Community (version 0)

(in)dividual: the self is a crust laid over a swarm. Self as singularity (that is effectively as multiplicity) is a social product, not of or for all time. Communication is not only the fallen state of primal mediation but its overcoming in the form of a communicative community which we demand because we do not possess it. In parallel the dividual is the crushed detritus of a) the destruction of community but also b) of the destruction of self as desire + data (subject as source of its own becoming and as signified). After desire, this dividual remnant stands in need, . . . . of the common (methodologically: Ontology crumbles in the mind's hands as soon as they touch it. We reach out to time, and though it falls apart as concept, we do not believe any the less in its actuality proved by all things temporal, including the time it takes to think time's impossibility. Community is of an other order. Sociologically, after Tönnies, it is quite possible to believe that it no-longer exists, and quite easy to believe that since its no-longer existence is a trope of Western thought since the Odyssey at least, that its failure to exist, or to exist otherwise than as always already over, is in fact its peculiar ontology. In this crumbling in our or any conceptual fingers, community is of a kind with the video image which, in its increasingly minuscule operations, is even more prone to fail to exist than the analog moving image, whose composition as both image and moving depends on the constant eradication of the previous image. The scanned image adds to that ephemerality the fading of the first lines before the last has even been illuminated, a constant self-erasure paralleled by the geography of transmission that ensures that the image is never where its referent has been. The I that speaks from a Skype screen is not even the self-contradictory person that speaks and is signified face-to-face, now manifestly not even the source of the enunciation. But then again, it is only on condition of this imcompossibility that "I" exists in the age of communication, and only on this condition of post-Hegelian compound contradiction that the urge to find community becomes urgent. Community is necessary not because it is lost but because it is a need generated in the failure of supplementation to create a shell robust enough to contain the fragments of a self denuded of autonomy in the very hyperindividuation that consumerism required after the collapse of the nuclear family as core unit of consumption