more on community, miranda joseph
As promised, some quotes from Miranda Joseph’s book Against the Romance of Community, on non-profit organisations, with notations and a rant….
Nonprofits often stand on for community metonymically. One gives to one’s community or to ‘the community’ by contributing labour or money to a nonprofit; nonprofits are asked to represent communities politically, to speak or the communities for which they are metonyms. Written into the Romantic narrative [by which she means a narrative that nostalgically posits community as premodern, idyllic, a lost, and ahistorical past], nonprofits are imagined to be the formal sites for communal behaviour, for caring and giving, supposed once upon a time to have taken place informally among neighbours. At the same time, nonprofits are defined through their relation to profit. Nonprofits are supposed to be not for profit — the capital they assumulate cannot be distributed as profit — but they are also not non-capitalist and especially not anticapitalist. Nonprofits are often posited as the institutional form in which community complements capital…. Largely run on women’s voluntary and low-waged labour and providing services once thought to be womens’ work (religion, education, social welfare) nonprofits might be seen as a site of reproduction that supports for-profit production in much the way women’s domestic labor has done.
This helps to explain why workers in ‘nonprofits’ often become caught in a bind that positions them as ‘the wife’, working too many hours — which, at any rate, are invisible in calculations of labourtime/wages precisely because ‘community work’ is coded as domestic work, always ongoing, never done. Part of Joseph’s argument is that ‘community’ functions in a relationship of supplementarity to capital: that is, ‘community’ supplements and organises bodies or needs so that they can be slotted into the machinations of capitalism as recognisable subjects:
…. [C]ommunity is posited as the origin of the journey toward individualism. In order to be recognised as a potential recipient of (subject to) the goodies that come from a pluralist state one must first constitute oneself as a legitimate community. But in so doing, one inscribes oneself into the machinery that turns the raw material of community into subjects on the nation-state and capital. That machinery is the bureaucratic and capitalist apparatus that community must inhabit … to participate in a community in the United States is to participate in a group with certain standardised features, such as businesses (bars, bookstores, restaurants and foodshops, small-scale manufacturing) and often more importantly, civil voluntary organisations … that are frequently organised as governmentally regulated and state-sanctioned not-for-profit corporations. If the group does not operate in this way, then it is a ‘gang’ or an ‘underground network’: it is not given the status of a ‘community’. The practical and rhetorical deployment of community makes one group equivalent to another and produces equivalent subjects, even when there are drastic power differences between them and discrepant logics organising the various collectivities (gay and lesbians versus Christians, eg.)
This book feels like the obvious accompaniment to Wendy Brown’s States of Injury, except that rather than dealing with the legal strategies that issue from ‘communities’, like Hate Crimes and Anti-Discrimination legislation, it tackles community itself, head-on.
Part of my time — an increasing amount of time, lately — is spent putting wheels on a group I started with some people in 2003 that does a non-normative line in trans advocacy and support. We began as an email list of two, a ragged group of trannyboys looking to drink beer and talk occasionally. Now the email list is 50+, we’re being paid (a pittance) for collaborative projects, and we’ve had to get an ABN, register a business name and open a bank account. We also seem to have acquired a more ‘active’ reputation than the modest activities we engage in seem to warrant. Some people tell others that we are a ‘trans youth organisation’ (I might have mentioned this before — we are mostly trannyboys, and trannyboys often look like 12 year olds, even if most of us are in our mid-late 20’s.) Other formalised organisations email me and ask who to approach, who is the co-ordinator, who funds us? People have been telling us to incorporate (for non-Australian readers, that means registering as a formal nonprofit organisation) and I feel a strong urge to tell them to jump off a pier. To do anything, the Gender Project needs not to constitute itself as a community group, a group representing anyone or any ‘community’. If we do incorporate, and become a formalised structure, we’ll become immersed in policing the boundaries of whom we represent, and where we fit.
I have to keep remembering that most of the people who are attracted to this sense that we ‘do stuff’, that we are engaged, that we are thinking and talking and trying to make some fucked up things better, simply do not recognise the existence of ‘gangs’ and ‘underground networks’. For most people, it’s entirely impossible that a group representing no community, and talking in the heart-on-sleeve language of revolutionaries, could actually do anything. I have to remember that this is probably the first time the ALSO Directory has ever included a group whose aim is to ‘creatively resist’ anything. I want fiercely for us to stay underground, to keep having picnics to talk instead of meetings in arid meeting-rooms. Underground networks have their own political pitfalls. But once they’ve done their work, located the trapdoors that undo them, they melt back into the night, as if they’d never been there.
You! Assuage my guilt!
This really belongs in the long discussion and para-discussion on immigration metaphors and trans identity, but I’m finishing the essay for Self-organizing men, and I’m wondering what you think of this bit, last paragraph in particular. I admit that it was surprisingly easy to slip into this analogy.
>>Now that I pass consistently as male, I am being mediated through another kind of silence, a silence designed to deal with transsexuality rather than gendervariance. Now that it’s clear that I mean to present as male, the people around me are as willing to smooth over my unmanly mistakes as they were to ignore my deficient performance as a woman. I’m a little soft, a little shy, a little weird, a little effeminate, but a nice boy.
Transpeople depend on this silence to function in a transphobic society. Traditionally speaking, our aim is to pass, that is, to escape notice: to walk down the street and meet nothing but silence. We are supposed to want to seem as much like ordinary men and women as possible; when we are openly, obviously transsexual, we have failed. On top of the myriad physical and behavioral cues we are required to adopt in order to become passable, we enter into a contract with the rest of the polite straight world to smooth over the facts of our existence that cannot be hidden. We agree to present ourselves as men and women, and they agree to treat us as men and women.
The silence is based on an assimilationist ethos, an unequal compromise: I give up the history that grounds me, and you give up the purity that supports you. I become as much like you as possible, and you pretend that you want us on the same side of the line. You grant me a portion of your birthright, but I agree that it’s yours to give. I make your life comfortable, and you make mine possible.
Comment by piny — November 15, 2005 @ 7:45 am
I reckon it sounds awesome, and I can’t wait to read more. ‘Self Organising Men’ is gonna rock. I like the ‘exchange’ idea in particular, because all the tiny social moments that make up ‘passing’, or ‘not passing’, are so much about an exchange, a ‘deal’ — and the concealment of the fact that it’s a deal, too.
At the moment I’m attempting to figure out why, precisely, the migration metaphor seems to work so well and is so powerful. Is mobility/migration/movement over-determined because of the conditions of modernity or postmodernity? Is it about how subjects need to be constituted in order to be recognisable by the state? (Because ‘assimilation’ obviously works on lots of levels, not least because of the homogeneity of the ‘ideal’ subject…) I’m remembering all the writing in the late 90’s that posited ‘gay and lesbian’ identities as evidence of ‘the ethnicity model’, modelled on ethnic difference, and I wonder if maybe the same thing is happening with trans/migration stuff.
Comment by goingsomewhere — November 15, 2005 @ 3:14 pm
Aw, thanks! I’m terrified. Plus, I haven’t worked towards a deadline since 2002.
I’m very curious about your submission, and looking forward to reading it. I have an allergy to theory, and your writing has been an accessible entrance into theoretical thinking.
Maybe the migration analogy works because it contains a petitioner/arbiter relationship. Depending on whether you understand that condition as it relates to emigration and gender, this analogy either unpacks cisgender privilege or cements it.
Comment by piny — November 15, 2005 @ 5:14 pm
Catching up
Some things I’ve been reading after a long weekend away from the computer:
Going Somewhere? has a post about nonprofits, underground networks vs. formalized communities, and Miranda Joseph’s book Against the Romance of Community, which so…
Trackback by Recording Surface — November 15, 2005 @ 5:56 pm
hi Az,
Thanks very much for this. I tried to get that book out the library but someone else’s got it. I’ll have to wait.
In the meantime - all of this is very interesting. The stuff I can most comment on (oh, before I forget, I’d love to hear more about this group which you’re part of, it sounds cool) are the bits on nonprofits and community being bound up with producing capital/value. I think bigger nonprofits - at least those big enough to have employees - are for profit (in the sense of capital — surplus value as profit that is extracted, re-invested and accumulated). It’s a very specific industry with its own idiosyncracies (and variance from sector to sector, firm to firm and so on) of course, but I don’t think that changes the for-profit-ness.
It’d be interesting to compare nonprofits with other industries that produce less tangible (but often still measurable) products - like media companies, management consultants, law firms, etc - to see if there are any similar dynamics. It’d also be interesting to compare nonprofits with theories of state capitalism (as states are other actors sometimes taken to be noncapitalist). I wish I had the time and the energy to do that myself.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 15, 2005 @ 9:59 pm
Thanks for reminding me about this book — I bought it a while ago but still haven’t read it. It needs to go on my syllabus now!
Comment by Mimi — November 17, 2005 @ 4:37 am
I hear that…the wilderness society’s work is never done, and the ‘overtime’ doesn’t exist, despite most workers being nominally anti howard’s new IR laws…
On top of that, if it ain’t wilderness, it ain’t our fight, which I find very frustrating…there is no politics in my workplace that are outside the status quo - comfortably in opposition - in the same way the government is always comfortably in power (whoever you vote for, the gvt always wins and all that)…
Having said that there were some interesting critiques that showed me a mirror on our org (actually, that’s a fallacy - it should read “the org that pays my wage”) in the oct new internationalist…
I am intrigued…thanks for the reference
Comment by datakid — November 19, 2005 @ 1:58 am
thanks: a whole new world just opened up…reminds of the first time I really listened to thelonius monk and saw music alive in a whole new way
Comment by isa — June 26, 2007 @ 1:56 pm