Clinamen

Change.gov recently posted a guide to commenting for those wanting to contribute to various policy discussions. The guide gives five general rules:

1: Know the comment policy
Our comment policy lays out the basic guidelines for material that should and should not be part of the Change.gov online conversation.

A diverse group of commenters with a variety of opinions post their thoughts on these pages. We won't censor any ideas based on their content as long as the comment is respectful and adds value to the discussion.

2: Set up an account
Setting up an account before you comment helps build a sense of community around these discussions. You can post a comment without an account, but creating your own log in name makes it easier to keep a conversation going with others.

3: Rate other comments
Only after you've set up an account can you take advantage of our dicussion tool's most interactive qualities. We encourage folks to leave their thoughts about other comments -- either by using the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons to rate a comment, or by responding to a particular comment with your own thoughts. This will help keep the liveliest discussions in front of new readers, and will make the community's feedback a valuable part of the conversation.

4: Post a comment
Once you've got something to say, let us know. If you’re responding to the question posed by the post itself, enter your comment in the text field at the top of the discussion. If you want to respond directly to another user, click "Post Reply" at the bottom of that particular comment.

5: Stay on topic
And most importantly, a reminder: on this website, we will submit many important issues and questions for public discussion. When we open a discussion on, say, the economy, it benefits everyone in the community if you comment only on that particular topic.

All of these rules make sense given the fact that such a broad range of people is joining this textual discussion. This is a way of funneling the various arguments that arrive at the site.

Now, given the definition of community that I am working with in my dissertation and in some other work, this gesture might best described as something other than "community." If we define community as a space in which various colliding interests bump into one another, then the Obama Transition team is "building" something else with this comment policy. By preventing collisions and encouraging everyone to understand the ground rules, Change.gov is hoping to guide discussion in a particular direction.

This is not to say that such building is wrong, but it is to say that such projects happen only after the structure of the hospitable Web has welcomed a broad range of voices to the discussion. That structure of hospitality allows writers to arrive without an "account," an "identity," or an agenda that matches what has been agreed upon. It is this structure that lays the groundwork for community, and when we build structures on top of that (such as the structure that Change.gov is putting in place to guide commenting on the site) we are building something other than community. Often, we are building a coherent project - a fusion of people and interests into One thing.

Again, these projects are not altogether bad, but I think we're best served to view them as something other than community. For me (and Jean-Luc Nancy...and others), community is not something we build. It is something that happens to us, something that "gives us to be." What we do in response to this experience of community is something else entirely. This something else is entirely necessary, but it might not be community. Recently, I have chosen the word "communion" to describe such coherent projects, and fusion might be another word. But I am also interested in the notion of community that strains to account for the arguments and voices that are constantly resisting attempts to "get with the program." These voices are constantly disrupting the push toward communion, and they often introduce noise into the circuits. But they also offer hope that community will always remain hospitable regardless of attempts to commune or fuse around a unified purpose.