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Impossible Practice and Theories of the Impossible: A Response to Helene Illeris’s “Potentials of Togetherness”

In a recent commentary in Studies in Art Education, Helene llleris (2013) discussed the idea of performative experimental communities via a critique of visual culture pedagogy and the romanticism of community-oriented art education in Nordic countries, llleris underpinned her arguments with Jean-Luc Nancy's (1997) philosophy on togetherness and community. While I agree in principle with llleris's movement away from individual learning processes toward community, I find problematic the relationship between a presumed practice of collectivity and the theoretical impossibility of community. In what follows, I also use Nancy's theories to analyze the idea of performative experimental communities provided by llleris and discuss the theoretical impossibility of it.Traditionally, In community-arts-based projects, the artwork is the outcome of the collaboration-but the work process itself can also be defined as art, as it is a continuous performance (Kantonen, 2005). Artwork, then, becomes a jointly lived event, and the event becomes a shared experienced artwork (Kester, 2004). Community-based art is considered by many to be a logical step toward a more intimate and meaningful relationship between the artist and his/her local audience, or participants, and an efficacious means of shrinking the distance between the traditionally separate poles of production and reception. As such, community-based art is often celebrated as an artistically and politically critical and progressive practice (Kwon, 2004).Community-art-based projects, especially as described in art education, rely on an idea of an already existing community, or presuppose that the act of making art together would build up a purpose of community. Illeris (2013) criticized these kinds of projects, claiming that they often yearn for a mythic past where true belonging still existed. Illeris's argument has reverberated with Nancy's theory (1991) that longing for original and harmonious communities, and for immediate being-together, exists in every generation and in most cultures, and should be seen as mythical thought-an imaginary and nostalgic picture of our past. Nancy (1991, 1997), however, went further and posited that a community cannot be a subject with an idea, mind, destiny, or meaning of its own.Nancy developed his theories of community interactively with Maurice Blanchot (1988). For Nancy and Blanchot, community could only be possible without any shared subjectivities and shared substances. In the so-called world of "practice"-often arbitrarily separated from the "world of philosophical theory"-most art educators understand the idea of community precisely through its subjectivity. For example, many community-arts-based projects, within the field of art education, aim to develop a stronger community identity by distinguishing social needs and community relations at a local level. In practice, the goals are often to improve community relations, to develop feelings of acceptance and belonging in the community, to support active citizenship and local involvement in governance, and so on. Through these practices, community is understood as presupposed, already physically and geographically existing. Characteristic to all presupposed communities of practice is that their members are supposedly embedded in some idea of a shared or communal mind. Collective subjectivity is exactly what is offered for members in community-arts-based projects in art education. In other words, in order to belong, in order to "practice collectivity," the only way to remain as a member in the community is by adopting and holding a position in a collective subjectivity.For Nancy (1991, 1997), community was not something to which one could belong. Instead, as a presupposed structure, community has rejected all that connects its members and what might offer a persistent essence to it. The sense of belonging to a community does not exist as "ready" but can be composed momentarily in togetherness of its members' sense. …