Caseorganic: Created page with "===Author=== Kevin Hamilton, American artist and scholar, of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His work concerns images, infrastructure and collective experience. ===Citation=== Hamilton, Kevin. "Absence in Common: An Operator for the Inoperative Community." ''Intelligent Agent'' 6, no. 2 (..."

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Created page with "===Author=== Kevin Hamilton, American artist and scholar, of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His work concerns images, infrastructure and collective experience. ===Citation=== Hamilton, Kevin. "Absence in Common: An Operator for the Inoperative Community." ''Intelligent Agent'' 6, no. 2 (..."

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===Author===
Kevin Hamilton, American artist and scholar, of the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His work concerns images, infrastructure and collective experience.

===Citation===
Hamilton, Kevin. "Absence in Common: An Operator for the Inoperative Community." ''Intelligent Agent'' 6, no. 2 (2006), 11 pp.<ref>[https://experts.illinois.edu/en/publications/absence-in-common-an-operator-for-the-inoperative-community Absence in Common: An Operator for the Inoperative Community], University of Illinois Experts.</ref> Also presented at ISEA2006, San Jose.

===The Title's Reference===
The subtitle points to Jean-Luc Nancy's ''La communauté désœuvrée'' (1986; English, ''The Inoperative Community'', 1991), which is the argument the paper works from.

Nancy's position, formulated against both liberal individualism and communitarian nostalgia, is that community is not something a group of individuals produces by coming together, nor a lost fusion to be recovered. Community is prior to the individual and consists in '''being-with''': a sharing that is constituted by separation rather than dissolved by it. His term ''désœuvrement'' — worklessness, inoperativity — names his insistence that community is precisely not a work, not a project, not something that can be made. Attempts to realise community as a completed fusion are, in Nancy's argument, the structure of totalitarianism.

===The Argument===
Hamilton takes this into networked and locative media. The prevailing assumption in that field — visible in nearly every social platform and in most locative art — is that community is produced by '''connection''': more presence, more contact, more shared awareness, more co-location. Absence is treated as the problem the technology exists to solve.

Hamilton's counter-proposal is that '''absence is constitutive''' rather than deficient. What people share, on Nancy's account, is precisely their separation and their finitude; a technology that fills every gap does not perfect community but removes the space in which it consists. The paper asks what a media practice would look like that treats absence as material to be worked with rather than an interval to be closed — hence "an operator for the inoperative community."

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
This is one of the few pieces in the locative media literature that argues against connection as an unexamined good, and it does so from a serious philosophical position rather than from nostalgia.

It is the sharpest available counterweight to [[Ambient Intimacy|ambient intimacy]], which proposes that continuous low-level contact produces closeness. Hamilton's question — whether continuous contact might remove the condition that made closeness possible — is not answered by the criticisms usually levelled at ambient intimacy, which concern volume and platform incentives rather than the premise. It also bears on [[Belonging|belonging]] and on [[Continuous Partial Attention|continuous partial attention]].

===Related Reading===
* [[Ambient Intimacy]]
* [[Belonging]]
* [[Continuous Partial Attention]]
* [[Beyond Locative Media]]
* [[Existentialism]]

===References===
<references/>

[[Category:Articles]]
[[Category:Critical Theory]]
[[Category:Communication Studies]]

Absence in Common - Revision history