Community at the Margin

By Crispin Sartwell

Close to where I live there was a drug arrest recently. This one was unusual because two of the people who were busted were Amish. And they were arrested along with members of the Pagans motorcycle gang, for buying cocaine in the Philadelphia area and selling it to members of Amish youth groups. The clash of worlds seemed almost too extreme to be believed: Old Order meets road warrior. Buggy meets Harley. Christian meets blasphemer. Abner and Abner meet Twisted and Trog (I'm not kidding about the names). But the Amish and the Pagans have a lot in common.

The Amish tourist strip in Lancaster County is a commercialization of the anti-commercial, an up-to-date marketing of the supposed innocence and simplicity of people who seem committed to living in the past. But no one lives in the past, as the Amish are the first to admit, and the relentless marketing of the Amish is not even ironic. It's just one example of the relentless marketing of everything. What is marketed here is a community that rejects marketing; Lancaster County businesses peddle an illusion of innocence. The Pagans are not innocent by anyone's standards. But they too constitute a community that in many ways rejects the mainstream form of life. The Pagans, like the Amish, form an insular community devoted to nurturing selves that are defined by their opposition to the dominant culture: to suits and ties, gleaming skyscrapers, climate-controlled luxury cars. Like the Amish, the Pagans represent for the rest of us a life outside the mainstream, a life that escapes some of the pressures and pains and prefab pleasures of postmodernity. Perhaps we fear the Pagans, but we also romanticize them, as we do the Amish. And like the Amish, one of the things that makes the Pagans romantic, that we yearn toward in them, is their cohesion as a community.

More and more, our "community" is national or even global. Or at least, so runs the familiar yammering. More and more, what lends us the semblance of a collective identity is what the Amish and Pagans reject: corporate culture, the culture of franchises and logos, advertising, mass media. The Amish and the Pagans want to check out of the global economy and into a highly local, cohesive community.

In this paper I am going to explore the consequences of a few bald assertions. First, there are no communities that consist of a million or 270 million or six billion people. Talk of a national or world community should be read as some sort of trope or metaphor, and it's a good thing, too, because any community on that scale would be a horror. There can be no American or world community. The unity of groups that large is really just a sad joke, a myth perpetuated in empty political or commercial rhetoric. Communities exist where people can come to face to face, where people can actually know each other and find a way of life together. Second, communities are made by exclusions: by excluding others or by being excluded by others: usually both. This could not be more obvious than in the case of the Amish or the Pagans. If there are still any genuine communities in the United States, they are communities like that. Third, the places where community happens in our culture are at the margins: among skinheads, religious cultists, street gangs, sexual minorities, addicts and recovering addicts, skaters, militias, farm communes left over from the sixties. You have got to be ejected from or eject yourself from the mainstream culture to find anything like a genuine community. Your suburban subdivision isn't going to do the job. The scale of our collective culture is huge; it is inhuman. Our institutions-governments, corporations-no longer have anything really to do with community. It is only at the margins and interstices, in the little spaces where people conceal themselves from or confront these institutions, that the possibility of community exists.

I.

Communities are formed by exclusion, and by violence, both internal and external. What is normal is articulated by a process of scapegoating, wherein a person is selected at random or not and is treated as being weird: that's how you end up being a normal person: you're one of those who torture weird people. If you want to see this process in operation you can look carefully at almost any schoolyard or perhaps consult your memory. And what is essential is not that the person selected for exclusion actually be weird even in whatever vague sense the term "weird" might be used in a given context, but simply that someone be excluded on some grounds or even on no grounds at all. It is such exclusions that make a community of children possible, because the exclusions define an "identity" for the children to share: We are the people who are not like: her, that; we are the people that aren't: weird, queer, retarded. When I was in elementary school, we picked out a girl named Shelley by no principle at all that I can fathom from here and spent all of fifth grade torturing her psychically for her supposed weirdness. I suppose that is something that she remembers pretty vividly.

Now people who get excluded this way or who exclude themselves from their own groups of origin sometimes form satellite communities, or maybe communities for celebrating a certain kind of weirdness (and of course such communities also practice analogous scapegoatings): communities of violence, s&m communities, biker communities, gangs, and so on. To say that communities like that aren't real communities or aren't communities in the truest sense or are pseudo-communities is just wishful thinking: probably those communities are closer the communitarian ideal than is "American society" or whatever amorphous abstraction you may have in mind. And of course to say these aren't real communities is just saying again "you're weird." That is, condemning street gangs' community as unreal or defective is just another way you wish you had an actual community or in which you actually go about trying to make one. The street gang is as genuine a community as can be found: it is paradigmatic and in many ways desirable. You should see what I mean by that as soon as you compare the cohesion and communication in a street gang to "the American community" or the "global village" or for that matter to a meticulously planned suburb.

You don't have to be Jacques Derrida or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to understand that dominant identities are formed almost solely by exclusions. Think, for example, about what it means to be a white person. Intrinsically, it means nothing: whiteness for white people is a kind of empty space in the racial taxonomy: the norm from which all other races are deviations. That is because it was white people who made the taxonomic grid, white people who were the anthropologists. Writing The Sexual Lives of Savages or measuring the cranial capacity of Africans is a pseudo-scientific exercise in what we did on the playground to Shelley; they are ways of delineating the normal or defining what it means to be human as what it means to be ourselves. They are forms of ejection that make community possible.

To repeat, being white seems to be to inhabit an empty space, but it is a specific empty space: a space that has been emptied of certain specific qualities or aspects of human personality. The ejections that create whiteness have very specific content. Roughly, whiteness is constructed out of the basic series of dualisms that constitute Western metaphysics: mind/body, culture/nature, master/slave, reason/emotion. To be black in the cultural imagination of white folks is to be highly embodied, or even to be pure body: all the stereotypes of black people are about embodiment: that black folks have rhythm, that they are highly sexualized, violent, and so on. These hallucinations are ways we exclude people and they are occasions or excuses to dominate and exploit people, but they are also ways that we pretend to make ourselves who we think we ought to be: to be white means to be a mind, not a monkey; it means to have a culture and hence to be free of nature; it also means, perhaps, to yearn romantically toward what has in hallucination been excluded from the self. And with some variations of detail, the same could be said for other dominant identities: being a man, being heterosexual, and so on.

"Mind," "culture" and so on are empty abstractions, or perhaps we could say that they are abstraction itself. Mind is what floats free of the particular into the realm of concepts. "Body" too is an empty abstraction; but "body" is not abstraction itself: it is, rather, an abstract sign of particularity. That is why whiteness in a sense has no content: it is an abstract sign of abstraction, and the only content the sign has arises in its exclusion of the sign of particularity, an exclusion which devolves in imagination to every particular thing.

A central point of the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and others is that community and identity are bound up with one another, that your community bequeaths you an identity: articulates a range of possible or acceptable roles, for example.⁽¹⁾ Now if that's true, then I think something interesting follows about folks in the dominant positions: they have no real community. Really, think about whether there is a community in any rich sense of heterosexuals. The only time I can think of having a sense of heterosexual community was once when I was in Greenwich Village, on Christopher Street, an epicenter of gay America. A pretty girl walked by (at least I think it was a girl), and I noticed that another guy was staring at her too. This guy and I looked at each other and smiled in mutual recognition: we were both breeders. Really we should at this point have gone to a strip joint and had a beer together and talked about pussy, but all the bars were drag bars.

The "white community" or "the community of men" (and think of how odd these phrases actually sound) are odd or defective in this sense. First, they have no awareness of themselves as communities, because they have no awareness of the identities their communities construct. Those identities are made by something close to a pure exclusion, and they think of themselves as the normal neutral examples of the universal human condition: in imagination these identities have no content, though in reality their content is perfectly specific and is delineated in a series of exclusions from the self and oppressions of parts of the self. So folks in the dominant groups do not in awareness bind themselves to one another through a recognition of a shared identity, nor are they forced to cohere in order to survive: their identity is precisely their lack of awareness of their own identity. Second, and here I put some realist cards on the table, there is something defective in these communities because the identities they construct are false or fictional or as I put it before hallucinatory. Really there could not be, for example, a community of minds, because you need bodies to communicate. The whiteness that constructs itself from the ejection of the devalued bit of each dualism is impossible in reality, and the demand for an appearance of ejection is an invitation to hypocrisy. Whiteness is a pathological fear and exclusion of the body, which in a creature that is a body can only finally consist in a deep self-loathing and self-betrayal. One might call this self-loathing and self-betrayal "metaphysics."

II.

Which brings me to another aspect of dominant groups: their communication is semiotic. That is, they communicate various "meanings" to one another with noises and scribbles that "signify" things. Throughout the history of the West, the privileged bits of the dualisms (mind, culture, master, reason) have been associated with language in its semiotic function, language conceived as something that conveys a distinct series of meanings. Language is the mind's medium, the repository of concepts, the abstraction into which whiteness abstracts itself. Whiteness is writing. The "savage," the "primitive," and so on are conceived to be linguistically defective in that they lack a system of writing. Dominant groups wield language like a transparent medium and use it to carve up and control the world. Call that "science." But my view is that language is degenerate when it is used as a transparent medium and that communication that is conceived that way is impossible in a pure sense and defective to the extent that it is possible.

By extension, the communities that form themselves around "truths"--for example around documents such as the Bible or the Constitution or the works of Nietzsche--are defective communities. A community that coheres in virtue of shared recognition of certain "principles" or "values" is an artificial creation, a simulation. Such a pseudo-community lacks the intensity and directness of communication that originates and consists in the reality of shared experiences. It is a nostalgia or a fantasy and always also a potential horror, because if the fantasy is vivid enough one attempts to impose it on reality: our "shared beliefs" are the ideology with which or for which we will kill or imprison each other in a furious attempt to compensate for their and our lack of reality, a furious attempt to make real what is by definition nothing at all: the abstraction.

Language at its best is noise with shape. I wonder whether you talk while you are making love. It is important "what you say," but it is more important that you say something, that you make some noise, and that the noise have, as it were, the right contour and the right intonation. When there are words, they are part of the general moaning; they are expressions of desire not primarily in virtue of their semantics but in their participation in a pure syntax of pleasure. That is a very intense and important form of communication: it is central. Most human communication is more or less like that. I say, "How ya doin'?" and you respond "I'll probably survive. You?" The point obviously is not whatever propositions our utterances may represent, much less the truth value of those propositions; the point is just to be in proximity to one another making the right kind of noise. It is a kind of touching. When I'm listening to country music on the radio, I am not usually decoding a series of assertions; I am just bathing in human-made noise.

Human communication reaches its most intense and beautiful and typical moments where all the semantics slips away and we are just emitting organized noise in the right shape. And that is key to community. Communities (just stick a little "in my opinion" in each of these sentences for me) are not about "shared beliefs." They are about bathing in the same noise: like gang colors or a neighborhood slang or rap music or Marilyn Manson. Beliefs that we allegedly share turn out, for the most part, to be the completely empty ideology we are all capable of mouthing when our minds have gone blank or when our minds are being scripted by advertising agencies and campaign consultants. This emptiness is the empty space in which dominant identities consist; this emptiness is the abstraction that demonstrates our transcendence of particularity; we reside in the empty space of concepts, of general ideas that we can all come to "share," that "hold us together as a people." This is where our civic documents and institutions reside: in a sphere from which all traces of the non-conceptual have been immolated. That is, these documents and beliefs are also noise, or perhaps we should say that they can only actually occur to anyone through a particular visual or aural interchange. But here we attribute to the noise the power of expressing truth, a power gained by a bit of syntax when it has detached itself from particular contexts of use and floated free like a blimp onto the plane of the eternal. The identity of these truths is like white identity: the blank neutral place where the communication is no one's communication in particular, where truths are self-evident, unchanging, and empty.

And of course these things are related to one another. Dominant identities, conceived through the dualistic ejections, are the identities that possess and wield the truth. The people who inhabit dominant identities, in conceiving themselves through this particular set of exclusions, arrogate to themselves the power abstractly to wield the abstract truth: we are mind, culture, essentially textual items. That is, "mind" is the language in your head, the semantics or the hectoring lecturer within you. "Culture" consists of literacy, science, discourse, technique. But in claiming to float free of the world into these abstractions, we also lose ourselves. We lose ourselves, first of all, as bodies. And we lose ourselves as communities, because we live in "structures" or texts: corporate flow charts, governments, universities. Then we have institutions but we can have no communities.

III.

Contemplate two fans of Marilyn Manson. Let us say that they mutilate themselves together, that they harm themselves, pierce themselves, cut themselves. That is an extremely intense form of communication: they are literally opening their bodies to one another and the world. Maybe it is "pathological" too. That's what we say in our little institutionalized discourse for purposes of inflicting truth on these people and community on ourselves. But it is an extraordinary process of communication and mutual identification: these kids are marking their bodies with the syntax of community membership or in a resolution or hope to join a community. Notice, of course, that these might be white male kids from the suburbs; in fact, that's most likely; they are part of the dominant pseudo-community. But what they are trying to do, or one thing they are trying to do, is remove themselves from that pseudo-community in a way that will be immediately visible to anyone, and in particular to the members of that pseudo-community. This may be a form of play that will end soon enough, and these boys will perhaps restart their training as stockbrokers. But what I am asserting is that if they have any chance of finding a community, it is going to have to be by a conscious process of self-exclusion, as well as by joining others. And there can be a snowball effect: they exclude themselves by self-mutilation, then are excluded further because they are mutilated.

Up to now I have been talking as though there are dominant psuedo-communities and subalternate communities, where the dominant pseudo-communities are constructed by ejection, the subalternate communities through being ejected. But even this little Marilyn Manson example shows that to be far too simple. First of all, the Marilyn Manson subculture emerges out of the dominant culture by self-exclusion. Second, it also requires exclusions to exist: we are not stockbrokers. And probably it practices internal exclusions as well, policing its goth borders: you are not weird enough, committed enough, suicidal enough, pierced enough. No doubt there is even a series of "truths" that the Marilyn Manson community might acknowledge, some of which we might find in Marilyn's bestselling autobiography.⁽²⁾ Furthermore, Marilyn Manson the figure flows through the dominant culture and the dominant culture's media and commercial distribution systems. Even as he attacks the pseudo-community, he depends upon it, and even as it condemns him it embraces him, markets him, provides him, circulates him through all the channels of image and commodity. His location with regard to the grid or flow of communities is extremely complex: he is multiply located, contradictorily located, impossibly profuse in his presence and effects. No community can be purely dominant or subalternate, and all communities have processes of ejection at the heart of their self-construction. Think again of the Amish, who form up through a rejection of "the English" as they call the rest of us, as much as through any positive religious or social commitment, but who also obviously interact with the English continually and in vexed or contradictory ways, as when they get caught up in the cocaine-distribution system.

As the interchange of Amish and Pagan shows, communities are fluid into one another in indefinitely many directions at once. Marilyn Manson is himself a corporate entity, whether he likes it or not. And he probably likes it, at least at some moments, because he is getting rich. Marilyn Manson is not only an individual who named himself with a beautiful pop culture flair: he is a set of products (t-shirts, compact disks, books, stickers); he is a fashion model, commercial musician, professional weirdo. He is a marketing machine and like all pop culture icons in this era he is perfectly accessible to anybody in all media simultaneously. So Marilyn Manson's relation to the dominant pseudo-community is extraordinarily complicated: he emerged from it; he is a symbol of resistance to it; he is exploiting it toward a suggestion of its own disintegration or destruction; he is exploited by it and producing fortunes for publishers and record companies and concert promoters; he is showing people a way out of it; he is cashing in on his nihilism; and so on

Deleuze and Guattari have an excellent way of describing these sorts of phenomena: they talk about "major" and "minor" languages⁽³⁾, but the very same things can be said about communities. On their account, "major" languages such as "standard English"--which is housed in dictionaries, grammar handbooks, books of quotations, and so forth--are dead. Insofar are they are indeed standard, major, set in stone, they have no life. They have lost the ability to become. They sit there in haughty detemporalized grammatical grandeur, like Latin. Minor languages-slangs, dialects, vernaculars-are, on the other hand, alive, in constant flux; they are always becoming. Black American slang, for example, is one of the truly vital linguistic zones in the world. However, this simplistic opposition breaks down, because of course black slang is part of English; it is a slang of English. That in turn makes it appear that black slang is parasitic on standard English: a variation of it. The differing temporal status of major and minor languages follows from their imaginary character and implicates the communities that speak them. The major language, which is the repository of eternal concepts and the medium of the minds that wield such concepts, partakes in a release from the filth of becoming, and promises that release to the people who wield it. The minor languages, on the other hand, are noise: they are thoroughly polluted by particularity and temporality.

One might, again, conceive of the minor language as a dialect or distortion of the major language, but that would be a serious misinterpretation. In fact the dependence runs more clearly the other way: the major language depends on its minor languages or slangs for life, even as it seeks in that same process to appropriate the satellite or colonized tongue. Black slang is one of the zones where English becomes: what is black slang today will be in the dictionaries tomorrow. The zones where the English language is alive, the zones that the English language depends on to stay alive, are the slangs of black America, of Jamaicans in London, of rednecks in the deep south, of sex workers, of Marilyn Manson fanatics, and so on. That is, the places where the language is alive are the subalternate communities. This shows that such communities are not distinct from the dominant pseudo-community, but it also shows which way the dependence really runs: the dominant pseudo-community absolutely requires the subalternate communities in order to keep itself alive. The dominant culture, as the culture of eternality and abstraction, is dead. And the dominant culture is entirely false, because its truths purport to float free of the particular in its becoming: the only sphere in which things live. Think again of Marilyn Manson: Marilyn looks to be dependent on the record companies, the press, and so on, in order to be a pop culture "phenomenon." But the record companies and the press need Marilyn, or someone analogous, both to make money and to give them the sense or illusion that they are alive, that they are hip, that they are actually able to become. Issuing the next reunion album by the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac is not going to do the job. The dominant pseudo-community lives vampirically on the blood of the communities it dominates: it needs to exclude them in order to construct itself, and it needs to incorporate them in order to keep itself alive.

One thing this means is that the subalternate communities are always in danger of being destroyed through appropriation, of losing their characteristic weirdness or kinkiness because their language and even their activities are being sucked into the death machine. We can see this in the "slumming" of the dominant culture, or in the romanticization to which the Amish and the Pagans are subject. But the subalternate communities also depend on that for their own life. What pushes gangsta rappers to get ever more extreme, what pushes the leather sex world to get kinkier and devise new pleasures and new pains, what pushes rednecks to stay red or get redder, is precisely the use of their inventions by the dominant community to keep itself alive. Marilyn Manson needs to violate taboos, needs to be right on the edge of what could possibly be done in a public concert. But when his followers have all grown up and there are twenty Marilyn clones out there, someone will have to push beyond that and start something new that will be alive for awhile. People will warm themselves at its life as at a fire.

We folks in the dominant culture romanticize the subalternate communities, we yearn toward them because of their aliveness and because of their cohesion as communities. We encounter them on slumming safaris or through mass media products: rap CDs, Easy Rider, Witness. We require these communities to be in proximity to ourselves as well as to be ejected. We define ourselves in distinction to them, but that means that we must maintain a constant awareness or illusion of who and what these people are. We require ourselves to be what they are not, and that requires us to know or pretend to know who they are. But we also require them in order to become who we will be: they constitute lines of escape from the intolerable and finally impossible Parmenidean stasis of our normality. We need the fear and the desire that the Pagans, for example, or the very idea of the Pagans, arouse, in order to constitute ourselves and in order to keep ourselves from being so fully constituted that we freeze into death and immortality like Platonic Forms.

IV..

It may seem as though the dream of community is a dream of stability, if not of stasis. Sometimes it seems that communitarian philosophers are reactionaries in the sense that they would like to slow time down or stop it: they like to imagine the Greek polis. Communitarian philosophers also like to contrast their approach with the abstract ideology of liberalism or libertarianism, preferring to start with the concrete situation of people actually trying to get on together. One of the implications of the points I have been developing, however, is that communitarianism is as abstract as the views it rejects. For example, the "Responsive Communitarian Platform" says that "communities that glorify their own members by vilifying those who do not belong are at best imperfect." From which of course it follows that there are no perfect communities, which of course was obvious to begin with. Or this: For a community to be truly responsive . . . it will have to develop moral values which meet the following criteria..."⁽⁴⁾

That simply drops us out of the possibility of any community at all and lands us in the never-never land of concepts and empty fantasy identities. As a Marilyn Manson fan might say: shut up and thrash.

It is perhaps ironic, given these dreams of stasis, that the actual communities that we can point to are the zones of our culture that are most in flux, in which identities are most liquid or most volatile, in which the language shifts with lightning rapidity, in which there is no telling what might happen on any given night. This is not surprising, though, because such communities consist without remainder of their members: they change as quickly as the people that are in them. And those people change quickly because they are constantly engaged in the processes of being excluded and of excluding others. Subalternate communities do not, by and large, worship texts or worry much about whether they have a system of shared beliefs: they just engage in a constantly fluctuating process of real communication. They bathe in each other's noise. That's what a community is, and it's not something that you make happen; it's something that just happens, and happens by an incredibly elaborate process of nested exclusions that is different in each case. So here's my advice: stop pretending to make communities happen or specifying how they can happen and simply allow them to continue to emerge. Anything else is an abstraction and a delusion.

1. See, e.g. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press: 1984), chapters 14, 15.

2. Marilyn Manson with Neil Strauss, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell (New York: HarperCollins, 1998). An example of a truth articulated by Manson and no doubt recognized by his community as central to membership: "You're gay if you get hard while sucking another guy's dick. If you don't, you're straight" (p. 134).

3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 104, 5.

4. This platform is posted at www.gwu.edu/~ccps/RCPlatform.html

It is endorsed by such figures as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amitai Eztioni, Francis Fukuyama, and Orlando Patterson.

Crispin Sartwell