Celebrations in Cities
Public spheres/public spaces
This chapter is a short step back, and up into the field of cultural management as this is controlled by city/state governments. The self-conscious management of history in many cities is centered upon the following: the city’s position as a national cultural site; the privileging of a single narrative thread, an historical tale that reduces the contests that occurred in spaces throughout history to a domesticated historical representation of space; and, the selling of this story to middle-class visitors (tourists). Each of these features has consequences for City-run festivals, and for those events that are staged as counter-events to open up urban spaces to multiple appropriations.
Having taken a look at more widespread neighborhood festival practices in Kyoto, and then at the organization and performance of the Higashi-kujo Madang, we are ready to begin to reflect upon the field of festival organization/performance in public places. In order to outline the tactical concerns and maneuvers that such counter events make, we must first understand the conditions that are presented by and in their cities.
It is also important to critique the interventions of government and other expert systems into local cultural production, a critique that can be based, in part, on the expressed goals of this intervention, and in part on a reappraisal of the potentials for and the limitations of “managing” cultural production.
- “...The festival is a game machine. It manufactures its field, its equipment and its rules. It trains its players, empowers its officials. It sets its time to start, and programs the timing machine for its own breakdown. The game happens in this space, in the street, at this time. The players know what to do. They cannot say what they know, but the doing gets done. No one is watching but the game machine. Next year it must be different, and it must be the same. The game machine recodes its own future.”
Deleuzions
For example, a festival (qua festival) cannot fully manage its own production. It is, at the time it occurs, a field of expression that is necessarily open to unexpected results. The presence of festivals shows an ability to “let go” of the street. It is a letting go, a letting loose, of expression. The circumstances that promote this ability are complex. The process of letting go requires that the space of letting go is bounded and transformed from its mundane coding into something completely different. There are various skills that need to be acquired, and the content that results is locally determined and highly singular. For example: Imagine the festival as a building. The festival is the act of construction. The resulting edifice is the neighborhood as a festival community.
