22 A festival counters the dominant...

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bourgeois lifestyle logic

“Objective distance from necessity and from those trapped within it combines with a conscious distance which doubles freedom by exhibiting it. As the objective distance from necessity grows, life-style increasingly becomes the product of what Weber calls a 'stylization of life', a systematic commitment which orients and organizes the most diverse practices—the choice of a vintage or a cheese or the decoration of a holiday home in the country. This affirmation of power over a dominated necessity always implies a claim to a legitimate superiority over those who, because they cannot assert the same contempt for contingencies in gratuitous luxury and conspicuous consumption, remain dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies....”
(Bourdieu 1984, 55-56).

This is not simply a wishful bit of nominalism, but one of those aspects of festivals that need further examination. Implied herein is an assumption that should there be a dominant lifestyle logic available at the place of the festival, and should this be describable in relation to some description of a local “bourgeoisie,” then a festival in this locale will operate counter to this. Such a statement is constructed as much on the description of (globally available) bourgeois lifestyle practices as it on notions of festival practices. The bourgeois life-style is at its core a spectacular display of the “affirmation of power over a dominated necessity,” as Bourdieu call this.

To live in a world that seems comfortable, where economic and physical threats are remote from the quotidian flow of time: this is a life project goal at the center of the bourgeois lifestyle. A history of the pursuit of this goal would include global institutions for policing and intelligence, agencies for insurance and transportation safety, for health care and, most recently, for environmental management.

All of these institutions provide several rationales for their cost, but they are each a party to the maintenance of a threshold of care-free comfort that lies at the core of the bourgeois life project. This becomes most noticeable in the travel industry, where the transportation, feeding, lodging and entertainment of millions of tourists must be accomplished without any gaps in the “comfort bubble” that is meant to envelope the traveler from doorstep to doorstep.

Of course, the irony here is that this “bubble” also separates the tourist from the places they have travelled to. Their journey is an expense of time and money, much of which is spent avoiding their destinations. And when they stay at home, these tourists still expect that the level of comfort and safety that they have acquired in their neighborhoods¹will do nothing if not improve over time. The bubble is created for/by them on The Street. The festival breaks this bubble.

A festival displays the domination of necessity, the hunger for desire, a need for laughter. And so a “bourgeois festival” is oxymoronic (elsewhere, as in Disneyland’s new “Festival of Fools,” the “oxy-” is optional). The most obvious elements in this claim are the direct connections of the festival to the body and to a type of sexuality (or sensuality) that is not determined by institutionalized “tastes.” Also, in festival there is the ad hoc quality of physical resources: which may be gathered from refuse or modified from everyday objects. The inclusion of women and of (other) marginal groups also works against the exclusivity of the bourgeois public sphere. The nature of festival performance, and the skilling it requires and promotes, is also a factor in this theory.

While this concept entails that events that do not counter the bourgeois logic of the dominant lifestyle are not festivals, it does not entail that all events that counter the bourgeois logic of the dominant lifestyle are festivals. Internal military actions against citizens, for example, also run against the liberal, democratic governmentality.

¹This expectation chooses to forget that, in the current world market, much of the comfort that nations with high-percentage middle-class populations enjoy is paid for by the lack of comfort of the populations of other nations and other groups within the nation.