Page 17 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

SPATIALITIES OF ‘COMMUNITY’, POWER AND CHANGE 11

understood as an extraordinarily difficult project. The Pilton arts worker
acknowledges this:
but you see for a woman who’s living in relative poverty down here, and
really should, five children, and y’know she’s in her mid-forties and I
mean you just can’t step up, even if you’re a brilliant writer, you cannot
make that transition on your own, just to step up from the depths of West
Pilton up into what is, really is in reality, is a sort of middle-class enclave.
Although I mean it’s not to say that all writers are middle class or
anything, but the structure of the sort of—facilities y’know, that which
enables somebody to get to the next stage, cos you can’t just suddenly
publish and everyone buys it, there are all these things in the middle, in
between, it’s even down to things like bus fares and stuff like that, but
confidence and all that.
This is, after all, a space understood by community arts workers as produced by
power going out from the centre, coming down from the centre, expanding out
from the centre, speaking from the centre. Its processes and pronouncements
have a direction of flow, and that, according to community arts workers, makes
moving into the centre very difficult. Yet community arts workers in Edinburgh
insist that this situation can be changed. It is possible for the marginalized to
speak, organize and struggle. The Old Town arts centre worker described the
process succinctly: people from a ‘community’ get involved in a community arts
project and then:

you want to see, yeah and you do see, you do see different people
developing in different ways out of that and then it gives people a general
sort of sense of satisfaction that they’ve achieved something and that
y’know leads on to them doing other things.

It is in the context of such claims about empowerment—‘the trendy word’, as
one arts practitioner put it—that an other kind of ‘community’ is described by
community arts workers. They assume that an other ‘community’ not structured
by marginalization does exist, and they do not map it in the spatiality they see as
created by powerful institutions. This is a ‘community’ of connections and
alliances, and it produces a different spatiality. Once again, this is a spatiality
that does not give form to an essence of ‘community’; it too has its absences and
gaps. But this time it structures a ‘community’ which can speak and act.
This other ‘community’ is imagined as a body politic of positive affect. It is
creative and full of energy: as the tape-slide worker said, ‘everybody, d’y’ know,
everybody can be creative, and like kind of accessing that creative kind of core in
everybody is like, is, erm, is—releases lots of like kind of valuable energy’. This
other ‘commimity’ is a place of ‘mutual support and interaction’, inhabited by
people with ‘spirit’ who can be ‘dead keen’ to get involved in community arts