“Bent to the Shape of Wordlessness”: Home, Hogs and Community at the Limits of Discourse

Abstract

What does hog production tell us about ideas surrounding “community” in Alberta today? The attempt by Taiwan Sugar Corporation to build a hog operation in Alberta in 1999, and the ensuing debate over this attempt, provides the occasion in this essay for reflecting on the narratives of community operating in a particular place, what those narratives share and what their limits are. The story of belonging through domination remains hegemonic on both sides of the debate examined in this article. This results from a tendency to tell the story of the successes of “our” “attack” on nature—and the promises of future successes that this narrative contains—and to cover over the initial moment of despair and the traces of homelessness which persist. Beginning with George Grant’s lament for the particular losses entailed by modern technological progress and putting this into dialogue with Ian Angus’s immanent critique of Grant as well as Jean-Luc Nancy’s unworking of the concept of community, the article suggests an alternative notion of belonging, one which always exists in relation to alienation, caught in the melee. Revealing the excess that persists in stories of community, through the examination of concrete particularities beyond this hegemonic narrative of completion, suggests a possibility for communication between the self and the Other, while disrupting such binaries.