Deviance & Resistance in Events

Dr Matt Frew

Lecture Format Events & the Deviant: unhappy bedfellows?

Understanding Resistance Events as Resistance? Resistance is Futile or Fun?

Events have, and have always had, a connection with and concern over the ‘deviant’ (Clark and Critcher, 1985)

‘Moral panics’ - a process by which the mass media exagerrates the deviant or criminal behaviour of young people, often for its own gain’ (Miles, 2000: 70) Threat to the society, if left unchecked anarchy will

reign The fear of the masses and work of the chattering

middle classes

‘Consumers of more traditional community-based pubs and ale-houses in the inner city, which hark back to an earlier industrial era, today are described rather unflatteringly as the spaces for the ‘underclass’ or the ‘rabble’, often stereotypically as petty criminals, welfare scroungers and hardened drinkers by the police, local state, the media and other more middle-class and respectable consumers.’ (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003: 188)

Events & the Deviant: unhappy bedfellows?

The deviant or resistant other highlights problems with the modern quest for the ‘normal’ and a fixed identity

If the modern ‘problem of identity’ was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open. (Bauman,

1996: 18)

The fear of Folk Devils has not gone away rather, since the 1960s, its intensified

Events and entertainment industries are key sites of moralising gaze and fear

So from the Summer Soltice, Harvest Festival to Rave - those deviant or resistant others constantly appear

A number of ways we can think of resistance

Events & the Deviant: unhappy bedfellows?

Events - often youth sites of resistance or opposition to capitalism

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS): Class-based, dissatisfied, alienated youth express or

advertise resistance - their dissatisfaction with the world – symbolically

Challenge the mainstream, parent culture, via their style - stylistic resistance

Bricolage: Sign with a stable meaning is appropriated and placed

‘in a symbolic ensemble which serves to erase or subvert their original meaning’ (Hebdige, 1999:104)

A form of ‘semiotic guerilla warfare’ (Eco, 1972, cited in Hebdige, 1999: 105) really magical

The work of Guy Debord (Society of the Spectacle) far more critical

Understanding Resistance

Situationalist International - live in world of the ‘spectacle’

Visually dominated and saturated society with cycles of pubic extravaganzas

Time commodified, segmented and packaged - we expect, value and demand the controlled spectacle festivals; illusions of community

Mediatized drama, a stage-managed life that masks and distracts us from the alienation of capitalism - sugar coated hegemony

But the ‘image society’ is Janus-faced: Stimulate life via spectacularization becomes

rationalized, suffocation of humanity the antithesis of spontanaity and creative expression

‘the spectacle is a space of consumer exploitation juxtaposed with the space of collective resistance’

(Gotham, 2005: 227)

Understanding Resistance

Strategy of ‘detournement’: Taking elements from existing works and

rearranging them into new configurations – make them look absurd

Jolt people out of their everyday, taken-for-granted way of doing and thinking - demystify authority, institutions, corporations, products and positions by subverting their meanings, symbols, language and behaviour

PUNK ATTITUDE - known as adbusting, culture-jamming, and subvertising (see MySpace)

Understanding Resistance

Events: points of protest? The Case of Burning Man:

All ‘walk on the wild side’ participatory experience that is a ‘feast for all the senses’ (Kozinets, 2002:21)

Challenge to commercial power: Event of subversive resistance, challenge to

corporate capitalism via self-sustaining practice; no Vending rule ‘’mask, hide or disguise the eye-sore logos that get in our faces constantly and without consent when we are in the ‘normal world’ (Kozinets citing Fang, 2002: 24)

An event that is the antithesis of Disneyland or Woodstock - about caring, sharing, gift giving communal experience

A cathartic ritual or release and rebellion

Events as Resistance?

The New Orleans Experience: Mardi Gras - from open engagement, family to

fornication Jazz and Heritage Festival - anti-global via local

pride, culture and people but tourist spectacle Essence Festival - African-American celebration,

empowerment and self-esteem but all with a Coca Cola smile

Victims of success; packaged event for global market; BUT lost local fuels resistance, maintains need for local autonomy and combats apathy

So normal, mainstream life and the deviant ‘other’ actually go some way to making new movements, rebellions, resistance and markets?

Events as Resistance?

Resistance is Futile or Fun?

Paradox of ‘spectacle’ -

Lost localization and erosion tradition replaced by globalized nothing, a standardized, rationalized experience - spectacles charged delivering gratification, revelry and attraction actually come to reflect ‘the impoverishment of the qualitative and sensuous aspects of human existence’ (Gotham, 2005: 234)

Unmasks Hegemony of Spectacle? - Las Vegasization, Disneyfication, and McDonaldization

Just as the brand has been ‘burned into our brains..and lifted a little closer to the sun by their sponsorship of much-loved cultural events’ to produce a ‘loglo’ (Klein, 2000: 349) this loglo is vulnerable in a society of the spectacle

Spectacle produces resistance - anarchist movements/events Slow Food, Slow City and G8 anti-capitalism or Burning Man

But the spectacle fights back

Detournement - corporations have assimilated into the mainstream

The political protest: -

‘anti-capitalist activists are constructed as a new class of folk devil through the media portrayal of protests and the associated political and expert comment…[this] ability to trivialise and dismiss activists through a rejection of their behaviour as simply destructive and dangerous…facilitates a silencing of these alternative voices in terms of both wider debates on the pros and cons of citizens rights to protest within neo-liberal capitalist democracy and wider contested issues of

social and economic justice’ (Dawson, et al, 2004: 1)

Lost in a ‘Wag the Dog’ world of media image and discourse?

Resistance is Futile or Fun?

Resistance is Futile or Fun?

How free of market? - Mardi Gras, Essence Festival, Jazz and Heritage Festival are ‘three spectacles’ that are ‘rationally produced to enhance consumption-based activities and are under constant pressure to make themselves ever more spectacular’ (Gotham, 2005: 234)

Burning Man - communal for cash ($11ticket); gift of self-status; constructing a cathartic ‘psychic location’?

Resistance: Experiencing the ‘wild side’ Escalation of extraordinary - ‘chance to go a see what has

become trite’ (De bord, 1994: 168) or stage, plan and manage points of resistance?

Events - spaces, times and behaviours out with the ‘norm’ - we recreate, release and reanimate the self and our identity

Jujutsu Journeys - experiential contest of meaning

References• Cohen, S. (20020 Folk Devils and

Moral Panics: the creation of the Mods and Rockers, London, Routledge.

• Clarke, J. and Critcher, C. (1985) The Devil makes work : leisure in capitalist Britain, Macmillan Press.

• Chatterton, P. and Hollands, R. (2003) Urban Nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power, London, Routledge.

• Miles, S. (2000) Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World, Buckingham, Open University

• Readhead, S. (1997) Subculture to Clubculture: and introduction to popular culturla studies, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing

• Lefebvre, H. (1984) Everyday Life in the Modern World, New York: Harper Row

• Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, Oxford, Basil Blackwell

• De Bord, G. (1994) The Society of the Spectacle, New York, Zone Books.

• Klein, N. (2000) No Logo, London, Flamingo

• Gotham, K. F. (2005) Theorizing Urban Spectacles: festivals, tourism and the transformation of urban space’, in City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, Vol. 9, No. 2

• Kozinets, R.V. (2002) ‘Can Consumers Escape the Market?: emancipatory illuminations from Burning Man’, In Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 29