NYU Press

Chapter Title: Community

Chapter Author(s): Miranda Joseph

Book Title: Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Second Edition

Book Editor(s): Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler
Published by: NYU Press

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 The complex history of the word “colonial” indexes
the equally complex politics that have characterized
U.S. imperialism. In the first decades of the twenty-
11
first century, debates about colonialism, and settler Community
colonialism in particular, remain at the forefront of Miranda Joseph
research in American studies and cultural studies. As
struggles over the future of the U.S. empire proliferate, In the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
it is all the more urgent for cultural studies to take stock United States, the term “community” is used
of the history of such a contested keyword. so pervasively that it would appear to be nearly
meaningless. The term is often deployed more for its
performative effect of being “warmly persuasive” than
for any descriptive work it accomplishes (Raymond
Williams 1976/1983, 76). Carrying only positive
connotations—a sense of belonging, understanding,
caring, cooperation, equality—“community” is
deployed to mobilize support not only for a huge variety
of causes but also for the speaker using the term. It
functions this way for companies such as Starbucks and
Target, which have programs and pamphlets in their
stores proclaiming their commitment to community, as
well as for the feminist scholar who seeks to legitimize
her research by saying she works “in the community.”
It is deployed across the political spectrum to promote
everything from identity-based movements (on behalf
of women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, and
others) to liberal and neoliberal visions of “civil society,”
to movements seeking to restore or reaffirm so-called
traditional social values and hierarchies.
The relentless invocation of “community” is all the
more remarkable given the persistent critique to which
it has been subjected. In the late twentieth century,
scholars examined its use in the contexts of identity
politics, liberalism, and nationalism, in each case
pointing to its disciplining, exclusionary, racist, sexist,
and often violent implications (Joseph 2002). Feminist
activists and scholars have argued that the desire for
communion, unity, and identity among women tended

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Burget_1p.indd 53 9/29/14 11:37 AM
 in practice to make the women’s movement white, seem to denature, crossing all borders and making
bourgeois, and U.S.-centric (Martin and Mohanty 1986). everything and everyone equivalent. The discourse of
Feminist critics of liberalism have pointed out that the community includes a Romantic narrative that places
supposedly abstract political community constituted it prior to “society,” locating community in a long-
through the liberal state actually universalized lost past for which we yearn nostalgically from our
exclusionary gendered and racial norms (Wendy current fallen state of alienation, bureaucratization,
Brown 1995). Critics of European and postcolonial and rationalization. This discourse also contrasts
nationalisms have historicized the communal origin community with modern capitalist society structurally;
stories used to legitimate those nationalisms and the foundation of community is supposed to be
emphasized the hierarchies and exclusions likewise social values, while capitalist society is based only on
legitimated by those narratives. Poststructuralist economic value. At the same time, community is often
theories have underwritten many of these critiques, understood to be a problematic remnant of the past,
enabling scholars to argue that the presence, identity, standing in the way of modernization and progress.
purity, and communion connoted by “community” are This narrative of community as destroyed by
impossible and even dystopic fantasies (I. Young 1990). capitalism and modernity, as supplanted by society, can
In light of these critiques, many scholars have tried to be found across a wide range of popular and academic
reinvent “community,” to reconceptualize it as a space texts; one might say that it is one of the structuring
of difference and exposure to alterity (Mouffe 1992; narratives of the field of sociology (Bender 1978). And
Agamben 1993). Such stubborn efforts to build a better it took on a fresh life in the works of communitarians
theory and practice of community only emphasize that such as Robert Bellah (Bellah et al. 1985), Robert
the crucial question to pose about “community” as a Putnam (1993), Amitai Etzioni (1993), E. J. Dionne
keyword is this: Why is it so persistent and pervasive? (1998), and others, all of which are aimed at least in
One answer to this question lies in the realization part at nonacademic audiences. These works inevitably
that many deployments of the term can be misread Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
understood as instances of a larger discourse that (1835/2004) as describing a now-lost form of local
positions “community” as the defining other of community that they believe would, if revived, promote
capitalist “modernity.” As Raymond Williams democracy and economic prosperity and solve many
(1976/1983) notes, “community” has been used since contemporary problems, including drug use, crime, and
the nineteenth century to contrast immediate, direct, poverty.
local relationships among individuals with something The discursive opposition of community and society
in common to the more abstract relations connoted provides a crucial clue to the former’s pervasiveness
by capitalist or modern “society.” While community in contemporary discourse; community is a creature
is often presumed to involve face-to-face relations, of modernity and capitalism. Williams optimistically
capital is taken to be global and faceless. Community suggests that modernity positively constitutes
concerns boundaries between us and them that are communities of collective action. In The Country and
naturalized through reference to place or race or the City (1973, 102, 104), he argues against the nostalgic
culture or identity; capital, on the other hand, would idealization of preenclosure communities that he

54 Community Miranda Joseph

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 finds in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century nongovernmental organizations (NPOs and NGOs)—
British literature, pointing out that preenclosure “civil society”—in the context of “development” in
villages supported “inequalities of condition” and that the United States and internationally. In the United
“community only became a reality when economic and States, nonprofit organizations are said to express
political rights were fought for and partially gained.” community and often stand in for community
More pessimistically, Nikolas Rose (1999, 172, 174) reads metonymically. They are the institutional sites where
the invocation of community as a central technology people contribute labor or money to “the community.”
of state power, arguing that “community” is used to And they are posited as the form through which
invoke “emotional relationships” that can then be community might be reinvigorated as a complement
instrumentalized. He suggests that the communities so to capitalism, providing those goods and services that
invoked are required to take on responsibilities for “order, capitalism does not. In the context of “development,”
security, health and productivity” that were formerly NGOs have been explicitly promoted as a means for
carried by the state. And certainly there is substantial developing human and social capital and involving
evidence for his argument in the proliferation of public- the poor in development projects—as, in other words,
private partnerships, neighborhood watch programs, sites for constituting liberal capitalist subjects and
restorative justice initiatives, and the like, all of which subjectivities. At the same time, the necessity for such
mobilize familial and communal relations to promote organizations suggests that subjects are not always
subjection to law and order rather than to fight for already capitalist subjects. And in fact, the promotion
economic or political rights (Lacey and Zedner 1995; N. of NPOs and NGOs has often been explicitly intended
Lacey 1996; Joseph 2006). to stave off socialism or communism; for example, in
Community thus can be understood as a necessary the post-Soviet era, “community,” in the guise of NGOs,
supplement to the circulation of state power and featured prominently in the promotion of “civil society”
capital; as such, it not only enables capital and power to in both former communist countries and “developing”
flow, but it also has the potential to displace those flows. countries of the “Third World” (Joseph 2002). The
Because the circulation of abstract capital depends on incorporation of subjects as community members at
the embodiment of capital in particular subjects, the the site of the NGO can be understood as hegemonizing,
expansion and accumulation of capital requires that wedding potentially resistant subjects (potentially or
capitalists engage in an ongoing process of disrupting, actually communist subjects) to capitalism.
transforming, galvanizing, and constituting new social The centrality of community to capitalism becomes
formations, including communities. Community more explicit in the context of globalization. Politically
is performatively constituted in capitalism, in the diverse iterations of globalization discourse, both
processes of production and consumption, through popular and academic, argue that capitalism depends
discourses of pluralism, multiculturalism, and diversity, on communities, localities, cultures, and kinship
through niche marketing, niche production, and to provide the social norms and trust that enable
divisions of labor by race, gender, and nation. businesses to function and that globalized capitalism is
This complex relation of community to capitalism is and should be more attuned to particular communities,
particularly evident in the promotion of nonprofit and localities, and cultures (Piore and Sabel 1984; Fukuyama

Community Miranda Joseph 55

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 1995). While a number of scholars have portrayed
the localization and culturalization of capitalism as a
positive development, creating opportunities for local
12
or communal resistance (Lipietz 1994; Mayer 1994), Contract
others have emphasized the weakness, dependence, Amy Dru Stanley
and vulnerability of the local (Peck and Tickell 1994).
The claim that capitalism only recently discovered “Contract” is at least as old as the Old Testament and as
community is, however, problematic. It suggests that new as the market transactions of the moment—local,
communities, and the economic inequalities among national, and global. It encompasses the provinces of
them, have not themselves been constituted by religion and commodities, state and civil society, public
capitalism. To the contrary, the explicit deployment and private exchange, the rights of persons and the
of community within globalization discourse tends to rights to property. Puritan theology speaks of covenants,
legitimate economic inequalities and exploitation as Enlightenment liberalism of social contracts, political
the expression of authentic cultural difference even as economy of commercial contracts, the law of liberty
it articulates all communities and cultures as analogous of contract. Informed by those traditions, U.S. culture
sites for production and consumption (Melissa Wright has long been infused by contract. Just after the Civil
1999). War, a primer handed out by Yankee liberators to former
The project of examining “the seductions of slaves testified to contract’s vast province: “You have all
community” remains a crucial one (Creed 2006). heard a great deal about contracts, have you not since
Exploring the ways in which community is constituted you have been free? . . . Contracts are very numerous;
by or complicit with capital and power can reshape our numerous as the leaves on the trees almost; and, in
understandings of the dimensions of our communities fact, the world could not get on at all without them”
and the connections among them. Such exploration (Fisk 1866, 47). The lesson of freedom was not simply
might enable us to recuperate and rearticulate the needs that contract was essential but that it was virtually
and desires for social change that are so often co-opted a fact of nature. In other words, “contract” stood as a
by the uncritical deployment of the term. keyword of U.S. culture. Never was this more so than in
the nineteenth century, when contract prevailed as a
metaphor for social relations in free society.
Implicit in the vocabulary of contract is a set of
fundamental terms denoting human subjectivity,
agency, and social intercourse. As opposed to
prescriptive duties or formally coercive bonds of
personal dominion and dependence, a contract is, in
principle, a purely voluntary obligation undertaken
in the expectation of gaining a reciprocal benefit—
an equivalent of some sort, a quid pro quo, or, in the
language of the law, “consideration.” Thus, contract

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