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26 The festival performs what it proposes
A festival performs its goals, these are internal to the event. This little concept fronts the performativity of festival practices. It also hints at the need to repeat the festival event: as much as the performance is the goal, its effect is established through a practice of iteration. Iteration provides the memory of the festival.
- “...Liminal propositions, or what Turner also called ‘frames,’ are ‘privileged spaces where people are allowed to think about how they think, about the terms in which they conduct their thinking, or to feel about how they feel about daily life.’ These frames place the spectator outside the system of instrumental propositions and objective measures used to conduct daily life. They recognize that other scrutinizing and evaluating procedures, really meta-languages, are required to talk about the system itself. At times the space of the city takes on this sense of liminality, it becomes a text to be read or a space to enter in order to retreat from and subsequently reflect on the social order and cultural significance of its architectural passages and transformations....”
(Boyer 1994, 211).One idea here is to make a clear distinction between festivals and spectacles, the latter which display features external to the event: status markers of powerful, famous, or historically noted individuals, or reminders of military and police strength.
Think of spectacle parade as holding up a wall of specially constructed mirrors that reflect into the eyes of onlookers the surrounding buildings and their occupants in a light complimentary to the parade’s organizers.
And then think of a festival parade as surrounding itself with mirrors that shut out the gaze of onlookers, and distort and reassemble the identities of those within the parade, rendering external distinctions indistinct, and opening up to laughter, reflection, and sudden insight. This moment is the goal of the festival.
There is a tendency in the social sciences (in part because of an economistic bent) to only ask what effect the festival has on quotidian life, to view the festival as an “episode” and everyday life and work as primary and external to such cultural episodes. In response to this tendency, there are a couple of features of festivals that need to be looked at. The first is the need for rehearsal, and the second is the availability of “doubleness.”
A festival does not simply erupt from the street (there are a few exceptions to this), it is organized and rehearsed throughout the year. And so it is active in the lives and relationships of its participants all year around. It is its own “lifestyle.” This means it adds another “lifestyle” onto that provided by the market/state. This “doubling” of lifestyle helps to decenter consumerist lifestyle production in the life projects of individuals (one aspect of the festival countering the bourgeois lifestyle [see: A festival counters the dominant...]). A festival becomes a double identity, which attaches to its performers and to its sites. Space is also doubled, and the street is made liable to short-term ad hoc appropriations by those who already know it as a festival space.
