Page 20 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

14 CULTURAL STUDIES

group of mothers and tots in Blackridge, and their kind of aim was to put
Blackridge on the map, so we worked with them to do that’. The ‘other’
community is thus scattered across a space, in a nodal distribution, but these
nodes are imagined with links between them. Links can be sociable—the youth
video worker commented that only when folk have developed ‘a network of
friends in the area is the point where they start to care about the area’—or
institutional:

well, I think probably what there is now is a whole network of area
groupings. I don’t think there’s a single Old Town community and—I
don’t think there probably has been for quite some time. There’s a network,
there is a sort of network though of—y’know concerned groups and
organizations that I think make up an overall sense of community, and if
that’s anchored anywhere it’s in y’know like, there are residents’ groups in
each little area.

These links shift too; they are established and then end. Like the spatiality of
power, this spatiality is highly dynamic, because this other ‘community’ is
constantly changing. People ‘move on’, they ‘get from there to there’, they reach
‘the next step’, projects are described as ‘stepping stones’. Yet this is not the same
kind of movement as the unidirectional flows of power’s processes, because the
movements of the other ‘community’ do not occur in a zonally and hierarchically
structured transparent spatiality.
In the discourse of community arts workers, this other ‘community’ is mobile
and many-layered; its nodes and linkages are of their nature highly changeable;
connections between nodes are made and unmade; and both groups and
connections are contingent rather than essential. This produces a complex and
uncertain spatiality. When, for example, the causes of change are listed—people
change because they have fun, learn skills, create pleasurably, find training
places, and this list is always recognized as partial—they are often described as
an unclear number of ‘levels’, a phrase which produces a complexity and
uncertainty of both spatiality and identity. The other ‘community’ is understood
as producing a spatiality very different from the simply structured, expansive
spatiality of power. Thus, although community arts workers in Edinburgh
frequently talk about ‘community’ as if it were a bounded entity—‘so y’know,
we’ve had critics within and outwith the community, and that’s fine, that’s
healthy I suppose’—I would argue that this does not mean that the workers are
mapping ‘community’ boundaries in the same spatiality as they see as that
produced by power. This is not a zonal spatiality which inflates a centre while
producing a marginalized Other. Rather, it is a fluid, multiple, web-like spatiality
of nodes and links in flux, in which positioning can never be stable.
The importance of rethinking the spatiality of ‘community’ in this way was
made explicit by one worker: