Intro questions

• What does it mean to be part of a community? How does our affiliation define our identity? What IS a community?

• How has the shaping of communities been used to dominate others, to maintain proximity to the central axis of power within a system? (xix)

Former models

• This is a divergence from community models based on nationalism, geography, or feudal or tribal systems of belonging to a clan/ monarchy/ tribe/ religious or ethnic group organized around belief systems

The gay community in San Fran

• What are the challenges to the notion of community as all-inclusive in the Rhino Theater? What does Joseph think this says about the nature of community? How does this relate to Hartford communities?

Capitulo 1

• What is the romantic notion of community that we all have and why do we have it?

Traditional Discourse on Community

Community = local, particular, face-to-face relations, boundaries between us and them, grounded in values;

balances and humanizes capitalism

Capitalism = global, abstract, faceless, crosses borders, grounded in economic values

Miranda Joseph

• Communities and capitalism co-dependent, have supplemental, complicit relationship, even though many critics and governmental policies suggest the opposite, that capitalism should not be held accountable for ills such as poverty or dislocation, but that communities should “solve their own problems”. [Hence the Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 (11)]

Community formation

• Joseph’s main argument is that community identity is primarily constructed around practices of consumption and production, and that those very practices mirror back to members what their identity is or should be. Watch Univision? Well then you’re part of “Lo nuestro”. Doesn’t that make you feel good? If so, then keep watching, cause watching gives you membership in Latinidad and gives you a sense of belonging.

Performing community

• Capitalism is then the very MEDIUM in which community is enacted. Consuming Mexican soap operas makes you a genuine Latina, and then you can talk about them with your other Latina friends and bond as a group. And feel soooo authentically Latina and part of the Latino community.

Marx

• Capitalism can destroy community because it can alienate individuals from particular relations with others and instead insert them into universal and abstract relations via the assembly line in a global factory: they are isolated from the consumers of their work in their specialized production of a part of a whole.

Historical shift late twentieth century

• Fordism (mass production + high wages = workers are able to consume the products they produce) gives way to capitalistic practices that address consumers in their cultural particularity, and that in addition, create new social formations.

Capitalism,

• our form of market economy, DEPENDS on mass consumption. It is in the national interest of maintaining our economy to create more savvy (i.e. hungry) consumers and to exploit diversity to better achieve market success (23).

Cultural plurality Cultural particularity

• Immigration class polarity; discourse of cultural pluralism allows individuals to become part of the assimilated melting pot

• Market forces and diversity discourse focus on participation of individuals in capitalism as niched producers and consumers with distinct identities and contributions

• Both cultural pluralism and diversity discourses contribute to the expansion of capital.

Plurality or particularity,

Ethnic inheritances and stories continue to be used to explain the unequal positioning of individuals in the hierarchy of the national society. “Recent arrivals haven’t fought their way up yet.” Or: “their culture holds them back from fighting for rights/ achieving economic success.”

The market becomes the container for and the manager of difference, often by evoking “community”. FedEx ad, 24-5: our commonality as Japanese, whites, blacks is that we all love FedEx.

Communities as equal

• Organizing cultural groups into communities allows a false sense of equality within society, but it is a legitimizing act: in order to be recognized as a potential recipient of state and federal goods, one must constitute a community. (even though a group of Jews or African Americans may have drastically less power in society as a group of white Christians). The system is constructed such that using your ethnicity as a tool is a legitimate way of getting what you supposedly already deserve as a citizen.

Constitution as a Community

• Often means a group can now be inserted within a particular slot in the hierarchy, and in addition, can be targeted by marketers.

• Marketers can now solidify a community’s “unique” identity

• This in turn encourages a group to “perform” an identity through their consumption of goods targeted to them, and through their understanding of their placement in the hierarchy (500 years of colonialism makes me act this way)

New dynamics

• Economic vs. social• Production vs. signification• Exploitation vs. dominationRelation of all the above one of complicity.Production, for example, is the most powerful

generator of signification (and thus social organization)

“Meaning is socially constructed and historically determined… to support particular arrangements of power.”

Production of commodities

• Has become less and less material, to include labor that produces services, means of communication, activism, “all human doing” @ Joseph

meaning constituted through action, performance, not just products; the performance can BE the product, or the way in which a consumer is manipulated to make “free” choices. Consumption = a site of performative production.

I = my work/ my needs or labor determine what my community is

• Marx argues that subjecthood and social relations are implicit in the production of the means of subsistence of a society, and of the new needs that are generated in response to new product development.

• This can, in turn, also create new community formations: into social divisions of labor (factory workers vs. intellectual property lawyers), or into groups of consumers (internet video game players)

Jean Baudrillard’s shift in capitalism

Profit (surplus value) depends no longer on controlling production but on controlling consumer desire.

This is done by controlling the symbolic order that exploits the interplay between use value, exchange value, and surplus value, and encouraging consumers to assign cultural capital to certain commodities or services

Appropriation of cultural forms

• Is one way to generate cultural capital; it is when a dominant group takes and profits from cultural forms and practices of a subordinate group.

• The key to exploitation is to convince both groups to voluntarily consume it and recognize it as theirs

Corporation = Community

• How to elicit a cooperative approach to collective bargaining? Use rhetoric to convince workers that they are part of a family or community of workers, that they are participants and not just wage earners. They should be invested insuring the profitability of the company. This displacement of loyalty onto the worker is ironic given that we are in a historical moment in which corporations show decreasing loyalty to communities of workers by downsizing, outsourcing, and moving jobs overseas.

Ending welfare as we know it

• The government has also displaced responsibility onto citizens for their well-being, by initiating the “Personal Responsibility Act” of 1996, thus divesting states from any responsibility for “individual” poverty (and avoiding an examination of group and community poverty)

Niche market consumers as producers

• Korean markets, Indian gas stations, “minority owned” firms are examples of diverse cultural and ethnic communities constituting themselves as producers in a new corporate rubric in an age of waning centralized US production. They facilitate the flow of capital by becoming the site and structures through which a community enacts its very existence.

Non-Profits’ Role in Capitalism

• The bottom line: Non-profits are organizations in which people who have benefited from capitalism are convinced to donate money (indirectly) to people who have not benefited, thus assuaging their own guilt and quieting needy people, and making capitalism tolerable for all.

Origins of non-profits

• Catholic missionaries to the New World were important instruments of colonial administrations who used them to promote Western values and culture, and to provide services they didn’t want to, like education and health care.

Non-Profits in the 20th century

• Continue to complement foreign policy interests of governments and corporations. The U.S. uses non-profits in Africa, China and the Middle East to “win hearts and minds” to U.S. values and political practices.

Andrew Carnegie

• Manifesto of Philanthropy created libraries, universities, museums, and parks, to create equality of access/ opportunity if not equality of outcome/ wealth.

• Was a way to disempower socialist and anticapitalist movements.

• Another direct response: the creation of foundations for community development.

How to make Capitalism appealing both here and abroad?

• Sentimental education (Schlesinger and Eisenhower)

• Postwar construction and relief efforts abroad• New Directions Initiative 1973: foreign aid

directed through NGO’s• Deployment of non-profits to deal with

humanitarian and political crises• Microcredit organizations that deploy and

transform communities for capitalism

Goal: to create willing subjects

• A capitalistic subject participates willingly in community ventures, formulates choices as an individual consumer, and express their communal preferences by submitting to a communal norm.

• Other forms of communal subjectivity: kinship, tradition, ritual

Civil Society

• Civil Society exists when willing subjects follow these communal and capitalistic norms, in spite of societal inequities.

• Civil Society is also defined as the presence of private nonprofit organizations (which again, make the inequities of capitalism tolerable and make people feel part of a compassionate, egalitarian society.)

Gift Exchange

• A debt, duty, or obligation to the community “freely” given, which facilitates social hierarchies and intra- and inter-community relationships.

• “Gift giving is not in fact free of the constraints of self-interest and power, cannot be opposed to commercial exchange through notions of altruism and disinterestedness, but is an exchange system driven by and determining the whole hierarchical social formation within which it takes place.” (104)

• Non-profits are used to offer “gifts” of assistance that presuppose a later non-monetary repayment.