ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

presumption of community-based art today, which seeks to become ever more inclusive
of this variety at the expense of a rigorous and self-critical examination of
the primary driving force that seems to define the field—the idealized specter of
community. 37
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The ideal of community, according to feminist social theorist Iris Marion Young, is a
dream that “express[es] a desire for selves that are transparent to one another, relationships
of mutual identification, social closeness and comfort.” 38 The strength and
seductiveness of such a dream rests on its promise of a “good society” that can
counter the experiences of alienation and disassociation (and the accompanying
social problems) that characterize life in contemporary urban mass societies. But
for Young the ideal of community is a highly problematic proposition, because it
typically envisions “small, face-to-face, decentralized units” as the preferred scale
of interaction for all social relations, which is impossible in a practical sense in our
postindustrial mass urban societies—fundamentally a nostalgic fantasy of a preurban
existence that is assumed to have been without alienation, mediation, or violence.
More importantly, the ideal of community is untenable to Young because it
“privileges unity over difference, immediacy over mediation, sympathy over recognition
of limits of one’s understanding of others from their point of view.” 39
The ideal of community, in her view, is predicated on an ideal of shared or
fused subjectivities in which each subject’s unified coherence is presumed to be
not only transparent to him/herself but identically transparent to others. 40 Such fantasies
of transparent, unmediated, and transcendent knowing, Young notes, participate
in the “metaphysics of presence” or “logic of identity” (theorized by Theodor
Adorno and Jacques Derrida) that overlooks difference between subjects and
denies difference as a constitutive element in the process of subject formation.
Moreover, “the desire for social wholeness and identification” through mutual
affirmation, closeness, and reciprocity as expressed in the ideal of community obscures
the extent to which it “generates borders, dichotomies, and exclusions.” 41 As
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THE (UN)SITINGS OF COMMUNITY