[lbo-talk] Report from KPFA CAB meeting

[Dick Grippon]

sheeeeeeeeeeeeit. I was involved in two community research programs. teams 
of researchers crawling all over said community. on one, the director of 
the research program was a high-minded intellectual type. we spent two 
years asking, "what is a community?" and once you answer that question, 
"how, exactly, do you study it in good faith?". there's no clear cut 
answer, but one thing: simply pointing out disagreements within a so-called 
community isn't enough to claim there's no such thing. to have a 
disagreement at all pressupposes that something is shared among those who 
disagree. and there, you have a place to start. community are imaginary. 
and there's nothing wrong with that. you, of all people, should appreciate 
that.

At 09:42 PM 10/14/2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
>joanna wrote:
>
>It is scary but worth pondering the fact that our attention is always 
>poignantly drawn to that which we are about to lose or have already lost.
>
>Here's the beginning of an 8,000-word piece I wrote for the Socialist 
>Register 2006 (Panitch & Leys, eds). I just got my author's copy of the 
>Brit edition, so I guess it'll be out there soon. Dunno about here.
>
>Doug
>
>----
>
>The U.S. may be populated by nearly 300 million isolated monads, but do we 
>ever love the word "community."  On the left, it's never "blacks" or 
>"Jews," it's "the black community" and "the Jewish community." Presumably 
>there's something abrupt and almost impolite about simple monosyllabic 
>nouns, so the addition of a few Latinate syllables softens the blow. But 
>there's a way in which the use of the word reads like a wish fulfillment, 
>a hope that a community that doesn't really exist in any for-itself sense 
>can be created in the act of naming it.
>
>But, beyond the left, it's also a popular formulation in mainstream 
>American speech. Examples I've collected over the years include the 
>reality TV community, the military community, the air-hijacking community, 
>the mortgage community, the Alzheimer's community, the cybernerd 
>community, the Phish community, and the copyright community. Of particular 
>interest to readers of this volume might be one of the more ubiquitous 
>examples: "the business community."
>
>Just what is the business community? [...]
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