Date: Tue, 12 Aug 1997 09:13:14 -0400
Subject: Re: festival


The remarks that have been made regarding my question of the spectator
and the festival have been helpful to me.  Evan's comments remind my of
Guy Debord's essay on the society of the spectacle, which addresses
many of the commercial aspects of "spectacle" and consumer culture. 
This position is certainly relevent to Bataille's discussion of
useful/useless economies in La Part Maudite, in which the festival
overturns the shoring-up of goods in an explosive moment of
consumption.


Both Leonardo and Edward have suggested important aspects of the
spectator of the festival in their posts in terms of the "trace"
(Leonardo) and "possibility" (Edward):


I find particularly illuminating the comment made by Leonardo:


>      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.


The suggestion that the spectator is <italic>there</italic> as
verification of the event recalls Sartre's witness in B+N, who is the
sole arbiter of the event of destruction: "Fragility has been impressed
upon the very being of this vase, and its destruction would be an
irreversible event which I could only verify" [Being and Nothingness,
40].  The event is already over even before it begins.  It becomes
memory and discourse -- a memorandum as opposed to a monument.


Upon re-reading the comment by Edward, I have some questions (borne out
of Heidegger if one really wants to know):


>This uncovering of blank space, of pure possibility, is the origin of

>the festival itself; it is a point in time when the self returns to

>its place(ment) as _center_, when the interpretation that is

>forthcoming because it is necessary encounters a greater language of

>gnosis in the midst of the greater festival that seems, momentarily,

>to have been abolished.


Although I agree that the festival (or disaster, or car crash, or
burning building) emerges from pure possibility, I am not clear about
the slip towards 'pure' identity (inseparable oneness, or the
disappearence of difference) that is suggested by the "return" of the
self to its center.  I would more readily accept that the building that
burns or the ship that wrecks is that which "returns" to its center
(I'm uncomfortable using the word "center" even in this context--too
architectonic and too intimate, I think that the word "possibility"
rightfully belongs in its place.)  


I wonder if the place of the spectator, that fragile envelope of
sentient tissue in a hat, is precisely where he or she stopped, dead in
their tracks, and turned their eye to one vibrating problem: the
event.