violating the community Reading Alphonso Lingis, The Community Of Those Who Have Nothing In Common. p.107: “For Aristotle the virtue that transcends, that makes possible all the others is courage, without which no one can be truthful, or magnanimous, or be a friend. This means risk, of one’s job, reputation, isolation, of one’s life.” The effort to envision, encourage, and develop a community of any kind--of improvisers, of co-workers, of neighbors, or of people with a common political intention—aims at a strength no private individual could have. Strength comes not by way of interior reflection of the individual but by claiming and asserting bonds of identity among those counted within a particular sphere, and by dissolving bonds with those perceived as outside, as lacking that identity. Through unity comes strength is the principle of the polis as of a friendship: we have this in common, and what we have does not extend to all. Community, and its kind of strength, cannot be separated from the effort to reduce risk, and therefore the need for courage, the facing of fear and willingness to risk. Every community excludes, it cannot help but do so, and by so excluding creates itself as other to the other: we are not other to ourselves, it says, we have each other. Community makes things work, without it nothing at all will work, there is not even the word “work”. But since there is no absolute uniformity among humans it also creates as its bond and pledge an internal hierarchy of value and consequently of status. On some level it must deny, at least obscure or obfuscate, hierarchy and status in the interest of the communal identity and bond; this is no less true of the medieval corpus christianum, of the nation state, or today’s global neo-liberalism. This is its ruling contradiction, its hypocrisy. It must claim to value the individual, but not the individual act that violates the communal code. It chooses which individuals represent and defend the community and represent its code, and these will be considered the virtuous.

What is of highest communal value cannot be the kind of courage that contradicts the community and its code. Indeed for that kind of courage it can never be ascertained beforehand what is the content, what courage will assert or defend. It takes courage to speak what others of the community unanimously agree is pure stupidity, or to play a music that does not represent the agreed code, or to disrespect its icons. At best one can only say: “you belong in a different community, perhaps (scornfully) one of yourself alone.” Courage separates, it is the act that creates a moment of danger, when one stands in the breach between the accepted and the unaccepted. There can be no community that can include those with the courage to violate the sanctions of the community, only those who reinforce its coded beliefs. If we disobey and wish still to be included then we make apologies for our exception, in effect showing how it proves the rule. We will downplay our apparent uncompromising stance, reduce our risk as much as possible in order to communicate what the code will not allow, which is from the community’s standpoint incommunicable. Without some appeal to community, perhaps to its buried beliefs, we will be talking into the wind, an Aeolian harp whose harmonies are heard as the velleities of nature and not yet of human durability.

It is essential that a community regulate itself and its values. This regulation is internalized unconsciously; one suppresses perceptions, impulses, wandering thoughts and possibilities that do not find some place of approval. Of course, this can leave a wide range of activity, even the illusion of total freedom, which is only belied by watching the shift of values and the inclusion of previously alien ideas over time. Contrarians make their points often after their deaths, from underground. Those presently respected will be seen to represent the values of the community most highly; some will in fact bend all their efforts to do so.

Labels: violation of a community

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