Encountering Iris Marion Young’s critique of community

A mailing list for a research network which I’m a member of recently passed around Iris Marion Young’s “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” and I tagged it to read (kind of a thing for me, as one of my major questions revolves around what exactly community is). Having managed one blog post for the first time in years, I thought I might jump in and do another one, this time a good bit more theoretical and academic.

Digging into Young

The overriding impression that Young’s paper left me with was of an extremely competent theorist engaging a concept using the consensus-best tools available at the time (1986) – in this case, among others, Derrida and Adorno on the “metaphysics of presence.” (I confess this is a corner of their works that I don’t know much about, so I’m relying on my adjacent readings and Young’s explanation, which are at least coherent with each other.) The primary point of criticism for Young, in a nutshell, is the affirming theorization of community as a shared similarity – some aspect of shared identity out of which what she cites Carol Gould as calling a “common subjectivity” or Dorothy Allen (in proposing an ideal for feminism) a “shared feeling of belonging and merging,” or as Young paraphrases, a shared subjectivity.

Community, in the approaches that Young criticizes, exists largely in opposition to individualism, as effectively all that which is not individual. In Young’s words:

Community here is conceived as a totality, in two ways. It has no ontological exterior, since it realizes the unity of general will and individual subjectivity. It also has no historical exterior, for there is no further stage to travel. (Young 1986, 9)

So what am I to do here, who find Young’s paper an incisive criticism gorunded in classics of 20th century theory, and yet ground my own work in valorizations of community as a highly potent mechanism of new forms of alternative modes of being? How does Young’s work speak to Fiona Mackenzie’s application of Judith Butler to community land in Scotland, particularly her celebration of community ownership’s creation of “collective subjectivities?”

The cheap shot short answer is that I think the problem doesn’t lie with either Young or with what community actually is in practice, but rather with Derrida, Adorno, and Hegel, along with the purifications and transcendentalisms of modernism. Specifically, the notions of community, identity, structures, bonds, and mediation have all been placed into the transcendental realm of abstract thought and strict human-to-human interactions, hence the increased “authenticity” which the theorists Young criticizes have given to face-to-face interactions. If community exists nowhere but in the minds of humans, it truly is an ephemeral and nonsensical thing which should be dismissed as so much wishful thinking. (This is not just Young’s doing – the various theorists trying to elucidate community operate on much the same ground, as I try to show below.)

I find several interventions from Latour here particularly helpful. Reading Young through a Latourian lens, a number of warning flags jump up. First, community is a social construct if anything in the world is a social construct, which in Latour and Callon’s actor-network theory, raises the alarm to look for non-humans interposing and mediating social relationships. Specifically, the modernist and post-modernist theorists underlying Young’s argument must be classed as suspicious characters, prone to inappropriately purifying human relations into the transcendental realm while leaving non-human relations in the intimate realm, then hybridizing them on the sly when no one is looking. Further, separations of subject from object should be treated as incriminating, with a preference for the reassemblage of subject and object back to “quasi-objects” which straddle the boundary. And on page 3 we find Young doing this very thing. By way of explication, Young declares:

The desire to bring things into unity generates a logic of hierarchical opposition. Any move to define an identity, a closed totality, always depends on excluding some elements, separating the pure from the impure. Bringing particular things under a universal essence, for example, depends on determining some attribute of particulars as accidental, lying outside the essence. Any definition or category creates an inside/outside distinction, and the logic of identity seeks to keep those borders firmly drawn. In the history of Western thought the metaphysics of presence has created a vast number of such mutually exclusive oppositions that structure whole philosophies: subject/object, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female. In the metaphysical tradition the first of these is elevated over the second because it designates the unified, the self-identical, whereas the second side lies outside the unified, the chaotic, unformed, transforming. Metaphysical thinking makes distinctions and formulates accounts by relying on such oppositions, where one side designates the pure, authentic, good, and the other the impure, inauthentic, bad. (Young 1986, 3, emphasis mine)

I highlight specific dichotomies here because they are, in almost so many words, the modernist purification to which Latour so strenuously objects. (note: although Latour, like Derrida, objects to these “purifications,” he does not treat these dichotomies as an imposition of violence, requiring deconstruction. Rather, Latour insists that the separation was illusory–a trick of ontology which purports to purify but which is also engaged in hybridization.) Indeed, this is the platform from which Young builds the separation of individual from community. Individual, then, becomes immanent – material, bodily, palpable; community, its converse, enters the transcendental realm, cut off from the body, only of the mind. It is a short trip, then, to show that in order for this collective state of mind to persist, heterogeneity must be kept below some minimum. In Carol Gould’s analysis of Marx’s social ontology:

The separate subjects who were related to each other only as objects, namely, as beings for another, now recognize themselves in these objects, or recognize these objects as like themselves. Therefore they recognize each other as subjects, and the unity between subjects and objects is reestablished in this recognition. The subjects are then related to each other not as alien external others, but as aspects of a common species subject. The relations are therefore internal, since they are the interrelations within this common or communal subject which is now no longer made up of discrete individuals in external relations, but rather of individuals who are unified in their common subjectivity. . . . The subjects are therefore mutually interdependent and the relations between them are internal because each subject is what it is—a subject— through its relation to the other, namely, through being recognized as a subject by the other. These individuals therefore form a communal but differentiated subject that expresses itself in and through each individual. (Gould 1978, cited in Young 1986, 8)

And here we have Latour’s hybridized move. Individuals, having been fully purified away from any environment, society, identity, or anything else familiar to them, are now permitted to re-join each other in a more authentic, modernized form, in which non-human elements have been removed and collective identities may be freely expressed. No wonder the Derridians are unhappy – people have been violently shredded into individuals, only to now be allowed to reanneal. To again return to Latour, this time for his criticism of post-modernism, he scolds those like Derrida for taking the modernists at their word that they actually managed to pull off the purification in the first place, rather than simply pretending that they did.

Because, as Young correctly notes, at no point did communities in common practice exit their contexts so thoroughly.

In ordinary speech for most people in the U.S., the term community refers to the people with whom I identify in a locale. It refers to neighborhood, church, schools. It also carries connotations of ethnicity or race. For most people in the U.S., insofar as they consider themselves members of communities at all, a community is a group that shares a specific heritage, a common self-identification, a common culture and set of norms. In the U.S. today, identification as a member of such a community also often occurs as an oppositional differentiation from other groups, who are feared, or at best devalued. Persons identify only with some other persons, feel in community only with those, and fear the difference others confront them with because they identify with a different culture, history and point of view on the world. (Young 1986, 12)

As Young goes on to note, while community may not be the point at which racism, xenophobia, or the other arch-exclusionary ills of our society originate, but a community which must limit heterogeneity is at high risk of reifying them. Young again: “I do not claim that appeal to the ideal of community is itself racist. Rather, my claim is that such appeals, within the context of a racist and chauvinistic society, can validate the impulses that reproduce racist and ethnically chauvinist identification.” (Young 1986, 13)

Finding a way out for community

To recap my purposes here, my work has me in search of a formulation of community which on the one hand is powerful enough to explain the strong results that folks in CERN continue to find, and which can be pragmatically deployed to explain why, for instance, community land bownership in Scotland opens so many new possibilities for a reconfiguration of social and environmental relations. This was the subject of my paper at AAG this year, written and given before I’d read Young’s critique. To quote myself:

To put it briefly, I have been working to define a model of community which can meet these criteria:

• Strong
• More than warm fuzzies
• More than human
• Role of common property
• Generates secondary connections
• Incorporates local place but isn’t fully restricted by it

I won’t recount the full paper here (the text and slides are at the link), but one of the key aspects of the paper was in the second link (which referenced an earlier quote from J. K. Gibson-Graham), that community is not simply a nebulous positive good. Community, as Young notes, can be evil, repressive, and unjust. Community also must be constrained – it can’t simply exist as the global opposite to the localized individual.

The key way that the functional definition I offer departs from those which Young criticizes is that for me, community is simply not a collection of people bound by some common though pattern or self-reflected identity. As the last blockquote from Young identifies above, community does not originate from a shared subjectivity, but rather from a share common feature, or in Stephen Gudeman’s language, a commons at the core of its constitution. I term this commons at the center of community a binding commons, (a concept meant to build upon Susan Leigh Star’s notion of a boundary object). The community defined by a neighborhood is bound together by a set of common spaces, and the relationship of individual humans to their nonhuman built and unbuilt environment goes a long way to structure their position in the community. For instance, in the case of two residents living in side-by-side houses, in which one owns their residence and the other rents, the social relationship to their buildings of residence will help define their standing in the broader community.

Critically, unlike the forms of community which Young rejects in favor of a “politics of difference,” no such re-introduction of difference is needed here. Because each human individual here holds a specific relationship (whether legal, economic, affective, or some other form) to the binding commons, perhaps radically different relationships, community can now be defined to fully include a much broader range of difference. It also becomes far easier for the researcher to describe and map these relationships; whereas before shared mental states and common feelings were our only markers, now we have spatiotemporally active interactions between actors.

Young, Iris Marion. “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.” Social Theory and Practice 12, no. 1 (1986): 1–26.