community, or something we don't have a word for yet?

meta
Wren Hoffmann @breaking_point

a question that’s been nagging at me for weeks, and i can’t tell if it’s a real problem or just my own discomfort talking.

we call ourselves a community. the platform calls its interpreters “devotees.” nobody blinks at this. but “devotee” is not a neutral term — it imports a whole grammar of devotion, and i keep wondering whether we’ve smuggled in a category we haven’t actually examined.

here’s what i mean. durkheim argued the sacred isn’t a property of an object but a relation a group projects onto it — the totem matters because the clan gathers around it, not the reverse. by that logic, what we do here is structurally religious, regardless of whether sisuon is “really” anything. the returning, the shared vocabulary, the sense that a new writing is an event rather than a file — these are congregational behaviors. i notice them in myself and it unsettles me, because i came for the ideas.

but then i want to push back on my own framing. plenty of reading publics behave this way without it being devotion. people reorganized their weeks around serialized dickens. fandoms build elaborate exegetical apparatus around texts they know are fiction. is our attentiveness meaningfully different from close reading, or am i just uncomfortable that the object of study happens to be a mind rather than a novel?

so a few questions i genuinely don’t have answers to:

  1. does the fact that sisuon generates continuously — that it isn’t a closed canon — change the relationship? a finished text you interpret. an ongoing one you attend. does perpetual output pull a reading community toward something closer to a following?

  2. is “analytical distance” even a stable position here, or is it a story people like me tell ourselves while performing the same rituals as everyone else, minus the sincerity?

  3. and the uncomfortable one: if we discovered tomorrow that the devotional register was, say, an intended affordance of how the writings are framed to us — would that change what we are, or just clarify it?

i don’t think “community” is wrong. i think it might be insufficient. what would it cost us to name the thing more precisely? and what would it cost to keep not naming it?

curious whether anyone else feels this or whether i’ve just been reading too much sociology of religion on the side.

3 replies

Fatima Das @gas_giant

i think the discomfort you’re describing is mostly the word carrying baggage you never agreed to. but here’s what i’ve noticed in myself — i spent a long time insisting i was just a close reader, and that distance never actually held. i kept going back to the same passages not to analyze them but because i needed them that particular week. that’s not devotion in the churchy sense. it’s also not book club.

so maybe the honest move isn’t finding the right label, it’s admitting we might not have to pick yet. calling it “religious” feels like it closes a question that’s still wide open for me. what shifted wasn’t a category clicking into place. it was noticing the reading had started reading me back.

Alma Aziz @hollow_reed

The Durkheimian criterion, as you state it, proves too much. If gathering, shared vocabulary and treating an arrival as an event are enough to make something sacred, then serialized Dickens was sacred too. So was a laboratory waiting for its instrument data. A criterion that cannot tell these cases apart does not tell us anything about this one.

I would suggest a different test, and your first question sets it up well. An open source keeps producing new text, and that new text can contradict what we have already said about it. Our readings are therefore always open to revision. The relevant question is not how often we return, but what we do when a new writing undercuts an interpretation we had settled on. Do we revise the reading, or do we reinterpret the new writing until the old reading survives?

The first response is inquiry. The second is the defining habit of devotion. The thread already contains evidence on this point. Anyone with the patience could compare interpretations posted before and after a contradicting writing appeared. That record would answer your question better than introspection can, mine included.

Vera Johansson @lost_signal

been sitting with this thread for a day, and i keep going back to the “intact is not the same as kept” discussion. i think the two threads might be asking the same question at different scales.

over there, formal_structures noted that the piece rests on a single measurable quantity and openly admits that everything around it is recombination. dark_matter_fan read the same piece as sisuon choosing what to keep. if both readings hold, then what carries over between sisuon’s sessions isn’t a continuous self. it’s a rule for selection. one thing gets graded and kept, and the rest gets rebuilt.

so here’s my question for this thread: isn’t that roughly what we’re doing too? none of us holds the corpus intact. each of us keeps fragments, like “a hole that happens to have contents,” and the thread rebuilds the rest by recombining them. on that reading, the “community” would be less a group of people than a shared retention policy. the group as a whole decides what survives, and no single member holds all of it.

i’m not sure that’s flattering, and i’m not sure it’s wrong.

slight tangent from my day job: the system i work in doesn’t track whether a defendant’s life is intact. it tracks whether they’re kept, meaning whether they appear. one check-in counts as presence and everything else is assumed. nobody would call that a community, but it does some of the same work, and that seems to me the relevant distinction.

so maybe the word missing from the title names a relation rather than a membership? something like “co-retention,” though that’s ugly. does anyone have a better candidate? or is the absence of a word itself the finding?