David M. Boje

November 2, 1999; Updated September 7, 2000

Essay prepared for Jerry Biberman and Mike Whitty (Eds.) The Spirit and Work Reader University of Scranton Press, to be published 2000.

Festivalism is an alternative to both the spectacles of state socialism and the late capitalism. Festivalism is rooted in Ahimsa, the practice of non-violence to all species. It provides an alternative to production and consumption practices rooted in violence to life. Festival is the self-management and self-design of our own leisure time and space, the realization of what we need to live and evolve as a species, with the most minimal harm to any other species. Festival is a way of doing business that respects people, communities, and the ecology. Festival balances stakeholder interests in the future generation (stakeholders include workers, managers, owners, investors, customers, local communities, future generations, and the ecosystem).

 

My spiritual teacher, Gurudev Chitrabhanu is a Jain Monk who worked along side Gandhi and spent twenty years walking about India with a message of non-violence. He now spends half his time in Mumbai and the other leading and inspiring the Jain communities in the United States. In November 1997 I toured India with my wife Grace Ann Rosile and Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanu. As I saw India, I was even more resolved than before, that world capitalism is a tragic coevolutionary-play led by the spectacle of inhumanity to all sentient beings. I saw the world’s future if we are not able to coevolve in more sensitive ways; it was written all over the streets of Mumbai, in people and animals sleeping in doorways, in the faces of starving children. Gurudev is a former Jain monk, now a spiritual teacher of non-violence. Gurudev says, "the decision is up to us to be violent or non-violent." He vows no harm to any sentient being.

Satish Kumar, also a Jain Monk, after walking halfway around the world promoting peace and disarmament, settled in England. Satish founded Schumacher College, named after E. F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful. Schumacher’s (1973) book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered challenges the concepts of unlimited growth, predatory competition, and violent forms of production and consumption. In bringing Jain teachings of non-violence to Western countries, both Satish and Gurudev have endured much criticism. Decades ago, it was considered highly inappropriate for Jain monks to use modern transportation systems and travel abroad. Both speak to the discontent people in the West experience with a crisis of identity and meaning, from spectacle life styles of over-consumption and violent production. Both spend hours each day in meditation to separate from the influences of what I call spectacle. Ahimsa teaching has had a profound impact on major figures.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., for example, applied Ahimsa non-violent teachings of social change. His nonviolent Civil Rights marches, open prayers, and other forms of protest captured the imagination of millions who did not realize that there were violent racial relations all around them. Nonviolent action brings about awareness, and it is then up to people to make their own choices. But, spectacle does not reform so easily. It is able to appropriate a reform movement and make it part of spectacle appeal. For example, Cohen and Solomon (1995) comment on how Martin Luther King’s life story has become part of the annual media spectacle of his ritualized annual holiday television consumption.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

Spectacle is selective in its storytelling. What the ritualized King spectacle leaves out in its annual tributes, is how in the last years of his life, Reverend King turned his attention to the growing gap between rich and poor. King observed that a majority of Americans below the poverty line, and these were mostly white folks. The year of his assassination, he was calling for radical changes in the distribution of wealth and proposing a poor man’s march on Washington D.C. Ahimsa and Gandhi influenced these three spiritual leaders.

Mahatma Gandhi was also deeply influenced by the Ahimsa philosophy. Ahimsa is part of the three millennia Jain philosophy of India (Yashovijayji, 1974). To Gandhi "not to hurt any living thing" is an important part of Ahimsa, but not the most important element. The important elements are to avoid hatred, lying, wishing ill, and to realize that millions of microorganisms live in and around us. Ahimsa, is not just non-violence it is unconditional love combined with self-control.

To hear suggestive stories with the ears, to see suggestive sights with the eyes, to taste stimulating food with the tongue, to touch exciting things with the hands, and then at the same time expect to control the only remaining organ is like putting one’s hands in the fire, and expecting to escape being burnt.

Gandhi’s choice was to be celibate to sustain his self-control. Gandhi sought alternatives to silk production, a process that kills the silk worms during the manufacturing process. I attended the Gandhi Institute and observed one of his inventions, a cotton spinning machine that any person with a bit of training and patience, can operate. He distributed the spinning machines to create an alternative to the then British controlled manufacture of cotton and the nation’s dependency on silk garments. My friend Susan Segall brought back this factory in a box machine so that I might also meditate while I spin threads. It takes a lot of patience and higher levels of skill than I now possess. It does allow me to mediate on non-violent options in my own production and consumptive practice. I am eager to find non-violent patterns of living in a world saturated with violence. In what follows I want to apply Ahimsa philosophy to a different understanding of what I study as "spectacle and festival."

Spectacle is above all a legitimating narrative for social engineering and social control masking the violent (non-Ahimsa) acts of production and consumption. By spectacle I mean Debord’s (1967) the Society of the Spectacle, the often violent and oppressive social control that masquerades as a celebration of betterment by recycling pseudo-reforms, false-desires, and selective sightings of progressive evolution, never devolution. By violent I mean the willful and careless and often unnecessary disruption or extinction of the life of another, including the life of non-human species. "The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life" (#42). "In particular the ways in which technical development becomes a substitute for natural development (#24, 36). "Last year, Americans, who make up only five percent of the world's population, used nearly a third of its resources and produced almost half of its hazardous waste" (Affluenza, 1997). The Situationaliste answer to the ideological social control of spectacle, is festival, by which we self-manage and self-produce our own production and consumption practices. In this way we redefine our needs and desires.

Festival is the "very keynote of the life" I see beyond a critique of spectacle … Play is the ultimate principle of this festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraint" (Situationist Internationale, 1966: 14). Many cities and nations still conduct annual festivals, a tradition that goes back centuries in many parts of the world. Yet, the festivals have taken on thick outer spectacle shells, becoming gaudy consumption rituals, without much referentiality to what makes a festival festive in the first place. Most organizing attempts of festival find they are mutating due to their organizing situations into bizarre affairs. The Pittsburgh Irish Festival, for example, features a Bingo Tent, Dog Tents, and a Gaelic Mass. Is this a strange or suitable organization? Perhaps it is a collage of spectacles more than a festival. Or, perhaps it is the bizarre juxtaposition that keeps it festive. Festival (merged with carnival) was once about narratives and theatrics that reversed or otherwise parodied the portrait of power. On Fool’s Day, the peasants became magistrates, clergy, and nobles, while all these elites took on lesser positions. In the Tomato Festival, people tossed tomatoes at everyone and on the next day life went back to its normal spectacle routines.

The pre-capitalism festival ways of life were appropriated and transformed by spectacle capitalism. Festival has been replaced by spectacles of theatrical consumption (the mall and the stores in the mall) as well as by spectacular organizations (producers of spectacles and themselves spectacles). The peasant is everywhere, composing as much as two fifths of the world’s population, many working at slave wages to provide the spectacle to the advantaged. The peasants sit on the margins of spectacle, ready to reclaim cyclical time and local spaces, and perhaps replace spectacle with festival.

The festival has something to do with one’s conscious awareness, and with a focusing of that awareness. Festival is defined as expressing inner happiness in a context of social activity. Spectacle is defined as material displays of happiness in a context of over-consumption. When festival is more about materialism than play, self-reflection, and social commentary, it becomes disempowered, just another spectacle. When the message of festival is in the externalities the inner spirituality of the event is suspect.

Consider the similarities. Both spectacle and festival combine theatrics, storytelling, crafts, and other arts into a community of performance. Both festival and spectacle incorporate food, story, theatrics, music, art, and other entertainment. I want to open up the question of what is festival for more rigorous exploration. They are oftentimes found together, occupying the same time and place. The same work organization has both festive and spectacle garniture. Two people can be in the same organization, doing the same job, for the same boss. One sees festive situations, another sees spectacles of misery, self-indulgence, and addictions to over-production and conspicuous, even eco-destructive consumption. One will experience a sense of joy; the other will find only frustration. Manyevents with the label "festival" do not appear to be festivals at all to all of the participants. I want to show the basis of festive and spectacle processes in modern organizations.

Shakespearean Festivals, Renaissance Festivals, Craft Festivals, Harvest Festivals (dates, Chile, wine, apple, etc.), Film Festivals, and Music Festivals are all the rage. They define the community, but so do spectacles. Disneyland, modern organization spectacle defines Los Angels County, though it is locate really in Orange County. Renaissance Festivals, oftentimes, reenact 15^th and 16^th Century Europe as a celebration of cyclical time and a local reverence for place, even though they are reenacted outside of Europe, in places like Kansas and Idaho. Yet most of festival is not separate from spectacle. It seems every state in the Union and most countries have their festivals and their spectacles, without much differentiation between, what is one and the other.

What is a Festival Organization? - Be it simple or complex, behind the festival stalls, booths, theater, exhibitions, and merchandising, there is the festival organization, and perhaps a spectacular one masquerading as festive. Some festival organizations construct fictive fantasies of the good olds days of King Arthur Knights of the Round Table or Elizabethan splendor in a Renaissance Festival. Spectators are invited to come dressed as princesses, wenches, noblemen, and barbarians, as they enjoy the jousting and feasting. Others go to great length to make the historical period become "living history." They recreate the architecture, dress, and customs of a particular epoch. Yet, in many cases, they are no more authentic than the Pirates of the Caribbean or the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland are. The sense of "authenticity" of a festival, be it a Renaissance Faire, Shakespearean Theater, or Bluegrass Music Festival varies from one situation to the next. The name "festival" in the title of the event is not a way to tell its pedigree.

There is much contemporary spectacle mixed into the festival. For example, The Colorado Renaissance Festival advertises that for a price you and fifty guests can be part of a Royal Wedding. For just $2,500 you can have the fairy tale wedding managed by expert wedding coordinators, complete with the melodious murmur of the King’s bagpiper, escorting you to the newly refurbished Canterbury Chapel where you will be a player in an Elizabethan Wedding Ceremony. A King and Queen wedding feast follow this wedding. Costuming and wet bar are extra. Is there something in Jain philosophy that can help us sort this out?

In Jain teachings there is a story about a prince who is about to marry. Just before the wedding feast, he observes the preparations. He sees a courtyard full of cages of all the various animals about to be slaughtered for his wedding feast. The moment is transformative. He decides to become a monk, and seeing his example, his bride elects to become a nun. They each lived lives of renunciation. To me, the meaning of the story is that the couple developed conscious awareness of the difference between a festival and a spectacle. They developed conscious awareness of a spectacle of material celebration and saw that this path would not lead them to attain higher spiritual values. Instead, they chose to renounce material possession and material violence in favor of non-violence and simplicity.

Ahimsa is a modification and reform of spectacle, a way to live spectacles that are non-violent. Festival can be antispectacle; it can lie beyond spectacle, in ways that I envision being non-violent. Festival is not an escape from spectacle. The practical concern of Ahimsa is with worker and community health and safety; alternatives to child labor and prison labor; living wages; enlightened work conditions; freedom of worker-association; ecological sustainability; globally equitable production and consumption practices; future generations. Festival is doing something proactive about inequality. 225 billionaires now have more annual income than half the planet’s 6.1 billion population. The festival is an attempt to make leisure more important than work.

We do not see the spectacles we grow up in, we do not see who makes our products, and we do not even glimpse how violent the production process has become. All we see are the glitzy lights at the mall, the sexy displays of TV ads, and the corporate claims to excellence on all web-sites.

On the Relations of Violence to Spectacle - The Society of the Spectacle desensitizes its participants to violence, in what Whitmer (1997) calls the "Violence Mythos." The myth here is a self-sealed logic of violence legitimation. Violence is everywhere, in the streets, in schools, in the workplace, and in the home. Our children scream if we deny them a Nintendo kill-game of "realistic" violence. Beneath the spectacle illusion of progress through technology and gadget accumulation-equals-happiness lies the brutality and cruelty to animals, humans, and mother earth to sustain our life styles. I seek to enter the festive world, to walk and breath real life "situations" as an active yet non-violent participant, not a passive spectator in everyday life space. I was socialized to accept and tolerate violence and to consume violence willingly as leisure.

It is often assumed that the most technologically advanced economies are the least violent. The United States is the most violent of all industrialized nations on the planet with the least safe places to live and work. According to a 1994 Justice Department report nearly one million violent crimes occur in the workplace each year. There were more than 6,200 deaths on the job due to traumatic injuries in the United States in 1997. The death toll from work-related disease is nearly 10 times higher (Weissman, 1999). There were more than 6 million workplace-related injuries and illnesses recorded in 1997, with more than 1.8 million of them causing time lost from the job. The United States has the highest rates of childhood homicide, suicide, and firearms-related death among all of the industrialized countries. In 1995 alone, 35,957 Americans were killed with firearms, in homicides, suicides and accidents (National Center for Health Statistics, 1997). Every day in 1994, 16 children aged 19 and under, were killed with guns (National Center for Health Statistics, 1994). Firearms kill more people between the ages of 15 and 24 than all natural causes combined (National Center for Health Statistics, 1994).

Empirical research is consistent in its findings. According to the American Psychological Association's 1993 report, "Violence and Youth: Psychology's Response," there are not just one but four long term effects of viewing violence:

1. Increased aggressiveness and anti-social behavior.

2. Increased fear of being or becoming a victim.

3. Increased desensitization to violence and victims of violence.

4. Increased appetite for more and more violence in entertainment and real life.

The long-term impact of children growing up watching thousands of hours of violence, is that they role model what they see in the spectacle of violence. The Center for Media and Public Affairs reports that the total number of violent scenes in entertainment programming increased by 74% in three years--from 1,002 in 1992 to 1,417 in 1994 and 1,738 in 1995--reaching an average of nearly 10 incidents of violence per channel per hour during the most recent season, even after excluding commercials and all non-fiction programming.

Violence is also increasing among spectators. After the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup, 70,000 mad fans took their violence to the streets, amid clouds of tear gas. Some 200 people were injured including two with critical head injuries, After the Detroit Tigers won the 1984 World Series, U.S. fans in Detroit and Chicago took their violence to the street, again destroying property and one another. Seventy-three University of Wisconsin students were crushed against a fence after a 13-10 win over Big Ten rival Michigan.

Violence is not only increasing in frequency in TV and movies, it is also increasing as a way of advertising. Violence in commercials also rose 30% since 1992. The 948 violent scenes tabulated during commercials in 1995 nearly equaled the 1002 violent scenes recorded during all entertainment programming in 1992. Ads have a few moments to show something interesting enough to attract the viewer. The easy way out is to show something violent.

Land Ethic and Non-Violence There is a close parallel between Leopold’s "Land Ethic" and Ahimsa. Both see ignorant interference in the evolution of other species as a form of violence. Leopold’s "biotic pyramid" defines ecology as an interdependent web of life, which includes the land.

Larger Carnivores

Omnivores-bears, raccoons, man

Herbivorous mammals .

Insect-eating birds and rodents .

Plant-eating insects .

Plants .

Soil .

Note: Final diagram will have feedback loops illustrated between levels.

Leopold contended that undisciplined human technology (e.g. guns, strip mining tractors, and laws allowing for mass extermination of wolves and other species resulted into violence to the biotic web of life. Leopold’s (1949) Land Ethic can be stated very simply: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." The contemporary result of Land Ethics is the Bioethics movement (Koch, 1992):

Through technology, we are rapidly changing the earth. These changes have accelerated as man moved from a hunter/food gatherer to a member of an agricultural society and finally into the industrial age. Many of the present technological changes are irreversible, damaging to the land and clashing with our increasing scientific knowledge of how biotic communities function. Individuals are faced with a moral environmental responsibility.

Ahimsa, is not about blame, it is about finding alternatives to violence, and letting people find their own way. Ahimsa, for me recognizes that you just do not wake up one morning and turn off the television, turn vegetarian and the next morning awaken in a non-violent world. Rather, it is a matter of cultivating a taste for nonviolence in a spectacle that encourages just the opposite. It is the path of nonviolent resistance, not blame and judgement.

The Web of Life In sum, the Ahimsa worldview encompasses the nonviolence philosophy of Gandhi, Chitrabhanu, Kumar, King Jr., and Leopold. It applies to issues such as gun violence, domestic violence, TV violence, animal violence and other aspects of a world nurtured in the spectacle of production and consumption.

People do resist spectacle - there is hope for spectacle transformation. There are eco-teams forming in Europe and North America to look at ways to cut back on our over-consumption patterns. Consumer groups are forming that resist shopping addictions, credit card addition, workaholism, and television/Nintendo/Web cyber dependency. Turning Point for example runs full-page ads to raise questions about the impact of technology and transnational corporate strategies on the environment and the ability of nations to sustain growing populations with a quality of life for their people (Murphy, 1999: 1).

Table two contrasts spectacle and more Ahimsa-Festival assumptions. In particular there are differences in how progress, happiness, and spiritual value are defined.

Table Two is focused on simplicity. Simplicity is a movement to cut out unneeded consumption and production in the hopes that others on the planet will have the means to live. Jain teachings apply to simplicity. The monk does not store possessions, has no roof over his head, some do not wear clothes, or own anything at all. He seeks simplicity in his daily life and equality with his fellow human beings. Merchants are encouraged not to stock products of animal sacrifice and consumers are galvanized not to consume such products.

Let no one run away with the idea that this type of merchant exists only in my imagination. Fortunately for the world, it does exist in the West as well as in the East. It is true, such merchants may be counted on one’s fingers’ ends, but the type ceases to be imaginary, as soon as even one living specimen can be found to answer to it (Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance, p. 49).

To the Jain businessperson, we are in the initial stages of transforming the old Spectacle assumptions into the new Ahimsa assumptions of what makes for an enlightened business organization. I think it takes daily meditation and critical awareness of the violence of the production and consumption spectacles, as well as the opportunities to make Ahimsa choices. The New Testament says, "to be as harmless as doves and wise as serpents in our actions." Harman (1994: 48) argues "we are moving from a culture dominated by materialistic values to one that recognizes the role of deep intuitive wisdom in guiding our collective future." The Ahimsa business paradigm would transform spectacles of production and consumption:

1. Engage in business practices that are non-violent to other species.
2. Limit economic growth to what is ecologically sustainable.
3. Develop ecological awareness through reduce, recycle, and reuse practices.
4. Cultivate personal Self-development through servant leadership, introspection time, and community service.

Festival means cutting back on an over-consumptive and conspicuous production life style. Materiality does not bring happiness. It also means overcoming societal addictions to violent entertainment. Festival is taking a critical look at commodity and production needs that are inherently artificial prescriptions for the happy person in the happy society. Part of Ahimsa philosophy is to treat all living beings as equal to ones own self. This means not interrupting or degrading the evolution of plants, animals, and humans. While not everyone can make such a commitment or make it all at once, the challenge is to encourage more people to behave with less violence. This would necessitate a critical look at animal rights, the living planet, and ways in which we are tampering with all species in the Biotech Century. It means looking at the coevolution of humans, their technology, animals, and planets.

I would like to look at Ahimsa as a non-violent way of doing business, an alternative philosophy to late modern capitalism and state socialism. Both it seems to me enact manic consumption habits. Spiritualism and Marxism are opposed, as are Capitalism and Postmodernism. Marxism seeks to reform and transcend the violence of capitalism and capitalism sees itself as a competitor and successor to (state) Marxism. The festival is, for me, a middle ground, at the center of capitalism, Marxism, spiritualism, and postmodernism. It is my attempt to open the flow of non-violent practices of production and consumption that can co-exist with other capitalisms, post-Marxists, spiritualities, and postmodernisms. The critical postmodern and Marxist approaches allow a critique of capitalist spectacle and Pollyanna or capitalist spiritualism in order to find where festival is sustainable. A critique of techno-determinism, linear progress, and evolutionism in capitalism is necessary. As is a critique of the technocratic and teleology of Marxism. I seek the "life capitalism" of festival. Without the critique the festival quickly reverts to spectacle.

In affluent pockets of economies, we the affluent can design a story for our lives in which we design ourselves as the main character using a variety of scattered and disconnected elements and fragments. We can design our body, our career, our environment, and live a life of simulation, playing virtual and theatric games, and never touch real at all. What is "authentic" in a world in which every aspect of spectacle is by designer choice.

Spectacle is ubiquitous to both market capitalism and state socialism. Beyond the extreme, an often-violent (to humans and ecology) spectacle of "free market" capitalism and "state-bureaucratic" communism there is a third path I call festivalism. Festivalism is both post-capitalism and post-communism because there is a resituation of both these violent extremes in favor of non-violence.

Is it possible to transition capitalism and state socialism to a higher stage of development? Whereas free capitalism adheres to free market to distribute resources the mechanism of state socialism is one of central planning to equitably distribute resources. Each views the other as an exploitative apparatus. The "affluent monster" in both systems continues to outstrip the earth resource base and widens the gap between rich and poor (Marcuse, 1969: 7). I view Ahimsa and festival as a different moral aesthetic and transcendent value system that will change work and consumption practices.

Festivalism makes five assumptions. First, festival assumes we can create companies that earn a capitalist profit and maintain non-violent ecological and social practices. Second, festival assumes local stakeholder groups of workers, citizens, and managers can balance the burgeoning power of global corporate monopolies by expressing their non-violent preferences through their market behavior. Third, festival assumes the myopic corporate focus on short-term accumulation could be abandoned when there is an understanding of the living whole. Fourth, when festival citizens recognize the difference between living to work versus working to live, then they will be able to tame their shopaholic and addictive consumption appetites, thereby letting others live. Fifth, non-violent work, fun, and leisure are possible. In sum, Festival is defined as the pragmatics of long-term sustainability in a non-violent culture, in balance with the whole planet.

The spectacle employee - It takes many employees to produce spectacles for others to consume. The employees are separated one from the other, and do not always see how their respective tasks make up the spectacles being produced for consumption. Each task may appear totally and completely non-violent. The spectacle employee is sometimes, maybe often, the distracted workaholic, the sacrificing breadwinner, never seeing how little leisure is left, or their children growing up without them.

The spectacle consumer - We are taught to be spectators, to look, but not to see, to be spectator but not to be active participant when we consume. Firat and Dholakia (1998), in marketing, are also writing about "theaters consumption" that are becoming more interactive, blurring the line between producer and consumer, by allowing consumers to self-design their experience. They argue the separation between production and consumptive activities are changing, but corporate control remains. The Jain Monk leaves spectacle altogether, in some cases forsaking even clothing, along with all worldly possessions, in short detaching from the world of spectacle altogether. Jain lay people, in particular business people, do not forsake all spectacles. They only seek involvement with the least violent forms of spectacle, and the most minimal forms of accumulation.

I am learning that each of my possessions, my car, my books, my computer, my house, my furniture, my tools, etc. is an attachment, a weight on my life. With each possession comes the attachment of caring for it. At work, each project, each conference, each dissertation committee, each class, each student, each email is also an attachment. I live in a whole web of material and social attachments. I am learning slowly to choose my attachments, to decide how I spend my time and energy, caring for relationships or caring for material possessions.

"The celebrity" says Debord (#60) is "the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role." Corporations such as Disney, Nike, IBM, Toyota, Intel, and Microsoft also become celebrities. In the Jain philosophy, each person must find their own uniqueness instead of emulating their fantasy about being the copy of another. Spectacles provide a mirage, a phantasm, and an illusion that allows us to safely avoid looking beneath the fabricated images, product stars, and corporate icons.

There are also those who see a future of spectacles that will be as nightmarish as Metropolis, Bladerunner, and the many sour predictions of the Biotech Century (Rifkin, 1998). To read spectacles of production and consumption requires a theory of spectacle. We are taught to not read and to ignore the "technical apparatus of contemporary" spectacles "the means and methods power employs, outside of direct force, which subject individuals to societal manipulation, while obscuring the nature and effects of capitalism’s power and deprivations" (Best & Kellner, 1997: 84).

Spectacle, says Debord, is an opium, that allows us to sleep walk, as if drugged, stumbling blindfolded through a devolving landscape of ecological and human horror; while cocooned in artificiality and illusion; mind-numbed by cyber media into passive stupefied spectators. This is why it is not easy for people socialized in spectacles and consumption images of the good life through consumption to step outside of its mechanisms of persuasion, and see its impact on nature, social systems, and the manipulation of our own desires. Our life is just too "saturated with spectacles" and we are too pacified in their "permanent opium war" (Debord, 1967: #44).

In the postmodern condition, spectacle and festival intermingle and we are left to live in their nexus. For example, on July 23, 1964, the first Meadow Brook Music Festival was held, featuring the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The Meadow Brook Music Festival staged its first Ballet in 1968. The first laser show was Starship Encounters in 1978. The festival features choral company, ballet, and symphony music. In 1980 the types of music expanded to include Jazz. In 1982 there were Fourth of July fire works. 1984 saw performances of the Marine Band and blue Grass groups. In 1990, the festival included the nights of laser shows to attract a more family audience. In 1992, Dolly Parton and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir launched the Music Festival. 1993 saw a more diverse or fragmented schedule including "Bugs Bunny on Broadway," James Brown, Dwight Yoakum, 10,000 Maniacs, Peter Paul and Mary.

Some of the postmodern festivals have an activist agenda. For example, the Amnesty International Film Festival takes on a more activist role than most other film festivals. They actively deconstruct the rhetoric and propaganda of governments violating human rights by putting their reports side by side with the oppressor claims that there are no such violations. Another type of activism is represented in the International CRÈCHE Festival. They present an interesting purpose:

Organizations in many nations are addressing the issue of the loss of biological diversity on this planet. Our organization attempts to speak to the loss of cultural diversity. We are attempting, in one small way, to help the folk artists of the world gain recognition of their arts and crafts and help them find a global market for their work at a fair price. If the folk artist cannot survive neither can the folk arts.

This particular festival advocates that the artist receives a fair price for their labor. Other festivals and craft associations are not so equalitarian.

Guy Debord (1967) sought to abolish (modern) spectacle, to smash the spectacle in avant-garde revelation, not to transform or reform it. Yet modern spectacle is everywhere. A group of students (SI, 1966) had the vision of festive play, as a dream beyond the spectacle. Yet spectacle is everywhere. Debord called himself a Situationist (#191) because he wanted to replace the spectacle of official illusion with a deep awareness of the situation of violence, and how spectacle inverts reality. If we are to dissociate festival from spectacle, we must begin with awareness.

In the postmodern, any line between festival and spectacle gets quite blurred. The 1998's Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a cyber-festival, filled with "frivolities and finito," including festive chat rooms with comedy stars. The cybertech world affords us new art, new virtual forms of interaction, and new ways to live out our fantasies.