THIS VILLAGE WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS (JUST STAY IN YOUR VEHICLES)

Without a divinity we could not rid ourselves of other divinities who might threaten our existence. Each divinity thus appears as an anti-divinity.

-Bruno Latour On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

“Will it be buildings, scenery or good old British eccentricity that wins the day?” So reads the blurb for Channel 4’s Village of the Year with Penelope Keith, in which five villages per heat vie for a place in the grand final. Primitive enticements abound again; village against village, ‘us’ against ‘them’.

This year’s winner, Broughshane in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, was selected for among other things its community, specifically referred to as ‘tight knit’. Already, and whilst quiet and out-chimed by the local belfry, alarm bells are a-ringing. Just how tight exactly?

Interestingly, this year also witnessed the introduction of the Annual Neighbourhood of the Year Awards, paradoxically championing individuals deemed instrumental in fostering community cohesion.

Empirically speaking of course, how can one community be better than another? But before interrogating the ontological properties of communitarianism, let’s consider one of the most common and contentious forms through which it manifests itself.

Since its noble inception in the late 1960s after it was realised that up to 38 witnesses failed to intervene while a young lady was fatally attacked in New York across the street from her apartment, (thenceforth referred to as the bystander effect), the neighbourhood watch has continued to grow arms, legs, eyes and ears. Launching in the UK towards the end of the 1980s, the scheme has proceeded to tackle the omnipresent societal pyramid of hate through its prevention of misdemeanours ranging from antisocial behaviour to terrorism, quite literally according to the A-Z guide adorning their website.

But it can’t be denied that, with its vehement linguistic hyperbole yet apparent physical inactivity, the watch has fallen prey to mainstream derision, mockery and insignificance. “What in the name of Christ is neighbourhood watch?” quipped comedian Dara O’Briain during a standup routine concerning generational idiosyncrasies of community involvement. “Is it just a sticker” and “is it just watching?” (my italics). Be it film, television, literature or theatre, the tone is, generally speaking, voyeuristically comedic, such as Alan Ayckbourn’s Neighbourhood Watch: A Play, described as ‘painfully funny’ for example, and a ‘“cracking […] understanding of the flaws in the social fabric”.

If not comedy, it’s horror, or in the case of the idiosyncrasies interrogated by The League of Gentlemen and their subsequent projects, it’s a deliciously coercive amalgam of both. An unfortunate flaw with the initiative is its self-perpetuation- it has become a prisoner of its own identity- in spite of its humble and noble origins, it finds itself trapped in necessitating the existence and indeed continuation of the very dangers it seeks to vanquish- it is inextricably reliant on that which it holds in critical opposition.

This snare of infinite regression is reminiscent of Bruno Latour’s On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, specifically his distinction of fetishism as the attribution of autonomy to an object or image that it does not possess, such as the creation of idols (how can an object be simultaneously man-made and divine?), whereas the anti-fetishist subsequently challenges this contradiction, in that one much choose between fabrication and actuality, between epistemology and ontology, theory and practice, fetish and fact.

As such, the anti-fetishist merely recognises someone else as being a fetishist. Throughout his essay, Latour articulates that overcoming fetishism is no simple adjustment and is in fact laced with an inescapable contradiction in that by disproving an idol’s celestial authenticity, the anti-fetishist will observe that the object in question all of a sudden begins to ‘act’ with newfound vitality; it shifts, distorts and reverses the origin of power; only human interaction can install power in objects. Yet, in a second denunciation, the now liberated human soon realises that rather than and such autonomous enlightenment, their activities are in fact governed from afar by a multiplicity of causal factors. Belief therefore is the strict separation of constructivism and realism, tarring both the fetishist and anti-fetishist with the same viscous theological impasto.

So both the fetishist and the anti-fetishist, while each the inversion of the other, perpetuate the same diametric grammar of attachment and detachment. What’s more, they both overlook a furtive yet progressive interstice- the factish- a passage in which construction and actuality become synonymous, meditating space, allowing one to traverse from authorship to autonomy without latching on to either; the attribution of alterity and human origins; a ‘wisdom’ passage that imbues “an autonomy we do not possess to beings that do not possess it either’. Be they ancestral, tradition of lineage, the factish forges a protected path through the sprawling, dense forests of antithesis, such as the ethnopsychiatric generation of divinities as part of a considered treatment plan; the divinities are, for all intents and purposes, real, but they are not to be mistaken for gods.

The Neighbourhood Watch is a curious shapeshifting amalgamation of both fetishistic and anti-fetishist sentimentalities. It is a dissonant machine of alienation; a self-perpetuating regress of internality/externality, cause and source, knowledge and illusion, truth and suspicion. It is both the condemnation and necessitation of the other; the fetishistic agency of danger and the anti-fetishist manipulation of mastery. It destroys the fetish of unification through the anti-fetishisation of threat, and destroys the fetish of threat through the anti-fetishisation of unification.

Whilst not the sole focus for this particular investigation, I am curious to interrogate the interstitial potentialities of the factish within this context. Would its influence be ameliorative, detrimental or inconsequential? To what extent could the factish be re-conceptualised as nuance; as a path of interlocution through the conceptual chaos of the gated communitarian machine; the community without nuance.

What are the implications of creating a stronger community? As a predominantly voluntary grassroots organisation embedded within communities, the associative hierarchical structures of ‘creationism’ akin to the watch are at immediate odds with the inclusivity professed elsewhere within their mission statement, and is something to be regarded with reserved yet considered caution. Furthermore, the notion of sociological authorship reduces the complex epistemology of community cohesion to something that can be monitored and orchestrated, or rather that it should in order to be maintained.

Would the factish be enough to unravel such complex entanglements? The communitarian predicament more broadly has remained one of the most vivacious sociological deliberations of the last century, largely distinguished from society as an unbreakable bond of unconditional kinship. Yet as the storm of globalisation bore its teeth throughout modernity, permanence and solidarity perished in the wake of a new post-colonial ‘liquid’ world. Deterritorialisation swept in with enough ferocity to uproot heavy capitalist Fordist factories in favour of a fresh and fecund ether of decentralised transience. Community became torn between such ontological uncertainties as anthropophagic patriotism and anthropoemic nationalism to the extent that it was reduced to panoptical citadels, regressing back to the control of belonging. The late Zygmunt Bauman referred to community as the “mutant of a voluntary ghetto”- the safer the inhabitants felt inside, the more threatening the outside world became. Whilst in real ghettos, insiders can’t get out, voluntary ghettos ensure that outsiders can’t get in, and, if I may reiterate, the insiders can’t get out! Paradoxically, pseudo ghettoisation serves as a perverse attempt at freedom, recalling the self-perpetuating Hegelean plight of freedom and security- one cannot exist without the other. Bauman concludes the ghetto is “not a greenhouse of community […] but a laboratory of social disintegration”. It represents the impossibility of community.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s instrumental text The Inoperative Community ruthlessly dismantles any insipid pre-Socratic sentiments of unequivocal communitarianism. A largely Western and Christian dogma vociferating the loss of communality- a ‘lost community’ waiting to be found- haunts contemporary debate, and lingers like a troublesome poltergeist. He explains however that community can never be ‘lost’, because it is a state of existence- a resistance to immanence and absoluteness; community attempts to undo the absolute- the sentiment that one can be removed from all relation. A singularity is the opposite of the absolute; singularities are independent entities sharing a common body like the features of a face. But for Nancy, this is still just a being-in-common; an inoperative community as opposed to a common-being, or, community. Ecstasy is the impossibility of being without relation, but is still more of a being-in-common than ultimate communitarianism. Community is not a vapid project of fusion; it means there is no singular being without relation; it is the performance of finite coexistence; the ‘between’; the you and I. As the denial of immanence, community ultimately reveals itself through death; death is the decomposition of immanence; and so any Christian sentiments of reabsorption into a community after death are as superficial as the aforementioned ‘lost community.

But surely if community cannot be lost, then it cannot be found either, making it not so much inoperative, but indefinable, inaccessible and ultimately unattainable.

Considered from the perspective of the increasingly prolific object-oriented ontological school of thought, community is an object, just as a brick, a dragon, a black hole and the Dutch East India Company are objects. According to founding philosopher Graham Harman and others within speculative realism, there are two types of objects in existence- the real and the sensual/intentional. There are also two ways of misunderstanding them- ‘undermining’, reducing them downwards to something overly specific, or ‘overmining', reducing them upwards to mere empiricist bundles of qualities. Materialism he argues, does both. Harman proposed that there is no difference between the human perception of a leaf colliding with a wall than the relation between the leaf and the wall themselves. Much of his work is a reconfiguration of Heidegger’s tool analysis, which presents us with two ways of encountering objects- both action (praxis) and theory. In the famous example of a hammer, we could either pick it up and use it (ready-to-hand) or contemplate it from afar (present-at-hand). By trying to intellectually make sense of it, Heidegger suggests we never uncover the object itself; it withdraws from us. The same happens however when we use it; the more successfully we use the hammer, the more it disappears from consciousness, thereby withdrawing to the same void until it breaks or something goes wrong, in which case we have the broken tool or ‘tool-as’, which despite re-emerging, is still not the actual object. Real objects can therefore never touch one another directly, both withdraw from each other, and encounter the other as nothing more than a caricature.

By contrast, sensual objects as outlined by Edmund Husserl exist vicariously through perception, though this perception is not limited to human experience. Whilst Heidegger’s objects withdraw from existence, Husserl’s objects are always before us. Sensual objects are anti-empirical, encrusted with multiple features which can be removed without the object itself changing, like the constancy of the ocean despite a succession of waves. Beneath the surface of accidental qualities are more fundamental qualities which can be accessed intellectually, and these qualities (the eidos) are the only way in which withdrawn tool-beings manifest in experience. If I close my eyes and fall asleep, the sensual object disappears.

And so one may well argue, that in this sense, just by contemplating community, we are perpetuating our lack of access to it, reducing it to present-at-hand and dooming it to withdrawal. We can only ever encounter a reduced parody of community, thus rendering it inaccessible. To quote Bauman, “never was the word ‘community’ used more indiscriminately and emptily than the decades when communities in a sociological sense were hard to find”. The gated community is the broken communitarian tool; the territoriality, the neighbourhood watch, the surveillance and fear of what lies beyond that community so desperately needs yet blindly insists it protects against, all reduce community to an unsurpassable withdrawal from existence. The sentiment of an inclusive community withers into oxymoronic wordplay and in the realm of real experience, community, understood as unadulterated and unabridged, is futile and without hope, postulated at best.

Also extensively documented is communitarianism’s predisposition for violence and diametric descent; Nancy positions Bataille’s ‘sovereignty’ as the death of community, whereas René Girard posits ritual violence as the bedrock of communitarian existence. The death of community is the disappearance of difference; a sacrificial crisis, a community on the brink of uncontrollable violence, hence why twins, incest and patricide are mythologically feared as the enemy of community, with their viperous and spiteful erasure of distinction. Ritual sacrifice protects the community from its own violence, and through the vessel of a selected surrogate victim, the community purges itself of its iniquity in a display of unimaginable collective brutality, allegorised by Girard through the metaphor of immunisation; defending the body to repel a microbiotic invasion.

All objects have qualities. Real and sensual objects exist in tension with their real and sensual qualities and within a fourfold structure of time, space, eidos and essence. Time and space emanate from objects- time is the emanation of accidents (imagined changes) from an sensual object, whereas space is the tension between real objects and their relations, such as a hammer emanating hammer-images through which it is encountered. Harman suggests that sensual objects are conjoined with their qualities, so for anything new to happen an act of separation or fission is required, whereas the real object is absent from the sensual field, so will only meet with its sensual qualities through an act of coming together or fusion. These forces form the basis of causality.

However, as a frenzied amalgam of real and sensual objects and qualities, ritual sacrifice, if we insert it into Harman’s algorithm, further complicates such a structure, because the real and sensual become confused and indiscernibly distorted, subverted and cross-pollinated. Ritual violence, or by association, community, could be said therefore to rupture and displace time and space through a turbulent and carnal entanglement of both fission and fusion.

Could it be conceivable that alterity, the Other, or the singularity is actually a sensual object in the Husserlean sense with both real and imaginary qualities? Harman argues that any relation generates a new object, and that all objects have a molten inner core where all activity unfolds. If my relation with another singularity forms a new object, then I and the Other will find ourselves on its interior. To perceive, he claims, means to encounter sensual objects on the interior of a larger encompassing object.

I propose that this larger object is what we mean by community; an anti-anthropocentric shapeshifting entity forever changing through relations, never reaching a final all-encompassing ‘universe’, but ceaselessly shifting and infinitely regressing; a whatever existence located exclusively within the realm of the sensual; a self-perpetuating withdrawal; an impossibility in real experience, a mechanised sensibility, a scent of sentimentality, a narrative of fictionality.

DANIEL NEWTON
2018
Foreword to There’s a Crocodile in the Canal!
MFA Dissertation
The Glasgow School of Art