A Dialectic Reading of Gemeinschaft und GesellschaftThe Persistence of Community in and Beyond the Modern State

L. DeSilva-Johnson : The Graduate Center, CUNY

Ferdinand Tonnies seminal 1887 text, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, (first translated in English

in 1957 as “Community and Society”) can be extremely illuminating in considering the epistemological

environment of the social sciences as influenced by the Modern turn. While this literature has long played

a role in Sociology and Political Science pedagogy, it has been too often passed over in the

Anthropological tradition -- in which it can serve as a tool not only to understand the historical and social

shift out of which these models were conceived, but also in our ongoing efforts to reconcile continued

efforts for community building with those projects of the modern state of which gesellschaft represents

the ultimate expression.

The text offers a framework within which to understand man’s response to technological change,

as well what can often be read as the processual response produced as a theoretical result. The

traditionally directional nature within which this framework has been understood -- that of a priori

“progress” as existing along a continuum -- has remained unduly privileged in not only the application of

Tonnies’ essentially structural model to cultural and political changes, but also continues to implicitly

shape theory in the social sciences and beyond.

The promise of technological and rational modernization often retained a heady hold over those

who were otherwise quite against its social and political ramifications. In addition, the industrial

revolution came in tandem with the scientific community’s significant advances in understanding

evolutionary science, surrounding and following the publication of Origin of the Species in 1857. It was

out of this that a stages theory of understanding human societal evolution would stem as a response to our

biological development -- as did a desire to correspondingly fit historical progressions of events being

observed into a natural, pre-determined continuum that could be empirically explained.

What remained difficult to explain with any empirical proof were those attributes essential to

human nature, so long the subject of philosophers and others who would serve as predecessors to

anthropologists and sociologists. Evident in Tonnies and others we can see the desire to understand how

what might be our most basic nature would either be the basis of, or changed in response to, the societal

restructuring into gesellschaft. Can our continued desire to create community truly be explained by

underlying self-interest?

This paper seeks to illuminate the way in which Tonnies’ two categories can illustrate the

persistence of both, despite his resignment to the modernity continuum of “progress” constraining the

two. A consideration of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft in the context of the unrelenting human

fascination with the project of Utopia supports a non-directional, dialectic reading of these terms, one in

which gemeinschaft and gesellschaft are not evolutionary stages but can be seen as coexistant, if

contradictory, forms of social order that balance conflictual human instincts for both community and

gain. Introducing the role of human will into the reification of either gemeinschaft or gesellschaft in

modern society offers a condition in which neither can be achieved without conscious intention. which

encourages a new approach to the creation of humanistic unity via undeniably modern avenues -- willed

communities that are formed and exist within and in tandem to the alienation of the modern state, instead

of the traditional model made antiquated by its institution.

The application of the “dialectic” model is derived from Georges Politzer’s text of 1976, from

which we posit Tonnies’ concepts within a relationship of reciprocal action, as well as expressing a spiral

form of historical development, in which during the alternating of dominant forms, there would

necessarily occur slight changes in the reincarnation of each, the Modern state of gesellschaft being

understood as defined by our will to individual emancipation and technological progress, eventuating in a

mechanical system of interaction. It is suggested here that a pre-modern gemeinschaft was in fact never

fully present, out of which grew the sentiment of achieving success through an urban, industrial model.

The source of this move towards gesellschaft derived, however, from a Puritan, ethically driven moral

code which when disposed with re-set the desired balance back towards a society organized around the

principles of gemeinschaft, a project which continues on in our efforts towards community.

In hypothesizing the significance of these efforts, one fruitful approach to the study of culture

hypothesizes that art and thought contain an implicit utopian dimension that internal analysis and

contextualization can render explicit. (Liebensohn : 1988 : 3) As the move to modernism was theorized

so consistently in reference to its spatial ramifications, it is only natural that attempts to render explicit a

new gemeinschaft would be realized in the marriage of art and empirical thought that molds that

environment - architecture.

The attempts to reconcile the utopian ideal with that of inevitable technological progress it could

be said was briefly realized in the theoretical moment of early modern architecture in an unusually overt

intersection of cultural sentiment and philosophy. These efforts, while differentiated in methodology,

scale, and material application, strived to reify the promise of technology into built form while using its

innovations as the backbone for a new society that would, through its rational relationship with the built

environment, produce a society that would assure its citizens of those intangible qualities that were lost

with the transition to gesellschaft. Importantly, even its more utopian expressions, modern architecture

would suggest a return to these qualities without the suggestion that a return to pre-modern conditions --

spatial, technological, or otherwise, would be necessary. It attempted instead to create within an accepted

continuum of progress a physical world which would mollify the experiences of isolation, overcrowding,

and unsanitary conditions that had accompanied industrialization.

We will approach the subject first through a brief review of Tonnies’ text, then explore other

expressions of the two modes of society he describes. These serve to reinforce a dialectical model for

gemeinschaft and gesellschaft within history, suggesting not only that the modern moment did not

represent the only turn from one to the next, but that in fact the two have recurred in a cyclical fashion

for some time. Ultimately, Tonnies’ illustration of the two is prescient in suggesting that the industrial

revolution would irreparably change the structure and function of modern society -- but that this would be

a mixed blessing. We paint him here as a predecessor of the theoretical framers of early modern

architecture, hoping to find new ways that allowed for unity firmly located within a technological,

bureaucratic society, and will rely largely upon material from the Bauhaus movement in Germany.

We consider this project of early modern architecture from the standpoint of late-stage

capitalism and consider the question of viability for unity within gesellschaft. However, rather than

suggesting a cyclical understanding of the dialectic within the contemporary frame, this paper suggests a

reading of the concepts drawing on a divisory line between our cultural and societal interactions that

allows us to exist simultaneously within both. This suggests that while our political economy (and to a

large extent, our culture of commodity, a la Jameson’s understanding) exist firmly within the logic of

gesellschaft, that there has long existed a parallel society, which can be understood as that of

gemeinschaft, in which its rules need not apply.

Using Bahktin and Turner, we find theoretical ground for this coexistence, concluding further

that it was in part the outward attempt to preclude the liminal line and apply theory functional within this

smaller, self-selecting community to physical space on universal scale that ensured the failure of the

modern architecture project as intended. Ultimately, this ongoing relationship between the will to unity

and the will to gain suggests that human nature possesses both these traits. It is the subject of

anthropology to discern how, when, and in what context we continue to exhibit them -- and if in doing so

we continue to participate in these dialectic forms of structuring our social interactions.

Friends, Tonnies, Countrymen

We can locate Tonnies as an influential driver of the school of German sociology that would

later include Troetsch, Simmel, Weber, and Lukacs. Central to the conceptual imaginings of this group

was an ongoing negotiation with the concept of society -- and more specifically, modernism -- as a form

of fate; however, while all these scholars are traditionally associated with the tragic sociological

perspective this fatalism implies, in much of the body of work they produced there exists too an often

personal commitment to the location of the community ethos within this new order.

Readings of Tonnies have found his outlook both pessimistic and hopeful in turns. His own

political life confirms an ongoing struggle to regain a foothold for a humanistically derived unity within

the dominant gesellschaft political and cultural environment in which he found himself. A close reading

of his text when considered with an awareness of his actions especially supports an more fluid

interpretation of these two terms, a reading which is strengthened by similar strains in Weber and

Simmel.

Like Marx, Tonnies locates the move to gesellschaft within the confines of a life now governed

by the laws of capitalism, viewing each exchange between individuals as essentially a material

transaction. In this reading, alienation is the result of the powerlessness that results from man being

“controlled by his own creations and tools.” (Barakat: 1969 : 2) Although Gesellschaft requires by our

living amongst others upon whom our livelihood rests on our having interacted seemingly in the interest

of the whole or either others, each act or mutual decision boils down eventually to one guided by

individual will, whereby exchange, “everyone gets rid of items of value not useful to him in order to

acquire those which are.” (Tonnies : 1887, 1914 : 57) While the individual will is the ultimate force

driving gesellschaft, it is the market which will determine value and our ability to make those

acquisitions based our what becomes our individual value through labor and currency.

Tonnies describes a Society whose common will (even if composed of individual wants) if self-

fulfilling, if not always conscious. It is this will which grants value to objects, to labor, to currency -- and

also this will which determines the class into which its citizens will fall. Simply by our participation in

the system we enter into a contract validating its operation -- despite the fact this creation of a bond

within the contractual act is as such at odds with the nature of gesellschaft. (ibid : 62)

The key to understanding this seeming contradiction lays in the outwardly shared will’s inability

for duration. In cases where common rule becomes necessary, this societal model produces

“conventional” mores in the place of tradition or custom. This occurs only when a positive prescription

for the society is “willed for the benefit of all, …designed and maintained for its own sake.” It cannot

replace tradition or custom, in that these do not arise from the same (ultimately selfish) desires, making

these essential characteristics of gemeinschaft obsolete. Tonnies’ idea of gesellschaft is that of the civil

society of Hobbes or Ferguson, wherein Society is understood as both legal and economic bodies

governed by exchange.

However, he will argue against Smith’s immediately material move towards market society

brought on by the division of labor, speaking instead of an eventuality brought about by the Social will

(in which his theory more than ever begins to foreshadow Durkheim’s theories of the conscience

collective.) While Tonnies insists that the move to gesellschaft is abstract, he will nonetheless describe its

evolution as an eventuality, an “unfolding…latent reality,…something that should be regarded as the

personification of the general will or general rationality.”(Tonnies: 1912:64).1

He distinguishes between market value and intrinsic value, claiming that profit is empty -- that

commerce itself is the opposite of community. In a second edition, and drawing on Marx’s Kapital,

1 As Tonnies addresses mid-19th century “mass commercial Society,” the perceived importance of industry over agriculture, and the growing global market of transnational economic power, the text the folly of presentism evident in so much of the recent globalization literature, and see in his theory a prescience for the eventualities unavoidable in this economic system.

Tonnies develops a picture of commercial society based on the ascendancy over a worker class who

despite an a priori ability to compete in that market have been deprived of property through, essentially,

legal usury. However, he overtly disagrees with Marx’s suggestion that labour power has intrinsic value to

be waged against as capital against their abusers; he would outright reject the theory that Socialism was a

natural follow to capitalism, instead suggesting that retail would next be the dominant world exchange,

again foreshadowing events long after his career ended.2

While some have criticized Tonnies as having a negative perception of modernity (and of seeing

society as eventually damned to beget its own destruction, a la Hobbes, on which much of his work

relies), a closer analysis of the German language version suggests a more nuanced reading. Adair-Toteff

writes that while Liebersohn and others saw Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as unrealistically sentimental

for a lost, bucolic Germany, and despite the fact the Tonnies concedes that the modern man is one of

conscious, self-driven decision making,, that gemeinschaft is ultimately the author’s vision for the future,

without a necessary (or possible) return to the past. (Adair-Toteff : 1995 : 60-61)

Adair-Toteff posits Tonnies as in fact a sub-textually Utopian philosopher, equating his immense

dislike of artificiality, along with the concept of the modern individual’s will or Kurwile, as clues that the

latter in fact believed in a late stage theory in which that individual will would be used for Dionysian, as

opposed to Apollonian ends -- to quote the categories later employed by Benedict, who seems in some

ways a natural follow to his dialectic reading. In this society, these individuals with the power to choose

have in fact “evolved to the type of individual who uses cold, calculating reason and who abandons all

ethical concerns to achieve personal, yet temporary pleasures.” (ibid: 62)

These descriptive categories reinforce the dialectic reading along the spiral historical model, of

which earlier examples can be found in the moral polis of the Greek state (gemeinschaft), which is seen

as (d)evolving into the hedonistic world revolving around Rome (gesellschaft). The spiral model is

important here in its critical inclusion of a conceptual framework that would necessitate certain

alterations, i.e.: the role of agency in development.3

2 Much of Tonnies’ comments on Marx were appended to the original version in the later 1912 printing.

3 Here I would argue that the Greek moment of gemeinschaft is very much in part functional due to conscious will, which would conflict with our modern understanding of the two concepts.

In this reading, Tonnies is framed as having worked continually towards a better life, in which

the trappings of modernism would not be eschewed, but embraced. He believed that in women, not yet

ensconced fully in the workplace or trading floor of market society, were maintained the sitte (custom or

inherent morality) of the volk (people); the calculation of gesellschaft had solely been the realm of its

male participants, but in its women, maintaining the hearth, remained those qualities that would imbue

the new gemeinschaft with “the best of the old, yet would be right for the future.” (ibid)

Utopia and the Will to Progress

The will is therefore posited as the control around which these concepts are formed.

Traditionally formed societies to which we have applied the gemeinschaft model, if understood in regards

to our conscious devising of our life world, would have in fact been ones against which we would reject

if we wished to be masters of our own domain. Quite explicitly, Marx outlines this moment as the one in

which the bourgeois was the revolutionary. The mistake is seeing modernity as only the moment in which

the bourgeois class has become to be equated with the oppressive ruling one. We have lost sight of the

struggle against the role of individual as oppressed within the historical system with which we equate

gemeinschaft, rather than seeing it as a concept bred of community and familial interactions that -- while

perhaps allowed more readily by this previous power structure -- are ideally and never mutually exclusive

from a society in which we are essentially our own masters.

It is this notion of modernism as not only fated but also holding within it the possibilities of the

emancipated individual out of which a richer reading emerges. We must recognize in the writing of these

dialectic forms that the text exists within an ongoing dialogue of nearly two centuries in length, during

which various strains of philosophy, art, and activism continue to address the liberal disappointment

experienced due to the modern project’s resultant oppression. Weber uses the will towards the

development of the American state to illustrate the rift between the Puritan, who “wanted to work for a

calling,” and the citizen of the modern capital state, who is “forced to do so.” (Weber : 1904, 1958 : 182)

Essentially, the project of emancipation, in which our individual and societal freedom was imagined, was

reified into its opposite.

However, the success of the technical aspects of the modern project confirms little more than the

power of human will to re-organize. The modern project is in essence a failed Utopian concept. It

confirms that a society of people willed towards an end can indeed achieve it -- unfortunately for the

Puritan ethic, modernism brought along with it empiricism and an abandonment of the moral system

around with the ethic was built. This suggests, though, that were the will and moral system of a group of

individuals so aligned, the establishment of a functional community along the lines of gemeinschaft

would indeed be possible, having nothing to do at all with the strict time continuum insisted upon by the

modern machine.

Weber too held out for the possibility of an alternative within the new experience. As

Liebersohn so deftly describes, “even the final pages of The Protestant Ethic, with their invocation of the

iron cage, do not close off the possibility of transcending modern society’s fragmentation. Alongside his

determination to affirm modernity, Weber did not conceal his awareness of the earlier values it had

shattered and his interest in alternatives to it.” If overshadowed by the elements in their writing that

projected nihilism -- so resonant in popular sentiment -- this strain of German philosophy sought “a return

to a full and beautiful humanity and experienced some moment when they thought they had actually lived

to see it.” (Lebanon : 1988 : 2).

A case for reading Tonnies as a Utopian Visionary is supported by his biographic history, in

which he remained “not content to criticize the Gesellschaft,” instead intending to turn his vision “into

concrete reality,” in repeated attempts to form a community of scholars around common values. His focus

on small scale community building represents a clearly Socialist endeavor but his actions represent, as his

writing had, an absolute rift with Marx and Engels’s conclusion that the party’s state would be the rightful

and natural step in political evolution. Instead, these personal aims support a theory of his belief in the

possible continuation of gemeinschaft via self-selected groups -- despite the perseverance of gesellschaft

as the dominant political and economic model. Adair-Toteff finds additional support for a dialectical, co-

existent reading of the two states in Tonnies’ later perspective on his own work, in which was expressed

in hindsight an awareness of the likelihood of this division of individualism and Socialism being read as

mutually exclusive, encouraged by the then-popular writings of Nietzsche. (Adair-Toteff : 1995: 65)

How to build Gemeinschaft Island in the sea of the modern German State - or, BAUHAUS

The architectural project of Modernism is essentially an effort to reconcile the larger project of

modernity with its Utopian origins by willing not only an understanding of its conditions but by

embracing the tools and systems over which conceptual control has been reneged. By imagining and

building a built environment in tandem with the promise of modernity and seeing man’s emancipation

through its possibilities, this design concept offers a foothold into regaining control over the lost reins of

the larger system through a complete, organic meld with our built surroundings. By re-conceptualizing

man as part of this system and recognizing the modern condition as the natural extension of the highest

level of human consciousness, we are freed from the constraints of the cage and work within and through

them freely. Our physical environment is imagined as the direct extension of our own bodily forms,

functioning at their most efficient, and therefore we experience a previously unknown freedom in which

we are working with and not against our surroundings; alienation is impossible.

More than a typology or a formal construct, the project of modern architecture must be

understood as a spatially realized vision drawn elementally from a larger Utopian vision. The

conceptualization of u-topia, as it etymologically suggests, relies not upon a community built in or on a

specific place, but rather take on the “less obvious form of an idealized version of existing society,…

mixing novelty with the rediscovery of inherited hopes.” (Liebensohn: 1988 : 3) All Utopia requires is a

consensus of like minds -- and in those minds does this condition begin to exist, whether or not it

becomes realized in fact. We can see the growth of these communities in different schools of Modern

architecture. We use as a model the Bauhaus group and school, appropriate as it grew conceptually in

response to and within the same philosophical environment out of which Tonnies and similar work in

German sociology developed.

The Bauhaus movement organized itself around a vision not unlike Tonnies’ own longstanding

project for an Academy of Scholars. While united by common morals they insisted on being understood

as a collection of individuals. By the time of its formation, in 1917, the move towards volk kultur as the

spirit of the country had been adopted by a no-longer revolutionary government and rejected by the

intellectuals looking for a more essential humanity. The idea of culture now tied up in nationhood felt

false, a creation of the state replacing religion as its new mass opiate, merely masquerading at being a

people’s movement.

The industrial revolution and a free market offered not only oppression but also new possibilities

for expression and differentiation, the ability to break out of antiquated structures -- both literally and

metaphorically -- and opportunities for reinvention and reinterpretation. Allan Greenberg calls this

possibility that of a modern age that could “fill the value void” rather than eliminate the values of a

sentimental earlier time.

Like Tonnies, the founders of Bauhaus wished to bring the essential values of gemeinschaft into

both their own communities and the built environment they strived to create -- while not only doing so

very much within the rational confines of the new gesellschaft society, but responding to and embracing

its promise of advance, of efficiency as an unadorned kultur - one which would return man to a naturally

rational state, in which he operated as the ideal individual, not at odds with his environment -- or his

neighbors. It is worth noting this was not the organic individual of the Enlightenment but very much man

conceived of at odds to that ideal.

While value was held high this was still an organization which accepted rational thought

wholeheartedly; like Weber it recognized the value too of these new structures. With rationality was

offered a freedom, too: “[Enlightenment] was the rational criticism of the existing order which allowed

society to be conceived as an aggregate of individuals and the state as an instrument in the hands of the

individual.” (Antliff: 2002: 149). Weber, Tonnies, and the advocates of the modern architectural

movement hold onto this conception of the new freedom of rational man while addressing the early

negative results of its reification in capitalism.

Bauhaus as other modern movements acknowledged the non-modern sentiment of community

but sought to reconcile it with this new understanding of the concept of value, which would be shared

first amongst the artist-intellectual collective but which was hoped to instill in the life of every German a

reconnection with something that had been lost. They believed that “through a new architecture would be

conveyed the modernized spirit, imagined though it may have been, of the age of cathedrals: the most

social of arts, embodying and objectifying the unity of art and life, would make s social reality of the

spirit of unity and its implicit values of humane rationalism, brotherhood, and internationalism.”

(Greenberg: 1979:43)

Our dialectic reading -- that is, understanding gemeinschaft and gesellschaft as perennially

interactive concepts maintaining stasis within our own confliction human natures -- leaves room for both

the traditional agrarian way of life and the Bauhaus to constitute gemeinschaft) -- but both assume a

directional continuum of progress. present is the possibility of a contemporary agrarian society, so

ingrained has become the modern “spatial-temporal configurations in resistance to the pervasive

rationalization of time under capitalism and the subsequent breakdown of older cultural patterns as the

capitalist system of time became universalized.” Harvey explains a global capitalism in which “space and

time were now socially constructed as quantifiable commodities to be bought and sold,” rendering our

relationships to time and locality irrelevant. (Antliff: 2002: 160). In the 1920’s not only in the Bauhaus

but central to other work of modernists like Corbusier was the view that industrialization was a “means of

liberating human society from the parochialism of local culture.” (ibid, 161) Unfortunately missing from

this was a socialism that would include the remaining global rural populations, or a conscious realization

that locality was becoming aestheticized and commodified, a process that has largely continued

unchecked, stripped of its earlier moral intentions.

While not overtly political in theory, because these visions are in essence a reconceptualization

of society, these movements rarely remain far from political involvement, particularly to the extent that

their work -- as in that of those schools of thought whose concepts became realized architecturally --

became not only theoretically but actually present.

In the case of Bauhaus, the relationship between the school and national issues regarding

education (not solely, but particularly in architecture, the arts, and technical professions) forced the group

to “become involved with political affairs in an effort to defend the position of the school.” (Greenberg :

1979 : 174). Notable members of the group confused its relationship with and Socialism and its

proponents -- a situation that can be seen as unavoidable in any realized “Utopian” project.

Utopias are never solely “for” but by necessity against. If we continue our reading from within

Politzer’s dialectic framework, it is suggested that the Utopian project becomes more common whenever

there is unrest or dissatisfaction -- making them necessarily political, if not so in their verbiage.

Accepting this condition, perhaps a more realistic project for the realization of gemeinschaft in the

modern age cannot be one that is built in opposition of the state and its systems. As Weber understands, to

achieve power and change from within the modern state requires the use of its most effective methods --

in particular, bureaucratic organization -- but it is not here that we will achieve salvation from alienation

and the values we wish to rediscover that are essential to the experience of gemeinschaft. The failure of

the modern architecture project, then, is that it so naturally served to reinforce the less human ideals of

modernity. Individually, expressions of modern architecture that seek to make most basic our relationship

to nature, that which of its own is in contrast to the modern foci of gesellschaft, succeed -- but even as

Corbusier would bemoan in the lesser known work of his later career, the project as such lost these trees

for the forest.

Conclusion: The Community of the Act:

Liminal Gemeinschaft and the Carnivalesque in Turner and Bahktin

We conclude by positing an active application of the gemeinschaft model to projects that are

utopian in their conceptual organization but utilize the elements of modernism which allow us to exist in

a manner alienated from a traditional bounded relationship with place and space to their benefit. This

vision of community that exists actually and only in U-topia -- that is, no-place -- suggests that it is in

fact in that alienation that we will find escape from the moral vacuum of gesellschaft. If modern society4

has brought about a moment in which our built and lived environment can no longer be disentangled

from the political and economic institutions of the capital state, it would in fact be an attempt at moving

backwards to assume community can be reestablished via these avenues.

However, with respect to a reading of a past state of affairs in which we have merely imagined

gemeinschaft to exist (call it the “good old days” if you will, changing always by a few decades as years

pass) we attempt to recall previous efforts at non-bounded community which would have superceded

manifestations we associate as closest to either state of mind, unity or gain.

4 In clarification -- I here use “modern society” to apply without pause to our contemporaneous situation, in which we continue to struggle against the contentions of capital and alienation brought about by this shift. Post-modernism is understood in this reading to exist as a philosophical approach, whereas our political and economic situation still rests on the bases -- called “modern” -- it was establishing at this instance.

This element can be found in nomadic societies and various subculture groups -- those not tied

to a modern understanding of identity that is indistinguishable from place, nation, “cultural group,” race,

etc. As anthropologists this encourages a broader application, too, when reading the semiotics of cultures

not our own -- when we escape from a time-bounded continuum of “progress” we are more able to see in

other societies manifestations of gemein or gesellschaft which may not fit in the model which we were

previously applying. Ritual process and its relationship to both power and kinship structures in

ethnography has in fact been for some the root source for continued engagement with these activities and

their significance in Western culture. Victor Turner’s career-long engagement with ritual action and its

significance in community formation began with his fieldwork studying the Ndembu in Africa, but led to

his theory of communitas and in what ways modern culture has left room for non-bounded unity.

Turner defines this u-topia as “anti-structural”in nature -- yet it is essential to grasp that he is

not suggesting a reversal or rejection of structures that exist, be they social, political, or economic -- for

that would require, as the failed projects we have discussed, the development of subsequent models

which would in turn produce (per Weber) the same results under a different banner. “Anti-structure” here

is understood as “the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the

normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a

sequence of social statuses,” a state Turner calls liminality. While this state, visible via creative, ritual,

and performative acts is not revolutionary, per se, Turner does consider people or societies in a liminal

phase to be a "kind of institutional capsule or pocket which contains the germ of future social

developments, of societal change." (Turner : 1982 : 44, 45) The first step towards this change becomes

the reified state of mind of an individual or group through action, a concept which would be explored

further by Bakhtin.

Actors in a liminal state are aligned as mutually juxtaposed against the normative structure.

They interact with it but exist in a hybrid experience of conserved usefulness in which they make of the

state of affairs what they will; Turner sees in Western culture this role as one played by “prophets and

artists,” and other “’edgemen‘, who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés

associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact

or imagination.” It is through the intensification of creative and philosophical unity by means of these

non institutionally bounded instances of communitas that the systems become potentially destabilized,

and “in their productions we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which

has not yet been

externalized or fixed in structure.” (Turner : “Liminality and Communitas”: 2)

Bahktin locates the u-topic potential for gemeinschaft in the actions he conceptualizes as

“carnivalesque” (the actors of whom can inasmuch be assumed to be the “edgemen” referred to by

Turner. Bahktin can be particularly useful for the anthropologist in investigating essential human nature

in that he also speaks to the carnivalesque as that which embraces and even flaunts those qualities and

interactions that are shunned by normative society.

The vision of the Carnival -- that which showcases and provides solace alike to freaks, our

sexual natures, and spectacle of all types -- is also one that is synonymous with transience; its

placelessness is essential in its existing outside a modern understanding of bounded identity, a concept

very much in keeping with Turner as well. The seekers of unity in modern industrial society rely on this

ever moreso -- "The very flexibility and mobility of social relations [therein] provide better conditions for

the emergence of existential communitas, even if only in countless and transient encounters, than any

previous forms of social order." (ibid)

Communitas is defined particularly through relation through pilgrimage, that ancient form of

drawing together that have long relied on and reinforced relationships that exist in exception to

boundaries and normative structures. The limen, from which liminalityis derived, is a pilgrimage center,

which derives from the belief of the participants the power of a threshold of sorts, in relation to which

actors have the direct experience of “I-thou” awareness out of time, at which moment these individuals

may experience “a profound and collective sentiment for humanity which includes or is stimulated by the

quest and presence of a sacred space, god and spirit.” (Turner : “Pilgrimages as Social Processes”)

While modern society continues to offer believers participation in such rituals as they relate to

religion (and there is much richness to be found in the perseverance of this despite and in fact because of

modernity’s alienating qualities) our creative and base expressions -- such as that of the carnival -- offer

possibility that escapes even the structural biases of religious belief systems. At the core of either the

base or the religious, though, is that against which gesellschaft forms itself in utter opposition: admitting

the persistent non-rational nature of man. Ritual of this nature is the dialectic opposite of rationality -- ie:

gemeinschaft. Without the blinders of sentimentality, we recognize, again, community as something that

has little to nothing to do with the societies of the past, except in their slightly less developed ability to

control the essentially non-rational expressions and relationships of their members.

In the carnival of Bakhtin neither church nor state holds sway, inverting both political-economic

and ideological forms of individual oppression. Allowing for the carnal and atheistic expressions of man,

he is returned to a non-modern state -- one from which he should rightfully return if society is to

“function”… or so the agents of the normative system would have one believe. A reconceptualization of

the edge involves seeing conscious participants (and especially proponents) of such expressions as in fact

not farthest from but most in tune with an essential human nature that allows for risk.

For anthropology this encourages the abandonment of a temporally negotiated sense of progress,

readdressing once more our human nature at its most essential. While the post-modern turn was quick to

abandon projects addressing universal truths previously so central to the discipline, it inadvertently

allowed the unchecked processual framework of modernity as fate to persevere. In no longer wishing to

make “assumptions” about human nature outmoded concepts have been too long allowed to remain. A

new reading of gemeinschaft und gesellschaft against the contemporary environment of activism can be

not only illuminating but instructive in understanding and conceptualizing creative resistance,

particularly in relation to global social movements and other manifestations of 21st century u-topic

organization. The revolution may indeed happen in no-place after all.

____

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