150 151 Re-building the community Since the end of the nineteenth century, sociologists have distinguished between simple formal association, based on contract, and community, which implies a deeper bond marked by sharing. To differentiate between the two, reference is made to the German pair Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. The latter term, moreover, is also used to designate Christian communion. But how do we build our communities today? In a similar way. The imperative Share! is not merely a whim of surveillance capitalism, but our brand new resource for producing that social glue no longer guaranteed by tradition. In the absence of shared transcendence, we have taken refuge in the immanence of cultural consumption. It’s not that we share a Spotify link or a television-series quote because we believe them to be immortal masterpieces, but because they function as symbols, in the etymological sense of tokens of recognition that allow us to rebuild the fractured unity of the social body. Love songs lend us words we do not possess, fill the awkward silences between two solitudes, offer a pre-written screenplay for relationships that would otherwise not know how to improvise. The role of popular culture, in the age of its digital reproducibility, is to provide the consecrated hosts for our profane communion. Without this immense repertoire of shared references, without this frenetic circulation of content acting as a collective páthos, we would suddenly find ourselves strangers to one another, inhabitants of incommunicable monads. If it is true that the imperative of sharing has been co-opted by mechanisms of value extraction, it is equally true that the gesture itself – the act of making something common – remains the only bulwark we possess against social entropy. Until now, we have used sharing primarily as a tool of distinction: we share to position ourselves, to accumulate symbolic capital, to signal our belonging to a moral, aesthetic, or political elite. We have built walls made of hyperlinks and photographs to define who we are, and who others are. But if we want this mechanism to build something more inhabitable than a vanity fair, we must reverse its logic, moving from sharing as competition to sharing as cooperation. Imagining a better world does not require some extravagant futuristic utopia, but rather a return to the original function possessed by language and ritual: reducing uncertainty and fear of the other. Sharing an idea, a resource, even just a moment of vulnerability means creating common ground on which one can walk without slipping into a war of everyone against everyone else. Therefore, the real gamble lies in wresting sharing away from algorithmic automatism, restoring it to the awareness of a political act. It is not sharing in order to be seen, but sharing in order to see whether there is someone else, out there, looking in our same direction. If technology has given us the means for planetary connection, it is up to us to fill it with meaning, transforming 'profiles' into people and 'networks' into societies. Because, in the end, the only way not to be crushed by the complexity of reality is to face it together, exchanging maps – however flawed – of the territory we are crossing. Community and communion To understand this paradox, we should first consider a word whose history spans nearly three thousand years: koinonía. The ancient Greeks used koinonía to designate community, and more broadly the social sphere itself. Aristotle, for instance, speaks of koinonía politiké, which we translate as ‘civil society’. Yet its original meaning is far richer when analysed through the root koinos (‘common’), which stands in radical opposition to what is idios (‘particular’). Koinonía does not simply denote a static group of people, but rather it encompasses three inseparable dimensions, designating the very fact of having something in common, the specific object of that shared possession, and finally the set of subjects among whom this bond exists. In this sense, verbs such as koinonein emphasise that community is essentially the act of participating in something or sharing something with someone, making koinonía a reality defined precisely by the nature of what is shared by its members. A few centuries later, Christians also speak of koinonía, translating it with another term: communion. Precisely that of the Mass. In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, Saint Paul speaks of bread and wine as means of communion with the body and blood of Christ. According to his vision, it is participation in the communal life of the Church – that is, in its rites, including the Lord’s Supper – that guarantees salvation. The act of sharing something constitutes the community. Sharing bread and wine makes the members of the community somehow resemblant, and it is precisely this resemblance (among believers and with Christ) that constitutes the community. Christ and Christians resemble one another because, so to speak, the same blood flows through them. The dispositif of communion unfolds across three levels of participation, sliding from economy into physiology. First of all, there is horizontal solidarity, a welfare system in which the sharing of resources defines believers as a class, without yet guaranteeing transcendence. Salvation instead requires a vertical mimesis with Christ: to attain immortality, one must replicate the sacrifice. This is where the ritual technology of bread and wine comes in, following an ancient medical paradigm: the material assimilation of substitutes allows one to biologically incorporate the virtues of the model, establishing through metabolism the necessary bond between the community and its God. In the ancient tradition, sharing is embodied through the symbolon, a token or a mark that attests affiliation to the community, defining who is inside and who is outside. It is the sharing of bread and wine, and thus of the body and blood of Christ, that lays the foundation for the Christian community, conceived – sometimes metaphorically, sometimes more literally – as a single body, in which a single blood flows. The very idea of a single blood shared by the community reappears in the “biological” theories of nationalism, that plagued the first half of the twentieth century. Yet if we strip these conceptions of their nefarious literalness, we find a recurring idea: there is no community without the sharing of something that renders its members similar to each other. That shared thing does not necessarily have to be material; it may be a language, a myth, a dream. When viewed from the outside, Christians are not a community because they eat the same bread and drink the same wine, nor because the same blood flows in them, nor because that blood is Christ’s, nor even because by assimilating it they gain eternal life: but, first and foremost, because they all do and believe in the same thing.
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