne Albers, Frank Kelleter. Articulations (August 2024): https://doi.org/10.60949/s5py-2465.

About

Corresponding author(s)
Curator(s)
Contributor(s)
PublishedAugust 2024
Curated Collection
Editor’s Tags
LicenceAttribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC (4.0)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.60949/s5py-2465
Version1.0

Contents

    Tags

    Community

    Print