Communes, Communes, Communes

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. "Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.

It' s interesting to read this article at this point in history. When Kanter wrote it, in the 1970s, an upswelling of communal living was underway, and I can't know for sure how this influenced her writing, but she does reference some "contemporary" communes. I'm interested in analyzing Kanter's piece in light of the "waves" of communal living in the 19th century communes, the 1970s communes, the communal living that exists today, and all the others in between that I may not know about.

What strikes me about Kanter's observations of communes are the presence of a strong central leader, the relationship to Christian values, and the emphasis on completeness and physical size. The theoretical explanations for these things make good sense--especially when it comes to the basics of how people organize themselves, and act out in different power structure. It doesn't reference particular thinkers on the matter, but Locke and Hobbes are looming. This is one aspect of the article that leaves me wanting more; the very idea that "renunciation," "mortification" and "transcendence" are important to community bonds is predicated on some overarching assumptions about the human condition.

I had a question about the idea of centralization as a major tenet of communal life. Can that center be ideological? Or is she arguing forthe Freudian model, where the center is a leader, and the harmony of the commune relies on an egalitarian relationship to that leader? My instinct is that such centralized leadership, even if it is just in the form of a "charismatic leader," is contrary to the communist ideals emphasized elsewhere in the commune. Then again, this brings me to my other thoughts, which revolve around contemporary communes and the principles (or anti-principles) of anarchy.

It struck me that co-housing was identified as a form of commitment among unsuccessful communes, since that is the type of communal living that seems to have endured. I don't have a strong basis for this statement, other than knowledge of communal housing among young people in the U.S., both within university institutions and without, and the existence of such housing in the 1970s, especially inthe lesbian separatist movement (who also created communes in the 19th century tradition). Kanter does make the useful point that 19th century communes attempted to create community gradually, which is not the case in most co-housing communes.

Another thought: (133) "Some commitment mechanisms arose from necessity rather than ideology." When does a communal group decide when to stop "mechanizing"?? Is there a possibility that the community will unravel in a communal tyranny? Is that part of the function of a centralized leader, to provide direction and priorities for the group, so that all concerns do not result in a new "commitment mechanism," which could lead to an unreasonable or unbearable lifestyle? Kanter discusses religious communities whose commitment mechanisms are guided by shared beliefs, and writes that communities bound by political beliefs may also find ties in a similar framework. I wonder, though, about the distinctions in the "nature" of those two belief systems. Some political belief systems involve questioning, dissecting, analyzing and confronting ideas, and although there may be doctrine involved in the social order of the community, the potential for bumps in the road to communal life may be heightened compared to religious communities.

Surveillaaaance

The Week published this snippet of news in its "The world at a glance section...":

http://www.theweek.com/article/index/101405/The_world_at_a_glance____United_States

"New York City
Security blanket: A high-tech surveillance network, already in place in lower Manhattan, will blanket midtown Manhattan by 2011, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week. The network, extending from 30th Street to 60th Street and encompassing Times Square, will feed data from high-resolution cameras, license-plate readers, and weapons sensors to a central command center. Funded by a $24 million federal grant, the security system will cover Grand Central Station, Penn Station, the United Nations, and other landmarks. The announcement follows the unraveling of an alleged terrorist plot to explode homemade bombs in New York City. “We cannot afford to be complacent,” Bloomberg said. But civil-liberties activists raised alarms. “The fear is that the NYPD, without any oversight or public scrutiny, is creating a massive surveillance system,” said Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union.""

Crime and response measures have always functioned in some kind of pendulum swing--but since 9/11, the tolerance for the speed and sensitivity of the downswing has shrunk enormously. By all measures that I can tell, as a former New Yorker and general news-following person, New York has gotten safer and safer over the past twenty years. This is due to a number of things, and a certain measure of safety. Mayor Giuliani swept the city clean of drug addicts and homeless people, contributing to a sense of safety for everybody else, but creating another kind of crime against a population in great need of the city's help. Bloomberg has been accused of treading further down the path of Disneyfication, and from my own observations, Manhattan is wealthier and is home to more seemingy-transplanted, un-wacky people every time I visit, and the borders of the working class neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan just keep shifting up. What once began at 96th street now reaches 145th, etc.

So a rational fear of crime--the kind likely to be caught on surveillance cameras--is really not as big an issue in midtown as it once was, yet now this new system is being installed. The praise that politicians welcomed following 9/11 helped to cement a narrative about quick and unwavering action in the face of "terrorism," over which, it would seem to follow, we have limited intelligence control. I'm really interested in the timing of this response cycle, as it is playing out, in this case, in Manhattan.

First of all, it doesn't seem that people really push for empirical evidence that this kind of surveillance works. That would mean questioning the NYPD, and after 9/11, it's quite unpopular to do so when the threat involves "terrorism." Of course, there are instances of success, namely the intelligence operations that resulted in the capture of this latest homemade bomber. Why isn't that intelligence sufficient? This could be settled by a plea for vigilance and the very incidence of such thwarted threats, but Bloomberg's quote really hints at a different, additional can of worms: "We cannot afford to be complacent." The "We" has this massive silencing power, the direct definition of any other action as complacency. There's no way to question it without directly coming up against the issue of the collective good, a historical fear, a weird reverential relationship with authority, and the uncertainty and poor understanding of "terrorism."

For more on the NYCLU and their case, see http://www.nyclu.org/node/2624

New York Times: Clotheslines Bans

What a bizarre, ongoing American quest to employ social control for the old fashioned ends of homogeneity :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/us/11clothesline.html?em

Debate Follows Bills to Remove Clotheslines Bans

CANTON, Ohio — After taking a class that covered global warming last year, Jill Saylor decided to save energy by drying her laundry on a clothesline at her mobile home.

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Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times

Clotheslines were common 30 years ago, when this woman in New York hung her laundry out.

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Cheryl Senter for The New York Times

Mary Lou Sayer, who uses her dryer sparingly, hanging wet laundry indoors at her condominium in Concord, N.H.

“I figured trailer parks were the one place left where hanging your laundry was actually still allowed,” she said, standing in front of her tidy yellow mobile home on an impeccably manicured lawn.

But she was wrong. Like the majority of the 60 million people who now live in the country’s roughly 300,000 private communities, Ms. Saylor was forbidden to dry her laundry outside because many people viewed it as an eyesore, not unlike storing junk cars in driveways, and a marker of poverty that lowers property values.

In the last year, however, state lawmakers in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have overridden these local rules with legislation protecting the right to hang laundry outdoors, citing environmental concerns since clothes dryers use at least 6 percent of all household electricity consumption.

Florida and Utah already had such laws, and similar bills are being considered in Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia, clothesline advocates say.

The new laws have provoked a debate. Proponents argue they should not be prohibited by their neighbors or local community agreements from saving on energy bills or acting in an environmentally minded way. Opponents say the laws lifting bans erode local property rights and undermine the autonomy of private communities.

“It’s already hard enough to sell a house in this economy,” said Frank Rathbun, a spokesman for the national Community Associations Institute, an advocacy and education organization in Alexandria, Va., for community associations. “And when it comes to clotheslines, it should be up to each community association, not state lawmakers, to set rules, much like it is with rules involving parking, architectural guidelines or pets.”

As much a cultural clash as a political and economic one, the issue is causing tensions as homeowners, landlords and property managers have traded nasty letters and threats of legal action.

“I think sheets dangling in the wind are beautiful if they’re helping the environment,” said Mary Lou Sayer, 88, who was told firmly by fellow residents at her condominium in Concord, N.H., that she could not hang her laundry outdoors after her daughter recently suggested she do so to save energy.

Richard Jacques, 63, president of the condominium’s board, said he moved to the community specifically for its strict regulations. “Those rules are why when I look out my window I now see birds, trees and flowers, not laundry,” he said.

Driven in part by the same nostalgia that has restored the popularity of canning and private vegetable gardens, the right-to-dry movement has spawned an eclectic coalition.

“The issue has brought together younger folks who are more pro-environment and very older folks who remember a time before clotheslines became synonymous with being too poor to afford a dryer,” said a Democratic lawmaker from Virginia, State Senator Linda T. Puller, who introduced a bill last session that would prohibit community associations in the state from restricting the use of “wind energy drying devices” — i.e., clotheslines.

At least eight states already limit the ability of homeowners associations to restrict the installation of solar-energy systems, and legal experts are debating whether clotheslines might qualify.

“It seems like such a mundane thing, hanging laundry, and yet it draws in all these questions about individual rights, private property, class, aesthetics, the environment,” said Steven Lake, a British filmmaker who is releasing a documentary next May called “Drying for Freedom,” about the clothesline debate in the United States.

The film follows the actual case of feuding neighbors in Verona, Miss., where the police say one man shot and killed another last year because he was tired of telling the man to stop hanging his laundry outside.

Jeanne Bridgforth, a real estate agent in Richmond, Va., said that while she had no personal opinion on clotheslines, most of her clients were not thrilled with the idea of seeing their neighbors’ underwear blowing in the breeze.

She recalled how she was unable to sell a beautifully restored Victorian home in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond because it looked out onto a neighbor’s laundry hanging from a second-story back porch. In June, the house went into foreclosure.

“Where does it end?” Ms. Bridgforth said of the legislative push to prevent housing associations from forbidding clotheslines.

Dwight Merriam, a lawyer from Hartford and an expert in zoning law, dismissed this concern.

“This is not some slippery slope toward government micromanaging of private agreements,” Mr. Merriam said, adding, however, that for these state laws to succeed they need to exempt existing agreements.

One of the biggest barriers to change, he said, is that most housing compacts that were written more than 30 or so years ago allow rules to be altered only if 80 percent to 100 percent of the association members attend a meeting and vote, which rarely happens.

Ms. Saylor, from the mobile home park, said, “Pressure makes a difference.” After a petition calling on the owner of the property where she lived to reverse the prohibition against line drying laundry, she said, the owner recently acquiesced.

But Alexander Lee, a lawyer in Concord, N.H., who runs a Web site, Project Laundry List to promote hanging clothes to dry, said the actual electricity consumption by dryers was probably three times as much as federal estimates because those estimates did not take into account actual use at laundromats and in multifamily homes.

Change promises to be slow, said Mr. Lee, 35. “There are a lot of kids these days who don’t even know what a clothespin is,” he said. “They think it’s a potato chip clip.”