Celebrations in Cities— Domestication
Domestication is a discursive practice that produces notions of the exotic and the grotesque, even as “taste” includes the notion of “disgust”, as Bourdieu reminds us. Today, the globalized market for lifestyle products uses simulated diversity and fashion to lend temporal movement to the consumption of domesticated objects, so that those objects that were purchased yesterday become disconnected to the constructed life-style imagination. Today we learn to be disgusted with whom we were (or, at least, what we purchased) only yesterday. The past is coded as a land of rejected choices and faded favorites.
- “The polymorphous pleasures of erotic ideology become the norm, rather than the transgression of the established order, and the fullest possibilities of sexual life take concrete form in the play of human bodies:
‘During the carnaval everything is permitted in terms of sex or drugs. The carnaval balls are, in certain places, a true orgy. Everything is permitted. You understand? There is no censorship, and the unrestrained exhibitionism and the desire to expose oneself are very common in the carnivalesque atmosphere. During this period, sex is present everywhere....Within a society full of ups and downs, the permissiveness of the carnaval is not interrupted by anything, and bodies, souls, and semen are left at their will, giving to everyone the freedom to do what they really desire. It is a good period for prostitution and the buyers of pleasure. Everything is sold, everything is bought, everything is given, everything is received with a lewd and inviting smile on the face. ... The streets become completely given over to the beat of samba and the frenzy of sweaty bodies having sex. (João)’
(Parker 1991, 147)”
Local festivals serve as counter-venues against the market-state’s desire to represent our interests, these events play at dangerous games in the face of domestication. Festivals not only de- and reconstruct cultural representations and personal identities, they also attempt to transgress the boundaries of domesticated space—by opening up a “savage” arena on the city street. Transgression of the limits imposed by market-state domestication is only one moment in the re-domestication of the space as a work authored by the participants of the festival. This re-domestication of the locale as again local is the starting point for emerging local tastes, desires and cultural practices. Those places (such as Venice) where “locality” remains a central feature of cultural production add local cultural value to everything they make. They achieve the primary goal of heritage management.
Domestication is never complete. For, as taste produces the grotesque object of its associated disgust, domestication creates its own savageness. In some later work I will explore the practical logic of domination and of festival play. But now I wish to return to the state in places like Kyoto, to see how domesticated national spaces resist re-appropriation by local neighborhoods, and where festivals can create a tactical opening in these spaces.
