Towards Festivalism

Can we be both critical and spiritual without being schizophrenic? Is there a reason why we might want to be both critical and spiritual? In this paper, we will suggest two reasons why the critical-management-studies (CMS) perspective might be incompatible with the management-spirituality-and-religion (MSR) perspective. The authors’ CMS perspective is a critical postmodernism, one which admits to an unalterable preference for, and celebration of, ahimsa (non-violence). Our CMS critique of MSR is based first on MSR’s potentially violent aspects of univocality, and second on MSR’s inherent susceptibility to spectacularization (Debord, 1967). We offer the concept of festivalism as an area of congruence of CMS critique and MSR belief.

We recognize that neither CMS nor MSR are monolithic concepts. In fact, the wide variations in positions within each category are what allow and perhaps demand frameworks such as the Mitroff and Denton (1999, p. 89) grid employed to organize this symposium. The position of the current authors leans towards the incompatibility of CMS and MSR, (cell 2) yet finds room within the critiques offered for a relatively small area of congruence. We locate ourselves personally within that narrow terrain of congruence, which we call festivalism. We will map this terrain by employing 5 main concepts: critical postmodernism, ahimsa, spectacle, festival, and carnival.

Our purpose is to celebrate Ahimsa (non-violence) in ways that transcend spectacle, resist spectacle with carnival, and invoke festivalism.

There are critical postmodern versions that embrace spirituality, and those that are completely opposed. Critical may seem contradictory to postmodern (and spirituality), in that many versions of postmodern do not assume an objective truth which is hidden behind the mask of spectacle images. ‘Critical postmodern’ is defined as moving beyond the supposedly "radical postmodern" positions of Lyotard (incredulity to grand narrative) and Baudrillard (all is simulacra) by recognizing the interplay of grand narratives of modernity with the spectacularity of virtuality and hyper-competitiveness that is the basis of global predatory late modern and postmodern capitalism. In the new forms of transnational-corporate-empire, the postindustrial supply and distribution chains are addicted to sweatshops, and wedded to postmodern identity-formation through the age of virtuality and advertising, such that we no long discern real from phantasm. Critical postmodern differs from social construction theory (or interpretivism) and what many think of as postmodern. Critical postmodern incorporates the critical theory assessment of material conditions in the embedding political economy. Critical postmodernism prefers Debord to Baudrillard (who rejects real in favor of simulation and implosion) and to Lyotard (who rejects all grand narratives). It combines Marx's focus on the material conditions with Debord's (1967) Society of the Spectacle, as our basis of critical postmodern theory. There is a dark side to postmodern virtuality that is missed by non-critical approaches. This dark side includes oppressive and often violent social control that masquerades as a celebration of progress. Debord’s (1967) work amends Marx’s critical theory of accumulation of production into an accumulation of spectacles in consumer society that produce and reap profit from illusions: pseudo-reforms, false-desires, and selective sightings of progressive evolution (Boje, 2001b). Using critical postmodern concepts and Ahimsa-spiritual ethics, it is possible to de-code and deconstruct layers of spectacle that heroize global virtual corporations and free markets, while distancing transnational corporations, such as Enron, from responsibility over their far-flung global energy-supply chains, where particularly exploitive conditions seem to flourish.

The present-day Peace Movement is a growing non-violent spiritual option to American Empire. In the largest anti-war demonstration since the Vietnam War era, on October 26, 2002 more than a quarter of a million people took to the streets in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and little communities everywhere, like ours, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We engage in the carnival, we wave our signs and wear our puppet masks to resist current ways of managing and organizing. At the same time, the peace movement, in which we participate, is opposed to the evangelical capitalism, to the holy wars, of the administration.

We see a transition from modern global predatory spectacle of empire, passing through carnival, to what we call festivalism. It is not a total transition, rather a trilectic (as opposed to dialectic), finding a bit of space for a spiritual alternative. We would like to explore how Debord’s (1967) dream of the demise of spectacle could take place. We see a delicate line of connection between Ahimsa and the Situationists by looking at the festive (SI, 1966) options presented in an unsigned document during the time of the student revolutions of the late 1960s in France, Japan, U.S., and elsewhere. It is this festive sense of work and play that we also see in Ahimsa. Festival is the “very keynote of the life” seen beyond a critique of spectacle, and “… 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” (SI, 1966: 14). We will define the three concepts, then develop the contribution of the presentation.

Defining Festival - Festivalism is defined here as the pragmatics of long-term sustainability in a non-violent and spiritual option to predatory capitalism, more in balance with the whole planet. Festivalism is a discovery of a life-oriented capitalism, a healthy spirituality. We search for the festival that has not been wiped from history by spectacle. Spectacle feeds our brains with illusion; we plug into the matrix of the phantasm and confuse it with life. Festivalism is a search for the rhythm of Earth, a celebration of less male, more feminine ways of knowing, and less violent ways of being a citizen of the world.

Defining Carnival - Carnival is much tamer today than in medieval times, when the term “Carnivalesque” could be applied to theatric ways of questioning hegemonic elements in society. Carnivalesque is a way to parody and satirize authority figures, societal norms of behavior, and rigid social structure. Although we separate the aesthetic forms of spectacle, festival and carnivalesque, they are conjoined within social events. Also, it is important to note that some parody and satire forms of carnival are hostile and violent.

Defining spectacle - By spectacle we mean Guy Debord’s (1967) classic work, the Society of the Spectacle. For Debord, spectacle is 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. Here, spectacle is a legitimating narrative for social engineering and social control masking capitalism’s violent acts of production, distribution and consumption. Spectacles are our own day-to-day religious-like practices of capitalist goods-accumulation, worship that Marx called fetish. The spectacle would convince us that production and consumption is godly while nature is godless. Spectacle is uniquely commercial and corporately controlled.

The table below lists some elements of festival, spectacle, and carnival. Carnival and festival share four elements: uninhibited freedom, suspension of hierarchical rank, primordial gaiety, and street theatre. Spectacle, carnival and festival share the six elements of feasting, masquerading, merriment, mirth, utopian vision, processing.

Ahimsa - Ahimsa is part of the three millennia Jain philosophy of India (Yashovijayji, 1974). Ahimsa means non-violence; it is not the same revolution of the critical postmodern, Situationaliste Internationale (SI) movement of Debord and followers in France. The Jain monk vows “to refrain from all injury to sentient beings” (Yashovijayji, 1974: 216). This non-violence (ahimsa) is extended to beliefs. Thus, if we attempt to persuade you that your beliefs are wrong, we may be doing violence to your beliefs. The SI resists spectacle in acts of parody, satire, or aesthetic explorations between spectacle spaces, such as La Dérive. Such parody and satire typically violate the concept of non-violence in thoughts, words, and ideas. In Dérive, the Situationists seek an aesthetics that persists in spaces not yet co-opted by spectacle, a bit of architecture that defies modernity, a common place that allows community, or a bit of vegetation among the asphalt. There is in the critical postmodern a sensitivity to options to the violent drums of modernity. In Ahimsa, it translates to “behaving towards all living beings with proper restraint and control” to “avoid the terrible (sin of) injury to living beings (p. 216).”

Next, we explore the use of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, as a way to oppose evangelical (war) capitalism. To do so, we have to meet Brecht’s challenge that in situations of violence (e.g. Iraq war machine), standing on the street doing carnivalesque street theatre, interfaith retreats, and prayer vigils did not stop the war. Brecht wrote a series of plays, pointing out the naïveté of spiritual movements that confront fascism and/or advanced monopoly capitalism. Brecht’s epic theatre uses devices such as projecting statistics, newsreel footage and photographs on the backstage simultaneously with the character action. These devices are supposed to introduce what Brecht calls the “A-effect” (Alienation-effect) to estrange spectators from passively empathizing with the characters and falling into the gaze of entertainment. Instead of the characters being the center of the gaze, the spectator attention is upon the epic of the political economy. In epic theatre, the scenes are separate elements, not integrated into a coherent dramatic story plot. The stage becomes the main character, for the stage is the system of late capitalism stripped of its spectacle façade of idealism. Brecht uses multi-level set in Saint Joan of the Stockyard, with most of the Stock Exchange scenes on the upper level, plant workers and strikers on the lower level to depict the class division of the society.

For example, Brecht (1969) introduced a Salvation Army girl, Joan Dark, in Saint Joan of the Stockyards, to show the absurdity of wanting to solve economic (labor process) problems of advanced monopoly capitalism by mere charity and spiritual idealism.

Brecht used the meat market in Chicago as the backdrop to his play. There are parallels to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; in both works, a worker starves to death in the stockyards of Chicago. Saint Joan Dark works for the Salvation Army (the Black Wool Hats), chooses to starve with the workers, catches pneumonia and dies. Brecht walked to streets of Berlin in 1928, studying the Salvation Army, visiting their soup kitchens, and “talking to the souls they save” (Grab’s Introduction, in Brecht, 1969: 10). Throughout the play, Saint Joan is easily manipulated by the capitalist class, particularly by the ruthless tycoon, Pierpont Mauler. Brecht patterns the scenes in the play after Marx (1867, Das Kapital, vol. 1, Part V The Production of Absolute and of Relative Surplus-Value, Chapter 16: 508-518). “Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus value” (Marx, 1867: 509). Mauler buys, sells, locks out workers, and deceives even his fellow meat packer factory owners to produce surplus value, and like Enron and so many contemporary examples, fraudulently manipulates the stock market. Saint Joan tries to alleviate misery of the poor by supplying soup and blankets to meet their physical needs. She tries to “stay above the battle” of the warring fronts (as Grab, citing Snyder observes, p. 10), but she is easily manipulated by Mauler to ser e the owners’ cause.

Saint Joan realizes it, “Like an answer to their prayers I came to the oppressors! Oh, goodness without results! Unnoticed attitude! I have altered nothing” (Brecht, 1969: 120).

Throughout the play, Saint Joan tries to convince Mauler to help the workers in his packing factories. She asks, “Mauler, why are you locking the workers out?” (p. 42). After a few exchanges, Joan, again asks Mauler to help the workers.

Mauler: “Spread the word that I warmly commend your activity and wish there were more like you. But you mustn’t take this thing about the poor that way. They’re wicked people. Human beings doin’t touch me: they’re not guiltless, and they’re butchers too. But let’s drop all that.

Saint Joan: “Mr. Mauler, they’re saying in the stockyards that their misery is your fault.”

Mauler: “On oxen I have pity, man is wicked Mankind’s not ripe for what you have in mind…” (p. 44).

Mauler tells his broker, Sullivan Slift to take Joan to the stockyards and show her “how mean and beastly” the workers are and “how it’s all their fault” (p. 44).

A man named Luckerniddle fell into a meat boiler with the meat, and was sliced up the bacon-maker machine. A foreman’s apprentice appropriates his coat cap in the cloakroom. Slift tells the apprentice:

Slift: Keep the things on. And come to Canteen Seven today at noon. You’ll get a free lunch and a dollar there if you tell Luckerniddle’s wife where you got that cap and coat.

The scene is the Canteen and Mrs. Luckerniddle, who has been looking for four days for her husband, confronts the Apprentice about the cap and jacket. Slift, in front of Joan, makes Mrs. Luckerniddle this offer:

Slift: I’ll tell you something, Mrs. Luckerniddle, he’s gone away and it’s very embarrassing for the factory to have you sit around here talking foolishness. So we’ll make you an offer which could not be required of us by law. If you drop your inquiries about your husband, you may eat lunch in our canteen every day for three weeks, free.

They argue, and Joan says “She will never come” and claim the free lunches in return for silence. Joan sees her return to the canteen, and even tells her husband fell into the boiler and was sliced up with the bacon. Mrs. Luckerniddle snatches the food out of Joan’s hands and starts to eat greedily.

Slift: For three whole weeks she will come and feed, without looking up, like a beast Now do you see, Joan, that their wickedness has no limits?

In scene V, Joan introduces the poor to the livestock exchange. Mauler has told her that workers are locked out do to market forces. She confronts Mauler about his buying and selling on the exchange to make meat more expensive. Mauler makes Joan think he is going to buy meat to can at exorbitantly high prices in order to put the poor workers back to work, but it is just one more manipulative scheme (buy all the cattle and thereby ruin competitors, who must buy it back from him at monopoly prices); Joan does not see through the charade. The factories stay closed, and Joan is excommunicated (fired) from the Salvation Army for meddling in the stock market. Joan joins the workers, to share in their suffering, until the factories reopen. The union wants the workers to go on strike, and Joan is entrusted to deliver a letter about the strike. But, Saint Joan fears that violence will be used.

After driving his competitors out of business, Mauler reopens his factories, and the workers call off their strike. By his time Joan-the-worker is sick and homeless. In the final scene XI, Joan dies, just as she realizes violence may be needed to change Mauler’s system of exploitation.

Saint Joan: And as for the ones that tell them they may be raised in spirit and still be stuck in the mud, they too should be tossed out heads down. It’s not like that! Only force helps where force rules, and only men help where mean are.

(All sing the first verse of the chorale, to keep Joan’s speeches from being heard)

During the play loudspeakers announce the latest manipulations to the stock market, and the eight million unemployed and the three thousand banks that fail in U.S.A. As the chorale continues, Joan’s last dying gestures are observed by the spectators. Twice she pushes a plate of soup back, and the third time grabs it, holds it up and pours the contents out onto the stage. Mauler hands her a flag to waive, but it drops from her hands.

Snyder: Joan Dark, 25 years old, dead of pneumonia in the stockyards, in the service of God, a fighter and a sacrifice.

Mauler: Ah, what’s pure and has no flaw- uncorrupted, helpful, whole – moves us common folk to awe! Rouses in our breast a newer better soul!

The play turned into farce. Snyder gives the sign, and the flags are gently lowered onto Joan’s body, until she is covered by them. Joan is canonized as the saint of the stockyards.

In Saint Joan of the Stockyard, using the A-effects of epic theatre, Brecht tried to awaken passive spectators from their spiritual ideological idealism by disrupting their identification with characters and alerting spectators to the artificiality of theatre’s fourth wall. Characters, for example, step forward and address the audience directly, content of scenes are announced before they are played, and spectators are asked to resolve the problems in their own life space.[1]

Brecht highlights the naïveté of St Joan confronting “predatory capitalism” in the stockyards and nowadays our own peace movement spiritual naiveté in confronting “evangelical capitalism” of Iraq war -- with its inherent violence with only “spiritual” methods. Critics assert that Brecht’s play is more Leninist, than Marxist.”Hanns Eisler, in fact, in a 1961 interview point out that Saint Joan of the Stockyards is really a Leninist play’ because of its stress on the necessity for force (or violence) as the only agent capable of bringing about social change” (Grab, 1969: 15).

However, great spiritual leaders (especially Gandhi, Martin Luther King, etc) have never advocated passive acceptance of violent and exploitive capitalist behaviors. But as King said, we must free the slave within ourselves first. Otherwise, any systems we create will reflect our own inner enslavements and flaws. This principle of beginning with the inner person before or while transforming outer social systems, is also compatible with the postmodern notion of cooptation of postmodern systems by modernism. As long as we as intellectual and spiritual beings are still modern ourselves, we will continue to make our world in our own image. But spectacle still rules.

Spectacle is the dominant type of transaction in our society today. Activism, for example in the form of the anti-war movement, uses spectacle just as religion and capitalism uses spectacle. People have a basic appreciation for, and desire to create, spectacle. Religion is full of spectacle. Our fellow demonstrators for peace say that their weekly (and 2-3 times weekly) events are like church for them, are as much for them (the “insiders”) as for others (the “outsiders” or onlookers).

Festival and carnival are eroded, debased, and so deformed by consumption servitude, they cease to be. Spectacle commercializes events that were formerly Festival or Carnival. Spectacle appropriates and morphs them into commodity attractions. Spectacle is increasingly (or continuously) predatory, illusory, and part of modernism’s alliance between state and corporate capitalism. Spectacle has turned festival into (the movie) Pleasantville, something with out color, passion, or risk. Finding festivalism means deconstructing, and letting go of the grip of spectacle mindsets; it means rejecting instrumentalism in favor of in-the-moment lived experience.

It is difficult to reconcile the obvious spectacle aspects of most religions with an understanding of spirituality and religion as inherently personal and internal phenomena. Critical postmoderns may view religious spectacles as manipulative and controlling, and in some cases, as commercialized commodification of formerly sacred spiritual traditions. In the medieval Catholic church, “indulgences” were sold. Today, avid non-native seekers after spiritual experiences—as well as corporate training directors-- fuel the selling of the Native American Indian traditions like drumming and sweat lodges. Barrera (2002) documents outright falsifications of indigenous spiritual traditions for commercial purposes.

The above examples highlight the value of the critical postmodern perspective in understanding how spectacle is a powerful and dangerous dynamic. While spectacle may be employed initially to enhance human experience and build community, it is frequently subverted to the point of obscuring these objectives and all festive aspects of society. Through awareness of the differences between festival and spectacle, and through carnivalesque resistance, festivalism can emerge like green sprouts through concrete, altering and transforming its environment. In conclusion, we suggest that festivalism and ahimsa incorporate both CMS and MSR perspectives. To us, this demonstrates that critique and belief are not incompatible, and further, may even be necessary to each other.

Alvesson, Mats and Stanley Deetz (1996). “Critical theory and postmodernism approaches to organizational studies.” In S.R. Clegg, C. Hardy and W.R. Nord (Eds). Pp. 191-217. Handbook of Organiztion Studies. London: Sage.

Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1997). The Postmodern Turn. NY/London: The Guilford Press.

Boje, David M. (2001a). Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research London: Sage. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0761965874/qid=996760152/sr=2-3/104-5347482-9721540

Boje, D. M. (2001b) ‘Carnivalesque Resistance to Global Spectacle: A Critical Postmodern Theory of Public Administration.’ Administrative Theory & Praxis. Vol. 23 (3): 431-458.

Brecht, Bertolt (1969/1932). Saint Joan of the Stockyards: A Drama by Bertolt Brecht. Translated by Frank Jones, with introduction by Frederic Grab. Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press. Play translated from the German, 1932.

Chitrabhanu, Gurudev Shree (1977). The Philosophy of Soul and Matter. Clare Rosenfield (ed.). NY: Jain Meditation International Center.

Chitrabhanu, Gurudev Shree (1980). Twelver Facets of Reality: The Jain Path to Freedom. Clare Rosenfield (ed.). NY: Dodd, Mead & Company.

Korten, David C. (1996). When Corporations Rule the World. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2^nd edition.

Marx, Karl (1867). Das Kaptal: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Hamberg: Verlag von Otto Meissner; NY: L. W. Schmidt. English version (1967), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Trans. S. Moore and E. Averling. F. Engels (ed.).Volume 1, The Process of Capitalist Production. NY: International Publishers. First published 1867, English 1967. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx

[1] See Michael Richardson, "Making Use of Brecht," The Book Press, February 1999 [Review of Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (Verso, 1998).

Spectacle	Festival	Carnival
Work Work or play time Imposed patterns of behavior Dead time Religions of consumption Pseudo desires Pseudo needs Loss of Self Colonized spaces Spectator Functionary Survival of the Fittest/Richest	Play Work and play Freely constructed behavior Live time Self Transparent desires Transparent needs Self-Management Free spaces Participant/Co-designer Self-Managed Coevolution and Co-survival	Parody Release Satire at status quo Desire time Power Embodied desires Empowerment Needs Mis-management Absurd spaces Spec-actor Class-managed Renegotiate the payouts of rich to poor