Ferdinand Tönnies

The Assertion of a Right to Behave That Way Earned That Right

James G. Poulos: <q cite="http://pomoco.blogspot.com/2006/05/preliminary-notes-on-community.html>the requisite component of community was self-identification, and the requirement for a person who desired to personally express freely the identity of his community was that person's declaration of his membership in that community. To repeat for emphasis: the right to publicly behave the way one's community behaved was triggered by one's behaving that way in public. The assertion of a right to behave that way earned that right, because the standard of judgment for the existence of a community had become the declaration of community identity itself. Whereas Adam had come up with names for the animals as he saw them, communities came into being as they were named.

You can almost hear him running out of breath when he writes “[h]eterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual impulses combine with the authoritative weakness of marriage, the commonplace of contingent, semicommitted monogamous relationships, and the prevalence of socially-encouraged fantasies of entitlement and commercially-heightened jealous interest in new sexual experiences to make small-group socialization comparatively less enjoyable for people who seek community for other satisfactions” and the sentence-paragraph “[t]he role of psychology in destroying the civilized ritual of social distance at close quarters by democratizing art and sex, destroying discourse by democratizing history into personal narratives of identity narcissism, and destroying community by democratizing the will to power into the claiming of a right to whatever is desired is imperative to our theoretical understanding of community in culture.” It took me a couple of reads to wade through the presented i.e. the intersection of community and identity as well as sexual politics and psychology. I've been trying to figure out what it means to either build a community around something or how to bring together an already-existing community. Every group is now calling itself a community, but it gets worse: the concept of 'nation' and 'citizenship' is diluted when fans of a professional baseball team can call themselves that, not to mention have a sprawling Wikipedia page written about them. (That, says the guy who registered the bluejaysnation.com and canucksnation.com domains.)

My favourite quote about community still remains that of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: “Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word 'community' were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.” This comes close to point #4 in James Poulos' piece, the idea that a 'majority community' is a contradiction in terms.