Celebrations in Cities— Re-savaged streets

Celebrations in Cities— Re-savaged streets

The party that has begun on the city street when the Higashi-kujo Madang steps out from the curb marks the process of recoding the street against its mundane “domesticated” construction (See also: Domestication). As much as the street in its modern mode represents a space where collective emotional and bodily control is assumed, the decontrol of the body and emotions constructs a break, a moment from which other rules and other behaviors become possible. While the festival in its annual enactment might not express a revolutionary plan, it cannot escape its revolutionary potential.

In part because The festival performs what it proposes, festivals work to decode the street-as-product even as they recreate the street-as-work. A festival is one occasion where we can see spaces of representation being torn down and reconstructed into representational spaces. Here is where historicity meets the present, and manufactures the works of art and life that can become the patrimoine for heritage management. But it is also a heritage beyond the grasp of any official narrative of state or ethnic communalism. Here the performance is the narrative, and those in authority would do well to learn to read this.

“In contrast to those, largely late-nineteenth-century theories, inspired by notions of the rationalization, commodification and modernization of culture, which exhibit a nostalgic Kulturpessimismus it is important to emphasize the tradition within popular culture of transgression, protest, the carnivalesque and liminal excesses (Easton et al., 1988). The popular tradition of carnivals, fairs and festivals provided symbolic inversions and transgressions of the official ‘civilized’ culture and favoured excitement, uncontrolled emotions and the direct and vulgar grotesque bodily pleasures of fattening food, intoxicating drink and sexual promiscuity (Bakhtin, 1968; Stallybrass and White, 1986). These were liminal spaces, in which the everyday world was turned upside down and in which the tabooed and fantastic were possible, in which impossible dreams could be expressed. (Featherstone 1991, 22)

Because of its physical and symbolic proximity to the government, a civic plaza is liable to become a site for revolutionary action, so too the festival, by its expressive openings and appropriation of public space, is liable to counter-practices that overflow its artistic representations, and articulate political and social demands. In part this is because the festival creates a link to the body which is oblique to the disciplinary bond that the state might prefer. Intimacy is first a connection to the body, we might remember here, and in many festivals this connection is made through an applied eroticism.

The festival re-savages the civic space by reaching deeper into the intimate space of the body than does the state. It is the spectacle of these savage bodies in public that pulls back the hidden curtain of a constructed civility. Festivals managed by the state to celebrate state occasions might present an appearance of the un-domesticated body (usually through the use of intoxicants), but the difference between this simulation and a festival is not difficult to perceive—assuming that the perceiver has a memory of other festivals.

This is precisely why festivals were themselves hegemonically domesticated—(mis)-appropriated by the state—at various times and places in Europe and Japan. The effect was to replace the memory of festivals with a memory of these state-sponsored events. But even then, the return of an imagination of festival space and practice renews this counter-expressive moment.

Mona Ozouf (1988) finds this appreciation for the festival form in Michelet’s accounts of festivals of the French Revolution:

‘"Not to have had any festivals”: that, for Michelet, was a truly impoverished childhood. “My childhood never blossomed in the open air, in the warm atmosphere of an amiable crowd, where the emotion of each individual is increased a hundredfold by the emotion felt by all.” And yet in Paris there was a splendid festival for each great imperial victory, when the wine flowed freely and flares lit up the sky. For the young Michelet, taken there by his father and mother, these were wonderful spectacles, but nonetheless depressing. Why? As a child Michelet did not yet know that a festival made to order inevitably has something sad about it; but the presentiment that he had of this is enough to explain the passionate attention that he was later to give to the festivals of the French Revolution. Indeed, what strikes one in his account of them—especially in comparison to the alternative accounts—is the absence of exclusion, derision, or anathema. We read of no secret festivals, no mock festivals, no condemned festivals. Even the enthusiasm aroused in him by the Festival of the Federation (in the case of almost all the other historians, this enthusiasm implies contempt for the festivals that followed) does not make Michelet indifferent to less successful festivals. One certainly senses this in the 1847 preface to his Histoire de la Révolution Française (Ozouf 1988, 15).’

The sadness of the made-to-order festival is the sadness of an occasion that fails its own logic. And the logic of the festival is one that counters the practices that “domesticate” the street. In a larger sense, this relates to the theory: A festival counters the dominant.... But here I want to look at the processes of domestication, re-savage-ation, and re-domestication. As this is practiced in many cities today, including Kyoto, heritage management is centered on the domestication of the past. And the emergence of counter-events, such as the Higashi-kujo Madang, marks the return of repressed and “savage” histories. However, these events are themselves a mode of heritage management—a form of living history and performing culture. And they would make their own claim, as Michelet (above) did: not to have an festivals—that is impoverishment.