Richard Seymour, author

Where I come from, Northern Ireland, we often used to hear about community – as in “the divided communities of Northern Ireland”. A community, by implication, was an ethno-national formation. The “Prods”, whether they were kneecapping Loyalist thugs, apolitical druggies or stalwart working-class socialists, were all of the same community. The Catholics, likewise, were all supposedly the same whether they were Provos, social democrats or doughty small-business owners quietly yearning for the option to vote Tory. There was a deeply coercive aspect to “community” in this sense, because ultimately it meant that each community was in some sense the property of its political and armed leaderships. They marked their territory with “flegs”, murals and bunting and – in the Proddy estates – an annual auto-da-fé in which the pope was burned in effigy. It was not unknown for aggressively self-righteous morons in balaclavas to take it upon themselves to police “their” communities, often with the aid of an ArmaLite.

In practice, of course, community didn’t always coincide with national affiliation. The real communities were a few streets, or a few houses on a few streets, sometimes in mixed estates. They were the gardens in which children indiscriminately played, the houses that hosted loud and drunken neighbourhood parties, the middle-aged women who gave local kids crew cuts. Still, it was undeniable that the exigencies of military occupation and nationalist war created real occasions for communitarian solidarity, where the rituals of identitarian belonging formed a counterpoint to the general trend toward atomisation and social breakdown concomitant upon deindustrialisation and the Thatcherite offensive on every relationship not mediated by the market. In war, people found vast reservoirs of feeling, often bigoted feeling, to bond over. What remains now that the war is done, the barracks have been dismantled, the flags and bunting put away, and the garrison-sized police stations shut down? What remains now that, in one of the poorest regions in Europe, with the highest rate of mental illness in the UK, the town centres are dead, and the shops have been relocated to large, windswept out-of-town car parks? The fact that some people cling to sectarian notions of community is evidenced in the occasional outburst of street violence, but the exclusionary terms of community are shifting. There have long been patterns of racist violence in Northern Ireland, particularly against the Chinese community (see how easily that word insinuates itself?). However, now both Catholics and Protestants, from north and south of Ireland, riot together against immigrants, beat up people with brown skin, and set fire to mosques and Muslim-owned businesses. While the active participants in the pogroms represent a minority of the population, their attitudes do reflect a hardened version of views that are popular. To that extent, Northern Ireland is becoming like any other declining North Atlantic region betrayed by its political elites and ruling class, in that it is turning to compensatory ideologies of community revival through nationalist cleansing. The question, now, is what is rational in the desire for community? What can be recuperated from, or salvaged in, that desire?

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Orlando Reade, author and academic

Last winter, police tape appeared across the street that runs between my apartment and the studio where I write. Later, I read that a woman had been killed. An attempt on the life of her son had claimed hers instead. The article called her “a pillar of the community”.

The next day, the street was open again, and tape across one doorway identified where it had happened. A house with a back garden, out of which music had once floated on summer nights. Flowers, candles and liquor bottles appeared on the wall outside.

One night, there was a car pulled up outside the house. The driver’s door was open, and a person – it could have been a man or a woman or a boy, I couldn’t tell – was standing in the gap between the door and the car. A ballad was playing on the stereo, and the person was rocking back and forwards. A private ceremony I had intruded upon.

Last week, there was a gathering outside the house, with music on a sound system. I guessed it was the first anniversary. “Candy” by Cameo was playing, and people were turning in unison in the December rain.

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Ryan Ruby, poet and critic

“Unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes,” Bertolt Brecht wrote in his 1938 play Life of Galileo. Today, we might say: unhappy is the society that is in need of communities. Alas, the United Kingdom and the United States are such societies, if you can even call them that. Four-and-a-half decades of brutal, invasive social engineering by the state have destroyed the material infrastructures and institutions of planned and spontaneous collectivity – workers’ unions, public transportation, third spaces, affordable housing, educational systems, art centres – so that capital can extract a profit every time one person attempts to interact with another. Is it any wonder that the economies that have given us an epidemic of loneliness have also given us a rhetoric of community? I, too, dislike it: the term is sentimental, corny, kumbaya, clichéd, and, what’s more, easily co-opted. But it would take the most cold-blooded cynic not to acknowledge that its overuse is a symptom, not the disease. If we must treat a human activity as basic as “bodies being together in space” as a consciously held value, something has gone profoundly wrong, and if we are tired of hearing about “community,” perhaps we ought to begin by retrofitting the political and economic conditions in which it simply went without saying.

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Selma Dabbagh,writer and lawyer

Community should be an option, not a label or a stricture. Community to me is akin to solidarity and friendship and as such is something that I am free to negotiate and to choose. Living between and among as many “communities” as possible has always been my thing. During lockdown, my social life was edited into two pyramidical WhatsApp groups with Admin as the Higher Power. I edited an anthology by Arab women on love and lust and found my lost tribe who strategised and teased, seduced and cajoled with humour and bravery across the millennia. A sense of communal belonging breathes from the books that line the rooms I have lived in across the world. It is found in the negotiation with writers, dead or alive, to create a more just world, lived more vitally. It is what I seek when I feel that in every cell of my body exists an image of a child trapped under rubble, mass graves, tortured medics, assassinated journalists, men stripped and tied at checkpoints. It can exist when being with those who believe that evil is created and can be stopped. It is standing with those who do not display cowardice during a time of genocide. It is bolstering those who are not afraid to take risks for what they believe in. A sense of community exists when chanting on a demonstration, when campaigning for change. It can exist when you are not alone, yet nothing needs to be said.

Dean Kissick, writer and critic

Nothing is wrong with the idea of community. It is wonderful to be part of a good community, whether you’re having a great or a hard time in life. But it is often a bright idea to leave, to betray, a community, too. I advise doing this quite frequently. I have often drifted out of, or simply abandoned, friend groups, moved away from cities and scenes, and never turned back. Do you really need to keep up with anyone from your old schools, your colleges, the companies you worked for, the places you lived, your cultural milieu? No.

It is very beneficial to be part of a community and to contribute to one, but often even better to leave it all behind, to strike out and forge new lives with new people in different places, exploring what other communities have to offer. There are so many out there, and you will find much to learn, and enjoy, and to give back yourself, in each. And, if it all goes terribly wrong, you can always return, like the prodigal son; that is a good thing about most communities, unless you have been permanently cast out.

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Justin Smith-Ruiu, philosopher and author

I’m pretty bad at community. Forget “bowling alone”: I somehow stay alone even when I go to church. Matthew 18:20 tells us that: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” That is, the minimal molecule of church, just two people, should in principle already be sufficient for the experience of what we might call ultimate community, in which we no longer have just a simple pair, but a pair united by the substantial bond of the Holy Spirit. I’ve been going to Mass for the past 18 months or so, and while I say “the peace of Christ” to all the others at the relevant point in the service, and I think I can feel that good Ghost moving between me and my fellow peace-wishers at that moment: other than that I have had a grand total of zero interactions with my fellow parishioners. Eighteen months is a long time. To whom may we attribute the fault for this silent stagnation? To me, of course, for being so reserved, so verklemmt, so mute. But also to my era, no doubt, whose atomising power has by now penetrated not just the bowling alleys and gyms (where the lunks sit on the machines and watch their phones with earbuds in, exactly as they do on the metro or anywhere else in our shared public space), but the very most formidable redoubts of ancient community. In any other era, to see a lone man in the pews week after week would have triggered at least some curiosity, whether benevolent or prurient. Today it is met only with the spirit of “toleration”, in John Toland’s old sense, a spirit shaped by the dawning awareness since the early modern period that we must live side by side in the secular sphere with others who do not share our beliefs. But what we now see is something like “toleration creep”, where the sort of respect for the inviolability of another person’s space, and of their enduring right to remain themselves, “in their zone” with their thoughts and values, a respect that might indeed be appropriate in public transportation, has reached everywhere, even into overtly sectarian spaces. I am at Mass, precisely, to “share beliefs”, which is pretty close to saying that I am there to take my place in a community. That this can no longer happen organically but must be forced by strength of will, a strength I myself generally lack, testifies to the total triumph of the secular in the past few centuries, which increasingly I am inclined to read in the negative, as at once the total defeat of community.

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Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, artist

Community, like any other thing on this planet, has become a potential commodity. A mere merchandise to be sold or bought. That or its close cousin, marketing.

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Eva Oh, dominatrix

Lean into, yet question, everything. I started my kink career in a professional BDSM dungeon. The cruellest and best part of that experience was the other staff. They practised a hierarchy, enforced it through harsh words and actions, taught me the ins and outs; I owe a lot of the success of my career to exactly how they were. I didn’t know it, but they were my entry point into the kink and sex worker community; I was just trying to stay afloat financially and in that environment.

Over time, I’ve found more people who overlap more specifically with my life approach and value of self-investigation – and I’ve refined my sense of who I can “commune” with and feel more joy around as a result. I don’t think that’s how we tend to define community though; we like grouping around interests and places, but without a watchful eye, bullshit, fear and hatred can hide in anything.

When gathering in numbers and creating resources and sharing, the sex worker community have taught me about justice and how it could be achieved. When gathering in numbers and creating spaces and lines of communication, the kink community has taught me about joy through a fearlessness of the totality of who we can be.

Community is not an endpoint for me; it is a resource that I can take from and give to. A part of the potential flow of a life’s experience. To feel the independence of that thought is too scary to many, and for those, bullshit, fear and hatred will continue to hide in the absence of self-investigation and hope for liberation.

Maria Lisogorskaya, artist, architect and cofounder of Assemble

Gaumont Tower and Labyrinth Tower apartment buildings in Dalston Square (approx. 500 homes) are named after the demolished Gaumont cinema building that stood there for years before their construction. The original grand Victorian structure was rebuilt and adapted a few times over a century: 1,000-seats, 2,000-seats, 4,000 standing, balconies, animal circus, variety theatre, picture house, car-auction salesroom, Tesco storage depot, whatever else who knows. Finally, it housed the legendary Four Aces Club and Club Labyrinth. Bittersweet name reuse, framing those who once improvised there: their liminal 2000s rave posters, immigrant gatherings, backstage kitchen, police raids, difficult decisions, beautiful music, complaints, late loud nights, creating space for themselves where those spaces weren’t given. So clear and sexy, survival and innovation of “community” as a distant curated memory.

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Mariam Zulfiqar,director of Artangel

I grew up in Lahore, where I lived in a house with female political activists who defiantly organised large protests against General Zia-ul-Huq, Pakistan’s military dictator between 1978 and 1988. These women were fighting for freedom of speech, for human rights, and for democracy against a military establishment that denied and suppressed it all through fear, intimidation and brute force.

As a child, I watched as our house became a stand-in for public spaces that had been erased by the military dictatorship. On some days it was a kind of witness box where survivors and witnesses shared their grief, anger and outrage at domestic, patriarchal, social and political violence. On others, it was a makeshift command centre where protests were planned and campaigns were devised. Regardless of the activity, it was always an assembly room, a gathering place for the unemployed, students, housewives and professionals across social classes and from different backgrounds. It was, like many houses at that time across the country, a site of resistance.

I grew up hearing the Urdu words jalsa and jaloos, which roughly translate into English as parade, public meeting or procession. As a child I was always enthralled by the planning – I listened as these women drew up schedules, practised slogans, and even helped make banners coloured in green, red and black. While I was just a small child, under the age of 10, in the hive of activity I couldn’t help but feel the presence of a kind of energy.

I never went to a jalsa or jaloos as I was too young, but I remember the aftermath, which often involved visiting the local jail with my father or cousins. Most of the women I had seen in our house would be in one large room, and even then, the energy was palpable – it was as if they had carried it from the house, to the streets, to the cell.

When I think of community I think of these particular women and the unmistakable presence of a potent energy around them.

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Jonathan Nunn, food writer

Recently, I’ve been CTRL-Fing the word “community” in my own writing and interrogating whether this is truthfully what I mean or if it might have been better served by another word. I overuse the word – there are community restaurants, there are restaurants which serve particular communities, and London neighbourhoods made up of different communities. I might flippantly refer to the “Gujarati community” if I’m writing about Harrow or the Turkish or Kurdish community in north London; at the same time, property developers are advertising restaurants in Fitzrovia that apparently serve the “local community”. Perhaps I’m attracted to the word because in London it so often feels like you’re not really in any community. I would never refer to me being part of the Peckham community or the Enfield community or the British-Goan community. The most meaningful community I’m a part of is the “food-writer community” and we mostly hate each other. Using the word so easily sometimes feels like a convenient way to plaster over all the complexities of what being in community with other people actually means.

I’m writing this at a time when Twitter is awash with British fascists openly saying what they’ve tried to obfuscate for so long, which is that they hate non-white, British Londoners, that they want them removed from social housing, that they want them deported, or at the very least moved out to the city’s periphery to lead a banlieue existence. Something one of them said stuck with me though, which is that the liberal left has no real curiosity about these communities; that it lauds multiculturalism but refuses to understand the cultures or the complex relationships between them. This struck me as mostly true: that often the right has a more nuanced, less romantic understanding of these relationships even if they use that knowledge to sow more division and promote a narrative in which we all secretly resent each other. Maybe it’s become too easy to talk about community without mentioning its building block, that other tricky word: solidarity.

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Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and academic

Komyuniti: the Japanese absorbed the English word, with all its accompanying cultural complications, directly into their language as part of the process of Westernisation. But the Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji used another term, aidagara, as the cornerstone of his thinking. In lieu of the boundary or closure often implied by the word community, aidagara denotes “betweenness”, a “field of possibilities” for co-existence, and by implication for openness and the understanding of others.

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Thomas Moynihan,historian & author of X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction

Wandering lonely like clouds, the Romantic poets became beloved for advertising eloquently their authentic immersion in untouched nature. It’s no coincidence Wordsworth emerged when he did. A time, that is, when industrialisation and breakneck urbanisation were removing the masses from “pristine nature” with unprecedented intensity. You can only long for an authentic connection to something once you have become alienated from it. As soon as you long for it, it can be sold to you. Professing and performing authenticity only becomes valuable once people feel genuineness has been lost. The pastoral and bucolic exist solely in relation to the urban: as concepts, as well as historic categorisations, the former came after the latter. The conceptual genesis of “nature” was provoked by its material deconstruction.

Like the hammer that snaps, things become present to us – stepping out of autonomic, ambient invisibility – precisely when they break. They also become profitable as soon as they’re perceived as scarce. What happened to “nature”, several generations ago, has now happened to “community”. All that’s solid vaporises, as they say, including our relations with our kind. Or, perhaps, as it was with “pristine nature”, “perfect community” never really existed anyway. That doesn’t mean it can’t, though.

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Stephen C. Finley, professor of African and African-American Studies

Africana existentialist philosopher Lewis R. Gordon contends that America is anti-Black, and the desire and intent is to make the world anti-Black. Some scholars, like Afropessimists Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Yates Sexton, argue that the world is already anti-Black, and that anti-Blackness is a necessary condition for social and psychic world-building of non-Black groups. My thoughts about anti-Blackness and the world fall within the interstice created by the tension between these positions. It is difficult to imagine a place in the United States or around the world where community happens naturally in which Black people might find welcoming places in which to flourish. Therefore, it is important to curate communities – groups of people whose interests, experiences, skills and goals cohere purposely and functionally. More specifically, broader, naturally occurring and racially inclusive communities for Black people in America have proved untenable, regardless of social and economic status or gender. Unintended communities, in addition to curated ones, are also valuable. For me, such communities cohere and revolve around intellectual and scholarly interests that are on the margins or not structurally legitimated in the academy. These interests defy strict disciplinarity and cross the boundaries of science, social science and humanities. Where some forms of community are problematic, others – both curated and unintentional – offer productive spaces for flourishing. .