Community as 'Good to Think With': The Productiveness of Strategic Ambiguities

You might not be surprised to learn that when I picked up my daily newspaper the other day (The Globe and Mail, 25 April 2009) and tried to locate references to 'community', I was quickly able to identify dozens of them. These references ranged over a wide variety of contexts and applications: 'local community leader', 'arts community', 'farming community', 'small community', 'utopian communities', 'outlying community', 'technology community', 'building communities', 'mining community', 'religious community', along with 'excluded and marginalized community' were but some of the citations that appeared, including many that were not specified. 'The community will not stand for this indiscriminate violence' was one of these unspecified references, proclaimed by a police officer outside a courtroom in which a judge had just rendered a decision on the sentencing of a man convicted of participation in a shoot-out on a Toronto street that had resulted in a number of injuries and the death of a young woman bystander (Appleby, 2009: 9).

The ubiquity of vague references to community is a familiar story to most of us. The range of these everyday invocations has been repeatedly noted by scholars who have in turn produced their own repertoire of proliferating references to and multiple definitions of community. A common scholarly response to this proliferation of unspecified invocations of community has been to suggest that this ambiguity fatally undermines the analytical utility of this concept.

But I want to suggest a small contrarian exercise: what if instead of viewing this proliferation of everyday references to community as an indication of its banality, we chose to take this propagation as important in its own right. If people continue to insist on using community to refer to many different forms of association, perhaps we need to probe how they might do so rather than bemoan the lack of precision in this terminology. So, rather than viewing the familiar ambiguity of allusions to community as the most problematic aspect of its conceptualization, what if we considered instead the possibility of developing a mode of investigation that recognized this ambiguity as a useful analytical resource rather than a handicap. The wide range of commonplace references scattered throughout my daily newspaper suggest that we are dealing with a veritable family of concepts of sociation. That is to say we are not dealing with one concept in various references to community but a genus of concepts. If so, our mandate in this contrarian exercise will be not to define community but to establish a broad working model for investigating a class of related concepts. We need a framework that allows for that kind of breadth and that is, moreover, 'good to think with'. So rather than providing a definition, I want to suggest a working model of community that may lead us to a variety of situations and concepts. In employing this model, we may well conclude that some of these circumstances are not most effectively grouped together, but such a conclusion is as useful an insight as the possibility that they might well be conceptually linked. In short, I am suggesting that the ambiguity linked with the ubiquity of references to community might just prove to be a useful vehicle for thinking about certain classes of sociation.

STRATEGIC 'SPOTS' OF AMBIGUITY

In his introduction to A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke chastises writers who scorn one philosophical term or other as being too ambiguous (1955: xiii). Burke notes that: '[s]ince no two things or acts or situations are exactly alike, you cannot apply the same term to both of them without thereby introducing a certain margin of ambiguity', and all the more so when dealing with key or what he calls 'titular' philosophical concepts (1995: xiii). Rather than avoiding ambiguity, Burke calls for 'terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise' (1995: xiii, emphasis in the original) because it is at these strategic points of ambiguity that conceptual transformations can occur. Thus in trying to develop a theory of dramatism that can be used to investigate the forms of thought involved in the attribution of motives, Burke identifies five terms that he regards as 'generating principles': act, scene, agent, agency, purpose (1955: x). He is not troubled by potential overlaps between these general terms, since these intersections arise because these concepts are interrelated as 'attributes of a common ground or substance', in this case the attribution of motives (1955: xiii). Indeed, Burke regards the overlaps between these terms as theoretically productive because they allow the analyst to combine and recombine distinctions and hence anticipate or generate different classes of theory.

Community, I will argue, is just such a 'titular' concept, and in investigating it we can productively draw on concepts that are general enough that they can encompass a wide range of situations and are therefore concomitantly – and productively – ambiguous. At the same time, since these terms are all being used as attributes of the common ground of community, we should not be surprised by overlaps between them; indeed, it is these interrelations that allow us to work and rework a variety of combinations and distinctions as we examine different cases. But in demarcating concepts that may prove useful to think with we would be well advised to avoid recourse to the criteria that have usually predominated in academic reflections on this subject. As Marietta Baba notes, the Latin root of community is communis or common (2005: 135). Working from this notion, scholarly definitions of community have therefore often focused on listing what they consider to be the most important elements that must be held 'in common' by members of a community: values, meanings, norms or symbols being the most familiar items included in these inventories. But in and of themselves these are essentially criteria of classification. They do not necessarily pose...