Page 13 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

SPATIALITIES OF ‘COMMUNITY’, POWER AND CHANGE 7

Scottish Opera gets more money, Scottish National Orchestra gets a
standstill, but it has already a lot of money, so it’s kinda like, y’know—
they actually y’know, just tinkering around the edges, not looking at the
core of the activity. core of the activity.

The core’s resources are never questioned, while those on the edge suffer. This
spatiality, produced by power’s definition of social difference, means that when
community arts practitioners who work in Edinburgh’s housing estates describe
those estates as ‘outer’ or ‘peripheral, they are referring not only to their location
on the edge of a conventional map of Edinburgh, but also to their location on the
margins of Edinburgh’s geography of power; this is a location which they see as
both materially and culturally constituted.
The spatiality that power produces is also understood as hierarchical.
Community arts workers describe the locations of power as ‘high’ and the places
marginalized by power as ‘low’, and this is a hierarchy produced by the actions
of power. Power acts from above. If threatened, commented the worker with
people with disabilities, ‘large organizations will start pulling strings’, like
puppeteers up above the social stage. The powerful are described as coming
down when they leave the city centre and enter the margins, so that a Craigmillar
arts worker told me about ‘one thing that the Arts Council were saying to us
when they were down’ there. Again, dominant arts forms are located in this
spatiality. Here is the arts worker in Pilton describing Edinburgh’s theatre venues
in these terms: ‘I mean we’ve got certain companies coming down here, but
they’re sort of touring theatre companies that go into communities a lot of the
time, who don’t do the, deliver their stuff up there’, in the city centre. The
spatiality of power is thus both zonal and hierarchical; power produces its
margins as low and peripheral in a three-dimensional spatiality.
The final dimension of the spatiality which community arts workers
understand as made by power is that of scale. To these workers, the institutions of
power are big. Professional arts companies are large—‘I mean big professionals
often work, often work with a community, like Scottish Opera were always down
here’—and they get large amounts of funding— ‘there was a wee bit of
controversy at the time, mainly started by me, about the big funding opera gets
and how the community doesn’t get enough’. Power per se can be huge. An arts
development worker with a project involved with people affected or infected by
HIV/AIDS placed the practice of community work in general in a spatiality of
large (and high) power structures; she then asked about social change:
Is that what community development work is about, and how much of that
is possible within the wider structures of society? Do you just work and
tinker away at the small things, when really the big structures are huge and
up there, but then, y’know, if you’re a community worker that’s what you