ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

constitution of the public sphere and not with the community per se.
46 Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (Brooklyn,
N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1996), 43–44.
47 Ibid., 45.
48 The mode of practice favored by CAE is nomadic and tactical, outside institutionally sanctioned
forms, spaces, and contexts. Very much informed by situationist strategies, they have
abandoned the belief in the realistic possibility of a mass social revolution but continue to
believe in the power of small “subversive” acts that can provide momentary disruptions in the
everyday maintenance of the rationalized order of society. The language of their avantgardism
tends to be strident if not militaristic.
49 The Rockefeller Foundation’s Project Against Community Tension (PACT) is an example of this
trend. See Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, “Who Made Us the Target of Your Outreach?,” High
Performance (Winter 1994): 15–16.
50 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” in Miami Theory Collective, ed., Community at Loose
Ends, 4.
51 Ibid.
52 Van Den Abbeele, introduction to Community at Loose Ends, xiv. La communauté désoeuvrée
is the original French title of Jean-Luc Nancy’s collection of essays on the community (Paris:
Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1986). The three essays in the French edition plus two additional
essays comprise the English edition of Nancy’s work, in which the word désoeuvrée is trans-
lated as “inoperative.” See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
53 In some respects, the one remaining project from “Culture in Action,” which I have not dis-
cussed thus far, marks an impossibility of community, but only by default and only in a highly
unproductive manner. In adopting a polling model of social interaction and communication,
Robert Peters’s phone survey project further individualizes such processes and reduces the
possible discourses on community and difference to “yes” and “no” options. See Culture in
Action, exh. cat. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), for a detailed description of the project.
54 I am extrapolating from cultural theorist Linda Singer’s proposal that we can think of the com-
munity not as a referential sign but as a call or appeal to a collective praxis. Linda Singer, as
207
NOTES TO PAGES 149–154