Entanglements, Issues and Spatial Enactment: Rediscovering Community for Social Work

This paper makes the case for rediscovering community social work based on the social ontological primacy of the "we". In doing so, I closely follow the writings of Jean Luc Nancy and focus particularly on his The Inoperative... [ view full abstract ]

This paper makes the case for rediscovering community social work based on the social ontological primacy of the "we". In doing so, I closely follow the writings of Jean Luc Nancy and focus particularly on his The Inoperative Community. Nancy wants to be rid of all notions of identity in thinking about community, with neither "the same" nor "the other" considered as primary. Instead, both identity (I) and difference (other) are derivative from a prior 'we'. The 'we' which he elevates above all other pronominal alignments is "the most remote, absolute priority of every ontology' (BSP, 76), that is, further back than which nothing is, nor can be thought. The "we" as plurality for Nancy is irreducible and primordial. As such this "we" is foundational and this is why both identity and other are both secondary and constitutive. Entanglement is the social approximation to this primary "we" and through spatial or topographical enactments brings the common to life. Here entanglement is conceived as a vital connectedness enacted across time and space. This paper argues for an entanglement perspective as the best way to conceive of community for social work. With this conception community is defined as an enactment or performance of issue entanglement. It is thereby a dynamic "meshwork of relations" which are emergent around an issue. If community is defined in terms of a saturation with issue(s) this suggests that community acquires distinctive associative properties only in virtue of their interpenetration of constitutive entanglement. The implications of this radical and new way of conceptualising community are discussed for social work.