Successfully reconstructing and theoretically reorganizing the notion of community, which has fallen under the critique of the “Kant of the 21st century,” Zygmunt Bauman («[…] This building technique can only spawn ‘communities’ as fragile and short-lived as scattered and wandering emotions, shifting erratically from one target to another and drifting in the forever inconclusive search for a secure haven […]» [Liquid Modernity, 2000, 40], wherein Bauman replaces the Anglo-Saxon, MacIntyrean, and Taylorian communitarian attempt at community-building with the sociological evidence of the feasibility of mere “peg” communities: «[…] Community’ conveys the image of a warm and comfortable place, like a fireplace at which we warm our hands on a frosty day. […] ‘Community’ stands for the kind of world which we long to inhabit but which is not, regrettably, available to us […]» [Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, 2001, 10]), is a fundamental objective of literary late-modernism. Having rejected Marxist and Marxian metaphysics, Bauman utilizes in his argumentation concepts introduced by 19th-century authors, such as the forgotten Ferdinand Tönnies of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [1887] (Bauman introduces a theoretical inversion between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), or the Georg Simmel of Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben [1903] (Bauman retrieves the idea of anomie, shared with Émile Durkheim), as well as 20th-century authors like the Norbert Elias of Über den Prozess der Zivilisation [1939] (Bauman senses, against the backdrop of the German thinker’s second volume, the anticipation of Sennett’s notion of flexibility), the entire meta-narrative of the heretical Marxism of the Frankfurt School, and, in a close-knit dialogue, the Anthony Giddens of The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration [1984]. Central to Bauman is the influence of Ulrich Beck’s Individualisierung and Risikogesellschaft, and, in recent years, his concept of “subpolitics” from The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (1997). Following Bauman, the topic has been extensively treated by Paul James in his studies on global flows in Globalization in Question [2010] and Globalization Matters [2019]; by Saskia Sassen (Sennett’s partner) in The Global City [1991] (the disappearance of the localized community and the community of solidarity); by Chantal Mouffe in The Democratic Paradox [1985] (a critique of the liberal community of harmony and consensus); by Byung-Chul Han in Die Müdigkeitsgesellschaft [2010] (an admission of the decline of the “we”); by Marc Augé and David Grazian (with the anthropological-architectural concepts of “transitory space” and “temporary community”); by the seminal studies of Manuel Castells beginning with The Rise of the Network Society [1996] (the replacement of the traditional notion of community with the network of the network society); and, finally, by Schindler and Fuller’s article Community as a Vague Operator: Epistemological Questions for a Critical Heuristics of Community Detection Algorithms [2022] (the two scholars, following the wake of edge betweenness, the Louvain method, and the Leiden algorithm, define the concept of community as a “vague operator,” inspired by Susan Leigh Star’s notion of the boundary object, and ultimately identify the community as mere “echo chambers”). The sociological experiment involving the request for reviews of my collection Kolektivne NSEAE – conceived as an analysis/evaluation of the social interaction between academics/art professionals and artists- reached a sample size of 6,000 requests for artistic solidarity (an art community or aesthetic filter bubbles?), yielding approximately 500 reviews, comments, and opinions from art assemblies regarding my collection. The results included 497 favorable and enthusiastic evaluations, 3 pan-job reviews by recipients ill-suited to my message on the artist’s ego-pathy as the cause of reader disinterest (who rave about History, Nature, Homeland, and Family with capital letters), and one highly stimulating critique (among many) expressed by Professor Allegra, Ordinary Professor of Philosophical Historiography in Perugia. Acknowledging the undeniable historiographical and theoretical validity and interest of my introduction, Allegra argues: «[…] Resta però aperto, a mio avviso, un interrogativo: come è possibile uscire dal narcisismo e dall’individualismo estetico in un’epoca che, attraverso le bolle social e le dinamiche digitali, tende strutturalmente a riprodurli e amplificarli? Più in generale, in che misura è ancora praticabile un’arte realmente collettiva, anonima o assembleare in un contesto culturale fondato sulla visibilità del sé? Etica della visibilità alla quale, mi pare, nessuno sfugge (nessuno che voglia incidere minimamente, intendo; diverso il caso per chi si rifugia in vallata alpina o affini) […]» [“…However, in my view, a question remains open: how is it possible to escape narcissism and aesthetic individualism in an era that, through social media bubbles and digital dynamics, structurally tends to reproduce and amplify them? More generally, to what extent is a truly collective, anonymous, or assembly-based art still viable within a cultural context founded on the visibility of the self? An ethics of visibility from which, it seems to me, no one escapes (no one who wishes to have even the slightest impact, that is; the case is different for those who take refuge in an Alpine valley or the like)…”]. Here, we can return to Schindler and Fuller’s “echo chambers.” Allegra’s question is significant, just as many of his volumes on the object/subject (the Taylorian dimension) are highly significant. Presumably, the filter bubble theory introduced by Pariser in The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You [2011] («[…] Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles […]») must undergo Bauman’s reinterpretation: under the fluidity of the “swarm,” the community collapses («[…] La forma di aggregazione propria di questo gioco sociale è lo sciame, i cui membri si raccolgono e si disperdono all’occasione, accomunati soltanto dal potere di seduzione di sempre diverse (e sempre deluse) promesse di benessere […]» [“…The form of aggregation proper to this social game is the swarm, whose members gather and disperse as occasion demands, united solely by the seductive power of ever-changing (and ever-disappointed) promises of well-being…”] [Homo Consumens, 2007, 16] and «[…] Gli sciami non sono squadre, nello sciame non c’è scambio né cooperazione ma solo vicinanza fisica e direzione […]» [“…Swarms are not teams; in the swarm there is neither exchange nor cooperation, but only physical proximity and direction…”] [Homo Consumens, 2007, 49]). The difference between a bubble and a swarm is denoted by monadization versus unorganized aggregation. A robust, pragmatic interpretation must be given to the concept of the “swarm,” given the highly detrimental influence exerted upon classical pragmatism by the complexity theory of Morin and Maturana. In Im Schwarm. Ansichten des Digitalen (2013), Byung-Chul Han interprets the “swarm” (Schwarm) as an uncoordinated narcissistic group: «[…] Die Masse ist Macht, weil sie eine Ideologie teilt, das digitale Schwarm ist narzisstisch und nicht geeint. Es marschiert nicht […]» [“…The crowd is power because it shares an ideology; the digital swarm is narcissistic and not unified. It does not march…”]. Why not instead interpret the “swarm” (Schwarm) as a coordinated “flock” (as Bauman does in Liquid Modernity, Globalization: The Human Consequences, and Liquid Life)? That is, a non-narcissistic, coordinated group which, having fallen into liquidity, possesses a weak, non-solid connection (λέγειν, λόγος), along the lines of the experimental zoological conclusions of Craig Reynolds in Boids [1987] and the biological conclusions of James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds [2004]. Through a coordinated and organized alignment of filter bubbles (Rorty and Putnam) – marked by the existence of an emergent leader and an increase in energy efficiency- the idea of the bund, the kolektivne/kolektivno, and the resilient assembly is born in literature as a cluster of filter bubbles coordinated into a “flock” by an emergent conducator. The compulsory visibility of filter bubbles would thus transform into the nomadic invisibility of the artist gathered in a bund, a kolektivne/kolektivno, or an art assembly. As I used to maintain with the former militant critic Giorgio Linguaglossa, a hyper-signification and hyper-trashization of ordinary language would be capable of causing the implosion of bubbles made of comfort, fitness, and seductiveness. The risk – as the artist Malos Mannaja emphasizes- is that only a militantly trained and organized elite would be capable of causing or allowing filter bubbles to implode. In the statistical majority of cases, the average man – the absolute majority of humanity – would remain trapped within his filter bubbles. Linguaglossa, with his kitchen poetry and new aesthetic ontology founded on an anachronistic F-factor, responds: chissenefrega [“who cares”]. Pozzoni, with his riots and new socio/ethno/anthropological an-esthetics, responds: it will be the primary task of the late-modernist intelle(a)ctual to burst bubbles throughout the entirety of the historical late-modern era. Summarizing, I believe it is necessary to shift the interpretation of neo-consumerism from La Société du Spectacle (narcissistic visibility) to the new sociology (nomadic, militant invisibility). This would mean shifting from modernist aesthetics to late-modernist sociology and politology of art (a change of “paradigm” [Kuhn], with the subsequent demolition of the very concept of “paradigm” [Lakatos]).
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Ivan Pozzoni
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