ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on 'community' as a cultural image is to show how 'culture' is itself a narrative, an emergent, multi-layered, rhetorical enactment rather than a pre-established, already-given, static and objective abstraction 'out there'. A unique rhetoric of community hence emerged alongside with the Project, enmeshing the 'deprived locality' to be 'rehabilitated' within the symbolic realm of the state of Israel, Zionist aspirations and the Diaspora. Community is supposed to efface and surpass diverse interests, conflicting relationships and personal idiosyncrasies to provide its members with a sense of belonging to and identifying with. The community has; in fact; become a self-display with no 'self, a signifier with no signified', or in the words of Baudrillard, a 'simulation'. While Baudrillard himself has 'closed down the social', abandoning theoretical critique of the culture industry, his insights into mass culture's seductive mechanisms of regulation are very relevant to such a critique.
