Here the production of social space1 comes into the picture: Who is producing who's social space? Or who defines what social space someone is in? We can very easily define someone as belonging to someone else by using the word 'community'. This Jean-Luc Nancy2 talks about in a negative sense as a community of common beings, as being absorbed into a common substance, a fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity, in fact a lack of identity for the individual.

In this context you can ask what lies behind using the concept or term 'community' as an artist? What subjective position evokes the need for the word 'community' and for community? At this stage I will only quote Jean-Luc Nancy2 when he says: "the political is the place where community as such is brought into play". It is always about power relations although not just.

Let me then return to subject position. If I or another artist say "I work with or in a community" what then is the underlying assumption?: That I can overview it, that I know what 'they' stand for, that I can address 'them' as one? Theis is an 'Illusion of Transparency'3; the concept used by Henri Lefebvre to describe how one think that one can see and understand a social space fully, that the space is innocent, free of traps or secret places. In the transparency everything "can be taken in by a single glance from that mental eye which illuminates whatever it contemplates".

This goes to the heart of my main objection towards using the term 'community'. It is 'unpositioned viewing'4, meaning that it is so unclear what forms what one sees5. What is actually (if one can anymore use this term) present in the unity of the people that is put under the umbrella of 'community' vs. what is my assumptions, prejudice, ideas and ideologies projected onto 'them'. Not only 'them' but also, more importantly, them as being united, as a whole or one.

Nancy warns us against this totalising approach to community where unity is the definition, as this will refuse us the political as a means and thereby abandon our communities, the being-in-common. The political being the site where what it means to be in common is open to definition6.

Instead of the totalising term 'a common being', Nancy defines it as being-in-common. As singularities being together and being with. And later he speaks "of a bond that forms ties without attachments..."7. He asks the question

Which again raises the question this essay is concerned with: how can an artist then communicate with a community when it cannot be treated as a whole with an essence? "How do we communicate?" asks Nancy7 "But this question can be asked seriously only if we dismiss all 'theories of communication', which begin by positing the necessity or the desire for a consensus, a continuity and a transfer of messages."

Let us wait a bit before we go further into Nancy's thoughts and have a comment from Christopher Fynsk8 who wrote the Foreword to Nancy's 'The Inoperative Community': Anyone that seeks an immediate political application of Nancy's thought about community risks frustration - however present the political character of Nancy's project may be!

In Empire Hardt and Negri9 gives an insight into the formation of the nation state as a community. Historically, the setting up of nation states made communities that both defended against opponents and unified the population. But there is a strength in speaking as a nation which is why it can be necessary to unify forces and level out differences. But in the process of that defensive act you repress "internal differences and opposition in the name of national identity, unity, and security". We could call this a 'community of sameness'.

In Marxist and socialist ideas, "community is the emphasis on the small-scale, on immediate experience, on the strength of affective ties, and on continuity from one generation to the next"10. The sociologist Ferdinard Tönnies11 called it "the perfect unity of human wills" which could be both in locality, based on a common habitat, or mind, e.g. religion and friendship.

Along from that urban life has been very influential on the idea of community. From Simmel's portrayal of urban life as inhuman: the constant interaction of strangers, and community as a re-action against that12, to Parsons' definition of community as 'that aspect of the structure of social systems which is referable to the territorial location of persons'13. With the latter Parson is making community a more objective term which I do not think carry the values we address to it today.

But in these and other more geographical definitions are also a very interesting common aspect that is addressed by Isabel Emmett as she says that "the shared knowledge of a particular place and its people enables all members to participate in a continuous fashioning and telling of the story of the place"14. This aspect also include and exclude people and the included know a more complex meaning of the social encounters they have. This is, however, a sociologic finding from a particular small village. But the local area around a corner shop in a city like London could maybe be seen as such as well!

For Janowitz15 people took on community responsibilities only when they sustained the security and well-being of the household which is a 'community with limited liability'. This gives a very negative tone to community and is, I guess, the result of the changed social life in urban life.

In continuation of this Manuel Castells brought a greater realm to the concept by saying that the urban had to incorporate a general social theory with the structures of domination in a society16. He also sees how cultural pluralism in a city gets blocked by the state because of its central planning and agencies to maintain order. This is very interesting following the above: In the second half of the last century Castells therefor sees an opposition between state and community. They worked against each other so to say. One, the state, wanted to make general structures, the other, community, worked for a local solution to problems. Hardt and Negri shows us how historically the formation of the nation state was a 'community forming process' as mentioned above. But once the state has been made the opposition between state and community that Castells illuminates comes into being.

This thread is taken up by Cockburn17 who argues that official bodies (the state) incorporate 'the community' in their management of state services. By doing this they ignore the present heterogeneity, mobility and isolation and have an unrealistic belief in the claims of community leaders that they have a popular mandate into action.

Peter Worsley10 sees how research shows that the formation of community is a situational strategies aimed at specific problems. That, which is a very basic understanding of community I think, people get together when there is 'rumble in the neigborhood'. Worsley also mentions a quite peculiar phenomonen: how blacks in Britain uses community to exert political energy to fight poverty on the one hand "while those with a chose - the affluent of the urbanised world - seek out other people's community in villages, or in inner cities, in their search for authenticity" on the other hand. Both 'findings' are very interesting as they show that we want to be part of a community and it is the preferred form to cope with both political problems and problems of wishing to belong.

Hardt and Negri criticise what they call the 'localisation of struggles'. To counter globalism and the formation of Empire with a local or "place-based" approach is for them signs of dispossession and defeat18. They continue to say that the assumption is that difference and heterogeneity are present in the local and that the global is the realm of a homogenisation process.

This is not the case. Rather, globalization should be seen "as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenisation and heterogenization". In other words whatever good intentions we have to preserve or even nurse differences in the being-in-common (Nancy's definition of community which I will return to), capitalism and globalization, or a specific regime of that called Empire19, is the realm of its determination. So the struggle is not to fight for the local but to search for liberation within Empire. The fight for the local can even obscure and negate that struggle!

Hardt and Negri say in the context of African Americans that "structures that play a defensive role with respect to the outside - in the interest of furthering the power, autonomy, and unity of the community - are the same that play an oppressive role internally, negating the multiplicity of the community itself."20Thus, we have two problems with 'community': first, can it be used as a local approach to solve problems in opposition to the global? Second, does it level out difference?

To the latter P. Gilroy suggests when quoting Anthony Cohen that community is a site for the investment of its members selves without having their individuality overly compromised. "Indeed, the gloss of communality which it paints over its diverse components gives to each of them an additional referent for their identities"21. Gilroy himself says that the "sharing of a common body of symbols created around notions of 'race'. ethnicity or locality...does not dictate the sharing of the plural meanings which may become attached to those symbols...Community is as much about difference as it is about similarity and identity". This is to say that a common face towards the 'outside' does not level out differences 'inside'! This I think is a very problematic and not a profound enough analysis of community, which I will return to later.

Another critic of community is put forward by the American Political Philosopher Iris Marion Young. To her the idea of community as e.g. proposed by feminists and anti-capitalistic thinkers (in Empire called the Left) is that it privileges unity over difference. Further, which is the interesting part, it uses the same ideal of exclusion as chauvinistic and ethical groups show22!

In contemporary postcolonial and postmodern theory the discourse of community involves a break with Hegel's dialectic. An opposition to the binary conception of the world with its implication of an essentialism and homogeneity of the identities of the two halves23. Depending on which definition of community we look at this could be seen as being against the idea of community. But let us have a look at newer definitions of community that goes very well hand in hand with the break with dialectic thinking:

As we saw earlier Hardt and Negri do not recognise the local as the site for resistance which is what Bhabha does26. But I still think Bhabha's location of a possible community is interesting as a model or definition of community even in its non-resistance or non-ability to resist dialectic and globalising power. It also seems to address the same issues as Nancy's definition does.

In this way art can work in this realm to show a way that allows for difference to be present, for the non-polariticised art work that makes no claim of offering solutions seen as unity, Bhabha says. "The 'middle passage' of contemporary culture...is a process of displacement and disjunction that does not totalize experience"28.

When Hardt and Negri calls the community Bhabha talks about a utopic one they cannot mean that arts role in this process is a future scenario. This because Bhabha gives numerous examples of art (litterature) that offers and allows for this 'in-between' presence of difference. But it could be that Hardt and Negri thinks it is of no use as it acts locally! So maybe art cannot be seen as being able to solve problems of globalization insofar as it does not do so within29 the global capitalistic realm.

Now, let us finally look at Jean-Luc Nancy's definition of community. He defines it as being-in-common, which we have already touch upon, via the following route30:

By this Nancy is addressing the need for sharing or rather a kind of 'forced nessesity of sharing', as you cannot be beyond or outside it. "Community is given to us with beings and as being, well in advance of all our projects, desires, and undertakings"33.

To get to the core of Nancy's definition of community we must address his political project as mentioned in the beginning, which is also what proves importent for an artistic project: After we have acknowledged "the end of ideology" we silently add, according to Nancy34, "the end of political options" and then substitute this for "what we call democrasy". Here we loses sight of community "and of the political as the place for its exposition"35.

So what we rather want to strive towards is being-in-common without being absorbed into a common substance. This he addresses as 'finitude' as "the infinite lack of infinite identity"36. He continues:

With the 'work' Nancy e.g. means family, people, church, nation, party, literature, philsophy, etc. With this he says that we have to unwork both the works of individuals and the community, e.g. its production of its collective property of knowledge and production38. This is to say that we have to unwork what is unity and totality, the leveling out of differences in the urge for common being!

This is what brings me back to the beginning of this essay, because how do we do that? How do we form a "bond that forms ties without attachments"40?

To this I will turn to Sarat Maharaj41 as he talks about the possibilities in art to be that link between "different" people. Let me explain this simplisitc formulation of Sarat's theory. The way I interpret Sarat's theory of difference and the untranslatable, which are central here, is the following:

just as money is the medium of equivalence and the reduction of quality to quantity as Georg Simmel42 argues so is language.