Page 15 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

SPATIALITIES OF ‘COMMUNITY’, POWER AND CHANGE 9

tourism, where does, how does that, who does that benefit, y’know?
Obviously hotels and businesses, but it’s difficult to see where it trickles
down to the ordinary pensioner.

His analysis of the power of the District Council and the International Festival
(envisaged as big and high) provides a way of understanding the position of ‘the
community’ marginalized by that power. It places ‘community’ as not-power, as
disempowered. This positioning encourages community arts workers to describe
this ‘community’ in general terms, echoing in their critique the binary spatiality
of power: the margin is the ‘community’.
Although this makes for some very generalized comments about the
‘community’, I would argue that it is not essentialist, for (at least) two reasons.
First, to counterpose a ‘community’ to power in this way depends on a relational
and constructed understanding of difference, not an essentialist one. The
marginalized ‘community’ is nameable as such only because power has made it,
not because of its inherent qualities. Second, the ‘community’ so named is not
essentialized because the qualities which are given to it in the community arts
workers’ discourse are—none. Far from having an essence, these marginalized
‘communities’ are described through a discourse of lack. Their qualities are
absent ones.
Most often, the margins that power creates are described as lacking money. As
another arts centre worker remarked, ‘poverty is the main issue for a lot of folk
in Wester Hailes’. In the discourse of community arts workers, these
‘communities’ have little or no money, few jobs, few skills, few resources, no
provision, little choice. The youth video worker continued his history of
Edinburgh’s postwar rehousing schemes as follows:
you got this ridiculous situation, y’know rural housing estates with high
rise flats, y’know people were forced to live in a very sort of tight area and
no way kind of way of making sure they wanted to be there together or
there was enough attraction to be there apart from the fact that they were
poor and they were shoved out there. I mean you combine with the fact
that these jobs aren’t, y’know, aren’t, y’know there’s not much money
floating about, so they’re not close to industrial areas often, they’re not,
y’know retails, there’s no work, so—what is there? There’s nothing in fact.

Other workers also commented that to be marginalized was to live ‘in a
vacuum’, to live where ‘there’s nothing’:
when people have got nothing in their lives except for how to get through
that day, through the boredom and the desperation and the worry and the
lack of worth, and the lack of activity or because, y’know, they’ve got no
money or whatever.