Abstract
This chapter investigates the background to social scientific research about community, critiquing the basis of present approaches, which understand community as an object, often one considered to be obsolete. Social science’s obsession with the state/individual axis is discussed. The concept of a relationality in which communality can be rethought as an action of being in common is discussed. The chapter also presents to the reader our research site, the town that we call Market-Town.
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Notes
- 1.
Gesellschaft (often translated as society).
For Tonnies, family life is the general basis of life in the Gemeinschaft and as such the form finds its most perfect expression in village and town life. Indeed, the village community and the town themselves can be considered as large families, the various clans and houses representing the elementary organisms of its body: guilds, corporations and offices, the tissues and organs of the town. Here, original kinship and inherited status remain an essential, or at least the most important, condition of participating fully in common property and other rights.
Conversely, the city is typical of Gesellschaft in general. It is essentially a commercial town and, insofar as commerce dominates its productive labour, a factory town. Its wealth is capital: wealth which, in the form of trade, usury or industrial capital, is used and multiplies. Capital is the means for the appropriation of products of labour or for the exploitation of workers. The city is also the centre of science and culture, hand in hand with commerce and industry. Here, for instance, the arts must make a living; they are exploited in a capitalistic way as is every activity and so, spurred by commerce, thought, in all its forms, spreads and changes with astonishing rapidity. Speeches and books through mass distribution become stimuli of far-reaching importance while the arts themselves become commodified and exploited.
- 2.
We would claim that this traditional duality arises in a slightly altered form within Sociological Foucauldian work, primarily because unlike Foucault himself, they conflate discourse and practice. Thus, according to Rose (1999) community does not exist, however in the name of community, the public is endorsing and participating in forms of governance, for example, reading schemes and so on. If the public are participating in such schemes in the name of community, then clearly this is a community created by something termed governance and further if the public are responding to community and participating in this idea that it is community, then they are participating in. Oh the wicked webs we weave when we try to make discourse and practice correspond.
- 3.
For further examples, please refer to Studdert (2006).
- 4.
Moreover notions of fluidity claiming to solve this issue do so only by collapsing agency and structure into a soup with one flavour (Donati and Archer Margaret 2012). We would claim that a true account of socially derived being-ness has no need for a normative approach but rather is capable of accounting for differences in particularity derived from communal being-ness in common. Something in our judgement these accounts are unwilling or unable to provide. Thus, whatever the value of these accounts in relation to other fields, in relation the investigation of communal being-ness, they remain stubbornly normative and incapable of accounting for relation of, particularity, action and communal being-ness. Thus, the individual in either method is either surreptitiously re-inserted or theoretically ‘disappeared’, neither situation being of much use for the investigation of community.
- 5.
See note 2.
- 6.
Given that DeLanda (2004, p. 58) describes an hierarchical ontology as ‘based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical’, with ‘each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera) our approach for reasons to be outline in the course of the monograph clearly is not of such an order’.
Conversely, given his defining of a flat ontology as made ‘exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status (DeLanda 2004, p. 58) it is also clear, as our text will make plain, that the proposed analytic is not that order either’.
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Studdert, D., Walkerdine, V. (2016). Building the Analytic. In: Rethinking Community Research. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51453-0_1
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