Community studies 2003-4: Lecture 11 Community and communication

Introduction

In this lecture we examine some aspects of this connection. It is more than just seeing that the words have the same root.

To emphasise the communicative aspect of community is to move away from the idea of community as based on a particular space, and also to challenge the necessity for shared identity. There is potential for a more radical and open concept of community that may be more relevant to contemporary globalised society.

In chapter 6 of your textbook, Delanty emphasises how community has tended to be seen in a conservative and affirmative sense. It looks backwards to an idealised state of events and it is resists change

But he suggests there is a more radical way to approach community. This is the notion of ‘community as dissent’. This does not mean people acting to defend a pre-existing community, as we saw earlier in discussion of community action. Rather it relates to how communities can be created through and can emerge from protest action: and specifically from protest as a type of communication.

Communication and community

Delanty outlines the views of the major sociological theorists Habermas, Touraine and Bauman on this issue. Each of them is critical of the traditional notion of community, seeing it as linked to control and repression. But the concept may be interpreted in a more critical way: in particular by emphasising the communicative aspect of community.

For Habermas: community can be oppressive by focusing on moral unity; but it can also be positive in terms of a communication community. Habermas sees communication as social action: it can be a means of social integration and a way to reconcile conflicting positions (eg the Belfast Agreement). Communication entails shared conceptions of truth, justice, ethics and politics.

Public discourse is, for Habermas, fundamental to democracy. Thus it is crucial that spaces (real and metaphorical) are created to allow this (ties into notion of 3^rd place)

For Habermas modern society has a number of such communicative spaces, some are more disposed to generation of ‘the truth’ – eg disinterested areas such as science and the university

Such communication actions lead to the development of what we might call ‘community’: it is, according to Delanty, never complete but always emergent

Like Habermas, Touraine and Bauman express a fear that community can become an exclusive and oppressive concept: indeed in its strongest and most aggressive nationalist form it becomes fascism. (eg exclusion of Jews from German ‘community’)

French sociologists Alain Touraine sees as ‘the main challenge to democracy conceptions of politics that appeal to cultural heritage, community and nationalism’. There is a link here to the recent growth of extreme right-wing politics in Europe (for example in countries such as Austria, Denmark and perhaps in Northern Ireland) and to the types of exclusionary protests we have seen in Ireland). It may also be discerned in the rise of bodies like Al Qaeda (see Barber’s book Jihad vs McWorld which we return to in a future lecture) and also to the influence of Christian fundamentalism, especially in the USA and to some extent Australia.

Bauman is suspicious of the nostalgia he sees to be inherent in the notion of community. It is ‘merely a word that conveys a feeling of security that makes the world a warm and cosy place’ (Delanty, p.118).

But security and freedom can be contradictory: for example in the contemporary USA the focus on ‘homeland security’ may make many Americans feel more secure, but it also involves discrimination against many people and groups, and severe restrictions on what people can do.

Bauman would like to see a community that is not built on identity but on care, concern and responsibility. One that is ‘based on individual autonomy and in which the exclusion of the other is not the price to be paid for the identity of the self’ (Delanty, p.119)

Social movements

Delanty argues that community and individualism are not polar opposites but are linked to each other.

Community can be created through people’s involvement in social movements. It is thus created through communicative action (Habermas’s term): it does not relate to a pre-ordained notion of identity or place, rather a common identity emerges through people’s interaction with each other. Such interaction usually takes place around a view of the future, rather than one of the past. But it is open-ended: the future is probably not achieved, but changes take place in the process, and new ideas, structures and relationships can emerge from the action.

Thus, according to Delanty, ‘in this view of community people from diverse backgrounds can come together in communal activism united by a common commitment and solidarity that results’. This can be seen, for example in the anti-globalisation protests

Politics is now more to do with identity than membership of pre-defined social groups (there is less party identification and a greater number of ‘floating voters’)

Delanty concludes then that ‘community is not an underlying reality but is constructed in the actual process of mobilisation’ (p. 123): commitment to a particular set of values is the issue.