Community, Communitarianism and Displacement Anxiety

Abstract

This article offers a psychosocial perspective on unconscious conflicts that occur within community organizations and that can become acute when the mediating or containing function of an authority in this case, the local authority in an English town (Purpletown), is withdrawn. This article argues that a psychosocial account of unconscious processes operating in the public sphere can cast light on some of the ground- level difficulties in translating policy into workable social arrangements (Froggett, 2002; Hoggett, 2000; Stenner et al, 2008). Such an account includes an analysis of the ways in which the quality of social relations in any given time and place depends on a variety of structuring forces, such as social stratification and segmentation; and also on public emotions driven by unconscious or unarticulated social processes, or what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977). These contribute to anxieties and tensions in public organizations and communities. On the one hand, they produce a reparative mindset that accompanies social responsibility, community service and civic action; on the other, they produce eruptions of seemingly irrational acrimony, intransigence, idealization and identification — all of which can derail struggles for recognition and equality. In this chapter I consider the implications for how communities of place, and what we can loosely term ‘communitarian’ political processes, are constituted through local divisions and solidarities.