Augmented Community
Where the Local Meets the Global
Standing at the Threshold
Standing at the Threshold
The augmented community produces contradictory traits, which often create a somewhat paradoxical relationship between the two forms of community (local and global). The contradictory nature of combining these oppositional ideals could very easily be divisive to the identity of the community itself. However, what if the community itself became based on a lack of identity, or a non-conditional basis? The augmented community becomes about standing in the doorway. The local community is staying within the confines of the inside where the surroundings are strong and dependable. The global network is going into the chaos of the outside with all of its weak ties and temporary relationships. The augmented community is the threshold, it is neither outside nor inside but some blank combination that is both and neither.
The augmented community fits into a structure of community described by Giorgio Agamben in The Coming Community. [1] Agamben likens the coming community to the image of the threshold. He describes it as being a “whatever singularity,” or that which always matters as it is.[2] This is to say that the coming community is “mediated not by any condition of belonging, nor by the simple absence of conditions, but by belonging itself.”[3] Agamben’s vision of community is one that is without identity, because it is non-conditional. Where characteristics are erased from this understanding of community, the actions of belonging reinstate the bonds of the community.
The augmented community must also come to terms with its “whatever singularity.” If the community is to think of itself as a whole, then it must be a community that matters as it is. While it may have different parts to it (the local community and the global network) it is still a singular thing. That thing is a community, regardless of how it communes as such. When members of a church meet inside a place of worship they are representing the same church community that meets on blogs to discuss bible verses. Both forms of communion hold very different characteristics, but both forms also exist as institutions of the same community. What makes this combination matter “as it is,” is not a conditional bond around characteristics; instead, the community manifests its whatever singularity through its actions of belonging – membership and tradition.
[1] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Regents of the University of Minnesota. 1993), 1.
[2] Ibid, 1.
[3] Agamben, 85.
