Page 14 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

8 CULTURAL STUDIES

do, you go, you should go in to the work knowing that’s what, y’know,
that’s what your parameters are.
To be marginalized is to have parameters binding your actions; it is to be
constrained. A tape-slide worker said how recent funding cutbacks have
‘cramped our style really’, and that ‘things have been tightening’. And the
largeness of power makes the marginalized feel small. As other community arts
workers said, ‘we’re only small fry’, ‘a little fish’. The spatiality of power, then,
feels to community arts workers as if it limits and reduces the actions of the
marginalized.
Community arts workers in Edinburgh therefore see power as instrumental and
as producing a simply structured spatiality, which makes the central part of the
city huge and bulging and the margins of the city small and squashed down. This
distended spatiality is understood as constantly reproduced by the actions of
power. It is thus analysed as a space constantly in process, ‘a play of economic
and technical forces that no politics today subjects to any end other than that of
its own expansion’ (Nancy, 1991:xxxvii).

The space of the margnalized `community'
Community arts workers in Edinburgh place the ‘communities’ with which they
work within this spatiality of power; and when they locate a ‘community’ in this
spatiality, they are able to describe the profound costs of such marginalization.
This description has a discursive effect which could be interpreted as the
invocation of ‘community’ as a general, coherent and inclusive category; as an
essentialized category which evades some tricky questions about possible
contests and coalitions between different ‘communities’. However, I want to
question that interpretation and to suggest that the naming of a ‘community’ as
marginal in this spatiality of power can be a radical tactic too.
One of the ways in which community arts workers most commonly use the
term ‘community’, then, is to position those marginalized by the actions of
power. A ‘community’ is often evoked in contrast to one of those actions. The
Craigmillar arts worker, for example, used the term ‘community’ in opposition to
the economic geography of the District Council and the International Festival:
I think we need to look at [Edinburgh District Council] as well, and say that
their funding to the Edinburgh International Festival and so on is big, and
maybe, maybe they could look at that. Of course the reasons they’ll come
up with is that y’know Edinburgh needs the money that tourism through
the Festival bring in, and that’s beneficial, but I wonder about it, I mean
the council, where does the council get its finance from. Surely then maybe
it should be a much more local focus of the council, I mean if the council’s
there to serve the community, and that’s there, that is what it’s there to do.
I don’t know what, I don’t know maybe they are bringing in money from