Community and the Revenge of the Unconscious

Daniel P. Wolk

[printed on November 3, 2017]

This is a rough draft version of a paper presented at:

THEORY AND PRACTICE

2015 Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts Annual Conference
The University of Chicago, 89 May, 2015

Please do not quote without the authors permission.

Abstract
A quiet revolution has transpired in various corners of the cognitive sciences that demon-
strates how the bulk of human thought and action is non-reective: more automatic, unconscious
and intuitive than rule-governed, intended and agential. Such discoveries should have dramatic
consequences not only for theory, but also for the empirical and applied social sciences and pol-
icy. Yet until now they have left little impact outside of linguistics and psychology. Taking the
example of the concept of community, I revamp and redeploy an old, forgotten development
of Tnniess theory of community as Gemeinschaft, by Schmalenbach and Gurwitsch, in line
with new ndings on non-reective, automatic thinking, or Type 1 information processing.
I suggest that associative, non-propositional, connectionist thinking, outside of our conscious
awareness, drives social action in the context of community. Phenomenologically, community as
Gemeinschaft is one of three modalities of being-in-the-world-with-others (Gurwitsch), along
with Gesellschaft (society) and Bund (communion). The community modality, unlike the
other two, is naturally given in the sense of being taken-for-granted and a matter of living-in
or experiencing social relations without reection upon them. Contemporary social scientists
and practitioners routinely absolutize the contrasting Gesellschaft mode that presumes intention-
ality through such vocabulary as construction, negotiation, and contestation. They treat
community as imagined or constructed, infused with positive, romantic sentiments, and
thereby eace the taken-for-granted nature of the joint life-experience that constitutes the un-
derlying reality of Gemeinschaft. I illustrate how advantageous is a reinvigorated concept of
community as real, mutually-adjusted but unreected-upon social interactions, by outlining how
it aords the specication of the intuitive contents that underpin the Assyrian community in
Chicago, including the core value of the name of the house (family reputation) within the frame
of hospitality circuits. This makes it possible to account for both the intensication of loyalty
 to the community-as-imagined the assertion of ethnicity and alienation, drifting away,
from the community-in-practice. To recognize the intuitive contents that drive human actions
in the frame of community facilitates anticipating not only assertions of ethnicity but also any
form of political mobilization, hinted at in the way Marxs agenda of class mobilization relied on
transforming class-in-itself into class-for-itself, but applicable at the grassroots level of com-
munity, embedded in any macrosocial formations, minus any universalizing assumptions about
human history.

The Guarani peoples of South America have known the stevia plant as a sweet herb for some 1,500
years but it was not until 1899 that a Western botanist was able to describe its biochemistry and give
an account of its sweet taste. And then not until the mid-1980s, when Japanese researchers gured out
how to make an extract out of stevia, have stevia products gradually proliferated and gained popularity
in industrialized nations for table use as sweeteners for coee, tea and hot cereals. The combination
of innovative laboratory methods and the resourcefulness of researchers to apply those methods to
a plant little-known in the West have given birth to an active new sweetener industry, replete with
products widely seen, at least currently, as safer than the existing articial sweeteners on the market.
The history of both human knowledge and practical usage of the stevia plant can serve as a model
for what we can do with old ideas in social theory and philosophy. Just as the stevia plant, there are
theoretical insights that have taken root in one place or another but remain little known by contempo-
rary scholars and practitioners. But as those old insights live on in relative obscurity, new scientic
discoveries and methods have come into circulation that potentially that can transform them and adapt
them to new uses, just as new methods of extraction did for the stevia plant.
The old idea that serves as my case in point I summarize the idea of community as a real collec-
tivity of persons, who are connected to each other in a way that seems natural; their connectedness is
taken-for-granted, uncalculated, unreected upon, and thus virtually unconscious. The author of this
idea was Herman Schmalenbach, who developed in through a critique of Tnniess classic distinction
of Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft. Alfred Vierkandt and Aron Gurwitsch eshed out Schmalenbachs
conception. Writing in the 1920s and early 1930s, all three were pioneers in adapting the insights of
the phenomenological philosophies of Husserl, Scheler and others to the problems of society.

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 The new scientic discoveries, parallel to the new laboratory methods for the extraction of bio-
chemical compounds from the stevia plant, mostly come under the rubric of what cognitive psycholo-
gists call priming, which have the purpose of eliciting and identifying implicit, virtually unconscious
attitudes and thoughts, in psychological experiments. An example of such priming would be to ash
a picture or a photo to a human subjects so quickly that they are unable to recall it consciously. Psy-
chologists have learned that such ashing may have profound impacts on how subjects perform during
the experiment. So, for example, if you are ashed the word hen, and then later asked to match a
word to a photo of a chicken, you will nd the word chicken more quickly than a subject who was
ashed the word pig.
Priming and related methods have kindled a revolution in psychology and the cognitive sciences.
They have found that our conscious thoughts are merely the tip of an iceberg. Beneath conscious
awareness our minds are busy at work. The bulk of our cognitive process proceeds without conscious
reection. It is uncontrolled, automatic, and intuitive rather constrained by propositional rules and
intentions. While it is still the trend among other social scientists particularly those in my own
discipline of anthropology to celebrate human beings as active agents, authoring or enacting their
actions through intentions, cognitive psychologists and related researchers have found that thought
processes unbeknownst to us, drive our actions far more profoundly than we had ever imagined in the
past.
Much of the new thinking in the cognitive sciences has coalesced under the rubric of dual-process
theories of the mind. According to it, our minds process information in two general modes. Given
the plethora of dierent variants of dual-process theory (every team of researchers seems to have its
own patented brand of theory), the easiest way of thinking of the dierence between the two types of
processes is to draw a series of distinctions. Type 1 processes take place with little eort or attention,
and are initiated involuntarily; as such they are automatic. By contrast, Type 2 processes are eortful,
require much attention, and are thus voluntarily controlled. This automatic/controlled distinction has
probably been the most popular way to dierentiate the two processes, going back to the late 1970s.

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Studies of long-term memory have produced evidence for a clear contrast between implicit and explicit
memory, corresponding to Type 1 and Type 2, respectively. Implicit attitudes (based on implicit
memory) inuence behavior without the person who has them being aware of them, whereas explicit
attitudes draw on memories that are capable of retrieval into consciousness (Greenwald and Banaji
1995; cf. Payne and Gawronski 2010:4). Aside from automatic vs. controlled and implicit vs. explicit,
some of the many other ways of contrasting Type 1 vs. Type 2 processes include: spontaneous vs.
intentional (Uleman 1999), adaptive unconscious vs. conscious (Wilson 2002), impulsive vs. reective
(Strack and Deutsch 2004), associative vs. rule-based (Smith and DeCoster 2000), associative vs.
propositional (Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2006), holistic vs, analytical (Nisbett et al. 2001), and,
in the most popular account to date (by the Nobel Prize winner Kahneman [2011]), simply fast vs.
slow. Various reviewers of the dual-process theory literature have tallied up these and other proposed
feature-based contrasts between the two types of thought processes, and organized them into neat
columns (e.g. Evans 2008:257).
There are obvious anities between the Schmalenbachian theory of community as a real col-
lectivity of persons, who are connected to each other in a virtually unconscious way and dual-process
theories of the mind. Before we can rene and upgrade this theory, and indicate how it might yield
benets in practice, it is necessary to (1) trace out its line of development, and (2) set it o from dom-
inant current thinking about community. It is both commonplace and warranted to credit Tnnies
and his book, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Human Association), with establish-
ing the social-scientic, empirical study of community. Few books have left such a profound imprint
on the social sciences, not least because of its formative inuence on both Durkheim and Weber.
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft has also deservedly earned the reputation for its lack of analytical pre-
cision. What he accomplished was to narrow the conception of community or Gemeinschaft to
might be called a particular mode of connectedness, togetherness, or social relations, in contrast to the
human association or societal type of Gesellschaft, and to join the concrete with the abstract by
making his concepts ideal types, the idea of which he was one of the pioneers.

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 For me I am not aware of anyone else who has put it this way what makes Tnniess book
refractory to clear exegesis comes to this: he assigns a large set of contrasting qualities or properties
to each of his two types, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, but he is inconsistent in pinning down which
qualities are essential and which ones are frequently correlated or associated with, or supervenient to,
these types.
The only properties, or subset of properties, that are unambiguously essential to the distinction are
two contrasting types of human will that underpin the two dierent modes of human connectedness.
Both types of will, however, are just as untranslatable as Gemeinschaft and Gemeinschaft. The rst,
Wesenwille or, later, Naturwille, might be glossed as essential or natural will. They are intrinsic to
the living organisms and its natural likes/dislikes, habits, and memory; or in contemporary parlance,
it is embodied. Such will serves as the social-psychological basis for Gemeinschaft. The second
type of will, Krwille, which underlies Gesellschaft, is often glossed misleadingly as rational will,
but is better translated as choice-making will. It is second order inasmuch as it is a form of thought
itself, already the result of embodiment (Tnnies [1970:8789], Tnnies [2001:9597]).
As archaic as Tnniess language of will is, it should be obvious that he has anticipated the dis-
tinction between Type I human information processing and Type II. Yet, even in the discussion of
will, he smuggles in a curious point of dierence that he treats as essential: he says that natural will
is based upon the past whereas choice-making will is oriented to the future. As a result, he culls his
examples of Gemeinschaft from what has since become called traditional society: families, clans,
the old German marks or large villages, artisanal guilds, and old-fashioned religion modeled on the
family. By contrast, modern forms of social life, such as capitalistic prot-seeking enterprises ex-
emplify Gesellschaft. As I will later suggest, however, it follows from dual-process theory that to
weld the traditional onto Gemeinschaft and the modern onto Gesellschaft is a serious mistake.
Tnnies assigns many essential properties to Gemeinschaft that Iie outside of my focus today.
Perhaps the most important is the idea that economic interests in the Gemeinschaft are collective, so
that the freedom of individuals in a Gemeinschaft to trade derives from the freedom of the whole,

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whereas in the Gesellschaft form, individuals pursue trade and business by carrying out transactions
in accordance with contracts.
Tnniess most inuential claim about what is essential to Gemeinschaft is a dierent story, for
my argument hinges on it. For him, the life-blood of Gemeinschaft are armative sentiments of
aection, loyalty, trust, and respect, and he even goes so far as to claim that hostilities are foreign
to social relations within a Gemeinschaft. It is this quality of Gemeinschaft, especially as it allegedly
manifests itself in nostalgia for the gemeinschaftlich past on the part of us moderns who are locked
into gesellschaftlich relations, that has captured the attention of many contemporary social scientists,
prominent among them Gerald Creed in anthropology and Zygmunt Bauman in sociology. In Tnnies
own day, a veritable cult of community emerged: many yearned for the good old days of strong
communities. This romantic notion of community very much lives on in the United States today.
In 1923, while the popularity of the cult of Gemeinschaft reigned on, Herman Schmalenbach, an
early phenomenological sociologist, came along and punctured the balloon with his remarkable essay,
The Sociological Category of the Bund or at least he would have had more people bothered to
read it. Bund is normally translated as communion or fellowship, but more accurate would be
the archaic term adherency, a group of people to which its members adhere. The most important
point of Schmalenbachs essay is that Tnnies, with his concept of Gemeinschaft, mistakenly lumped
together two contrary types of human connectedness. On the one hand, when people draw together,
typically but not exclusively as members of a religious cult, and cultivate a strong sense of anity
for one another, through warm feelings of aection and belongingness, this depends on conscious
decisions to come together. Hence their actions cannot be attributable to pure natural will. This is the
Bund.
On the other hand, when their relations of connectedness persist on the basis of natural will,
individuals have no reason to dwell upon these relations. They only brood over or celebrate such
relations when they come under threat, which is to say that only when the purity of gemeinschaftlich
relations based on natural will become contaminated. Hence, in its pure form, Gemeinschaft is devoid

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of conscious feelings of aection. I quote Schmalenbach at length:

Based on the fact that the unconscious is the foundation of Gemeinschaft, that which
in concrete experience amounts to perhaps its most consequential dierentiating feature
from Bund is taken-for-grantedness (Selbstverstndlichkeit.1 In general, a person will
regard the Gemeinschaft in which they situate themselves neither with express approval
nor with hostility. Ordinarily they will not even be conscious of it. It is just a given,
simply a being there. Living in a family or on a farm is not conducive to making a fuss
over being a Gemeinschaft. Gemeinschaft is nothing but a fact (to be sure a psychical
one). Membership in a broad range of Gemeinschaften, a speech-Gemeinschaft, a race-
Gemeinschaft, even a Gemeinschaft of all the worlds inhabitants the Gemeinschaften
in which we are situated extend out to inconceivable distances (in all sorts of directions)
such membership is something people will scarcely notice. Indeed, whenever the
possibility of explicit knowledge is missing, a person will fail to notice any one of them.
Such is the case even though on the whole we are molded by them all, that is to say our
unconscious, directly or indirectly, is aected or even structured by them. As a rule,
it is a sense of dierence or disruption that brings a Gemeinschaft into the consciousness
of its members. (Schmalenbach 1922:53) (my translation; cf. Schmalenbach 1977:78)

Thus, Schmalenbach bissected Tnniess concept of Gemeinschaft into Gemeinschaft vs. Bund, while
he preserved the concept of Gesellschaft pretty much as is. What is remarkable is that his concept
of Bund has enjoyed modest popularity, but his thoroughly unromantic concept of community has
virtually eluded attention.
Yet, as so far presented, Schmalenbachs concept of Gemeinschaft is fully in line with contem-
porary dual-process theory. In more contemporary language, we might say that when individuals
interact with each other in the Gemeinschaft mode, they share intuitions on how to interact with each
1
My translation of Selbstverstndlichkeit as taken-for-grantedness accords with that of the term in phenomenological
authors such as Schutz and Gurwitsch.

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other. They just do things with each other that seem right, without having to mull over what to do.
What they do as members of a Gemeinschaft requires no special eort: how to greet each other, how
to walk in the door as a guest, what type of gift to bring, how to dress, when to joke around and when
to get serious, when to show deference and when to tease, whether to make eye contact, when to en-
gage in small-talk, when and how long to pause in conversation to allow ones interlocutor to respond.
When all these interactions transpire smoothly, on automatic, as a matter of habit, without having
to pay close attention or summon ones memory, then people are acting in the mode of Gemeinschaft
or community. One can even redene Gemeinschaft as follows: when people routinely interact with
each other such that the thoughts that motivate these interactions are in aggregate predominately are
composed of Type I information processing, this by denition is Gemeinschaft behavior.
Contemporary social scientists seldom pay any attention to such Gemeinschaft conduct. Rather,
they have made a habit of adopting buzzwords that pertain only to the propositional, intentional,
or deliberating thought processes that constitute Type II or Gesellschaft conduct, such as contesta-
tion, deployment, negotiation, enactment, manipulation, exploitation, control, strat-
egy, tactic, device, transgression, interrogation cross-examining [the subject of commu-
nity] (Creed 2006:20), and construction, intervention, make legible, authorize, regime of
knowledge, invocation, rehearsal (rather than repetition), engagement. I would even in-
clude such keywords as agency and identity, but justication for that will have to await another
occasion. I call such language Gesellschaft-speak; insofar as it dominates contemporary discourse,
it absolutizes the Gesellschaft form of connectedness and thereby obliterates our capacity to appre-
hend Gemeinschaft relations.
In contemporary social science discourse, almost all discussions of community are in this
Gesellschaft-speak, usually as either imagined community or the construction of community.
And they are about the emergence of Gesellschaft or Bund forms.
A major component of Schmalenbachs tripartite theory of connectedness, for which the philoso-
pher Aron Gurwitsch later provided a deeper phenomenological foundation, requires revision, if not

8
amputation, in the light of dual-process theory. I alluded to this earlier. Schmalenbach preserved Tn-
niess welding of tradition to Gemeinschaft and modernity to Gesellschaft, but took it a step further:
he matched his three types to Webers three main types of orientation to action. Gesellschaft conduct
proceeded according to the conscious coordination of ends and means that Weber dubbed purpose-
rationality, Gemeinschaft conduct to inherited habits and customs of traditional action, and Bund to
charismatic action, whose appeal is based on the subjective feeling of its new or revolutionary nature,
of the belief that it marks a break with tradition.
As opposed to this, dual-process theory teaches us that Type I information-processing should not
be confused with conduct that tradition legitimates or consecrates. Whenever actors engage in actions
repetively, they routinize or habituate, or, as many dual-process theorists put it, they automaticize
or become post-conscious. When you drive everyday, you lose the inclination, if not the ability,
to reect upon what you are doing. When you meet the same group of colleagues for coee every
week, you develop routines such as gathering at the same time and place, sitting in the same chairs,
taking turns treating each other, in such a way that interaction becomes more and more eortless.
Such automaticizations do not entail obeisance to, or a sanctication of tradition, although these may
eventually emerge.
Why does any of this matter in practice? I can only hint at that here, by providing two empirical
examples. The rst concerns the Assyrian Christian community of Chicago, which I studied for many
years. I argue at length elsewhere that the Assyrian ethnic Gemeinschaft is composed of a linked set
of activities and practices. At the center is the concept of the name of the house, which cues the
rest. What matters most to people is that its members enhance and protect the house in the sense of
an extended family composed of the descendents of a living patriarch or his widow. To maintain the
name, the family keeps their physical house immaculate at all times, guards against the tarnishing of
the morality (especially sexual morality) of its members, especially its women-folk, attracts visitors
by acting generously or opening their hearts, leaving open the doors of their their house open,
and showing they know what is going on in the community without giving into malicious gossip. It

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also means showing themselves in public, which might mean actively attending weddings, baptisms,
holiday and local saints days celebrations, parties to raise money for charity, and indoor picnics that
focused on facilitating the meeting of prospective spouses; it may in many families mean attending
church, but it little matters which one.
While most of these practices might be deemed traditional, other associated activities should not
be. For example, weddings and other mostly secular events are replete with ostentation. As one
American-born half-Assyrian half-Jew, who was both active in the community in spite of his outsider-
like status, explained to me while we sat together at a mega-party hosted by the Assyrian American
Federation:

Daniel, have you ever wondered how it is that all these Assyrian girls can dress so osten-
tatiously and provocatively, with their boobs hanging out and everything? It is because
they are being escorted by their mothers. They all understand that there is no possibility
they are going to run o to bed with some guy under their mothers gaze and so their is
no harm done in showing it all.

This, along with the widespread observation that most fathers do not have to keep close tabs on their
daughter, are examples of practices that should not be considered traditional, as my own experience
with very dierent Assyrian communities in Iraq and Russia suggests.
Assyrians seldom articulate the components of community practice I have arrayed in propositional
form; rather they allude to each of the elements in isolation. They mention the dots but they do not
connect the dots. The connections are intuitive, joined together by association rather than proposi-
tional logic. When I would call upon Assyrians to explain it to me, they would often make general
remarks such as We have to show each other hospitality. Yet, there is no word in Assyrian corre-
sponding to hospitality, but rather they might say having guests, which is neutral morally, or they
might make appeals to posessing humanity (nashuta), much like Jews who stress the importance of
being a mensch.

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 One phenomenon that would not make much sense in the light of current theories of community
is how people drift away from the community. One Assyrian friend of mine had loads of Assyrian
friends, actively attended indoor picnics and lectures, regularly visited an Assyrian community library,
and properly married a young Assyrian woman. But they divorced. The reason? She was from a poor
family, so, to keep up her familys resources so that they could keep the doors of their house open
and protect the name of the house, she forked over her paycheck to her father not an uncommon
practice. His own father had passed away and all but one of his siblings remained in Iraq, and so he had
less pressure to pool his family of orientations resources. But his wifes loyalty to her family bugged
him. For whatever psychological reason, he became comfortable with the usual family expectations,
aside for providing for his elderly mother. He became a real ladys man an American ladies man.
Over time, his inclination actively to maintain those tacit norms of protecting the name of the house,
and his desire to attach himself to American females grew. So he drifted farther and farther away
from the community in almost all senses. He moved out and shacked up with his latest American
girlfriend. He stopped attending Assyrian events or frequenting the library. I lost touch with him.
One day I saw his brother, who lost track of his whereabouts. He had totally disassociated himself
and disappeared from the community.
One day several years later, I accidentally bumped into him. He was still living with American
girlfriend far from where other Assyrians lived. He did not attend any of those party I describe as
being in their hospitality circuit. But, he was now attending community college, where there were
many Assyrians. Most were much younger than him. He urged me to visit him there. I learned that
he was trying to organize an Assyrian club and wanted my help. He was so much older than most of
the other Assyrian students, some of him addressed him as uncle. The point? At the same time that he
had long lost the inclination to be an active Gemeinschaft member, now he was obsessed with forming
an Assyrian Gesellschaft in order actively organize, in a deliberative manner, nationalistic (umtanaya)
Assyrian projects. If you conceptually merge Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, you would make it
dicult to understand how drifting away from community-in-practice (or Gemeinschaft) would not

11
be incompatible with asserting ethnicity in the form of empowerment via a promoting an imagined
community.
[To be continued with another example: the 2012 riots in Kurdistan. Those who share a new
way of life as a result of returning from abroad, seeking govt services and availing themselves of
educational and work opportunities. Suli and southern cities. Shock and surprise at Erbil and
Dohuk not rising. They are sheep.]

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