Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere

Gerard Delanty, Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli, Gerard Delanty, Liana Giorgi, Monica Sassatelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415714969
• eBook ISBN: 9781136738579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere provides the first major social scientific study of these festivals in the wake of their explosion in popularity over the past decade. It explores the cultural significance of contemporary arts festivals from their location within the cultural public sphere, examining them as sites for contestation and democratic debate, and also identifying them as examples of a particular aesthetic cosmopolitanism.

The book approaches contemporary festivals as relatively autonomous social texts that need interpretation and contextualisation. This perspective, combined with a diversified set of theoretical approaches and research methods, and guided by a common thematic rationale, places the volume squarely within some of the most debated topics in current social sciences. Furthermore, the multifaceted nature of festivals allows for unusual but useful connections to be made across several fields of social inquiry.

This timely edited collection brings together contributions from key figures across the social sciences, and proves to be valuable reading for undergraduate students, postgraduates, and professionals working within the areas of contemporary social theory, cultural theory, and visual culture.

1 Urban festivals and the
cultural public sphere

Cosmopolitanism between ethics
and aesthetics

Monica Sassatelli

The relatively scarce social science material on contemporary festivals is on the whole dominated by a fundamental narrative of falling from grace with respect to pre-modern (temporally or conceptually) festivals. Implicitly or explicitly, it draws on master narratives of modernization as secularization and disenchantment, or, even more critically, commodification and one-dimensionality. When not exclusively focused on ‘impact evaluation’ and management issues, this literature has mainly posited a directly proportional relationship between the growing professionalization, commercialization and basically popular success of festivals and their becoming both less critical and less significant in terms of their role within wider social life. The exponential growth of festivals in recent decades and their enduring relationship with their location and, in particular, with urban settings lies behind a still timid, but growing, academic interest. However, this is still hardly attuned, if not in open contrast, to the substantial literature on traditional, often rural, festivals, developed especially by anthropology and folklore studies, which instead conceives of festivals as organic expressions of so-called traditional societies and platforms for the representation and reproduction of their cultural repertoires and, thus, identities.

This chapter aims at questioning this common normative stance, which sees contemporary festivals in terms of what they lack in comparison with their forebears or – taking the lead from the theory of the public sphere – as an example of the shift from a ‘culture debating’ to a ‘culture consuming’ public sphere. The conceptual tool that allows for such a critique is that of the more focused and articulated cultural public sphere that this volume concentrates on (Jones 2007; McGuigan 2005). The notion will be substantiated here by showing the limits of dominant approaches in research on festivals and the promise of alternative ones. Such a critical programme is important because, whilst master narratives of modernization have been discredited in their cruder versions, they lie quite comfortably at the basis of the literature on festivals because unacknowledged.

In order to unveil this, both the classical vision of the traditional festival and the mainstream vision of contemporary festivals will be considered. The analysis proceeds from a consideration of how the cultural significance of festivals, in their more far-reaching aspects as sites for the re-enactment and reproduction of ‘community’, has been thematized, from the classic studies by Durkheim on. As a corrective to the dismissive attitude to contemporary festivals somehow implicit in this approach, the critical and engaged position of Simmel, who is often overlooked, will be presented. Simmel's snapshots of world exhibitions and his concept of sociability in particular are relevant for the cultural public sphere and provide a possible counterweight to the critical and dismissive position of the Frankfurt school towards mass culture. The latter still informs rigid dichotomies at the basis of festival research, as well as of a similar stance in public sphere theory, especially in its original formulation by Habermas. We then consider how the study of contemporary urban festivals, too, is dominated by such dichotomies, showing especially how even those who do take festivals seriously, i.e. cultural policy researchers, have explained the increasing recent success of urban festivals in Europe as levers for economic regeneration and, by the same token, as possible agents of standardization. Most of the time this leads to bypassing urban festivals’ cultural significance, which, as we shall see, is rather better understood in terms of ‘festive sociability’ as the type of experience informing the cultural public sphere. Finally, the chapter goes beyond its critical objective, applying the notion of this emerging cultural public sphere to interpreting the significance of post-traditional urban festivals as expressions of contemporary society, with particular reference to the notion of cosmopolitanism, often theorized as an aspect of urban experience itself, and in its aesthetic declination a key ingredient of urban festivals. Here, too, the notion of the cultural public sphere allows the evaluative distinction between ethical and aesthetic cosmopolitanism, which is often just the premise for dismissing the latter, to be overcome. Although this chapter mainly advances a critical theoretical argument, examples will be drawn from major urban festivals, and in particular from the European Capital of Culture programme, a long-lasting research interest of mine (Sassatelli 2002, 2009), as well as insights on mixed arts urban festivals in Europe from ongoing research forming the basis for the publication of this volume (Sassatelli 2008; Giorgi and Segal 2009).

Festivals and modern experience

That contemporary sociology has dismissed the study of festivals is somewhat ironic, since virtually no study of them ever fails to cite Emile Durkheim's pioneering work on festivals as intensification of the collective being. Indeed, even today Durkheim's work remains the point of departure. In festivals Durkheim saw a form of ‘collective effervescence’, in which the solidarity of collective consciousness found both expression and consolidation. Developed in his study on The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1912 [1995]), this referred to equally ‘primitive’ societies held together by mechanical solidarity.¹ This is because festivals can be seen as a space and time separated from the profane dimension of daily life and actualizing the sacred. Durkheim's approach was then taken up and accorded long-lasting impact through the work of Marcel Mauss and others (see also Caillois 1958). ‘For Durkheim, as for Caillois, the festive process ... generates a collective excitement that frees society from its everyday ups and downs, engaging the social substance in its sacred substrate’ (Piette 1992: 40). To describe this social effervescence, Durkheim stressed the moments of exaltation, passion and loss of control (however planned) that, transcending daily life and its rules, established contact with the transcendent in general and with creative moments of rule-making. In this French school of sociology, festival theories derive from within the sociology of religion. Within the latter, and in Durkheimian fashion, the festival becomes an exclusively serious space–time, and little room is left for ambiguity and alternative voices apart from those of the order reinforced through sanctioned transgression. Based on such rigid dichotomies as that between sacred and profane, this type of approach is likely to interpret divergent forms as non-equally serious and therefore irrelevant. Even approaches based on the more recent, but already ‘classic’, study of rituals by Turner (1982), whilst they stress festivals as polyvocal performances rather than as unified signifiers of a consensual collective conscience, characterized by plural and contrasting rituals,² still seem to have serious, ‘traditional’ festivals in mind as being on the right side of the distinction.

It is perhaps because contemporary, post-traditional festivals have lost their close association with religion that they have escaped the sociologist's attention and have been dismissed as not equally revelatory of society's self-representation when compared with their traditional forebears. More interestingly, given that contemporary society is itself allegedly secularized, festivals are dismissed as remnants of earlier, more Gemeinshaft types of social relations and not really representative of modernity, now that they are emptied of that deep, organic meaning. The conceptualization of festivals – or lack of it – can thus be read in the light of this master narrative of modernization. However, an often overlooked approach that can be useful in teasing out this equally often overlooked connection is to be seen in the work of another founder of sociology, Georg Simmel. This is the case in particular in his short essay on the Berlin Exhibition of 1896, one of the many articles Simmel wrote intervening in the ‘public sphere’ of his time.³ It is admittedly little more than a cursory glance at festivals, although one that shows their relevance for some of Simmel's key themes such as sociability, the blasé attitude and the shifting relationship between objective and subjective culture in modernity. Simmel explicitly classifies world exhibitions as one of the clearest examples of social phenomena that continue to exist after the original, specific function for which they emerged fades as a result of changing social conditions. What is left is not empty of meaning; rather it is taken over by ‘sociability’, a more generic, but still sociologically fundamental, form of sociation, and still a crucial indicator of a society's character according to the specific forms it assumes.

Alongside the very process of sociation, there is also, as a by-product, the sociable meaning of society. The latter is always a meeting point for the most diverse formation of interest groups, and thus remains as the sole integrating force even when the original reasons for consociation have lost their effectiveness. The history of world exhibitions, which originated from annual fairs, is one of the clearest examples of this most fundamental type of human sociation.

(Simmel 1896 [1991]: 119)

Such sweeping comments may have become rare in contemporary research on festivals (or in general); often, however, the result is only to make the broad generalizations at their basis implicit. So although clear-cut dichotomies and unilinear master narratives of modernity have been amply criticized in social theory (for a review, see Delanty 2006), in research on festivals, as in other cases of cultural production and consumption, they tend to remain as unchallenged and unspoken. Contemporary society is seen as not needing, wanting or being able to reproduce the conditions for ‘organic’ festivals as codified social phenomena expressing and reinforcing a (well-defined) collective identity, as described by Durkheim. Simmel's account is refreshingly explicit, whilst at the same time allowing acknowledgement of the historical fact of the transformation of festivals, not necessarily in terms of inexorable loss of authenticity, but in terms of the sociability function they continue to perform, a particular sociability that could be, as we shall see, the key to festivals’ specific public sphere, or better to their cultural public sphere. Indeed, even if ‘amusement’ is the key to understanding these kaleidoscopic events, according to Simmel, this is not a way to dismiss them, but rather an insight into the specific, modern experience of sociability through its forms of (cultural) production and consumption. In what we would today call mega-events, the common denominator one can grasp amidst the excess of stimuli, the overall message, is that ‘one is here to amuse oneself’ (Simmel 1896 [1991]: 119). The fact that amusement should take this spectacularized and heterogeneous form is not frowned upon as a sign of the corruption of previously more serious, ‘finer’ cultural entertainments – an attitude implicitly or explicitly at the basis of much contemporary research on festivals – it is instead linked to the very foundation of modern society, to the predominant ‘blasé’ psychological condition and to the emergence of what already at the turn of the twentieth century were called ‘world cities’. In keeping with his subtle analysis of the modern experience epitomized in the metropolis, Simmel describes how ‘overstimulated nerves’ need this richness and variety of impressions, thus creating a sort of inverted proportion between ‘modern man's one-sided and monotonous role in the division of labour [and] consumption and enjoyment through the growing pressure of heterogeneous impressions’ (Simmel 1896 [1991]: 120). In a way taking up the Durkheimian topic of modernity as characterized by division of labour, specialization and differentiation, Simmel here observes a corollary in cultural life (a theme that he developed in a number of key essays; see especially Simmel 1903 [2000], 1918 [1997]), where consumption instead becomes characterized by ever-growing diversity as well as quantity of stimuli. At the same time, fragmentation is avoided through the superficial, but still meaningful, unity of being part of the same event, reaching an aesthetic and sociable, if certainly not cognitive or rational, coherence. This outward unity emerging from contrasts and variety also has a specific modern character in that the ambition of such big celebrations is to be representative of a whole city, and of the whole world within that; in these events ‘a city can represent itself as a copy and a sample of the manufacturing forces of world culture’ (Simmel 1896 [1991]: 121).

Although not really developed, and found in an occasional paper focused on world exhibitions, these remarks are useful because, instead of pointing out easy distinctions between ethics and aesthetics, authentic and inauthentic, they take the new meanings that festivals may acquire seriously by trying to tease out the relationship with wider societal trends. One may challenge Simmel's conclusion, but the task remains for any serious research on festivals. It is a task that is often made more difficult by a tendency to consider festivals as worlds in themselves. Indeed, a risk that both Durkheimian and Turnerian approaches run is that by conceiving festivals as containing whole worlds that have their own kind of parallel reality – the much quoted ‘time out of time’ of Falassi's definition (Falassi 1987) – they end up actually forgetting festivals’ equally relevant contextualization into the world ‘outside’. As a result,

many studies of festivals, in both theoretical and empirical terms, are marked by tightly defined boundaries of their immediate social context, with an emphasis upon closed spaces, fixed times, indigenous social actors, internal regimes and symbolic contexts, and bounded rituals. Fewer studies have sought to position festivals in a context that is fluid, open to different scopes of (transnational) society and cultural vectors, and that resonates with the realities of ongoing change.

(Picard and Robinson 2006: 4–5)

Other useful analytical tools to avoid these shortcomings come from another field of studies that can be brought to bear on that of festivals and may have much to say about cultural production, display and consumption in general. This concerns studies of cultural displays, which have been developed mainly with regard to museums and visual arts exhibitions, but which can be, and have been, also applied to festival settings. This is well exemplified by a trail-blazing volume edited for the Smithsonian institute on Exhibiting Cultures (Karp and Levine 1991). The book considers cultural displays in general as contested arenas for competing meanings, ‘settings in which different parties dispute both the control of exhibitions and assertions of identity made in and experienced through visual displays’ (Karp 1991: 279). Turning to festivals, here they are defined as inclusive, celebratory events (with little attention to their commercial side), with a view to ‘examining how festivals present yet another public forum in which cultural displays tend to produce disputes over meaning’ (Ibid.). Indeed, especially when contrasted with museums, festivals are characterized by their ‘living’ dimension. Unlike museums, festivals are seen as sites of more unrestrained sensory experience, whilst museums rely on distance (they convey an idea of preciousness, rarity and high cultural and financial value, all of which is related to authenticity). Festivals, too, are about authenticity, but in a different way; ‘[f]estivals communicate messages about authenticity while they also invoke pleasurable, sensual experiences that more totally involve the person’ (Ibid.: 282) – a totalizing participation that engages all senses and behaviours, and that some describe as ‘blowout’: ‘The stance that is stressed in festivals is active rather than passive, encouraging involvement rather than contemplation.’ (Ibid.)

At the same time, cultural display has a high potential for empowerment, and an underlying question remains as to who exactly is empowered in given cases (an observed positive effect of festivals is raising the status of despised groups of performers, often reaching beyond the event to the context the performers come from). Festivals have a more democratic and non-judgemental participatory and sensory aesthetics than do museums; as such the distinction between museums and festivals is seen as basically reproducing that between elite and popular culture. This observation is obviously more relevant with folk festivals in mind; however, its corollary might be worth considering also in the case of our contemporary, international ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere
• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Urban festivals and the cultural public sphere: Cosmopolitanism between ethics and aesthetics
• 2 Between tradition, vision and imagination: The public sphere of literature festivals
• 3 Art biennales and cities as platforms for global dialogue
• 4 Festivals and the geography of culture: African cinema in the ‘world space’ of its public
• 5 The cultural public sphere – a critical measure of public culture?
• 6 Festivals, local and global: Critical interventions and the cultural public sphere
• 7 International festivals in a small country: Rites of recognition and cosmopolitanism
• 8 Festivalization, cosmopolitanism and European culture: On the sociocultural significance of mega-events
• 9 Festival spaces, green sensibilities and youth culture
• 10 Cannes: A French international festival
• 11 ‘Space is the Place’: The global localities of the Sónar and WOMAD music festivals
• Conclusion: On the cultural significance of arts festivals
• Index