Under the Common

Rethinking communication from the lack critique of community

Abstract

This essay reflects on the concept of community in the field of Communication from the standpoint of Black critique and decolonial perspectives. It develops through a situated bibliographic analysis, articulating authors from different theoretical traditions while highlighting convergences and tensions. It begins with an archaeological reading of community in Western modernity, emphasizing its link to an immunitary and exclusionary logic of the common, present in certain communicational paradigms oriented toward transmission and consensus. As a critical displacement, it examines the notion of the undercommons, by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in dialogue with radical Black critique. It argues that this perspective enables a reconfiguration of the epistemological horizon of Communication by foregrounding forms of relationality based on difference, refusal, and contagion, in approximation to Muniz Sodré’s formulations.