Page 18 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

12 CULTURAL STUDIES

projects. This sense of ‘a kinda active community’ is often talked about as a
natural state. Here is a Muirhouse worker:
down here, there’s much, it sort of seems to be much more organic sort of,
like maybe it’s sprung up, like y’know. It’s like a group always springs up
here and there.
This other ‘community’ is thus described as full of life, active and growing
naturally. Other imagery naturalizing an aspect of ‘community’ was used by the
Craigmillar video worker when he argued that getting involved in community
activity:

keeps your strength up and you can resist these things. It’s like the body
resisting germs, y’know, you keep fit and you resist germs generally, I
mean, I mean things go wrong sometimes but it does make a big difference
that way. I mean it lifts, it lifts the whole community.

The body politic of the other ‘community’ is thus understood as a kind of
organism. But this discursive analogy does not work to naturalize a time-less
‘community’ of unchanging and pure identity: just the opposite. What is
naturalized in this discourse is an other ‘community’ of unstable flux (cf. Nancy,
1991:75–6).
The energy and growth of this other ‘community’ is almost always understood
as articulating itself through connections between people. The Muirhouse worker
described what he thought was the best pantomime of the project he had
facilitated:
at the end of it, like everybody up on their feet and leaping about, it was
just, really getting off on it like, really working and that got people
involved in other things and from seeing that…a sort of snowball effect.
The production was full of the energy of this other ‘community’, and this was
good because it ‘snowballed’ other people into participating in other things. It is
this process of participation in projects and groups that is seen by community
arts workers as being the other ‘community’. For example, the Wester Hailes
worker remarked that ‘Wester Hailes is—had a focus formerly called the
Festival Association’, his effort to describe the nature of Wester Hailes leading
him to describe its umbrella community organization; and when I asked the
Craigmillar arts worker if he thought Craigmillar was a ‘community’, he
answered by commenting on its ‘united organizations’. Groups give structure to
this other ‘community’, by getting individuals involved. The youth video worker
said: