Art and the ideal community

While it is probably fair to say that politics (in the broadest sense) has always been a site of contingency and contestation, the number and the scope of the crises that have emerged in the twentieth century, and the expansive range of their effects, constitutes something new. The often-dramatic changes in modalities of communication and production, for instance, have contributed to the fragmentation and reformation of power bases in both internal and geopolitical relations. And, as we have seen so vividly in the recent history of places like Yugoslavia, the dual and contradictory effects of globalisation and hyper nationalism have compromised people's willingness to participate in the civic society or to imagine themselves as a cohesive community. Such events and issues, along with recurrent environmental and economic disasters, together constitute a crisis of legitimation which is forcing communities and their governments to reconsider their modes of presentation, their authorising narratives, and even their ontological status.