Monday, May 17, 2004
(6:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Stop it with the community crap!
I'm sick of hearing about community. I'm sick of people railing on the evils of individualism. I'm sick of people throwing around the term "responsibility" as though they know what it means. Yes, we're all responsible for the actions of the social bodies to which we belong. That's obvious. We all contribute in our own way to society, although society is not simply the sum total of all individual actions. I'm fine with that. What I'm not fine with is when the harping on community seems to shift into a desire for a hive mind. Yes, I know that none of the advocates of community would say they desire a hive mind. They have nicer, friendlier, more morally-charged and guilt-inducing ways of putting it. Still, that seems to be the goal: all of us together in one big blob.
They want to forget about subjectivity -- that's the problem, thinking that particular people are identifiable. It's all an illusion -- in reality, we're a blob. Fine. But I will never be Ralph Luker, Dallas Jones, Tara Smith, or Mother Teresa. I will always be Adam Kotsko, and if I change my name, then I'll always be the blogger formerly known as Adam Kotsko. There are particular people. There is some necessary space between particular people. Maybe particular people's minds or their way of relating to the world have a particular structure, and maybe they have some other kind of structure, or whatever -- but there are particular people! And that's not just a secondary phenomenon! I'm willing to grant that "society" or the symbolic order or whatever we want to call it has a relatively autonomous existence, once it's founded. I'm willing to grant that we are deeply shaped by that order. But there are still particular people! And those particular people have a relatively autonomous existence once they are integrated into the symbolic order. Certainly some theories of subjectivity have been inadequate or misleading in accounting for that autonomy. Some of them (in my opinion, the Lacanian one in particular) are better. Having none at all seems to me to be the worst option.
The evangelical intellectuals' fixation on "church" seems to me to repeat the moves of the theories of subjectivity they critique -- instead of a bunch of particular subjects who individualistically turn inward, they want a collective subject that turns inward. It's the exact same structure. It's all about the survival of "the church" and of Christian identity -- shoring up the defenses against the incursion of secularism or liberalism or whatever the fuck else they're afraid of. Even when you get someone like Craig Keen, who is, as Bill Brower says, always on the right page -- even with students of a guy like Craig Keen, who advocates the church at the same time that he makes his students read Kierkegaard (who, I'm sorry -- is all about subjectivity!), you get this tedious "community" crap. Suddenly, the point is that the church needs to be the church and needs to excommunicate more people and all that -- a reactionary move, the church turned in on itself. "Let the church be the church!"
Talk of community can be dangerous among young people, who are usually deeply lonely and are too often prone to pursue a dream of fusion -- they don't like being a self, so they try to enter into the hive mind, whether it's a youth group or a dating relationship or whatever (there's a reason, beyond simple physical fitness, why young people are always recruited into the army). It's two sides of the same phenomenon: I am alone, there is no one else, so in order to solve this problem, I need to become no one. Lose myself. As I constantly said during undergrad when Levinas was the rage, "There are two ways of being self-centered." No one ever understood what I meant! It's outside the frame of reference, and too often, talk of community just slips into this "lose-yourself" Robin Williams bullshit. No, the problem is how to be a subject relating to others. The problem is precisely how to be the particular person you are, how to move freely through the society that shaped you in order to be with those people you're responsible for. Just doing the opposite of whatever "individualism" is supposed to mean is not the answer. Maybe making sure everyone knows all your intimate secrets and that your door is always open is not the answer, either.
(I know that I single out evangelicals in this post, but it's only because that is still my main experience of what young people in churches are like -- I'm sure there are similar phenomena in other types of churches as well.)
This has been my theological rant for the week.
