Page 21 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

SPATIALITIES OF ‘COMMUNITY’, POWER AND CHANGE 15

I think there’s huge problems in terms of defining geographical
communities, because it’s, it’s, it’s, in a way it contributes to the image of
that particular area. So if you say well we reserve our resources for the
people of Craigmillar, and you build this in Craigmillar, all your way of
doing is to participate in—the fact that people from Craigmillar live in
Craigmillar, they should stay in Craigmillar and they shouldn’t come from
anywhere else.

To imagine ‘community’ through the same spatiality as that through which power
produces its margins is only to reproduce that marginalization. A different
spatiality is necessary if a different ‘community’ is to be articulated, a dynamic
spatiality where nothing is fixed forever, where there are no essentializing
inclusions and exclusions, and no hierarchies of power.

Conclusions
This is certainly a utopic vision of ‘community’. In particular, it erases difficult
questions about power relation within this other ‘community’, and several arts
workers acknowledged that such questions had none the less to be faced: ‘the
process has to accommodate the fact that it’s not all going to be sitting around
saying “peace, love and power to the people”, y’know, it disnae happen.’
Nevertheless, such efforts to reimagine the spatiality of ‘community’ are sorely
needed. Dominant visions of essentialized ‘community’ have been criticized in
recent discussions about the violent costs extracted by a spatiality structured as
transparently three-dimensional and territorialized by power into a centre and a
margin (Bhabha, 1994; de Certeau, 1984; Deutsche, 1991; Lefebvre, 1991; Rose,
1996). It is a spatiality complicit with (at least) colonialism, the phallocentric
constitution of sexual difference, and the bourgeois construction of classed
difference. All these critiques suggest that the desire for this legible space is
constitutive of essentializing fantasies of identity. While the centre’s
transparency supposedly renders it fully knowable to itself, the marginalized
Other is positioned as the object of an (impossible) desire to know absolutely
what is there. A conceptualization of ‘community’ structured by this kind of
spatiality can only be exclusionary and essentialist about both its own and its
Others’ identities.
But there can be other ways of thinking about ‘community’, as these
community arts workers, among other cultural-political critics, are
demonstrating. ‘Community’ need not mean the articulation of an essence;
‘community’ need not be mapped in the dualistic spatiality of power/knowledge.
Several such critics have argued persuasively that one element of a radicalization
of ‘community’ must be to challenge the idea that ‘community’ has impermeable
boundaries (Hall, 1995; Massey, 1994). But another element must be to think of
‘community’ through a space which does not structure essentialized identities.
This rethought ‘community’ must be mapped in a spatiality which can