Columbia English professor Joseph Albernaz celebrated his new book, Common Measures, in a lively discussion on formations of community. 

What does common life look like after devastation? Joseph Albernaz, scholar of Romanticism and English professor at Columbia, articulates the notion of “groundless communities” in his new book, Common Measures, published earlier this year by Stanford University Press. Groundless communities share a communal life but are not bound by labels of collective identity that would otherwise create grounds for community. The “collective ongoingness of the everyday” becomes the fertile ground for Albernaz’s exploration of what community, communal ideals, and “communism of spirits” can look like in the groundlessness of community. 

In a panel event hosted at the Heyman Center for Humanities, Albernaz was put in conversation with several scholars. Introduced by department chair Denise Cruz, the panelists included Professor Branka Arsić from Columbia’s English department, Professor Emily Sun from Barnard’s Comparative Literature department, and Professor Colin Jagers from Rutgers’ English department and Center for Cultural Analysis.  

Albernaz’s work is in conversation with William Blake’s notion of “all things common,” and true to the spirit of a literature student, grounds his work in close reading. Language, he tells us, is an excess, both ongoing and overflowing, and literature, Albernaz continues, is a process of “unowning and unworking.” Jagers applauded Common Measures as a return to Romanticism’s close reading of language, which as Sun puts it, is a romantic excursion of excess. Returning to the lines of the poem is  Albernaz’s main source of inquiry. Poetry is the plot Albernaz plows and with the book available to readers, the field of poetry can become everyone’s employ. 

All three panelists recognized the relevance of Albernaz’s work to the present moment. Sun added to this, noting that the expansive nature of Albernaz’s inquiry—on an era of British poetry—puts his work in conversation with global modernity beyond Europe. It is also an interdisciplinary work, conversant with climate anxiety, and reacts to disappointments with a capitalist reality. The community that Common Measures explores is centered on communalism that is deeply rooted in the everyday lives of its people in a period of sociopolitical upheaval, an echo perhaps to our current moment as well. While recognizing the brilliance of Albernaz’s new book, the panelists also collectively meditated on the features of community; it is a form of sharing that precedes identity, a dwelling in the “sweetness of pure shipwreck.” 

What is the boundary between a groundless community and anarchy? Furthermore, in this community, what happens to love? Love, as Arsić elaborates, is possessive and may be hierarchical. How would one reconcile sharing one’s love with this community? 

Albernaz responded by critically distinguishing the groundless community from Rousseau’s originary community, which is a series of pure events, and therefore not a community. The community in Common Measures is not random but contains a rhythm of life. It is, as Albernaz eloquently puts it, “gestures that refer life back to itself without metaphysical grounding.” Fundamentally, there is a social fabric in which a common spirit exists. 

Now, what happens to love? Albernaz answers: Love is not possession, but a continuous dispossession. It is the sweetness of pure shipwreck. 

Wow. 

The event concluded with some questions from the audience, with many of the questions directed at the scholars Albernaz cites in his book, like Weddleburn and Blake. It was a scholarly conversation I was eavesdropping in on with no knowledge of Albernaz’s work or the significance of these Romantic figures. Yet, as I left, it seems like Albernaz has permanently expanded how community figures in unprecedented times.

Albernaz’s book via Columbia University Department of English