Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 15:54:23 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: festival



  Festivities,
     Take time through the making of time, marking time with traces of
bygone significance. 
          At each moment when there's a ritual pattern to be followed a
trace of the past returns, a continuity in historical time is opened
through the substitutes and proxies that take their place in the
meaningful exchange of roles.
               What disturbs the simple intelligibility of a festive
enactment is this close link between an identity and its proxy, the
incessant flow of replacement that lacerates each symbolic unit by cutting
it and offering it in a sacrifice, as an abduction or expenditure. The
"thing" of the event is no longer a discreet identity, a unique thing, but
a function of an ancient identity that includes this passage into the
oblivion of the unique, that is understood only by this possibility of a
substitute that is jeopardized.
 
Although the festival and the structure of sacrifice are certainly
different events traces of the latter always remain, vestiges of practices
that prestate, that offer coinage towards something that's more than just
an economic exchange.. It is these traces also that underly every form of
ritualism that remains even when it has been diverted for this or that
other more hidden purpose. Everywhere that roles exist, everywhere that
titles are conferred the sacrificial knife, still wet with blood, is also
raised..
      The festive is a trace not a monument. The spectator participates
fully as the required distance that makes the proceedings appear
mysterious and secretive. They are the "memory" that something has
happened, that an encounter with the symbolic becomes real.
            Something more is offered through the contagion of the festive
mood at every moment that doesn't allow itself to be captured and
marketed. It passes only by a subliminal recognition that a still living
past erupts into the present. 
                   Present without present..
                       ..void of substitutions    offered..              

in the blank,
Leonardo R.