Notes for Eric #3

Tuesday evening. My cat, Bob, died tonight, in my arms. She had been with us 19 years. I sat with her as she passed, until the last breath and then we sat wake for her as she rested on our altar. I wanted to start this weeks notes at this point. It’s Morrigans 51st birthday. We’ve been together 29 years, married 29 too, anniversary just this 27th September gone.

The moon has just begun waxing into the October rising.

This Mortal Coil sings to the siren. The music plays, the drink and smoke.

The next day I buried Bob, in a large planter, filling it to the brim with layers of bulbs for the spring and summer to come.

I’m trying to follow on from the previous post, and so I thought I’d reflect on the idea of taking things personally, or more accurately on how to take things personally, beyond society and towards community. This last notion, of community, seems troubling to a lot of radicals, it’s too easily bandied about as a simple positive and to such an extent that it can mask the negative role of community. To the extent that ‘community’ can become a positive notion it needs to be attached to ‘communism’, the two need to become entwined. This involves both a means of working out what the positive elements we refer to in ‘community’ are as well as working out how the ‘communist’ can form a community. The former question is perhaps more theoretical, more abstract in some ways. The latter involves those of us who are communists facing up to the challenges involved in the ways we organise and live with our comrades.

When it comes to trying to work out what a positively valued concept of community might involve there are some words from Walter Benjamin that offer a possible solution:

There is a very simple and reliable criterion by which to test the spiritual value of a community. It is to ask: Does it allow all of an individual’s efforts to be expressed? Is the whole human being committed to it and indispensable to it? Or is the community as superfluous to each individual as he is to it? It is so easy to pose these questions, and so easy to answer them with reference to contemporary types of social community. And the answer is decisive. Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality – that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. It is not uncommon for the community to be the site where a joint and covert struggle is waged against higher ambitions and more personal goals, but where a more profoundly organic individual development is obscured. 

The life of students, https://libcom.org/library/life-students-walter-benjamin

In some ways this quote from Benjamin illustrates what I was thinking of when I said that working out the positive elements of community might be a more theoretical or abstract question. It’s easy for me to agree with Benjamin but the ease with which I can agree also points to the shallow nature of such agreement, the fact that we’re not agreeing on much in practice. To a large extent this might be easily shown by simply thinking about who exactly might disagree with what Benjamin says here. For some, his words are convoluted and dense, so they might not agree or disagree, but would feel excluded, or angry at the ‘theoretical’ language. For others the idea of a ‘spiritual value’ might set their teeth on edge and they might never have heard much more of the quote, feeling like some religio-mystical supernaturalism was being plied on them. For others the emphasis on a community playing a role in enabling the ‘whole human being to be expressed’ might be enough, they might feel like this emphasis on the problem of alienation, on the way communities we might negatively value can isolate, alienate and separate individuals demands agreement.

Benjamin says what he says here in the context of talking about the role of Universities and students and the ways in which Universities are a kind of false community. It’s interesting that this is from 1914-15. For over a hundred years radicals have known about – and worked against – the way in which Universities suck people in to a set of values that is two-faced, purporting to free the individual whilst they construct new chains they can attach to themselves, chains they can love and defend as if they were means of freedom. The dangers of the University rest in its capacity to liberate, a process that does often truly feel like it’s taking place, often because it is, but which is constructed in such a way as to take one to the edge of freedom but never beyond. The University ‘experience’, ever increasingly the focus of the corporate University, is a double-edged sword and the radical left within the University is one of the most self-deluded elements of the wider radical community, less capable in practice of offering modes of resistance the more it increasingly theorises them. This might seem as though I am off at a tangent, and I probably am to some extent, but it’s also because it’s one of the the communities I have most long term, generally negative, experiences with.

Part of the problem here lies clearly in what Benjamin says. The relation points in his discussion are ‘the community’ and ‘the individual’ and this relationship is a mystification of what takes place, a mystification that is probably the single greatest problem inside most concepts of community. Let me try and formulate this a bit more clearly – who is it that makes up a community? It is not the individual that makes up the elements of a community, but the group. A community consists of groups not individuals, at least not individuals in the sense of singular persons, this me here. This is one of the valuable implications in beginning to think in terms of the three-fold structure of one-to-one (rather than individual), groups and community. This me here is organised by all three of these formations, all at the same time, and in a continually shifting, sliding, problematic way.