The Individual and the Community

Love is a series of scars. No heart is as whole as a broken heart.
---Rabbi Nahman.

Quite often one will hear the words, 'the Muslim community'-a rather meaningless and trite phrase if ever there was one. It's not just that it represents belonging to an imagined, monolithic entity or that one's position on a particular issue is supposed to be explicable in terms of this identity, it's that the very notion 'community' is a construct of late capitalism, a reaction to the atomization that it produces, a warm after-glow set against the narrow (and false) individualism that is supposed to have supplanted it.

But in essence, these two terms, individual and society, are not so fundamentally distinct as to warrant a radical disjunction. In the reign of quantity, society is nothing but the accumulation of individuals. For Bentham society was a "fiction" or, as the latter-day saint would say: there is no such thing as society. And one could with equal reason say that the individual is a "communistic fiction" (Myrdal).

The community is a fictitious body composed of the individual persons who are considered constituting, as it were, its members. The interests of the community then is what?-The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.
---Bentham, 'An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation'

In modern consciousness there is not a common being but a self , and the concern of this self is with its individual authenticity, its unique, irreducible character, free of the contrivances and conventions, the masks and the hypocrisies, the distortions of the self by society.
---Daniel Bell, 'The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism'

The presiding idea of the individual against society is also the predominance of liberty over equality and solidarity in the western political tradition. the triumph of capitalism is one reason why one will rarely hear a western leader talk about politics in terms of Justice, Fraternity, or Solidarity. The language of justice is replaced by the language of the markets.

However, this only represents an accurate picture of the first stage, the solid stage of capitalism. In liquid modernity , the restraints of norms, society or bourgeois respectability- against which the avant-garde could press back- have dissipated. The problem for the individual (and art) now is not to break free but to ask what is meant by freedom when there is nothing to be free from. The problem now is one of leisure and boredom, how to kill time (the Eloi). There is no more tension between the market and the Republic, citoyen and bourgeois. The end of politics, the victory of the sea-gypsies. Remember, modernism starts with the profound desire to escape the earth (Marinetti).

The revolt against convention which was a sacred duty in the 19 th century is now, as a result of greater flexibility of society not obviously appealing.

From Iris Murdoch, 'Existentialism and Mystics':

Liberalism, then, destroys tradition through challenging authority. In a society where every man's opinion is equally valuable there is no unity of outlook [this is mirrored in art: the waning of a common symbolic order: C.Fuller]. This follows overspecialisation, the worship of techniques...Liberalism is a creed which dissipates and relaxes; and it prepares the way for that which is its own negation.: the artificial mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

'Existential political myth':

An age of anti-essentialist thinking, anti-metaphysical. A move away from all that is abstract: there is only the contingent..one might say, there is only the surface. For Hegel there is only the phenomenal show and nothing outside it (the pure immanence of reality..to be alone in Paradise!..Levinas: Gagarin, on reaching the limits of outer space says: "the re is no god here", thus confirming that man is the measure of all things, that man encounters no 'other', just himself or the products of his own mind).

The lived world is the real world (and therefore the best of all possible worlds) and has its own truth criteria within it. From now on the truth of life will have to be discovered from within history (what does it mean to say that truth is historical? Burckhardt). The way in which we picture the world becomes reality. So, the solipsistic individual, cut off from any transcendental truth-knowable or not-becomes our reality. There is no human nature or determinable essence, no telos, only eternal striving, only existence. Man is nothing (neant). Marx would say: Man is nothing, Time is everything. Only at the end of time is Man redeemed again. His aspirations are subject to no role external to itself or common to others. [see Motherland for the Russian tradition]

A universalist individualism is now impossible. So those who are morally sensitive and intelligent enough not to be taken in by capitalism embrace a solipsistic and hubristic individualism [on the shallowness of homo economicus see Mary Douglas, 'Missing Persons']

The inhabitant of the great urban centres reverts to a state of savagery-that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism. Any improvement of this mechanism eliminates certain modes of behaviour and emotions. Comfort isolates, on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization.
---Valery

The cult of personality has deep roots in the Puritan and Romantic revolt against authority external to the individual. But it is also the desire to be free from nature or order, to invent oneself ceaselessly. Modern man is haunted by time, which is to say he is haunted by death.

The End of Politics, the End of Community.

What binds people together nowadays? "Organic solidarity"? what obliges me to open my hand to my brother? If politics is the site at which we are bound and free, the place where we are at once united and distinct, is it possible to still talk in terms of politics when there are only individuals, each with their own private, incommunicable vision of the good?

Nancy writes poignantly about how the death of Communism is more than the ceasing of a political system: it is the the demise of a horizon, a possibility, a way of thinking about community. Of course, it was a false community from the outset since it was, in essence, tainted by a 'western' and materialistic understanding, a revolt against the very traditions of the land (the Communists' love for the machine was no less than that of their capitalist counterparts..witness China now !).

But perhaps it is fair to say that in the very notion of community there is always a sense of loss, of a falling away? Why are we always harking back for some lost sense of unity? Is this a remnant of Arcadia or the Garden , or is it a longing for membership in a mystical body?

It is tempting to say that the end of the left marks the end of politics, perhaps the end of history even. but what of the disconcerting possibility that it has been the success of the left that has ended politics? Iris writes, the moral energy of the socialist movement was founded , or at least animated, by the desire for equality and efficiency and the revulsion towards all forms of exploitation. Surely the parliamentary labour party (along with the trade unions) have achieved their primary goal-that of political participation, to be counted amongst the ranks? And isn't labour, the standard of living, the measure of all value now? (It's the economy, stupid!) The Left, with its passion for modernization, its messianic desire to sweep away all that was remotely associated with the past, the imperative to tidy-up the messy world as it was and re-shape it to what it should be (whence the distrust of philosophy in favour of action), its contempt for limits and tradition, in this and so many other ways it was already in the camp of its opponent. Once the revolt against the Father is over, once the initial thrill of the frenzy subsides, the question remains: what is to be done? The warmth of any common purpose has drained away.

It is tempting to say that the demise of communism signalled the dissolution, the dislocation of community. This can hardly be denied. But it seems as if the roots of it go back much further: isn't Descartes' positing that of an isolated individual, isn't the enclosure movement already the destruction of the commons?

Can we now think of community except in negative terms, as something parochial, myopic in its outlook? Community as the place where everything is reconciled, as a false hope for wholeness, innocence, and completeness when we live in shattered time? But perhaps this is to formulate things int eh wrong way since it is to think of it terms of happiness, as a state of being where 'love stilleth the will'. Might it not be that it is the place where the death of the individual is not meaningless, a place beyond technopolitical domination or happiness? Might not community be the place where I find myself, where I am myself..a reformulation of the cogito: we are, therefore I think. There can be no 'I' without the 'other'..this is the cross we bear...

The problem for 'community' in the western tradition is that it is a community of human beings as producers, and fundamentally as the producers of their own essence in the form of their own labour and work. What greater paradox could there be? Labour does not bring people together-unless it be admitted that a crowd is also 'political'. To labour is to suffer-and that is a private matter. What is this but an absolute immanence of man to man -a humanism-and of community to community-communism ?

Everything (including nature) is humanized (or "socialized"). But the individual is merely the residue of the experience of or dissolution of community...it is another, and symmetrical, figure of immanence. One cannot make the world with atoms. There has to be a clinamen, an inclination of one person to another, which is to be inclined outside oneself, over that edge which opens up its being-in-common.

To be ab-solutely detached, ab-solutely alone, is to be closed in on oneself , without relation (to other people, the land, or distant times)..it is to reject ecstasy (ex-stasis) and wonder (which is the ability to marvel and not appropriate, colonize all that is not 'I')