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FESTIVALS IN THE NETWORK SOCIETY
GREG RICHARDS
Pre-publication version of chapter to be published in Festivals in Focus, a tribute to
Dragan Klaic, edited by Christopher Maughan and Franco Bianchini.
Albert Einstein once remarked that ‘The only reason for time is so that everything
doesn’t happen at once.’ In the contemporary network society, however, this system
seems to have ceased working. We are constantly bombarded by events. The
regular rhythms of events in traditional societies and the ordered series of events in
industrial society seem to have given way to a chaotic cacophony of happenings,
which we might characterise as ‘hypereventfulness’ or ‘hyperfestivity’.
As Richards and Palmer (2010) noted:
The slogan ‘festival city’ or ‘city of festivals’ has become a popular choice as
part of a city’s brand image. Edmonton refers to itself as ‘Canada’s Festivals
City’, setting itself in competition with Montreal and Quebec City that define
themselves in similar terms. Milwaukee and Sacramento are two American
cities, along with some 30 others, where being ‘cities of festivals’ has become
a prime element of their destination marketing throughout the year.
Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, similarly tries to gain national and
international standing by communicating itself as a festival centre. The world
status of Edinburgh is claimed on the official website of the Edinburgh
Festivals: ‘With the stunning Hogmanay celebrations heralding a brand new
year and the start of Homecoming Scotland 2009, the World's Leading
Festival City is gearing up for spring, and more of its exciting Festivals’
The explosion of eventfulness and festivity evident in contemporary society was also
one of the reasons that Dragan Klaic founded the European Festivals Research
Project in 2004. The project was launched ‘believing that festivals have become
emblematic for the issues, problems and contradictions of the current cultural
practices, marked by globalization, European integration, institutional fatigue,
dominance of cultural industry and shrinking public subsidies.’ As these challenges
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have only become sharper during the past decade, festivals and events have
emerged as an essential part of the contemporary cultural landscape.
This brief review considers why events have become so important in modern society
and how events are shaped by and in turn influence the contemporary network
society.
A brief history of pseudo-events
In the 1960s the American historian Daniel Boorstin was the first to comment on the
gathering avalanche of events that seems to have overtaken modern society.
Boorstin illustrated the development of what he called ´pseudo-events´ through the
rise of the media and tourism. He took the example of a hotel that wishes to increase
its business. The hotel hires a public relations consultant, whose advice is that the
hotel creates an event – a celebration of the hotel’s thirtieth anniversary. ‘Once the
celebration has been held, the celebration itself becomes evidence that the hotel
really is a distinguished institution. The occasion actually gives the hotel the prestige
to which it is pretending’ (Boorstin, 1962, xx).
According to Boorstin, such pseudo-events are distinguished from ‘real’ events by:
• A lack of sponteaneity – they are purposefully planned
• An orientation towards the media – the purpose of a pseudo event is to be reported
• Their ambiguous relation to the underlying reality of the situation. Whether it is ‘real’
or not is less important than its newsworthiness and ability to gain favourable
attention.
• Their inclination to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The result of the proliferation of pseudo-events, according to Boorstin was ‘the
programming of our experiences’, with ‘no peaks and valleys, no surprises.’
Somewhat ironically, Boorstin himself became something of an event organiser
when he was appointed as Librarian of Congress in 1975, as he ‘installed picnic
tables and benches out front, established a center to encourage reading and
arranged midday concerts and multimedia events for all’ (McFadden, 2004).
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Today Boorstin’s predictions about the rise of the media and events seems to have
become reality. Places everywhere are celebrating sport, culture and heritage, to
the extent that ‘eventfulness’ has become an essential part of the cultural DNA of
cities and regions worldwide (Richards and Palmer, 2010). Contemporary societies
increasingly seem to be flooded with events, designed to meet a range of different
needs, varying from economic development to stimulating creativity to supporting
social cohesion. The result is a feeling of ‘festivalisation’ or ‘hyperfestivity’ in certain
cities, to the extent that Einstein´s vision of time as a separator of events seems to
have collapsed.
Although individual events may have blurred into one another, their growth has
defined a recognisable ’events industry’ , with increasing economic and political
power. The OECD (2008) recently took an interest in ‘global events’ and the
European Commission (2007) undertook a study of the economic benefits of cultural
and sporting events. Before the 2010 World Cup, it was estimated that a Dutch win
in this one event alone would be worth €700 million to the national economy (and
such was the confidence in a Dutch victory that nobody bothered to calculate what
second place might be worth).
Events in the network society
Is the rise of eventfulness all hype and hyperfestivity, or is there a real need for
events, beyond the seemingly ubiquitous appeals to economic benefit? Arguably, in
modern society social relations have become increasingly ‘disembedded’ through the
creation of abstract global systems (Giddens, 1984). Castells (1996) paints a picture
of global society operating at two levels: the global ‘space of flows’ and the local
‘space of places’. Through the rise of information technology we have increasingly
become ‘networked individuals’, connected to people on the other side of the globe
through the space of flows in cyberspace, but increasingly isolated from those
around us in the space of places.
Castell’s vision of the network society appears bleak. But the idea of increasingly
isolated networked lives does not completely match reality. The Internet, rather than
replacing face to face contact or ‘physical co-presence’ (Urry, 2002) has in fact
generated more demand for social contact. Part of the evidence for this lies in the
growth of events and festivals. People deprived of more traditional means of contact
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with their fellow human beings, such as the chat over the garden fence, the animated
conversation of the local bar or the family discussions over a relaxed meal, seem to
seek out new ones. One of the potential explanations for this has been provided by
the work of Randall Collins (2004) on ‘Interaction Ritual Chains’ (IRC), or a ‘theory of
individuals’ motivation based on where they are located at any moment in time in the
aggregate of (Interaction Ritual) chains that makes up their market of possible social
relationships’ (xiv).
Collins argues that Interaction Ritual Chains can help to explain individual
motivation, since they cause people to seek the ‘Emotional Energy’ (EE) that is
generated by participation in IRCs. Emotional Energy seeking is
‘the master motive across all institutional arenas; and thus it is the IRs that
generate differing levels of EE in economic life that set the motivation to work
at a level of intensity ranging from enthusiastically to slackly; to engage in
entrepreneurship or shy away from it; to join a wave of investment or to pull
one’s money and one’s emotional attention away from financial markets’ (xv).
Wittel’s (2001) analysis of ‘network sociality’ provides similar examples of social
rituals which generate ‘fleeting and transient, yet iterative social relations’ which
create ephemeral but intense encounters.
The point of such encounters, according to Collins, is that they require face-to-face
contact, physical co-presence. In other words, there have to be events to generate
the emotional energy that makes social rituals function. In a dis-embedded network
society, one could argue, events become a means of re-embedding networked
individuals in the space of places. Events are a framing of time that isolates and
draws attention to a gathering of people in a specific place at a specific time
(Richards, 2013).
The need for co-presence also means that we literally have to make time for each
other. We need to coordinate our presence at events and the performers also need
to be there at the appointed time in the appointed place. The growing number of calls
on our time in contemporary society means that the time we give to each other
through events becomes increasingly valuable, and so events themselves also
become more valuable containers of time as a result. The value we place on this
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time also means that the choices we make between different events become more
and more important. Today, the fact of paying attention to somebody on Facebook
has a particular value (conferring status measured by our number of Facebook
friends, for example), but actually turning up in person at an event organised by one
of our friends has a much greater value, because it implies an investment of
increasingly valuable physical presence.
Relational goods
The problems of choosing from the increasing stream of events in the network
society are highlighted by the difficulties posed for Canadian architectural critic
Sanford Kwinter in October 1997. Like many of his colleagues he could have been in
the Basque Country, attending the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao. However, as
is often the case nowadays, he had another invitation to consider: the fiftieth
anniversary re-enactment of the first supersonic flight by Chuck Yeager in the
Mojave Desert. He decided on the desert: ‘We came because we believe in shock
waves, we believe them to be part of the music of modernity, not something to watch
a ribbon be cut from, but something to feel with our diaphragms, eardrums, genitals
and the soles of our feet. We wanted to be in the desert badlands that day with
nothing but the sun, the baked dirt, the pneumatic tremors, and the unbroken
horizon’ (Kwinter, 2010, 89).
The Bilbao Guggenheim had become an event, even before the ribbon was cut. As
Gehry’s titanium titanic rose out of the ground it became a place of pilgrimage for
architects, art critics and leisure scholars. But for Kwinter, the building was an empty
shell. He referred to it as an example of ‘pseudo innovation’ in architecture, echoing
Boorstin’s complaint about the (post)modern shallowness of events. The real event
was in the Mojave Desert, because: ‘Out there somewhere we knew was the zero-
degree and the future, and that Bilbao was the past.’ (Pratt, 2008). There was,
however, a certain irony in Kwinter’s decision. Arguably, by following Boorstin’s
prescription to attend a ‘real’ event dedicated to a real American hero he was
actually looking back to events of the past. The Mojave Desert celebrations also had
many of the trappings of a Boorstin-style pseudo event, including the issue of a US
Postage stamp, the unveiling of a statue of Yeager and the re-naming of the main
road to Edwards Airbase as ‘Yeager Boulevard’.
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Like many architects, Kwinter may have disliked the Guggenheim because he was
more concerned with form than function and more with structure than context. But
one could also see the new museum in a different light. The opening of the Bilbao
Guggenheim was arguably an important turning point in the relationship between art,
architecture, culture and local development. Before the Guggenheim, Bilbao was a
run-down northern Spanish port-city with a filthy river and declining industry. The
new museum put Bilbao on the map, with international tourists suddenly flocking to
see Gehry’s futuristic colossus and urban leaders across the globe scrambling to
emulate the ‘Guggenheim effect’.
The debate about the economic and image impacts of the Bilbao Guggenhiem has
tended to overshadow the role of the museum as a marker of a significant qualitative
change in the way in which art was being consumed. The Guggenheim made clear
that art museums did not need to worry about content in the same way as they had
in the past. Curators used to focus on assembling artworks to tell a meaningful story
to people who appreciated art. But the modern harried leisure consumer no longer
has time to contemplate art and think about its meaning. Increasingly museum
visitors are skimming the artworks on their way to the café or the museum shop. The
legendary marketing campaign launched by the Tate Museum in London had already
heralded this change in 1988 by calling itself ‘an ace café with quite a nice museum
attached’. People were no longer using museums as location for the serious
development of cultural capital, they were seeing them as an extension of socialised
leisure. People no longer went to museums as temples of culture, but because the
museums in themselves had also become events, places to be.
The example of the art museum is perhaps one of the most interesting for our
purposes, because it concerns the transformation of a practice associated by
Bourdieu (1984) with elite culture into a form of cultural sport for the masses. This
transformation was heralded by the opening of the Pompidou Centre in 1977, the
first ludic art museum with no serious collection. The device was rapidly employed in
other cities, as the opening of the Tate Modern, the Bilbao Guggenheim and
countless other contemporary art museums underline.
The Tate Modern in London has perhaps become the archetypal example of the
genre, if for no other reason than its sheer size. Housed in the largest brick building
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in Europe (a former power station), it attracts over 5 million visitors a year, and is due
to add a 21,000 square metres extension onto the existing 31,000 square metres to
cope with the demand. The reason for this success is obvious to those who visit. The
Tate Modern is not so much an art museum as a relational space. Children run (or
roll) down the ramp into the turbine hall, to be greeted by a giant sun, or a theme
park-like installation of slides, while their parents drink coffee in the Members’ Room
or browse the shop. The quiet contemplation of art that Bourdieu and his
contemporaries would have valued has been replaced by what the contemporary
French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) has termed ‘relational
aesthetics’. In his view, it is not the art object itself that matters, but the interaction
with it. The Tate Modern, and other cultural institutions have become relational
spaces where people develop their own meaning through their relationship with art
and each other.
As Vickery (2007, 77) discusses, the way in which people relate to culture-led
regeneration projects such as the Tate Modern is key, because this determines if
relational capital is actually being developed for the wider community, or if the
‘audience’ is simply being used to add symbolic capital to the physical space. In the
ideal case:
Collective participation can perform an act of symbolic integration of a diverse
social and political constituency, such as social minorities usually absent or
excluded from social or cultural institutions.
This is certainly true of grass roots cultural production and creativity, such as the
Festes de Gràcia in Barcelona, where local residents make their own creative
landscapes from recycled materials, attracting around 2 million visits to the
neighbourhood every year (Crespi Vallbona and Richards, 2007). One of the
important spaces in the Festes includes the ‘gypsy plaza’, where this often
marginalised group becomes the focus of collective attention in a transcultural ritual
of music and dance.
One of the Turbine Hall installations at the Tate Modern in 2009 was Robert Morris’
Bodymotionspacesthings, a series of huge props including beams, weights,
platforms, rollers, tunnels and ramps built from materials such as plywood, stone,
steel plate, and rope. This was actually a recreation of Tate Gallery’s first fully
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interactive exhibition which took place in 1971. The original exhibition was actually
too successful in its innovative call for people to physically interact with an art work.
It was closed just four days after opening, due to the unexpected and over
enthusiastic response of the audience.
The events industry has imitated art by providing many more ‘places to be’ in the
festive calendar. But in addition to carefully constructed commercial events or
expensive art museums, there is a whole raft of ‘eventfulness’ emerging in different
spheres of everyday life. Eventfulness can be found in many different public spaces
in cities across the globe, as seen in the trend towards watching live football
matches on giant screens in city centres, the growth of mega discos, the increasing
popularity of live concerts or the proliferation of ‘stag and hen’ parties.
Festivals in the network society
Festivals have been argued to represent a special case in terms of events,
combining the festive atmosphere that gives them their name with the presentation
of the arts. Festivals are therefore perhaps the ultimate vehicle for relational
aesthetics – the content cannot exist without the context of place and the audience
that devotes their precious time to ‘being there’.
In the case of festivals, however, the fact that they revolve around cultural
programming in specific places at particular times compounds the temporal
challenges they face. As the number of festivals has grown, so the festival season
has become choked with events, all seemingly presenting a similar panoply of artists
and performers. There is competition to be the first event in the season in a
particular artistic genre, or to avoid the performance fatigue that affects performers
and audiences alike by the end of the season. There is competition to present the
key performers who will anchor the programme and attract the large audiences
necessary to pay the inflated fees of the star acts. There is a tendency towards
sameness in programming that Mary Miller, Director of Stavanger 2008 and now
directing the Bergen Opera House, once neatly characterised in the formula ‘Bono
and Tall Ships’.
The growth of the network society has ensured that such competition now extends
globally. Not only do performers travel, but audiences do too. Why watch Bono in
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London when you could do so in Benicassim, or Rio, or Tokyo? So the more
traditional festivals in North-western Europe or North America now find themselves
dealing with more mobile audiences who can opt for warmer climes, or cheaper beer
or better atmosphere elsewhere.
One of the reactions from some festivals has been to clone themselves. Sónar, the
advanced music festival established in Barcelona in the cultural vacuum following
the 1992 Olympics, began organising foreign editions in 2002, and since then it has
appeared in various guises in more than 20 cities worldwide. Different strategies
have been tried to implant this globalised ‘local festival’ in the space of places in
different cities, including partnership with local promoters and a tour of North
American cities organised primarily from Barcelona (Colombo and Richards,
forthcoming). The question surrounding these developments is an interesting one,
since strategies of cloning, copying and franchising are becoming more and more
common for festivals (Richards and Palmer, 2010). If so many festival clones or
copies exist, what does this do to the original? Does the existence of many copies
detract from the value of the original version, or does it add to its authenticity, as
Baudrillard (1985) might have argued? The Sónar experience seems to suggest the
latter, since the ‘original’ Barcelona version has gone from strength to strength, in
spite of the proliferation of copies. This also underlines the power of festivals as
rituals that support physical co-presence and generate emotional energy in the
network society.
The authenticity of festivals and events therefore arguably depends as much on the
audience, and on their ability to co-create festivals as a social happening, as it does
the artistic programming. It is the fact of ‘being there’ that makes the event real or
‘authentic’, rather than just the content presented. The implication for festivals in the
future may well be that they need to pay more attention to designing the ritual of
participation and ensuring that ‘emotional energy’ is generated as a result. This
means that festivals need to look beyond their traditional programming capabilities to
embrace new skills in the areas of ritual design and experience management in
order to continue being successful.
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Conclusion
The development of the network society has linked people together virtually, but
rather than replacing face-to-face contact, it seems to have heightened the need for
physical co-presence. We need to be with others to participate in the Interaction
Ritual Chains, and these need to have a collective focus of attention which can give
meaning to our activities. The result seems to be more, rather than less mass
participation in festivals and events of all kinds.
Although Boorstin long ago predicted the rise of pseudo-events, one could argue that
the current trend towards hyperfestivity is not just a product of PR campaigns or
overblown instrumentalism. It is just as much a result of a real individual and social
need to build the social fabric and to generate shared, meaningful experiences. The
problem with Boorstin’s analysis, as Whitfield (1991) pointed out, is that he was very
good at identifying the ‘unreal’ in modern society, but was at a loss to define what
was actually ‘real’ or ‘meaningful’.
Although it is easy to be critical of the contemporary festival landscape, there are still
plenty of signs that people are capable of using the spaces and places around them
to create meaning and shape fulfilling moments of co-presence. The real problem
starts when you want to channel that energy to achieve concrete social, cultural and
economic goals. As Boorstin pointed out, pseudo-events are lacking in spontaneity
and content, which suggests that ‘real’ event should be spontaneous and creative.
The problem is, how do you plan for spontaneity?
In fact, planned spontaneity is already happening in the network society.
Trendwatching.com has identified the tendency to make ‘spontaneous decisions to
go somewhere or do something’ as one of the main impacts of networked
individualism. If this trend continues, then festival organisers will also have to
become more spontaneous, or risk being left behind by the creative audiences of
tomorrow.
Acknowledgement: This chapter is partly based on Leisure in the Network Society:
From pseudo-events to hyperfestivity?, an inaugural lecture given at Tilburg
University, October 2010.
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