By Miranda Joseph
Neighborhood is nearly constantly invoked as an unequivocal strong, a hallmark of a top quality of lifestyles, being concerned, selflessness, belonging. Into this universal portrayal, opposed to the Romance of group introduces an unusual be aware of warning, a penetrating, sorely wanted feel of what, accurately, we're doing once we name upon this excellent. Miranda Joseph explores websites the place the appropriate of group relentlessly recurs, from debates over artwork and tradition within the well known media, to the discourses and practices of nonprofit and nongovernmental companies, to modern narratives of financial transformation or "globalization." She exhibits how neighborhood legitimates the social hierarchies of gender, race, country, and sexuality that capitalism implicitly calls for. Joseph argues that social formations, together with neighborhood, are constituted during the performativity of construction. This method makes it attainable to appreciate connections among identities and groups that might another way appear to be disconnected: homosexual shoppers within the U.S. and Mexican maquiladora staff; Christian correct "family values" and Asian "crony capitalism." Exposing the complicity of social practices, identities, and groups with capitalism, this really confident critique opens the potential of real alliances throughout such adjustments. Miranda Joseph is affiliate professor of women's experiences on the college of Arizona.
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Additional resources for Against the Romance of Community
Example text
Taken together, differentiation and subordination would seem to yield hierarchy. Whereas Tocqueville describes the ways that the integrating tendencies of democracy complement the isolating tendencies of equality, in these texts it becomes a question of complementing the freedom and equivalence generated by capitalism with social hierarchy. However, I will argue, capitalism does not simply entail freedom and equivalence. In fact, it is precisely in generating and legitimating social hierarchy that “community” supplements (enables, fills a void in) capitalism.
But Putnam goes further, and this is the crucial point: he argues that the health of democratic states and economic prosperity both depend on social capital, saying, “The social capital embodied in norms and networks of civic engagement seems to be a precondition for economic development, as well as for effective government” (“Prosperous Community,” ). In arguing that economic progress (he means but doesn’t say capitalist economic progress) and “democracy” depend on community (or rather on the hegemony-producing functions of community), The Supplementarity of Community with Capital 13 he points to the supplementary, and not merely complementary, role that community plays in relation to capitalism, and thus begins to make my argument for me, although he does so as a fan of capitalism, where I will do so as a critic.
While Agamben claims that “[whatever being] is neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation” (), in working to evoke “the impotent omnivalence of whatever being” (), he excludes the possibility of articulating even contingent subjects and political goals. He celebrates the Tiananmen protests for “the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands (democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict . )” (). While I generally disagree with those who argue that poststructuralist theory promotes political passivity or paralyzing relativism, Nancy and Agamben would certainly seem to offer grist for that complaint since in fact they do quite explicitly promote passivity.