Burning Man (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) 0367407361, 9780367407360

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Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

BURNING MAN LEARNING FROM HETEROTOPIA Linda Noveroske-Tritten

Burning Man

This book centers on a philosophical analysis of creative acts at the Burning Man Festival and their roles in wider social change. With particular focus on the Ten Principles of Burning Man, Linda Noveroske-Tritten posits a re-interpretation of common notions of “self” and “other” as they apply to identity, difference, and the ways that these personal impulses ripple outward from changing individuals into changing societies. Such radical re-imagination of ideology can be most powerful when it occurs in spaces of otherness, of heterotopia. This study casts Burning Man as a heterotopia not only to destabilize what we think we know about visual art, performance, and creative encounters, but also bring these acts into an attitude of immediacy that facilitates previously unimagined behavior and opens out artistic drive into the unknown. This book would be of value for scholars and practitioners in Performance Studies, Theatre and Dance, Art History, Psychology, Phenomenology, Humanities, Architecture and Urban Studies. Linda Noveroske-Tritten is a lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis, USA. She attends Burning Man every year.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Performing for the Don Theatres of Faith in the Trump Era Hank Willenbrink Afrikinesis A Paradigm for Research on African and African Diaspora Dance Ofosuwa M. Abiola Genre Transgressions Dialogues on Tragedy and Comedy Ramona Mosse and Anna Street An Actor Survives Remarks on Stanislavsky Tomasz Kubikowski Black Women Centre Stage Diasporic Solidarity in Contemporary British Theatre Paola Prieto López

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre-Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

Burning Man Learning from Heterotopia

Linda Noveroske-Tritten

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business. © 2024 Linda Noveroske-Tritten The right of Linda Noveroske-Tritten to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780367407360 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032224664 (pbk) ISBN: 9780367808815 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction1 1 Radical Inclusion: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community29 2 Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value47 3 Decommodification: In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience58 4 Radical Self-Reliance: Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources69

vi Contents

5 Radical Self-Expression: Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient89 6 Communal Effort: Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote, and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction106 7 Civic Responsibility: We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state, and federal laws130 8 Leaving No Trace: Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them143 9 Participation: Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart160

Contents vii

10 Immediacy: Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience181 11 Conclusion

198

Index207

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, my gratitude to Laura Hussey and Swati Hindwan cannot be overstated. They are the Routledge dream team, and this project would never have happened without their endless patience and encouragement, especially as the pandemic descended upon us and changed everything forever. The official Burning Man event in Black Rock City was canceled for 2020 and 2021, and while no one knew what would come next, we all believed there was so much still worth exploring! I would also like to thank a bunch of people I have never met before I go into specifics. I have a deep and persisting sense of gratitude for burners all over the world, those who feel moved to gather in one of the most inhospitable climates on Earth and see what kinds of shenanigans we can pull off as we create that magical space in Black Rock City. As well, there are many who have taken the lessons they learned in Nevada and brought them to hundreds of cities, across five continents, to create the incredible network of Regional Burns. The Black Rock City burn and the Regional Burns are once again firing on all cylinders, and I thank every single one of you who has made that happen. My mother Becky has also been a huge influence along my journey as an artist and scholar. Though she never got to go, she would have loved Burning Man. We lost her during COVID, but she somehow still keeps teaching me how to stay focused on the beautiful, the sublime, the world of dreaming, and of miracles. I miss her every day and love it when she reaches out from beyond, she usually sends me an owl. My colleagues at the University of California, Davis, have been wonderful. I could not imagine a more supportive, brilliant, yet absolutely down-to-earth group of theatre people. In this regard, I send a particular shout-out to Susie Owens and Larry Bogad (a fellow Burner), for always keeping it real. Simon Sadler has also been an absolute force in my academic life ever since he joined the UCD faculty in 2003. I’ll never forget talking to him and saying, “Hey, what do you think about a deep dive into Burning Man?” Simon said, “Cool, let’s do it.”

Acknowledgments ix Every past and present member of Camp Frosty has helped make this happen, but there are a few I must call out individually: Kaki, Cal, Carey, America, Christian, Frank, Deb, Dave, Rob, Yaella, Pete, Ashley, Dan, Estaybahn, Merel, Angela, Vanessa, Nam, Etienne, Bertier, Taylor…I’m certain that I am forgetting a few and I’m so sorry but I promise you are there in my heart. I also want to send all my love toward my 2021 Renegade Burn posse, that was epic. And I got to camp with Lance and Bug, who remain two of the finest humans I know to this day, seriously best of the besties. Costco camp has also figured prominently over the past few years, thank you to Josh for bringing me into the fold and being an absolutely beautiful friend. Jennifer Smyth, whom I have known since our glorious, tumultuous teens and twenties in Hudson, Quebec, offered insight and beautiful stories about the far-reaching, Burning Man Temple art that touched her community in Northern Ireland. One of these days I will convince her to come to Burning Man in the desert. There are so many people I want to bring out here, please consider this your formal invitation. I saved my immediate family for last in this list of thanks because I love them so deeply, respect them so completely; my husband and our daughters are my raisons d’être. I thank them for putting up with my special brand of crazy. Jeffrey, I would not recognize the world without you in it. Jules and Elly, you are the most fantastic people I know and I love you more than life itself. I’m heading back out to the playa in a few weeks. You will all be with me as we wander through our high desert home. Old Razorback, I’ll talk to you soon.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Introduction

Finally, the last characteristic of heterotopias is that they have, in relation to the rest of space, a function that takes place between two opposite poles. On the one hand they perform the task of creating a space of illusion, that reveals how all of real space is more illusory, all the locations within which life is fragmented. On the other hand, they have the function of forming another space, another real space, as perfect, meticulous and well-arranged as ours is disordered, ill-conceived, and in a sketchy state. This heterotopia is not one of illusion, but of compensation. (Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”)

August 1st, 2020: Burning Man 2020 is canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was no surprise when the news came out, so many of us were expecting it, but if you’d asked me this time in 2019, I would have confidently said that Black Rock City’s Burning Man would continue, uninterrupted, just as it had for the previous thirty-four years. THIRTY. FOUR. YEARS. DAMN … That’s definitely well past the point when one might take a thing for granted, especially That Thing in the Desert that occurs during the week leading up to every American Labor Day holiday—an entire city appearing then disappearing—ushering in a frenzy of art-making and then taking all our mistakes away with its gracious retreat into the liminal space between now and what is yet to come. I do not think I am alone in having assumed it would always appear again on schedule. No one knows for certain whether it will return next year. Or any year, at least in the form of something that looks like its most recent incarnation. Naturally there is constant talk of die-hard burners heading out to the playa for an impromptu gathering around the time that the sanctioned burn would have occurred this year; it would have been August 30th through September 7th for the main event, but this seems like a reckless, if not completely insane idea given the current state of the world. Many participants drive to Burning Man from

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-1

2 Introduction California, now the most dangerous hotspot in the United States, which leads the world in confirmed cases of COVID-19. Regional Burns have all been canceled. From Black Rock City, Nevada to Tankwa Karoo, South Africa, these yearly events are in a state of suspended animation. It would be one thing if we could cut our losses from this year, focus on fund-raising and event planning for next year, and throw all the weight of our frustration and pent-up energy behind something productive. Make next year the best burn ever, take the extra time off to double down on our efforts and imagination, come back stronger! But if the last six months have taught us anything, it is that we have no idea how life will keep changing as we recognize the world less and less every day. Here I am working from home, as is the new normal. It has been one hundred and thirty-two days since Governor Gavin Newsom issued the official shelter-in-place order for all residents of California. It simultaneously feels like it has been forever and yet I will never get used to the newness of every weird moment. I have taught classes remotely since mid-March 2020, communicating with students and colleagues through Zoom and Canvas. My partner lost his job in live event production; concerts, theatre, festivals, right around the same time, the entire industry seemed to evaporate overnight. Our teen-aged children came home from school one day in early April and announced that they would not be returning to school for “a few weeks” while we get this virus thing under control. Now, with the Fall semester upon us, we have no idea when they will return to school or what that might look like, just that the rest of 2020 will be distance learning as the only option for their public school. This book, my project, is predicated upon Burning Man as a heterotopia, the kind of radically different place where artists, makers, thinkers, and other participants can reimagine what we might do in that moment we wake up each day and consider our infinite possibilities before we move toward what is next. Now the whole world is a heterotopia, a place of otherness, somewhere between here and there, sometime between then, now, and next. Perhaps it would be smarter and more creative to cease attempts to return to what was so recently considered normal and instead contemplate new forms of routine, of ritual. Was it really so great before the world started to spiral down this particular rabbit hole? Is it worth trying to recapture what is slipping away as we navigate this thing we did not choose? In my sphere, the upcoming generation is known as the “Zoomers.” Who knew that term would eventually, quite literally, reference the software through which we now conduct so many social and professional meetings as we attempt to flatten the pandemic curve? I knew that the name “Zoomers” was a combination of “Gen Z” and “Boomers,” a reference to how much more quickly things move now than they did during my

Introduction 3 parents’ coming of age in the 1950s and 60s. These days things are not just moving quickly, they are trampling us as they race into unknown territory. There is no room to settle here and now nor plan for there and then. It’s nearly impossible to root down into the present when the past and future are continually being superimposed upon each other. It has been a difficult six or so months and I wish Burning Man was happening this year so I could go to the desert with my family and make art and hang out with my friends and hug strangers and know that this temporary city will always come back for us. I’ve always known that Black Rock City was a place of otherness, that it worked because it was about the thrill of making and unmaking, that we got to exist in ways there that we had never before imagined within our default lives. But here we are now in the heterotopia of our no-longer-familiar places that strive to be permanent, rather than the more forgiving, temporary spaces that resemble something we might once have desired. This situation is scary because all the mistakes seem to count. The stakes are high as we navigate toward an end-game that will never stop moving its own goal posts. We cannot say what Burning Man might look like going forward any more than we can plan around the changes in school, work, play, scheduled and unscheduled life. Is it important for things to remain constant, such as the dates and the specific rituals around our daily lives? Perhaps not, but it sure has been comforting to know, for decades prior, that no matter what happened throughout the rest of the year, we burners could leave those things in the default world for a while and come together in the most inhospitable climate imaginable to make some art together. That was 2020. I first went to Burning Man in 2000, a struggling but happy actor. My conservative, Lutheran wedding was coming up in two weeks and there I was, contemplating leaving San Francisco for one of those weeks to camp at some random event in the high desert when I didn’t even own a tent. Maybe it was the mayhem of wedding planning that gave me the final kick out the door, I have never been good at seeking help until the universe forces me to scream for it. My roommate Cal told me I absolutely must go, so I said okay, sounds good! The logistics were fairly simple. My parents lived in Sparks, Nevada, a then-small city just over 100 miles from Black Rock City. It would be a perfect stop on my way from San Francisco to this strange place, I could regroup and get all my supplies before driving my trusty Toyota Tacoma into the unknown. I had traveled recklessly before, but never to a destination where physical survival was a real and present factor. Dust storms! Dehydration! Shelter! Again, okay, sounds good. I just had to take a minute to call upon the mantra of the improv performer: yes, and …. So I went to Burning Man for the first time 23 years ago and I’ve never looked back. I wanted to see all the creativity, to grapple with the questions

4 Introduction around why people would want to make a bunch of art just to ultimately burn it, in the middle of an incredibly dangerous environment. Though I was not much of a camper, I was first and foremost a visual and performing artist who wanted to change the world. And Cal had told me that this was a revolution, as he packed up his camping gear, staggering amounts of water, and his ukulele. Somehow, singing together, looking at weird and astounding art together, and just camping in the desert with similarly creative people would facilitate some kind of radical change in the world that awaited me when I returned home. Little did I know, “home” would soon become the definition of this place I’d never seen before, the Black Rock Desert, this terrain outside of anything familiar. “Revolution” would begin with an infinitesimal experience rather than a grand, violent gesture toward opposing forces, though it would be a long time before I began to figure out why. How does something like Burning Man actually work, in rippling outward from the individual to the communal experience, and into the realm of shifting paradigms? Revolution, as both concept and action, is a hot topic in academia. Making visual art, creating theatrical performances, and curating extraordinary experiences has traditionally comprised an integral part of social change. These actions get people to think about where imagination can lead to when it picks up thinning historical threads, which are only strong enough to reinforce themselves by repetition until we have the opportunity to rehearse new behaviors, involving risks on deeply personal levels and bringing that experimental attitude out from the margins into the structures of society. Change cannot simply be decided nor dictated, it is a process that begins with human beings who feel moved to act in ways that are unfamiliar. Because social change is arguably one of the top priorities in the arts and humanities, I find an increasing need to critically re-examine modern notions of revolution, especially those that have resulted in duplicating the same conditions they sought to subvert. This repeating cycle of means and ends within historicized, event-based revolution is perpetuated by its linear ordering of history, for a narrow view of the past encourages similarly linear predetermination of the future. A past that is only revealed through a rationalized structure of events and transitions, even when radical change is desired, places limits upon an otherwise limitless future by keeping it within the realm of what is already known. Such a process casts both past and future outside the realm of immediacy as “other,” restricting the present to continual reinforcement of structure that establishes its relationship to the other as mutual constitution by exclusion. The purpose in describing this closed, cyclical form of revolution is to set up a point of departure for alternative re-imaginings of social change,

Introduction 5 forms of resistance that offer opportunities to conceive possibilities outside of an already-articulated future that is based in difference. This is not to dismiss organized resistance as futile, for there are positive aspects to action that anticipates specific results, such as empowerment, momentum, and inspiration within ecologies of mutual support. Ideas that become actions serve as reminders that revolution does not happen in a vacuum. However, I would argue that establishing strict goals in relation to obstacles can undermine the potential for new value-making. Attainment of an ultimate goal presumes an ending, rather than a becoming, privileging rationality above imagination. My perspective in this particular project is grounded in the concept of heterotopia as a space within which the self is destabilized, transformed into a more kinetic point of origin for social change. Because the “Ten Principles of Burning Man,” the skeletal structure of this perspective, comprise the majority of my argument, I must re-imagine the self-affirming, ego-led language of the Ten Principles, and explore interpretations rooted in the notion of “radical,” as the qualifier in several of the written principles, as that which moves change outside of rational knowledge production and toward embodied insight that ripples outward from a changing self into its changing community. Performance has long been utilized as a tool to inspire social change, as a form of expression that questions authority through metaphor, representation, imagery, and participation. In Utopia in Performance, Jill Dolan states: Performance … offers a way to practice imagining new forms of social relationships. I believe in the theatre’s use-value as a place to fantasize how peace and justice, quality and truly participatory democracy might take hold sometime in the near or distant future, as well as in theatre’s value as a place in which to connect emotionally and spiritually with other people.1 Dolan’s assertion that performance possesses crucial use-value in critically rethinking society is accurate, however the frame of utopia suggests approaching an ideal that by definition cannot exist. Utopia literally means “no place.” While it is essential in terms of imagining what a perfected culture might look like, it is not an attainable destination. Even if artistic events succeed in revealing deep societal problems and/or performing imaginary alternatives, the process unfolds within the margins of a culture that cannot escape its ideological space. Revolutionary ideas respond to their current cultural conditions, cultural identification is constituted in difference from that which it aspires to change. Self-expression most often manifests as ideological negation.

6 Introduction Heterotopia is a term that is linguistically and intimately tied to utopia yet remains conceptually distant as a conceivable and inhabitable space as opposed to an impossible space. Heterotopia is not an impossible place but a different place, outside of that which is familiar. The ten chapters that make up this book—every thought articulated within, give or take a few tangents—are predicated on heterotopia as a logical, geographical, “real” place at which humans can quite literally arrive and look around, take in unfamiliar social spaces, and become something they have not yet been within their familiar space outside. Black Rock City, Burning Man’s community that marks its geographical space in the Nevada desert and divides itself from the outside world with an industrial fence, is a heterotopia. Its location can require extraordinary effort to reach, its climate is relatively unique, its landscape and soundscape suggest having left all sense of ordinary life behind, and most importantly, it only exists for the span of one week each year.2 Few would disagree that Black Rock City exists in a real space outside of familiar space, in a time separate from cumulative time. The purpose of framing Burning Man as heterotopia is not simply to explore all the interesting reasons that people seem to feel more free, more creative, more engaged there than they normally do; it is to make the claim that there are many unique ways that Burning Man works for its artists and performers that make it a powerful resource for social change. Communities of support are essential for most artists and activists in order to navigate the alienation that often goes along with exposing injustices and calling for change. Burning Man’s community does this but it also goes a step beyond by offering a culture that does not require closure for the spaces that it opens. In a temporary society that disappears and reappears, creative acts remain in the realm of rehearsal that continually evolves rather than performance that resolves. Founded in the spirit of ludic pranksters and characterized by transformation through fire, the event has evolved from a relatively small celebration on Baker Beach, San Francisco in 1986 into a worldwide, cultural phenomenon. I believe this is due in large part to the ways that Burning Man radically changes participants when they pass through the gate, leaving familiar ideology behind, locating value in creative acts rather than provable or repeatable results. A Brief History of Burning Man Burning Man is not something that can be concisely described or summarized in brief. To explain it as an annual, week-long, arts-based event in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, where tickets now cost an average of $600 and attendance is capped at approximately 80,000 people, is like defining art as combinations of visuals and sounds that affect the eye and the ear.

Introduction 7 That statement is not wrong, but those words no more convey what Burning Man means than give any sense of what visual art and music feel like. Just as one can scarcely appreciate music without hearing and/or feeling it played, it is not possible to fully understand Burning Man without participating in the site-specific event. However, because this book takes Burning Man’s Ten Principles as its over-arching frame, some basic background on the event is necessary in order to begin an analysis of the way this heterotopia works toward social change. There have been many excellent books that thoroughly canvas the event’s history, thus it is not my intent to dive deeply into that history here but to provide a fundamental overview of how Burning Man began. In 1986, a group of approximately 20 participants gathered at Baker Beach, San Francisco, and burned an eight-foot wooden effigy constructed by Burning Man cofounders, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, in honor of the summer solstice. As the crude, wooden figure burned, an onlooker clasped one of the Man’s hands in an act that has since been called Burning Man’s first, spontaneous performance. Between 1986 and 2019, the official burn took place once per year and the effigy ranged in size from 20 feet (1987) to roughly 100 ft. in 2014. The gathering moved from Baker Beach to the Black Rock Desert, to the Hualapai Playa, back to Black Rock City, with attendance estimated to be around 80,000 in 2019.3 “Regional Burns,” events in which local communities hold gatherings that spread and celebrate Burning Man culture beyond Black Rock City, take place in hundreds of cities all over the world. Since 1990, with the exception of one year, the main event has taken place in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada,4 a harsh, arid climate that presents physical challenges above and beyond the normal concerns of taking care of one’s body in everyday life. Because the festival lasts for over a week, issues such as dehydration, heat stroke, hypothermia, and “playa lung,” a condition brought on by ingesting alkaline dust particles, are serious concerns. The climate is more unfriendly than friendly, ranging from freezing temperatures to scorching heat, often within the same 24-hour period. Looking after one’s physical well-being takes precedence over all else, but even the most experienced, well-intentioned Burners occasionally treat the desert conditions too lightly and become seriously ill. Participants endure the physical and emotional hardships, however, because the experiences available within Black Rock City are unlike most events, objects, and interactions one could expect to encounter in the “default world,” Burner jargon for all of life outside of Black Rock City and Regional Burns. It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive list of all the art objects, installations, events, theme camps, ideas, and performances at Burning Man throughout the past three decades; even a representative cross-section is well beyond the scope of this book. However, some of the

8 Introduction more notable examples include: the climactic Man Burn that takes place every year on the Saturday night before American Labor Day, the Temple Burn that follows on Sunday evening, the CORE (Circle of Regional Effigies) burns, millions of dollars worth of large-scale installation art, art cars or “Mutant Vehicles” of vastly differing sizes and complexities, personal art-as-gift, theatrical performances, fire-dancing, family oriented activities for young burners, geodesic domes with sound systems to rival state-ofthe-art amphitheaters, concerts, drum circles, and workshops on everything from acro-yoga to how to give your own sermon.5 Again, this list is not meant to cover the abundance of diverse creativity in Black Rock City; it is a subjective list drawn from memory to illustrate that which tempts newcomers and reassures veteran burners that the journey is worth the overwhelming effort. Surviving at Burning Man is a provocative balancing act, vacillating between moments of bodies-against-the-elements to bodies-in-harmony with the elements. Burners pride themselves on answering the challenges of surviving and thriving in these harsh conditions, as well as participation in the Ten Principles, the agreement one consents to uphold the moment they enter the city gates and leave the default world temporarily behind. There is no prescription for what actions constitute fulfillment of the Ten Principles; it is left to the individual to decide one’s own levels and methods of participation, which can manifest in a multitude of different behaviors. It is not necessary to produce and install your own large-scale artwork to fulfill the agreement, but the bare minimum does ask that participants recognize the Ten Principles: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Radical Inclusion Gifting Decommodification Radical Self-Reliance Radical Self-Expression Communal Effort Civic Responsibility Leaving No Trace Participation Immediacy.

The Ten Principles were not conceived to assert a code of ethics from the time of Burning Man’s inception, rather, they were set down by co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004, nearly two decades after the first burn, to record the observations of a culture that was evolving organically. Harvey offered the principles as guidelines for a swiftly growing network of Regional Burns as well as a worldwide phenomenon of carrying Burning Man’s ethos into

Introduction 9 other areas of society. My intention is not to establish the Ten Principles as a dominant ideology, but rather as an observation of values by which to deconstruct individuals’ relationships to ideology both inside and outside of Burning Man. By refracting the Ten Principles through the concept of heterotopia, a place of spatial and temporal otherness, I will engage in both surface readings and alternative interpretations of the Ten Principles in order to examine the way behaviors are formed and habits are destabilized differently in Burning Man than in the default world. While human bodies often cannot help but succumb to their inherently political cultures of influence, they are first and foremost sensory objects in persisting, relative states of becoming. They move through spaces both familiar and unfamiliar, negotiating subsequent action or inaction based on notions of safety and risk. In general, the body protects itself with its ability to sense danger and avert that which threatens its ability to thrive. Western tendencies toward Cartesian dualism, or deliberate separation of mind from body: “I think, therefore, I am,” often prompt parallel instinct toward preservation of the ego-as-self. While the instinct of self-preservation works to amplify the uniqueness, and thus the valuable contributions of the individual, in many ways it also restricts the individual’s potential to evolve. Because this discussion of heterotopia assumes a common understanding of what constitutes “space,” it is useful to begin with Bernard Tschumi’s brief genealogy of space as argued by prominent philosophers throughout history: Remember: with Descartes ended the Aristotelian tradition according to which space and time were “categories” that enabled the classification of “sensory knowledge.” Space became absolute. Object before the subject, it dominated senses and bodies by containing them. Was the space inherent to the totality of what exists? This was the question of space for Spinoza and Leibniz. Returning to the old notion of category, Kant described space as neither matter nor the set of objective relations between things but an internal structure, an a priori consciousness, an instrument of knowledge. Subsequent mathematical developments on non-Euclidean spaces and their topologies did not eliminate the philosophical discussions. These reappeared with the widening gap between abstract spaces and society. But space was generally accepted as a cosa mentale, a sort of allembracing set with subjects such as literary space, ideological space, and psychoanalytical space.6 It is the cosa mentale space that I foreground, for the fence that encircles Black Rock City’s space is much more than a geographical demarcation; it

10 Introduction is a symbolic, liminal zone in-between entirely different sets of ideological and emotional impulses. The ecology of heterotopia is made of physicality and climate, thought and action, resistance and response. The space of Black Rock city is constellated as much by its sensing, moving bodies as its circular grid of streets. In “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Foucault divides the concept of heterotopia into two distinct, but related strands: In the first place there are the heterotopias of time which accumulate ad infinitum … creating a sort of universal archive, the desire to enclose all times, all eras, forms and styles within a single place, the concept of making all times into one place, and yet a place that is outside time, inaccessible to the wear and tear of the years.7 These are the “permanent” places of otherness that exist outside of ordinary and familiar levels of reality, often made of built structures and landscapes designed to convey timelessness. Paradoxically, heterotopias of accumulation frequently express themselves by referencing a very tactile and historicized record of time. The other heterotopia, essentially an inversion of Foucault’s heterotopia of accumulation and permanence, would be the spaces that come into being only temporarily: Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporary. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities …8 Burning Man falls more accurately into the latter category, the timebound heterotopia. While the heterotopia of accumulation exists as a “permanent” space of otherness, Burning Man, whether in Black Rock City or a Regional Burn, happens in a temporary space that deliberately appears and then disappears on a fixed schedule. The only claim of permanence is one of a repeating temporal cycle defined by the Western calendar year. Prior to the pandemic, it was assumed that the effigy of the Man had and would continue to burn every Saturday night just before Labor Day in an act of radical self-expression. Even with the constraints of COVID-19 Burners found ways around whatever might arrest this ritual. In his article, “Foucault, Borges, and Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces,” Robert Topinka provides an academic review of

Introduction 11 heterotopia as a term, beginning with its first known use in medicine: “the displacement of an organ or part of the body from its normal position.”9 The article also establishes Foucault’s heterotopia as a problematic concept, not because its features—as outlined in Foucault’s six principles, in “Of Other Spaces”10—are immanently contradictory, but because Foucault himself does not provide a succinct definition of what they are so much as how they work.11 As such, a noticeable critical trend has been to provide brief conceptualizations of heterotopia before bringing its core ideas into other arenas. Topinka offers a review of eight different scholars’ uses of heterotopia, highlighting their recurring themes of resistance and relationship to order, and asserts that more thorough understanding of the term necessitates including at the very least Foucault’s The Order of Things in conversation with “Of Other Spaces.” While Foucault explores the concept of heterotopia by way of six loosely framed principles in “Of Other Spaces,” he offers a more succinct insight in The Order of Things: Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together.’12 This statement, typically of Foucault, is less concerned with what heterotopia is than with what it does, but I interpret the affront to language systems as an indication that language cannot contain heterotopia’s space, nor is it possible to contain language within its space. Ask almost any participant to describe what Burning Man is, and you’ll get the same answer: It is impossible to describe, you just have to experience it. A space that cannot be articulated can be neither rationalized nor resolved. While its Ten Principles could easily be read as overtly libertarian or anti-capitalist rhetoric by those wishing to leverage it for specific political agendas, the principles in and of themselves can also be interpreted as a call to prioritize creative acts over political gestures. Topinka’s work moves heterotopias out of the realm of resistance and into knowledge production: “Shifting the focus from resistance to order and knowledge production reveals how heterotopias make the spatiality of order legible. By juxtaposing and combining many spaces in one site, heterotopias problematize received knowledge by destabilizing the ground on which knowledge is built.”13 This argument casts heterotopias as spaces where destabilization of order reveals ways in which knowledge is

12 Introduction produced within hegemonic order, asserting that new knowledge is formed in the clashing of forces; the cutting or opening of previously “intact” ordering systems. However, Topinka concludes by saying that heterotopias “can help us re-see the foundations of our own knowledge, but they cannot take us outside this knowledge or free us from power relations.”14 While I agree that there can be no total freedom from power relations, I consider Topinka’s conclusion a point of departure from which to posit a different version of freedom that is made accessible through heterotopia. Assuming knowledge is produced by bringing what was previously unknown into the known, to reproduce a different version of the same order, then perhaps the utility of heterotopia lies in its function as a space for temporary freedom from knowledge production within the “same order.” Because the unknown is arguably limitless, a space that permits intimate co-presencing of known and unknown might serve to recast the known as also temporarily limitless, rather than a reordering of the difference between two clashing forces. From this perspective, the unbounded known—or the self in-the-making as opposed to continually re-affirming—is defamiliarized because it need not establish its origins in relation to rote structures of power. Raymond Williams offers a vital characteristic of hegemony in Structures of Feeling: “A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or structure. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities with specific and changing pressures and limits.”15 Once hegemony is articulated as a structure, it ceases to be a process and becomes an object, in relation to which individuals might feel bound to perform. Because heterotopia exists in a state of otherness, undoing structure by refusing to resolve, there is no need to conceive of social change as accessing something outside of established ideological limits. Rather, change is a persisting, internal state within a self that is oriented toward an other. In order to conceptualize this re-interpretation of heterotopia, it is necessary to imagine conditions in which individual behavior is not overtly dictated by the desire to locate and reinforce limits. Ideology itself is no more than a set of arbitrary limits established in order to make sense of cultural behaviors and contradictions; it possesses no absolute or fractal truth but rather a system of knowing. A possible function of heterotopia, then, is to nudge the individual from a deductive self toward a creative self. In this regard, Michael Bakhtin’s prolific body of work on dialectic versus dialogic communication seems a perfect lens through which to refract Foucault’s heterotopia and bring it into play with performance and visual art. Not only was Foucault influenced by Bakhtin’s work, building on it from a poststructuralist perspective, but Bakhtin’s theories around monologic, dialogic, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque add layers of

Introduction 13 rhetorical complexity to heterotopia that offer a deeper look at spatial relationships by foregrounding the things inside of the spaces. While Topinka notes that heterotopia juxtaposes many different spaces into the same site, I would expand on this by saying that it brings together a multitude of communications and creative acts. Heterotopia is defined by the space and time that encompass it, but it is created by the bodies that move through it. Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque body—both individual and communal—is often considered a site at which experience is brought directly into the realm of the senses. A sensing body deconstructs its own relationship to order and to the unknown because the body does not produce or refine knowledge, but rather embodies experience. Bakhtin argues that all communication is dialogic because it can never be closed nor resolved, even through agreement, and that all speech is refracted through infinite combinations of experience, perception, and desire. The inclusion of different kinds of speech and the cultural differences that mingle to produce its performance in endless combinations—Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia”—is what prevents communication from ever being finished. Because the concept of heteroglossia extends beyond speech acts to all forms of communication, including private, inner dialogue and outward, creative acts, it stands to reason that a heteroglossic body includes difference in its connection to the world: embodied otherness. In contrast to the dialogic, Bakhtin’s “monologic” implies closed communication, that which is asserted and/or received as absolute. Many forms of authority, including dominant ideology and the power structures that enforce it, function as monologic narrative by excluding difference and therefore restricting communication to no more than the possibility of continually reproducing multiple versions of the same narratives. The force of monologic authority within society is reinforced by conditions ranging from its architecture to its entertainment, constituting a frame by which behavior is repeated or modified in perpetual contingency. In “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” Gregory Bateson describes frames as, “metacommunicative; any message which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame, ipso facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the messages included within the frame.”16 Bakhtin describes this ideological framing as a communal process of identification: The ideological environment is constantly in the active dialectical process of generation. Contradictions are always present, always being overcome and reborn. But for each given collective in each given epoch of its historical development this environment is a unique and complete and concrete whole, uniting science, art, ethics, and other ideologies in a living and immediate synthesis.17

14 Introduction This suggests the dialectic model as a monologic mode of thinking, quite different from the dialogic, and it is worth emphasizing this difference here because the dialectic and dialogic are so often mistaken for each other. A negating, dialectic process reduces ideology to an absolute truth to be excavated, while a creative, dialogic progression never ceases remaking ideology. Burning Man, as a heterotopia, resists the dialectic process inherent in ideological formation because creation is valued over negation. Its space possesses a crucial aspect that presents as both a conceptual and temporal limit; everyone knows this thing is going to disappear. A perspective of time’s spatial dimensions that incorporates Derrida’s “trace,” that all experience is “always already absent,”18 suggests that this quality makes Burning Man no different than the rest of society’s space. However, I believe that the overwhelming cultural attention given to its intentional and celebrated erasure makes its ecology-in-the-making more fully present by its profoundly anticipated, subsequent absence. Creating objects with the intent to burn them, building infrastructure with the intent to remove it, imagining without intent to know, and sensing without obligation to make sense, all conspire to de-normalize the process of translating feeling into structure. Again, the relationship between human feelings and the production of hegemony is the crux of Raymond Williams’ “Structures of Feeling,” a phrase that refers to the factors that combine to form a particular culture within a given historical moment without reducing it to a zeitgeist. Williams is careful to retain the idea of a structure within which individuals operate while acknowledging that different structures are interrelated and interdependent. Because his project is to examine a culture of the present, Williams asserts that the moment culture succumbs to the lens of critique and evaluation, it is no longer a structure of feeling. He rejects this idea of transforming lived experience into a completed project, claiming that a structure’s usefulness extends only as far as it reveals how performance reflects the larger socio-cultural, historical moment in which it is produced. Williams states that the most appropriate example of this process is that of language, because every generation speaks a slightly different one that is shaped and influenced by individuals and moments, but permeates the culture as a whole style, almost an entity unto itself. Following this logic, Foucault’s claim that heterotopia undermines language, by refusing to let it hold together and denying the linearity of syntax, suggests that heterotopia by definition cannot be immobilized by reducing it to a structure. Structures of power in the default world, ordered and rationalized by language, leave no option but a pre-rationalized future that is already resigned to repetition. In contrast, heterotopian space cannot repeat itself because it cannot be contained by language.

Introduction 15 According to Williams, the closer one looks at the formative process of culture, the clearer becomes the separation of the social from the personal. The personal, which must acknowledge the physical presence of the individual, permits embodiment of moments that are initially received as feelings. Individuals operating within these paradigms do not have “social” experiences; they have personal experiences that inform the choices, actions, and reactions that ultimately shape structures of power. Structures of Feeling can therefore be considered a form of kinesthesia because the physicality of the individual is inseparable from the experience of the present. The placement and displacement of the individual, as well as the complex interactions that constitute social structures, are first sensory experiences—the senses need not necessarily describe that which is limited to one single, human form, but the body of an entire culture as an extension of that form—wherein one movement by any part of the body causes the rest of the body to adjust in diminishing or increasing returns. It is felt, if not with complete awareness of the body’s relationship to otherness in its space, with at least the possibility of orientation toward it. The distinction between personal and social experience at Burning Man is not meant to suggest that its environment is completely devoid of social influence, but that participants behave within the circumstances offered by the alreadyabsent present rather than a self-perpetuating, monologic narrative. While the geographical space of Black Rock City is clearly marked by an industrial, plastic fence bolted to steel spikes, commonly known as the “trash fence,” its ideological space remains largely unresolved. Almost any critical project on social change in contemporary Western society must acknowledge the role of Marxism in defining and naming the increasingly rigid forces that form the core of society’s socio-economic stratification, for one theorist’s capitalism is another’s contradiction. For the purposes of this project, which in part seeks to deconstruct performance in relation to dominant ideology from an orientation toward otherness, it is necessary to note the overt references to capitalism in every one of the Ten Principles of Burning Man. Commodification, fetishization, accumulation, consumption; all are part of a familiar vocabulary that implicates capitalism in the reduction of all that was once real into representation. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord invokes “spatial alienation”—a debilitating force—as the antithesis to the desirable “living alienation”: As Hegel showed, time is the necessary alienation, the terrain where the subject realizes himself by losing himself, becomes the other in order to truly become himself. In total contrast, the current form of alienation is imposed on the producers of an estranged present. In this spatial alienation, the society that radically separates the subject from the activity it steals from him is in reality separating him from

16 Introduction his own time. This potentially surmountable social alienation is what has prevented and paralyzed the possibilities of a living alienation within time.19 For my interpretation of the “living alienation within time,” I employ a strategic misreading of Hegel, perhaps not much of a leap within the context of Debord’s appropriation, as the opportunity to gaze beyond the mimetic mirror of society, to interrupt the reified monologue of self-affirmation among structures that arrest space. If the temporal nature of Burning Man serves to release space from its stillness, the bodies that move through its space animate its already-unmade structure in the creative act of detextualizing its time. Because its inarticulable space prevents the self from re-creating the conditions in which it can discern a recognizable reflection, this defamiliarization might well constitute a “living alienation within time.” For “spatial alienation,” I assume that Debord is asserting a standard example of capitalist society’s conditioning to privilege exchange value over use value; to prevent the subject from active participation in his or her own time by using the end result of productivity as a means to establish its worth. Burning Man as heterotopia also responds to this alienation, both overtly in the language of its Ten Principles and experientially in the practice of its participants’ creative acts. Creativity that questions without having to answer, ruptures without the need to heal, and detextualizes so consistently that there is little room to retextualize, sustains a fully present self in-the-making. The following chapter-by-chapter synopsis offers a brief description of each of the Ten Principles, one chapter dedicated to each, and touches on the arguments and case studies that will be discussed in order to open out a wide range of perspectives oriented toward the implications of Burning Man as heterotopia. Because the principles themselves cover a broad range of issues, from the personal to the political, arguments will cover many different arenas. Case studies move inside and outside of Burning Man, from public performances to personal anecdotes to Performance as Research, often setting up comparisons and contrasts between the ways in which these examples work differently inside and outside of heterotopia. Some of these performances are located within the writings themselves as objects of inquiry. And, while a portion of the studies represents my faithful attempts to communicate narratives of performances from my role as observing outsider, some are those that I consider my own stories to tell. These personal relics of remembered acts are not meant to be an indulgence; I choose to bring them into and alongside my critical writing because they are the ones I know best. Having attended Burning Man since 2000, I have collected an abundance of relevant material. After all, Burners are asked to be participants, not spectators.

Introduction 17 In my write-ups of case studies, I have always proceeded with the knowledge that my desire to be objective is categorically impossible to attain. While I am confident in my attunement to sharp, detailed observation, the fact remains that there can be no “truth” of a performance in its retelling. There is the event that one might categorize as beginning and ending, just as an entrance and exit might demarcate the duration of a theatrical production. There is sensory affect as participants—including audience—in the performance register awareness that they are being changed by a force that originated outside of themselves. There is interpretation as individuals assign meaning to what they have sensed. There is often articulation that takes the form of discussion, writing, or private reflection. Sometimes there is critique, as it is brought into conversation with other performances, questions, theory, judgments, and a desire to learn. Somewhere in there is the thing we are trying to figure out. For all its inadequacies, language is our primary tool for this purpose. Within the language I have available to me, I find the most utility in a style that switches between distinctly different writing voices: the scholar and the performer. The two voices cannot help but occasionally blend in support of common goals, but as a general guideline I will indicate any such deliberate switch by using italics for pieces of performative writing. Wherever poetic recapitulation seems appropriate, this voice may appear. Unless otherwise indicated, the italicized writing is my own. I offer it as evidence, data; as information to further serious critique. The performer in me does not apologize for turning to poetics, metaphor, sentiment, and desire. The scholar just wrote that sentence to offer justification for an absent apology, that is why it was not in italics. The irony is not lost on any part of me, and yes, this would be an example of what happens when those two voices combine. The paradox of writing as documentary evidence is that it can never be the thing it describes; it becomes its own performance, a reconstitution of memory with every retelling. The following chapter breakdowns each begin with the principle in question, written exactly as they appear in Burning Man’s official literature: Chapter 1: Radical Inclusion. Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community. It is easy to derive a surface reading of “Radical Inclusion” that attends to real and present problems in its formative culture that Burning Man seeks to address. Starting in 2011, the event grew in popularity so much that ticket demand exceeded supply, and that disparity has increased each year since this initial ticket sell-out. The Burning Man Organization, which I will subsequently refer to by the popular term, the “Org,” has devoted extensive resources to a very public struggle to welcome all wouldbe participants while abiding by federal, state, and local restrictions on

18 Introduction population control and ecological impact. However, to presume that responsibility for practicing “inclusion” begins and ends with attendance numbers would be to ignore the overall spirit of all ten principles, which invite radical reinterpretation, subversion, creative action, and outright rejection as they hold space for responses ranging from ratification to dissent. In at least one case, the principle of Radical Inclusion has been rewritten by the founders of a South African Regional Burn, “AfrikaBurn,” to foreground the need for focused, organized action to radically shift the demographics of Burner culture. Taking “radical” as an invitation to re-imagine potential interpretations of inclusion, Chapter 1 sets up a dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion both inside and outside of Black Rock City to establish a series of questions around difference. If heterotopia as a space of otherness must assume an exclusion zone, then what other barriers are formed around sites of inclusion versus exclusion within that heterotopia? If a Temporary Autonomous Zone relies on autonomous individuals to bring it into existence, do those individuals exercise freedom through self-affirmation, or is it possible to realize new modes of autonomy by resisting the need to assert a recognizable self? Drawing largely upon Bakhtin’s theories of monologic, dialogic, and heteroglossia as rhetorical devices to frame the behavior of bodies inside and outside of heterotopia, I explore a self that is bound by monologic ideology as its own exclusion zone. It is bound, even if change is desired, to repeat different versions of itself in order to resolve its own narrative; to include only that which it can bring into its system of knowing. Within a heterotopia such as Black Rock City, however, the de-centered self is less obligated to resolve what is unfamiliar into what is known, and therefore evolves toward heteroglossia because it has access to voices that are not its own. Radical Inclusion posits a self that includes the unknown or limitless other. A self-in-limitlessness is one capable of behaving in ways previously unimagined and rehearsing the ability to change. A changing society must begin with the changing individuals who perform that society, and heterotopia is a place where individuals might embody new ways of valuemaking. This is not to suggest that one can only change society by stepping outside of it, solving its problems, then returning armed with solutions to be implemented. Rather, one can rehearse how to act in the unknown without presuming a recognizable outcome. The main case study for this chapter employs a heterotopia of the Black Rock City diaspora; a site-specific arts event produced by the Artichoke Project and designed by Burning Man Temple artist David Best. Best garnered a wealth of resources in Derry, Northern Ireland, and took Radical Inclusion to another level by not only including a new community of participants in the long reach of Burning Man art, but also by creating a space

Introduction 19 where two factions of a deeply divided population were able to embody the experience of including each other. Chapter 2: Gifting. Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value. This section picks up a similar thread to Chapter 1 by assuming a position that gifting offers individuals the chance to temporarily undo the alienating impulses of capitalism by practicing behavior that does not anticipate reciprocity. Gifting does not assign value to goods being exchanged, but to the act of giving itself. This principle does not attempt to offer a substitute for capitalism in the default world—such a practice could not be sustained for very long outside of a temporary community—but every gifting act at Burning Man holds a temporary space where capitalism is absent. In these conditions, individuals move toward doing rather than having. Both case studies in this chapter, “The Bipolar Express” and “Kaisa,” offer reason to believe that gifting is one principle that can easily traverse the difference between Burning Man and the default world. They describe mutually beneficial connections, founded in and fortified by gifting, that reinforce values formed in the gifting act both inside and outside an event framed by the Ten Principles. The realization that gifting moments denormalize habitual patterns to accumulate capital, while still yielding their own satisfactory returns, can encourage similar behavior in many other circumstances. Resistance to habits that fuel increasing alienation are cultural moments of arrest that allow bodies to change. Both of these case studies are deeply personal, yet I had little to do with what transpires in their stories. I draw upon the descriptions and reflections of others to examine humans engaging in different ways of forming relationships that grow through a desire to move toward the other, in which things given do not register as things gained or lost. I chose them because they are rare gems in the complicated search for examples in which small, unfamiliar gestures become life-changing habits that significantly alter the course of entire communities both inside and outside of heterotopia. In a much more dispersed format, with very different motivations and results, there was the initial shock and then the: “Ah, of course … that makes sense” aspect to such phenomena as the explosion of gifting following the announcement that there would be no official Burning Man 2020. Social media sites such as “Burning Man Gifting Guild” provided a way for thousands of burners to connect and offer their creative efforts to each other. It quickly became obvious that burners still craved the usual outlet for their gifting impulses but the ritual time and place in the desert for these exchanges had suddenly disappeared. They had to adapt, and they did not disappoint.

20 Introduction Chapter 3: Decommodification. In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience. The principle of gifting flows naturally into notions of decommodification. All ten principles of Burning Man, while not exactly enforced as rules for participating, offer ideals that attempt to lay groundwork for alternatives to familiar society. Even though many would argue that the event itself has been commodified past the point of no return—and I often concur with many such complaints—it is still an individual’s choice whether or not to perform their interpretation of decommodification once they enter the gates. The cancellation of Burning Man in 2020, the first time since 1986, threw ideas of commodification into a tailspin. No tickets to sell, no trash fence to separate the inside from the outside, nothing to covet beyond perhaps the ability for some participants to take a rogue trip out to the high desert while others stayed behind. Those who threw caution to the wind and headed to the desert anyway became a target for a shedload of on-line hate. As anyone could have expected, the frustrations of our early pandemic days were thoroughly, excessively, ventilated on social media. Just as Burning Man tended to mimic Carnivale in prior years—a temporary rebellion against the spectacle of capitalism for just over a week—the Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter backlash of 2020 flared up and burnt out within roughly the same time. Arguments and accusations rocketed back and forth. People wrote things they would NEVER say to each other in person on the playa. I went out there with my partner for 24 hours and stayed far, far away from all the other humans, but when I mentioned afterwards on social media that it was actually kind of nice to hang on the playa without paying that huge price tag, marveling at what other people had managed to bring in the way of smaller-scale gifts of creativity, even I was shocked by the resulting vitriol. It became clear to me how much the pandemic was changing us. Ironically, there were no reports of infections linked to the 2020 Rogue burn; it was the next officially sanctioned burn in 2022 where COVID spread like wildfire. The primary case study for this chapter, however, is not the pandemic, the 2020 Rogue Burn or the 2021 Renegade Burn. These events are so drastically and directly rooted in opposition toward a specific other that I might as well call the other the enemy, and decommodification is most effective when it is not so reactionary. While its process may begin by squaring up to an enemy, the battle will fire up and fizzle out quickly if it remains in the realm of us-against-them. The more creative, affectionate, playful disruptions are the ones that help us to change even when we don’t think we should or are ready to do so.

Introduction 21 Otto Von Danger’s “Burn Wall Street” interactive installation, looks at the human seriousness of play as an alternative form of resistance. Using such precedents as détournment and dérive, techniques developed and popularized by Situationist International and Cacophony Society, among others, this case study unpacks ways to broaden notions of revolutionary action offered by ludic modalities. The opportunity to interact in a collectively understood “game” with forces of oppression, particularly knowing that the large-scale sites of revolution are destined for spectacular incineration, provides unique moments in which participants need not behave habitually. Individuals might perform creative ways to diminish the threat of oppression—in this case, predatory financial institutions—without fear of repercussion. While these acts do not exactly solidify specific solutions to fix real-world problems, they do open up a space in which fear is removed from symbols of power. In that space, individuals have room to imagine alternatives and embody the memory of creative engagement within circumstances that pose no direct threat. Chapter 4: Radical Self-Reliance. Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources. Chapter 5: Radical Self-expression. Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient. There has been extensive attention to the personal and social process of identification in the field of Performance Studies, and I believe this is based on widely held assumptions that performance is first and foremost a form of self-expression. The intention behind performance is often to raise questions or make statements about what it means to identify—individually and socially—but because identification generally takes the form of negation, its process strips self-expression down to a process of revealing a “true” self, or accessing a unique core of selfhood that arrests the potential to change. In this case social change has little room to negotiate territory that has not yet been imagined. As the last of three principles that invoke the term “radical,” I again turn to this as a caveat to suggest, in the simplest of phrasing, that traditional self-expression often reinforces difference, while radical self-expression opens it out. Both case studies that I analyze in this chapter invoke some sense of sacrifice, whether it is artists performing symbolic sacrifice, or selves making an actual sacrifice in the form of sacrificing the ego. One example, a non-traditional performance piece by Keith Hennessy, takes the discussion outside of Burning Man into contemporary theatrical space, questioning how a theatrical representation of sacrifice might merge into self-sacrifice outside of heterotopia by mingling with pain and vulnerability. My other study, Black Rock City’s 2012 “Man Burn,” deals with a

22 Introduction more direct sacrifice by an entire community that participates in the transformation of an elaborate art object into ash, creating a safe space for individuals to undergo the aggressive act of deliberately burning something to which they have assigned intensely personal meaning. To admit that burning the central sculpture of Black Rock city is more of a release than a loss is to acknowledge that sacrificing the ego releases the self into being rather than appearing. Chapter 6: Communal Effort. Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote, and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction. While many possible interpretations could be argued for the principle of communal effort, my attention as a Performance Studies scholar and practitioner naturally gravitates toward the notion of spaces for art, collaboration, and cooperation. This statement can easily be read as a plea to feel free to interact and express yourself, as long as you do not impede anyone else’s ability to do so. In the default world, I would refer to this promotion and protection of expression as “holding space” for performance to happen in relative safety. In Black Rock City, I like to think of this as an invitation to take advantage of the prolific, creative spaces and challenge yourself to experience forms of invention in which you may not otherwise have the privilege to partake. It is not just a call to make original art while on the playa, but to find new ways of accessing and participating in meaningful encounters. The case study in this chapter is one in which I directly participated, and plan to continue doing so as a yearly volunteer, with a continual attunement to its volition to keep evolving; the “Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet Camp.” It is worth noting that this is considered the earliest continuous theme camp at Burning Man, founded in 1999. In their words, “This group is dedicated to facilitating connections at the Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet. It has become the largest company on the BURNDAC that never charges money for its services. Instead, Costco relies on a trade-in policy to maintain its inventory of used and dusty soulmates, which it then gives away (for free) to other parts of its own inventory.” Costco Camp holds the space for burners not only to engage in the earnest process of finding a soul-mate, but to experience connections they may find by talking with others who they would not otherwise meet, or under alternate circumstances, might dismiss without a second thought. Chapter 7: Civic Responsibility. We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state, and federal laws.

Introduction 23 The Playa is patrolled by the nonviolent, conflict-resolution trained Black Rock City Rangers, but it is also patrolled by multiple federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. For an event of this size and scope, it is no surprise that its organizers feel the need to afford themselves some protection by stating the obvious. While Black Rock City is a Temporary Autonomous Zone, that concept does not extend from the conceptual to the legal. Tensions often run high between burners and law enforcement, for it is a widely held opinion that the presence of law enforcement is far more oriented toward entrapping those who are unfamiliar with their civil rights than with protecting and serving the community. Chapter 7 returns the discussion to the efficacy of ludic behavior as a tool for bringing new strategies into play in efforts to challenge a faltering system but takes play one step further by introducing more serious risk. Encounters with Law enforcement do not generally include an invitation to play, and even slight missteps can have dire consequences. But while the division between “us and them” is an omnipresent specter, this has often temporarily crumbled away in moments within which individuals have risked their safety by reaching toward law enforcement officers in an attitude of play, and officers have risked their relative security by accepting the game. Two case studies, a “Reclaim the Streets” activist performance from 1996 and a personal law enforcement encounter at Burning Man 2012, bring the tales of two ludic choices into conversation, the important distinction being that one event took place on a busy, public motorway in England while the other took place in Black Rock City. The juxtaposition of these cases raises interesting questions around Law Enforcement performing duties in familiar ideological circumstances versus how they may engage with participants differently in an unfamiliar culture, which they themselves must be complicit in creating. A fascinating phenomenon occurred during the 2021 Renegade Burn that made me rethink the entire relationship between Law Enforcement and burners, mainly in the form of an oft-repeated phrase from the Bureau of Land Management, “Be safe! Enjoy your federal land!” and the burner response, “Thank you so much for looking out for us!” Lots of smiles, palpable absence of agitation when conflict occurred, an underlying desire for peaceful resolution. I have never resented the presence of local, state, and federal officials, but I had always felt the tension in prior years. 2021 was the first time I glimpsed such willing humanity, easily offered and gratefully received. Chapter 8: Leaving No Trace. Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them. Leaving no trace in almost any situation is an ideal that can never be fully realized in practice; even attempting to avoid leaving obvious,

24 Introduction physical traces could be considered an exercise in futility. As such, this principle must be read with a wide caveat; it is usually understood to mean that burners must take care of Black Rock City and do their best to leave it in a condition as closely as possible resembling its pre-event state. Burners are expected to pack out all their trash and to pick up after others who might have neglected to do so. However, while Burning Man professes to be the largest leave-no-trace event in the world, it does not claim to be a sustainable event. Efforts to educate burners on ethical, green practices are ongoing, but there are few mechanisms in place to enforce such behavior via sanctions or other practical consequences. The exception would be a number of large-scale theme camps that are no longer welcome, due to treating Black Rock City disrespectfully, but the individuals in these former camps can easily return even if their camp has been banned. It is difficult to reconcile this culture, so drenched in excess, as one that aspires to leave no trace. While purchase and exchange of goods and services is banned within the city, the event traditionally depends upon excessive consumption that takes place outside its spatial limits and in advance of its temporal limits. As such, the illusory world of living without commercial transactions for one week may well contribute to leaving a significantly larger trace, even if that impact is felt within the landfills of Northern Nevada as opposed to the playa itself. However, because my intent is to move beyond surface readings of the Ten Principles and use them to frame possibilities for a wide range of opportunities to effect change, this might be an opportunity to interrogate the possible effects of individuals practicing unfamiliar ecological behavior for a particular duration. It is rare for the contemporary capitalist to go an entire week without buying something that will generate waste and to personally transport trash much farther than to a nearby curb or dumpster in order to dispose of it. A society accustomed to impulsive consumption, which often serves as a form of validation, must consider different behavior when that option is not available; creative activity can be a viable alternative in the absence of habits that substantiate the symbolic value of accumulation. I employ two case studies for this inquiry, examples that represent contrasting versions of Foucauldian heterotopias. The first is the temporal heterotopia—Black Rock City—that happens outside of time, and the second is the planned community of the Sea Ranch, a coastal Californian community that exists as a permanent space of otherness. They are both heterotopias that offer little opportunity to engage in commercial transactions, and both in their own way aspire to leave no disruptive trace on the environment. While the production of both of these spaces relies on capitalist accumulation and its inevitable waste-generation, they do provide brief respites from the cycle of means and ends, time in which behavior focuses on being rather than accumulating.

Introduction 25 Chapter 9: Participation. Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart. This chapter is a slight departure from previous arguments, many of which center on heterotopia as a “safe” space for artists to create in a supportive community and for individuals to depart from ingrained patterns that respond to monologic authority. Even a community that is fiercely devoted to supporting radical participation can make no guarantees that preclude negative repercussions. As in any social space, actions involve varying levels of risk, and risk is of course essentially unstable. Even the best of intentions can result in unexpected and unwelcome twists; while burners love their playa home, few would claim that it is a space of absolute, unrelenting joy. Sometimes it works differently, inviting participation only to answer it with wholly unexpected challenges. To address the contradictory nature of these unforeseen challenges, I employ the performative language of “ghosts” to a case study that examines the Black Rock City Temple Burn, the final act to a week-long build-up, as a space rife with potential for the inexplicable and the unanticipated to rupture expectations for a gentle or predictably cathartic ending to Burning Man. “Ghost” as a critical term has received considerable attention in the field of Performance Studies due to its uncanny ability to signify the phenomenon of doubling. When something is simultaneously there and not there, absolutely present while profoundly absent, or both eternal and always already gone, the poetic language of specters feels like an effective frame. Chapter 10: Immediacy. Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience. The principle of immediacy seems a perfect inroad to bring a discussion that spans vastly different meta-ideological points of view into its most basic elements, to employ a micro-lens that focuses on the matter that intimately affects every principle but has no specific agenda. Concepts of the carnivalesque, of sensing bodies in heterotopic space, and radical change via de-centered selfhood thread through every chapter of this book. However, there is one specific, fundamental aspect of Black Rock City that is present at all times, even if it is not always the primary catalyst in facilitating embodied change, that affects every body that enters its space and contends with its terms. It is the omnipresent, simultaneously infuriating and comforting, playa dust. Dust is the element that persists interminably on the

26 Introduction playa, relentless in its determination to adhere to every object that enters its domain. Whether its state is near-total saturation of the air, as is common during storms, or a subtle skin coating when all is calm, there is no avoiding its profoundly strange quality of merging bodies with their surroundings. The case study in this chapter is a piece of narrative writing, an experience that attests to notions of otherness that go beyond familiar impulses to find identity in difference. “Becoming Marionette” is the story of a woman who endured severe trauma; injury that seemed able to find its relief only through an unwitting process of total self-abandonment. While unmaking difference between self and other can be a progressive destabilization of ego, this example describes a human body that temporarily relied on the absence of an observing self in order to perform its perceived duties within conditions it could not internalize. Her narrative indicates that she was able to convince everyone with her performance as a representation of selfhood; as a sensing, feeling, capable human being, but that her observable actions were no more than mirrors in which others could recognize their own unchanging selves. Though her flesh could feel, she stopped short of processing feeling through familiar systems of signification as a defense mechanism against the stories that haptic memory could unveil. It is impossible to know how long she could have otherwise sustained such an existence, but it is clear that this unconscious, protective technique ended in a moment when the sensation of playa dust on her skin refused to allow her withdrawal into a state of otherness within which she had long found solace. This final chapter on immediacy connects every argument that precedes it, the evidence that distills the specific philosophy of Black Rock City’s heterotopia, into the sensory experience of what it feels like to be there (Figures 0.1 and 0.2).

Figure 0.1 Aerial view of Black Rock City. Photo credit: Huybert van de Stadt, 2015.

Introduction 27

Figure 0.2 Lemur and Stardust shriek with laughter. Photo credit: Dan Perlea, 2015.

Notes 1 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 90. 2 Burning Man as an ongoing project is year-round and world-wide, but for the purpose of this project, heterotopia should be taken to mean Black Rock City specifically. 3 “Burning Man Festival Draws Record Attendance,” CBS Sacramento, http:// sacramento.cbslocal.com/2011/09/05/burning-man-festival-draws-recordattendance/. 4 In 1997, Burning Man took place on private land, the Hualapai Playa. Because of the difficult permit process, however, the event returned to the Black Rock Desert the following year. 5 For a complete list of registered events for 2014, see: “Official Burning Man Website,” http://playaevents.burningman.com/2014/playa_events/1/. 6 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 30–31. 7 Michel Foucault, “Of other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miscowiec, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité (October, 1984): 7. 8 Foucault, “Of other Spaces,” 7. 9 Robert J. Topinka, “Foucault, Borges, and Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces,” in Foucault Studies, No. 9 (September 2010): 56. 10 It should be noted that “Of Other Spaces” is based on a lecture that Foucault gave in 1967, which he did not review for publication until 1984. 11 Topinka, “Foucault, Borges, and Heterotopia,” 58.

28 Introduction 12 Michel Foucault, The Order of things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xviii. 13 Topinka, “Foucault, Borges, and Heterotopia,” 54. 14 Topinka, “Foucault, Borges, and Heterotopia,” 70. 15 Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 112. 16 Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 188. 17 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), 127. 18 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, ed Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xliii. 19 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970), Thesis 161.

1

Radical Inclusion Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (Macbeth Act 5 Scene 5) I think that if you ask first and it’s okay, you should give away all the hugs and stickers and cupcakes that you have because giving is better than having. (My seven-year-old daughter)

It is difficult to try and capture the essence of a Temple Burn, the epitome of Burning Man’s first principle of Radical Inclusion, in writing. The experience of it is as comforting as it is excruciating. The ritual is as weird as it is essential. Sometimes it comes up short, sometimes it’s energizing, and sometimes, it is a really lovely story: September 16, 2017, this year’s Temple Burn: I’ve had a tough time decompressing this year. Has it really been almost two weeks since we watched the Temple burn? It’s been a tailspin of driving, packing, moving, fixing up the house, driving more, packing more … and we haven’t even gotten our stuff from Burbank yet. Our gear is still piled in my parents’ garage (bless them) in a heap of playa dust. I’ve been sleeping on a camp cot for weeks. My partner is still in San Francisco, after basically driving straight through from the playa into 14-hour work days. But he comes home tomorrow, YAY!! Fell into bed last night at 9:30, but woke up at 1:30 and haven’t been able to get back to sleep. I guess my brain is buzzing too hard, anxiety tossed about with excitement, full of questions, concerns, hopes, and one beautiful memory. This year’s Temple Burn.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-2

30  Radical Inclusion We very nearly missed it. Those of you who were there will never forget the dust storm that hit on Friday night before the Man Burn, and those who weren’t there … I can never do it justice in words. Since 2000, I’ve never seen anything so fierce, overwhelming, sublime, and beautiful. A true reminder that nature is capable of tearing us limb from limb any time she chooses. Our young daughters hunkered down under a thick blanket while Tijuana and I held onto our shelter with all our strength, a geodesic dome that must weigh well over a thousand pounds, but managed to shift about ten feet in a storm that lasted for what seemed like hours but was probably only about ten minutes … I truly have no idea because time somehow shifted at that point. In a rush of pure adrenaline, we made it through the chaos. And then I fell apart. But I always fall apart at Burning Man. I’ve come to expect it, to embrace it, to know that the playa will hold that space for us all to run the gamut of emotions that we spend the rest of the year stuffing down and ignoring in order to get on with the business of life. The girls really, really wanted to go home the following day. We managed to get out and see the Man burn that night, but none of us (our family) had connected with the structure that year and it felt superficial; spectacle. We went to bed early and spent the next day assessing damage and preparing to depart early. Our camp mate’s yurt had literally blown away with all his possessions in it. Our trusty tent, aka the “playa palace” had been shredded into a twisted mess of broken poles and torn fabric, thankfully we had the dome this year and were only using the tent for storage! Our shit was everywhere, no point in trying to reorganize it. Our daughters helped us pack up Saturday, and we went to bed early again, planning to disassemble the dome and leave early Sunday morning. But the prospect of missing the Temple Burn weighed heavily on us, and as we pulled apart the steel struts of the dome, Tijuana and I finally admitted to each other that we really, really wanted to stay. I’d missed a few Temple Burns before this one, due to work and school schedules, etc., and I knew that I would feel incomplete without it. We had to have a deep talk with E and J (then 9 and 10 years old, three burns under their little belts), because they were tired and feeling defeated and didn’t want to face what they had come to regard as the “sad” part of Burning Man. They knew many people would be crying, mourning, and falling apart in their release. And though we try to instill in them the importance of giving room to your sadness and processing the feelings society deems unpleasant, they still learn the unfortunate lessons from their peers and protectors that we must always try to put on a brave smile. Somehow, we convinced them that it’s okay to share the sad parts of yourself with your people, that this was a unique place where you can

Radical Inclusion 31 move through the darkness without being consumed by it. In a stroke of inspiration, Tijuana and I simultaneously invoked the movie “Inside Out,” where the little heroine realizes she cannot heal her wounds without acknowledging the importance of Sadness. Our daughters agreed to stay for the final burn. A small group from our camp headed out to the Temple Burn together, some on bikes, and some of us huddled in blankets on our art car. We wrote notes to our friends and family who had passed, said silent prayers, and took our places amongst the crowd to snuggle and lean on each other in every possible way. In a beautiful act of random chance, David Best, the artist behind so many of our exquisite Temples, strolled by and greeted us. And then it burned. The most beautiful burn I have ever seen on the playa. All I could feel was love. Deep, peaceful, soul-shaking love. It grew so warm that we had to cover our faces and cuddle even closer. I nearly laughed out loud with joy. We held our friends who were crying, we held each other fast, we held our hearts out, broken wide-open with gratitude and the infinite blessings raining down on us even harder than the dust storm that had hit before. There are few moments in life that we can call absolute perfection; this was one I’ll never forget. E was too cold to stay for a perimeter walk as the flames subsided into embers, so we took her back to the art car and bundled her up with blankets as J stayed with our camp mates to place the notes we had all written upon the blazing hot pyre. I later heard the story, from our camp mate, of a firefighter who reached out to our girl when she wanted to place the note she had written to our departed friend Alan on the embers, but couldn’t get close enough due to the heat: He said, “Can I put that in the fire for you? I don’t feel the heat because of this gear I’m wearing.” She said no, she wanted to put it in herself. So he turned his back to the heat, gently covered her with his jacket, and together they slowly backed into the remains of the temple until she was close enough to place the note to Alan in the right spot. Then he walked her back to our friends, our chosen family, and they all embraced. We rode home in a toasty-warm puddle of blankets and slept under the stars that night. It was the coldest night of the week, but I stayed warm in the embrace of my daughters, the bravest souls I’ve ever known. The ones who gifted us their trust even in the face of extreme fear and fatigue. I wish I could find that firefighter and thank him, but I’m sure the memory is just as precious to him as it is to me in the retelling. I wish that our entire camp, our family, had been with us for the final burn, but they were absolutely there in our hearts. As were the souls we said goodbye to, as we gave space to our grief.

32  Radical Inclusion Exodus was excruciating; eight hours in line just to get to the road that would then take us several more hours to get back to our default home. If we had left early, we would have avoided it, had a chance to sleep, to unpack with some actual planning … but would I do it again? ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY. I will never miss a Temple Burn again. It’s a place—for many of us, the only place—where we offer our release as a gift to our community instead of a burden to be borne or avoided. I intend to take this insight into the rest of my life and arrest the insanity of stuffing my emotions into a convenient corner so that I can put on that brave smile. True bravery can be found in tearing off that mask-smile and greeting the world with an open heart. Because once the heart breaks open, it’s ready to receive everything; the love, the joy, the pain, the sorrow, the rough edges that batter the soul yet make it stronger in its fullness. There is nothing to be afraid of (Figure 1.1). As a space of literal as well as conceptual otherness, Burning Man assumes an exclusion zone, the boundary that defines where the default world ends and Black Rock City begins. It is bound by linear time as well as geographical space, where one must obtain a ticket and cross a threshold in order to participate. Radical Inclusion in the sense of actual attendance extends only to those who follow predetermined procedures. However, a deeper reading of the principle of Radical Inclusion suggests that it is not a ticketing policy, but an invitation to join an open dialogue and deconstruct one’s own relationship to perceived social structures by participating in an

Figure 1.1  Temple Burn 2016. Photo credit: Huybert van de Stadt.

Radical Inclusion 33 alternative community, or just sharing a moment around a beautiful fire without fighting. In both surface-level and in-depth interpretations, the Principle of Radical Inclusion seems well-intentioned but flawed; as with any ideal, it cannot represent the reality of a world that leans toward locating the self through identification forged in separation from that which it is not. The principle works as a basic frame, however, because its wording establishes a vocabulary concerned with difference: inclusion versus exclusion, unknown (stranger) versus known (familiar). If this principle is literally interpreted to mean that anyone can attend the event, this must be immediately qualified by the fact that participants must be able to afford it. The 2022 price was $575 plus taxes and vehicle fees of $150, as well as taking time away from responsibilities in the default world, and one must have access to adequate emotional, physical, and material resources to participate. These significant problems are addressed more fully in subsequent chapters of this book, where issues around cultural, socioeconomic, ethnic, and class systems affect participation in the Black Rock City burn as well as Regional burns. For example, AfrikaBurn’s recasting of Radical Inclusion, according to their website at afrikaburn.org, states: “Everyone should be able to be a part of AfrikaBurn. As an intentional community, committed to inventing the world anew, we actively pursue mechanisms to address imbalances and overcome barriers to participation, especially in light of past, current and systemic injustice.” Examination of such injustices is crucial to curating a deeper understanding of Radical Inclusion and what that might mean: not only to those who intentionally strive to take part in the movement but also to communities to which Burners must reach out if they truly want to realize the potential for the Ten Principles to ripple outward into systemic change that includes previous outliers. There is no room within “inclusion” for that which requires individuals to have a bevy of resources at their disposal in order to be accepted, to make space for those who offer rich and nuanced experience but do not possess a well-trodden path of communication. New and radical ideas around talking to each other, including each other, must be employed. For now, we will drill down into the core philosophy of Radical Inclusion by way of a deep dive into one case study, for we are just beginning our adventure through the Ten Principles. If the Principle of Radical Inclusion is taken to mean that Burning Man welcomes everyone who can afford a ticket as well as travel costs, then it holds true until one considers the 2011 ticket debacle. One month prior to the 2011 event, tickets for Burning Man sold out for the first time. The cap had been set at 50,000 tickets, and in an unprecedented rush, every last ticket was purchased, leaving thousands of would-be participants empty-handed and spawning

34  Radical Inclusion a rampant secondary market for scalpers. “Inclusion” became suddenly and dramatically limited to those who could afford a wildly inflated ticket price, figure out a way to sneak in, or were well-connected enough to score a “gift” ticket.1 In an effort to avoid a repeat of the 2011 ticket disaster, the Org decided to employ a lottery system for 2012 ticket sales. Hopefuls could enter their credit card information and requests for one or two tickets into a pool, from which the “winners” would be drawn. Between January 31 and February 1, 2012, winners were selected at random from over 80,000 entrants, and the results confirmed what might have logically been expected; a substantial percentage of veteran burners as well as first-timers were left without tickets.2 Andie Grace, Burning Man’s Communications Manager, echoed the concerns of many in the statement: “Even people who did get tickets aren’t cheering right now, since so many of their camps and friends are standing out in the cold. Entire groups are worried they’ll have to scrap all their plans. Burning Man is a participatory and collaborative event, and many collaborations are perilously close to falling apart.” With no miraculous solution on the table, Radical Inclusion at Burning Man crept perilously close to the reality of inclusion in the default world. It became limited to those with the exceptional means, be that money, connections, luck, or resourcefulness. Grace concedes as much: We continue to welcome the stranger. But we can’t work so hard to welcome new Burners to BRC that it comes at the expense of those who have and will make the event what it has been. Radical Inclusion is the first principle, but faced with a Burning Man event that is limited in population, Civic Responsibility and Communal Effort dictate that we endeavor to radically include those who create Burning Man in the first place. There are, after all, Ten Principles, not just the one.3 As sincerely sorry as the Burning Man organization must have been, Radical Inclusion eventually succumbed to one of the hard realities of a market economy. When demand outstrips supply, there will inevitably be those left wanting. As of Burning Man 2022, the Org has yet to come up with a solution that delivers on its principle to include all who wish to participate. A conceptual interpretation of Radical Inclusion is far more complicated than issues around attendance, but still employs frames that create exclusion zones; it would be difficult to talk about inclusion without acknowledging that which it is not. If, as I assert, Burning Man is a heterotopia, a space of otherness, it must be a space apart from something that

Radical Inclusion 35 it is not. Individual inclusion inside this space of otherness, however, does not necessarily require exclusion of the space outside it. Individuals moving through a space of otherness may embody its alternative logic or illogic without abandoning the familiar. Within the co-presenting of individuals in deliberate pursuit of opportunities to change, dominant ideologies are not so much left behind as they are opened out into the unfamiliar. Lacan argues that unfamiliar conditions cause individuals anxiety in their figurative collision with the familiar: “When you are shown a new perspective, in a manner which is decentered in relation to your experience, there’s always a shift whereby you try to recover your balance, the habitual center of your point of view.”4 This is arguably the case for encounters in daily life when one must confront experience that radically contradicts one’s own sense of logic or experiential reality. Communication of alternate perspectives within the context of habitual space, where one is in constant negotiation with a familiar, dominant ideology, must negotiate both personal horizons and social conditions as individuals process levels of rejection, acceptance, or both, in a manner that accepts new information—often with certain caveats—or rejects it as impossible to reconcile. However, while individuals may be more likely to qualify heavily or outright deny diverging points of view when immersed in well-known and well-worn paths, they may conversely incline toward accepting information that changes them if encountered under conditions that are profoundly strange. The boundaries fashioned by cultures are dynamic and complex, with ideologies that shift and slip and only become dangerous when they claim to represent a fixed truth, which they often do. Failure to acknowledge that there is no underlying truth that exists only within that culture itself is to ignore the inherent impossibility of ideology as absolute. Attempts to define and critique particular ideologies often prove futile unless they take into account ideology’s central role in the production of culture and its propensity to accept, reproduce, and sell itself in order to counter the threat of individuals who seek to examine possibilities outside themselves. Althusser claims that there can be no true escape from ideology without transcending it: It is impossible for any form of ideological consciousness to contain in itself, through its own internal dialectic, an escape from itself, that, strictly speaking, there is no dialectic of consciousness: no dialectic of consciousness which could reach reality itself by virtue of its own contradictions; in short, there can be no “phenomenology” in the Hegelian sense, for consciousness does not accede to the real through its own internal development, but by the radical discovery of what is other than itself.5

36  Radical Inclusion By this argument, an essential element of change must be the self’s inclusion of the other, a radical prospect indeed. A useful parallel to this concept is Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic communication. Though Bakhtin worked primarily in literary criticism, his theories on the monologic, the dialogic, heteroglossia, the chronotope, and the carnivalesque can be utilized in terms that help to untangle the complex forces that constitute social structures. In this example, where there can be no escape from an ideology while one is bound to behave contingent to its structures, immanent ideology functions like the monologic author of a novel. In the monologic novel, even if characters undergo conflicts with each other and argue different points, their voices are still inflected through the singular voice of the monologic author. Their interactions cannot produce anything new because their collective voice is not in conversation with others; the author has not created characters with access to experience outside their own. In the realm of ideology, individuals may possess radically different opinions and frames of reference, but any interaction within their society will inevitably respond to its ideology, not necessarily by agreeing with it but always in relation to it. In Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic novel, the characters, setting, action, and even the narrator are not restricted by an overwhelming authorial voice, but allowed to bring entire, unfamiliar worlds to bear in their narratives. Their conflicts and outcomes are not required to serve a closed vision; they need never to be finished. In order for society to imitate this level of freedom, individuals must escape the authorial voice of familiar ideology by agreeing to radically include the other. However, if Lacan is correct in claiming that individuals tend to cling to habitual points of view when alternate perspectives knock them off-center, then habits must be broken before individuals can change in ways not yet imagined. As previously noted, Raymond Williams explains in “Structures of Feeling” that all reaction is processed as a feeling before it influences behavior. The sensing, feeling body is not just a single human form but also the body of a whole culture, whose habits are reified through repetition. Society’s repetitive performance of passing symbolic value among its members—the appropriate behavior of attuned capitalists—is often so habitual that the sensing body has nothing new to react to; no unexpected feeling to process into modified circumstances. In an alternate space, however, breaking habits that prevent change might logically be far easier if that space has no use for the performance of those habits. If such a space allows individuals to rupture their own conditioned tendencies to exclude alternative perspectives, it might also be a place where one could seek something radically unknown by including the other. To bring the other and the self into inclusivity is not to know the other, for that would transform the other into the familiar. But the space of otherness where they come together is not

Radical Inclusion 37 constrained by monologic ideology; it holds space for dialogic communication where self and other both retain voices that are not predetermined. Burning Man cannot claim total freedom from ideology, after all every participant is expected to know the Ten Principles and even if they reject every one of them, they are still complicit in the production of a culture. Burning Man’s utility lies not in its openness, but in its strangeness. As a time-centered heterotopia, its culture can evolve unconditionally because it is never expected to resolve. Interactions do not presume pragmatic action or quantifiable outcomes, process is privileged over product, and creative acts generate sustenance for bodies that are nourished by their energy without consuming it. The culture of excess, which could not be sustained in the default world, never collapses within its own temporal space because it never seeks to justify itself. Bodies rehearse new behaviors. One is permitted to encounter the other without the need either to make sense of it or to abandon it. The processual reality of a space bound by time, however, is that ideological escape to this destination must precede some form of return; none of us can escape the timeline of our lives. But again, the escape into otherness never obligates an individual to shed its own origin story; rather, it removes that story from the closed system in which it has most likely served as an instrument for power concentration, and instead includes it in a generative dialogue. Bakhtin’s heteroglossia is an appropriate frame here because it expands on the concept of the dialogic to include defamiliarization of one’s own perspective within the act of dialogic communication. When an individual’s habitual perspective is resituated into conditions that do not encourage its ingrained performance, that perspective ceases to inflect communication, even if only temporarily. Via the absent metacognition of the observing self, not only is the individual present within otherness, but the self is made strange. Radical Inclusion of the other permits Radical Inclusion of the unfamiliar self, and it is this radically strange self that returns to its origins as a critical participant. Adorno claims that dominant ideologies do not impose themselves on potentially unique thought processes all at once, but rather slowly “immigrate” through perpetual socialization.6 Individuals who inhabit systems of intellectual freedom can become entrenched within their social conditions just as strongly as those who live in societies that openly censor them through sheer repetition and recognition of social behaviors. To reinforce and reproduce a dominant ideology, imitation must be rewarded and invention discouraged. However, invention is the natural state of the unfamiliar self; a heteroglossic body is open to voices of difference. Rather than return to the behaviors they once performed by habit, in effect holding up a mirror to a society accustomed to recognizing itself, the individual may include difference—radical combinations and recombinations

38  Radical Inclusion of familiar and unfamiliar—as they process the feelings that connect them to the world. The multiplicity of voices that combine to defamiliarize the self to find a path into ideological space that would otherwise exclude them, recasting the individual as critically aware participant rather than complicit mimic. When change is improvisatory and invention supersedes imitation—even within a single body, for that body is also in and of its culture—social change is no longer an impossible dialectics of ideology, but a creative act. The narratives in the following case study come from testimonials of those who were all involved in an extraordinary, and ongoing, act of Radical Inclusion. The Artichoke Project, an arts charity based in London,7 set in motion a force of art-making that moved across cultures, across continents, social structures and ideologies, and centuries-deep antagonism to produce a revolutionary movement that allowed intracultural and intercultural narratives and counternarratives to mingle and generate comparatively safe spaces in which habitual identification could give way to dialogic communication. The origins of my personal involvement with this project are peripheral, but for me it all began in a personal email exchange with an old friend that I had not seen for nearly two decades. In the Spring of 2014, Jennifer Smyth McKeever, currently president of the Chamber of Commerce in Derry, Northern Ireland, reached out to me because we had formed a lasting friendship in our late teens/early twenties, when we both lived in the small city of Hudson, Quebec. She told me that she and other local business associates were considering sponsoring David Best, the internationally acclaimed artist most well-known for his Burning Man Temple designs, to come to their community to design a site-specific Temple build and burn. She had researched his art and was intrigued, but held some strong reservations due to her community’s sectarian attitude toward bonfires, and feared that building and burning a giant temple might not be well received. Having experienced life-altering participation in Best’s Burning Man Temple projects for many years, however, I assured her that it could be much more of a bonding experience than a divisive one. I relayed some of my personal experiences of David Best’s art, how it often seemed to dissolve differences almost effortlessly, and she thanked me and said that she would bring my encouraging testimony to the table in their decision-making process. Though I was gratified by this, I was quite busy and distracted at the time, so the story slipped off my radar until nearly a year later. In March of 2015, the Northern Ireland Temple burn was all over the news, social networking sites, and YouTube, including BBC documentaries.8 The Burning Man principles have rippled outward countless times over decades, but I had never before seen anything quite so powerful. It began with the Artichoke Project and Burning Man partnering to bring

Radical Inclusion 39 four citizens of Derry to Burning Man 2014 as members of the Temple crew.9 The following blog entry on the Derry-Londonderry Temple website, written by crew member Darran McGlynn, provided eloquent detail: “Burning Man Is What You Make It” September 8, 2014 The offer of going to Burning Man, and being part of David Best’s Temple building crew, certainly seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was one that required just a few moments thought, before an intrepid “yes.” Not knowing how I was going to get to the Nevada desert, whom I would be with or how I would actually survive for over a week was, admittedly, slightly daunting. But I could feel already that the positives would outweigh the negatives. Luckily for me, Artichoke and Burning Man took care of the logistics of getting our four-strong contingent from Derry to Black Rock City, Nevada. From the first instance, being together in a team provided great relief to us all and respite from the task in hand. We had not anticipated, at this stage, how much we would be “looked out for” by Artichoke, Burning Man and Temple Crew. The first sensations of awe began on the bus journey to Nevada. The scenery. Everything was different. The old cliché that everything is bigger in America rang true. The mountains, lakes, trees, roadways and trains were on a different level to what I am used to—setting the tone for what was to come. Arriving at The Playa, Black Rock City, Nevada, the temporary city, was, after an almost ten hour bus journey, slightly overwhelming. It was hot and dusty. There was nothing here but other travelers and their kit— other Burners. I think at that point it becomes clear that to survive here, you need to be friends with your neighbor. Prior advice to read the first timers guide was racing around in my head. The landscape is vast and unforgiving. Blistering heat by day and frigid by dawn. Trees do not grow here to provide shelter. There is not so much as a shrub, a twig or a rock in sight. There is nowhere to buy provisions. Somehow it all seems fine. From the outset, the overwhelming aspect of Burning Man that seems to escape translation is the communal effort and responsibility that is shown by everybody there. It seems effortless. You can’t see it in the pictures. It reaches out to everyone. And we can all respond. We have it inside us too. They say that what you put in is what you get out—but prepare to be surprised what so many individuals focused on the same goal can achieve. It’s beyond what’s conceivable by any one of them. The principles of Burning Man are in effect all day, every day—a new adopted way of life, and it’s refreshing. It’s mentally stimulating and at

40  Radical Inclusion times psychically challenging—a combination that provides a healthy state of existence. Excitement is in the desert air. Generosity, inclusion and participation—the stranger is welcome here. Nobody is weird. An open mind is required to function and interact. Immediacy and initiative are recognized and rewarded with appreciation and warm smiles from all around. Gifting is the currency here. It is impossible to give too much at Burning Man, because what you will receive in return will exceed your expectations. It has been interesting to learn, and pertinent to the Derry event, that the guiding principles of BM are not a dictate of how people should act or be, but a reflection of the community’s ethos that has developed organically since the event’s inception, and written especially for the Regional Network of BM events. It is in all a relatively new concept, and nobody can feel “left out” or be “too late.” Burning Man is what you make it. Grasp it while you can. Express yourself radically. Your individual talents are a gift to others. With this spirit, the giver should always respect the rights and liberties of the recipient. Recognise your inner self and see through the barriers of our societies and leave no trace—70,000 people were here and there was not so much as one cigarette butt on the desert surface. The “Temple” holds a special place at BM. It is somehow the spiritual centre of an event centered on being in touch with yourself and others around you. It is absolutely a mutual space. It is for you and me. It is simultaneously yours and mine. Arriving on the site three days before its completion did not prepare me for the reactions of the opening night. The decorative wood panels that I placed on the days before seemed insignificant in the scale of the “Temple.” The gratitude that was extended toward me for my involvement was overwhelming. This is in essence the spirit of the event—that the effort of the individual is recognized in its ability to create something truly unbelievable in collaboration with others. David Best said to me one day about the “Temple,” “nothing you see here is perfect.” Nothing under the face of it was perfectly symmetrical. It involved over one hundred volunteers to construct it. But it is harmonious. Perfectly harmonious in its stance and with its recipients. The Temple is an emotionally charged environment. People relate to it in their own individual ways. Realisations and regrets are written on the walls. Grieving meditation and letting go takes place. Memorabilia to loved ones is left. I think the one thing in common for everybody is that they come to nurture a part of their souls that craves to be nurtured and cleansed. We all have it somewhere, instinctually. And it will all disappear into flame, ash and clouds of smoke. And memories.10

Radical Inclusion 41 Best’s intention in bringing this small crew to Burning Man was to expose them to the ethos embedded in such projects, effectively preparing them to facilitate the transition between making art in Black Rock City and welcoming members of their home community to participate. In an interview with the BBC, Best stated, “Our desire was to involve a cross-community workforce in making something beautiful that means something to everyone in the community.”11 McGlynn’s blog post suggests, particularly in his phrase, “see through the barriers of our societies,” that cross-communal involvement in a project where there are no mistakes, only creative acts, place value in shared action rather than resolution. Everyone is welcome to set their own intentions for what the event might mean, and their feelings cannot be wrong. Without the Temple burn, one might expect symmetry, goal-oriented accomplishment, or profound premises to be realized within a permanent structure. However, because the material relics of labor are quickly transformed into ash, one might expect no more than memories of working together. Even ideologically divided populations can include each other when the goal is not to finish an architectural representation of sectarianism, but simply to practice the art of designing, building, and burning, side-by-side. The next stage of the process, bringing David Best to Northern Ireland to design and direct the Derry-Londonderry Temple build at Waterside’s “Top of the Hill,” was communicated to me in a personal email from Jennifer Smyth McKeever on March 22, 2015: I got involved because the arts company that brought the Temple to Derry is called Artichoke and they have previously brought other really beautiful events here during 2012 and 2013, so I knew they could be trusted to produce something sensitive and amazing. But I really had my doubts about something being burned. In NI, we have a dreadful, violent and hateful relationship with bonfires and I really wasn’t sure if we—as a community—could handle the responsibility of burning as art. Also, let me describe the location: In Derry we have the mostly Catholic city side and the mostly Protestant Waterside, however, on both sides of the water you have these really bitter enclaves and where the Temple was built was situated above a part of the Waterside called Top of the Hill—a very republican enclave in the waterside, albeit with the most stunning views of the city below. Technically a “shared area” but definitely not somewhere you would choose to go and definitely a risky place to build a bonfire! However, David and his team were very careful to involve the whole community and it did indeed feel shared. He has his own crew but used talented local people as well as some disenfranchised individuals whose lives have been undoubtedly transformed by the experience.

42  Radical Inclusion We went to see it on Wednesday night and we took the kids and Norma and I was really amazed at how touching and emotional the experience was. People were encouraged to write anywhere, anything and anyway. People left photographs, newspaper articles, Mass cards. Their messages were beautiful—they asked for family members who had passed on to look out for them and their children, they wished for peace, for happiness, for the end to their troubles. Surprisingly, I didn’t see one message of sectarianism or hatefulness—not one. This in itself is unbelievable. There was the strangest feeling of spirituality, as you get when you bring a group of people together, and I found myself fighting back tears the whole time I was inside, though I couldn’t tell you why. My wish, though it stayed in my head, was that when it burned it would take our pointless, polarized politics with it. David Best was humble, hard of hearing and exhausted by the time we met him but had been touched by everyone he had met. He took people who have been ravaged by poverty and substance abuse and made them into builders. He got one of them a job as a carpenter. He was very clear that the art is built with the specific purpose of being burned. His vision is certainly one of fire as cathartic healer. He was very knowledgeable and respectful of Northern Ireland and its troubles, but he was very specific that the Temple was not about The Troubles, it was about people’s individual pain, love, grief, loss, hope. He had no grandiose vision of him as a hero, he was very grateful for the opportunity to be here and to have built something here. In addition to her own personal narrative, Jennifer also reached out to her community and encouraged them to share their experiences with me so that I could attempt to understand what it was like for the people there to take part in such an event. As a result, I received emails full of heartfelt commentary. One that stood out in particular for me was a message that Jennifer passed along to me from her colleague, Kathy: It began in September … an idea that captivated and inspired me, the notion of Temple, not just the physical sense of it but the symbolism of the project. I was enchanted. As the time for the project start grew near so too did my excitement, my poor family and work colleagues listened to me go on relentlessly about it since Christmas! I just had a feeling this was going to be something very special and I wasn’t disappointed. Travelling home from work on the week of the build I could see this enigmatic presence slowly grow and take over the landscape of my journey home. On my first visit I took my aunt who is 84yrs old. We met David Best on the way, he must be special, I have never seen my aunt star stuck!! David welcomed us both with hugs, a very friendly and open gentleman.

Radical Inclusion 43 On entering the site for the first time it was the smell of the wood that overtook my senses. The atmosphere was peaceful a complete sense of calm had settled over the building and its visitors. I was awestruck by the structure, its size and the level of detail. I am still overwhelmed at how everyone embraced the idea. People had written all over it with messages of love, loss and hurdles faced. My second visit was equally as inspiring. Filled with a sense of calm and peacefulness. David was there, a blind lady visiting the site was met by David, he led her to the structure placing her hands on it and describing what she was feeling, it was breathtakingly moving. What moved me most was the sense of community that existed between and around the visitors, consenting to come together but not knowing what to expect, willing to embrace the possibility that just by engaging with this, something will change. People leaving behind sadness and looking forward into a future with a real sense of positivity and hope. I wasn’t disappointed.:) :):)12 The overwhelming sentiment in these two personal passages, I believe, is that many participants in this event had desired change for as long as they could remember, but because their conflicts went back for so many years, it was difficult to imagine or remember a precedent for alternative ways of engaging with antagonistic forces. Even though the effort involved in maintaining barriers between embittered factions was painful and exhausting for everyone involved, they performed that struggle continuously because behavior had become habitual to the point of ritual. In a place where two drastically opposed social orders continue to commemorate their historical moments of symbolically defeating each other with successive, annual bonfires, it is difficult to imagine the unmaking of identities so strongly forged in difference. In Performing Disidentifications, Jose Munoz characterizes the paradoxical concept of “identity-in-difference” as “emergent disidentification,” or the formation of communal senses of selfhood by minoritarian subjects whom hold conflicting or unequal places in society to their majoritarian, or normative subjects. Munoz quotes Norma Alarcon’s survey of several fundamental theories around identity-in-difference, and while Alarcon’s analysis focuses on radical women theorists, I believe it is applicable to any subject whose identity formation is not only predicated upon that which it is not but also that to which it specifically is opposite: By working through the identity-in-difference paradox, many radical women theorists have implicitly worked in the interstice/interface of (existentialist) “identity politics” and “postmodernism” without a clear cut modernist agenda. Neither Audre Lorde nor Chela Sandoval’s notion of difference/differential consciousness subsumes a

44  Radical Inclusion Derridean theorization—though resonances cannot be denied and must be explored—so much as represents a process of “determined negation,” a nay-saying of the variety of the “not yet, that’s not it.” The drive behind that “not yet/that’s not it” position in Sandoval’s work is termed “differential consciousness,” in Lorde’s work, “difference,” and in Derrida’s work, différance. Yet each invokes dissimilarly located circuits of signification codified by the site of emergence, which nevertheless does not obviate their agreement on the “not yet,” which points to a future.13 I have witnessed burners from many different political and social spheres, as they come together at the Temples within the neutral territory of Black Rock City, enter the space only to find it impossible to retain their familiar habits of expressing identity-in-difference that previously defined them by separating them from the other. However, I cannot claim to know what it must have been like for a Northern Ireland community, so divided by The Troubles that for decades, they were literally considered by many to be “at war,”14 to make art together and share an event designed specifically to subvert a sectarian tradition based on conflict. In an interview for the BBC, Artichoke founder and director Helen Marriage describes her inspiration for organizing the event: The city is no stranger to burning, bonfires are very much a part of both loyalist and nationalist traditions. It was about taking the bonfire tradition and subverting it. I thought it would be interesting to invite David to create a bonfire about inclusivity, peace, and letting go of the past. The choice of field was important—it would not be considered neutral space as it is close to a republican estate in the city. I spoke to elderly people who had picnicked as children up here and then came the Troubles and they had never come back. The spaces that are never considered to be shared never become shared. The decision was made to try and change that, to reopen areas that some considered “no go.” The reception has been very warm, all have been most welcoming.15 The relative success of the Derry-Londonderry Temple in creating a safe space for the healing of differences depends in part upon the extent to which individuals are able to enter vulnerable states; greater proximity to the other than they might be able to achieve elsewhere. Similar to the old saying, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” which describes a place that permits behavior one might not risk in other locations, the Temple heterotopia’s primary currency is removing the fear of consequences for behavior that would otherwise represent great risk.

Radical Inclusion 45 Ironically, architecture generally represents boundary systems, spatial separation, and reinforcement of hierarchy. In Body, Memory, Architecture, Charles Moore proposes to consider the built structures around us as existential space, to “peruse them from the boundary of the individual body to the first shared boundary (the house), and beyond that to boundaries shared by larger and larger communities, seeing how they can make a means of extending inner order outward, of making a world that is a sympathetic extension of our senses of ourselves.”16 But, by building that world with the intention to burn it, participants are not only symbolically externalizing senses of shared selfhood but they are also literally removing the physical boundaries such a structure cannot avoid assigning to its space. Selfhood can be shared and expressed without setting up identityin-difference, for such a self is always doing, always making, and never arrives. Like the woman that David Best led through the Temple, who smelled the wood and touched the surfaces and heard written messages read out loud, the experience was deeply sensory and one can feel it without necessarily making sense of it. From inception to incineration, within the Derry-Londonderry Temple there is obviously enough material to fill several books, but I seek only to convey the overall spirit of the Temple from the vantage points of several individuals who were personally affected, refracted through my own authorial voice, however heteroglossic I strive to remain. The narratives I chose are overwhelmingly positive, but I acknowledge that reception of this event may have also included the negative, the contradictory.17 I have not delved into examples of that here because negation reinforces difference rather than working to deconstruct a radicalized self that includes the other, and such negation is a process with which I believe most are so familiar as to have become desensitized. Because social change cannot be expected to change everyone in one fell swoop, I’ll just take this moment to lean into it instead of validating habitual resistance to it. Notes 1 “Burning Man 2011 Sold Out,” huffingtonpost.com, http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2011/07/26/burning-man-2011-sold-out_n_910351.html#s316564. 2 Mallia Wollen, “Burning Man Festival Regulars Lose Out on Tickets,” nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/arts/music/burning-man-ticket-lotteryproblems-anger-regulars.html. 3 Andie Grace, “The Jackrabbit Speaks,” Official Burning Man Newsletter (Vol. 16, No. 12, February 9) 2012. 4 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55, ed. Jacques AlainMiller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton and Company, 1990), 41. 5 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 207.

46  Radical Inclusion 6 Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 148. 7 Artichoke was founded in 2005 by Helen Marriage and Nicky Webb: “Our aim is to work with artists to create extraordinary, large-scale events that appeal to the widest possible audience.” “Artichoke,” artichoke.uk.com, http:// www.artichoke.uk.com/about/. 8 “Burning of Temple in Londonderry Takes Place,” bbc.com, http://www.bbc. com/news/uk-northern-ireland-32002102. 9 Fiona Audley, “Derry Residents’ Nevada Trip has prepared them for project in Their Home City,” irishpost.co.uk, http://www.irishpost.co.uk/news/ derry-residents-nevada-desert-trip-prepared-temple-project. 10 “Burning Man is What You Make It,” Temple, David Best, http://templederrylondonderry.com/blog/burning-man-is-what-you-make-it-. 11 “Take Part,” Temple, David Best, http://templederry-londonderry.com/takepart. 12 Jennifer Smyth McKeever, quoting “Kathy,” personal email to author, March 22, 2015. 13 Jose Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 7. 14 Peter Taylor, “Who Won the War? Revisiting NI on 20th anniversary of ceasefires,” BBC News, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-29369805. 15 Nuala McCann, “Artist David Best on burning his Londonderry Temple,” BBC News NI, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-31986595. 16 Charles Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 77. 17 In just one example of many, Reverend Graeme Orr from Magheramason claimed that he feared the burning could leave people open to the “influence of the occult and Satan … It’s not the way to God.” “Burning of wooden temple in Derry a ‘Pagan Practice,’ says minister.” BBC News NI, http://www.bbc. com/news/uk-northern-ireland-foyle-west-31958819.

2

Gifting Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value

Stardust’s favorite hat, a western top hat adorned with flowers and patches and relics she’d collected over several years at Burning Man, had blown away in the massive dust storm that erupted in an instant during our outing to see Bliss Dance, the 40-foot sculpture of a woman made out of welded steel rods, that graced the deepest reaches of the playa. We’d been kneeling down, writing messages in the playa dust with our fingers, when the storm hit and knocked her hat off. We chased my little daughter’s hat through the maelstrom as far as we could before conceding that it would be dangerous to continue any further. Stardust sat down and cried as I protected us from the storm by throwing my long coat over us. Out of nowhere, in the blinding conditions, a BRC Ranger approached us and bent down close to check that we were all right. I assured him that we were safe; our distress was because she had lost her beloved hat. As he took her hand in his, he removed a pink, bedazzled, floppy, well-loved hat from his head and handed it to her. “This was a gift to me from my daughter,” he said, “and now I’m giving it to you. I know it’s not the same, but I want you to have it. She’d want you to have it, too.” It might as well have been the original Velveteen Rabbit, she was so blown away. When the dust storm cleared, we found our bikes and got ready to ride back to camp for a much-needed decompression. Another man, who was just as bedazzled everywhere on his body as the awesome pink hat that Stardust now proudly wore, approached us. He said nothing beyond, “This is a symbol of family,” before looping two exquisite necklaces around our necks, both bearing beautiful, hand-crafted peacocks made of twisted copper wire and turquoise gems. We both wear them regularly to this day. On the way back to camp, Stardust’s original lost hat literally blew into our path. In a city of seven square miles, the playa had coughed it back up DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-3

48 Gifting right in front of us. We stopped, picked it up, and rode our bikes back to camp, hand-in-hand. At that point, we both cried freely, so full were our hearts. The principle of gifting at Burning Man should not be confused with other examples of gifting societies, for example, Potlatch, or such elaborate gifting rituals as those of the Trobriand Islands in Polynesia,1 where each gift is not directly reciprocated but carries significant, symbolic meaning. Gifting in Black Rock City is not meant to represent the ritual or rote, but to encourage practices that empower individuals to participate in acts of generosity without suspicion, expectation, or exploitation. There is also an important distinction between the giving of gifts, without the obligation to reciprocate, and bartering; the value of gifting is in the action, whereas the value of bartering lies in the completed transaction. Even though reception of a gift often inspires a desire to gift something in return as an expression of gratitude, the different actions come from separate and distinct motivations. I have both given and received many gifts at Burning Man, but one that stands out in my mind was a gift I was given at Burning Man 2009, five years before I ever took my daughters to the burn. For many reasons I need not go into here, I had been left, hungry, depressed, exhausted, and without a ride home, to carve my way through the last 12 hours before the Temple Burn, the event which traditionally concludes the official Burning Man itinerary. As I stumbled through the dust, contemplating my situation, I realized that at some point soon I would be in real danger of serious illness/dehydration unless I sought help. However, I had barely processed this thought before a woman approached me and offered me water and a bowl of hot rice and vegetables. I attempted to give her a necklace as a symbol of gratitude but she refused to accept it, insisting that it gave her much more pleasure to give me this gift me than to take something from me that I clearly cherished. She would take no more than a hug. Is this conclusive evidence that the principle of gifting is intrinsically free from anticipated exchange value, or that the gifting act is merely a performance designed to accumulate less-obvious capital than material goods? No, but even after participating in many burns, having given and received a multitude of gifts, this simple act knocked me off-center. I was beyond upset over what I perceived as an unfair situation for which I felt I was not at fault, disillusioned with the most intimate part of a community that I loved. Yet one gesture, probably just this woman’s attempt to do something kind and useful with excess food from her camp before they packed up and left Black Rock City, restored me in all the ways I desperately needed at that moment. She just wanted to give me some sustenance and my obvious gratitude validated that impulse without turning it into a transaction.

Gifting 49 As Hannah Arendt claims in The Human Condition, “Today, civilization tends to be increasingly embroiled in a never-ending chain of ‘means and ends,’ the ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of’ utility as meaning generates meaninglessness.”2 It is easy to imagine a tradition of gifting forming with the best of intentions, but inevitably succumbing all-to-easily to the habits embodied in members of a society who perhaps even subconsciously expect reciprocal gain, and this is indeed the case in many actions-cum-transactions in Black Rock City. However, while gifting often regresses into performance of fair exchange, in the sense that a certain gesture anticipates a particular response in the form of another gift or an unspoken sense of obligation, there have also been many instances in which gifts were given without strings attached whatsoever, their meaning inscribed within acts that anticipate no exchange value. Though Burning Man is an event so overfull with capitalist excess that literally billions of dollars worth of materials are deliberately burned/ destroyed each year, micro-performances between bodies during the event often seem possible only within a space that acknowledges capitalism but remembers to refuse, occasionally, to respond to its implied authority. In his article, “Burning Man, Desire, and the Culture of Empire,” Fenton Johnson posits possible motivations for attending Burning Man, such as: “Desire for the divine,” “nomads in search of a personal revolution,” and “subverting the culture of empire.”3 Johnson’s argument suggests that the efforts of Burning Man’s organizers and participants are not bold enough to effectively promote their own set of principles. He does, however, concede that his late-night visit to the “Dust City Diner” in Deep Playa—an area sparsely populated by large, relatively isolated art installations—during which he was gifted coffee and a perfectly grilled cheese sandwich, resonated profoundly in his psyche: “The events of my waking life usually take years to penetrate my subconscious, but the week after Burning Man I dream of it every night, drifting in and out of sleep, unsure whether I’m encountering hallucinations or memories.”4 Amid his sweeping critique of the Burning Man Project as an exercise in reinforcing the power structures it seeks to subvert, Johnson’s Dust City Diner anecdote belies a possible, deep symbolism embedded in acts of art as gifting: “… art that springs from love just might be one version of a moral equivalent of war, an outlet for all that testosterone that otherwise expresses itself in battle. Love roots itself in desire—not for combat but for communion, in which a grilled cheese sandwich can serve as an entirely adequate Eucharist.”5 Because gifting does not assume reciprocity, it goes beyond privileging use value over exchange value. It places value within the act rather than the object. The haptic memory of a gifting act in the space of otherness that facilitated it is where heterotopia’s radical efficacy lies, within a changing body that relates to its varying ecologies in ways previously

50 Gifting unimagined. Gifting impulses that originate at Burning Man often form habits that find ways to continue in the default world. The following two case studies convey much more than a tradition of bringing small tokens to the playa to express affection or appreciation, they offer analyses of what is possible when the gifting impulse exceeds its modest origins and gains exponential momentum. Though I believe that even the most subtle, individual gifting acts generate space for embodied revolution, these stories offer such powerful evidence for locating value in gifting acts—to the point at which logical cause and effect cease to influence behavior and moral ecology seems to evolve on its own—I find that they quell even my own cynical voice that might not otherwise recognize moments in which “illogical” motivation yields pragmatic results. The intent behind the principle of gifting is certainly not to maneuver toward quantifiable gain, but the end result sometimes seems to produce just that. The first study is a story I received in an email communication from a personal friend, fellow burner, chosen family member, lauded improv performer, and Pixar voice actor; in short, someone who has my immense admiration and respect, Calum Grant. I had put out a call on line to ask for answers to the following questions: 1 What is the best Burning Man gift you have ever received? Why? 2 What is the best Burning Man gift you have ever given? Why? Calum’s answer, which he titled in the email subject heading, “The Greatest Gift of Them All, or What I did on my Summer Vacation,” was the clear choice out of all the responses as the best way to dig a little deeper into how gifting works and what it really does to disrupt habitual behavior, for the greatest gift he had ever received was also the greatest he had ever given: I’ve gotten some wonderful gifts on the playa. Artwork, handmade jewelry, music. A couple of swigs of water from a stranger when we were stranded in a dust storm miles from camp. All great gifts, as much for the moment of the exchange as the object itself. And I like to think I’ve given as good as I’ve gotten. I love to share. I love floating in the abundance I feel giving things away. But I think the greatest, the rootenest-tootenest, best-ever gift I’ve received, is also the same gift I was given: “The Bipolar Express,” and the 2 mutant vehicles that preceded it, “St. Frosty’s Rolling Revival Church” and the “Frostromo,” which I created with Dan Donovan for 5 years beginning in 2004. They were back-breaking, blood-drawing, bank accountdraining labors of love. And they were a gift Dan and I gave each other, and then we both gave to the people of Black Rock City.

Gifting 51 I got to know Dan one day in 2004, when we met as part of a writing group suggested by our mutual friend Deb Fink. Within a half hour, Dan asked me if I’d ever heard of Burning Man. He had gone for the first time the previous year. I had been going since 1997. He told me about his dream to bring an ice cream truck out there and serve ice cream on the playa. I suggested snow cones as a more practical alternative—ice is sold in Black Rock, eliminating the need for round-the-clock refrigeration of stock. Plus our capacity would be essentially infinite—only limited by the amount of syrup we would bring out. We should only use premium Italian soda syrup, not the corn syrup crap they usually use in “Sno Kone” brand cones. He showed me an old Wonderbread delivery truck he found on craigslist that bore a passing resemblance to an ice cream truck. I told him I was in. We were best friends from then on. Over the next few years, we would upgrade to a larger truck, and more ambitious designs. He and I would work for weeks building the vehicles. Often only getting four or five hours of sleep a night before returning to his shop. One year we worked nonstop for 36 hours before making the 8-hour journey over the Sierras to Black Rock City. Then we’d spend another three or four days building the vehicle on the playa. It was brutal and exhausting, and we never asked why we were doing it. It was obvious. More on that later. But here’s the thing: Dan and I could never have built these huge works without each other. Before I met Dan I had never built anything more complex than an IKEA desk. And Dan, a brilliant fine carpenter in his own right, could not draw to save his life. He could design a beautiful, cunningly assembled cabinet or a breathtaking table, but designing a spaceship, or the rococo swirls of a cathedral buttress were beyond him. So I would design, and he would look at the design, and tell me if it was possible. He taught me how to draft. My sketches were the only blueprints we used. And we did it together. We showed up when no one else from our camp did, and worked vastly greater hours, into cold nights, into pale dawns. We built impossibly big, outrageously intricate. Hidden staircases, secret compartments with two-way mirrors, strobes, and disco balls. And why? That moment of handing a snow cone to a grateful person in 100+ degree heat. Seeing their faces light up. The smiling tears of a 50-ish woman when she tasted the root beer-flavored snow cone we made for her. She said “I haven’t had one of these since I was a little girl.” Or a grateful parent mouthing “thank you” as we hand her three girls snow cones as they shelter from a blinding white out in the Ice Castle-themed interior of the Bipolar Express. This is YEARS before Frozen, too, come to think of it. Or the ecstatic crowd forming around the vehicle, dancing to the peerless grooves our resident DJ, Don Steele, put together. During one of these moments, or countless others, Dan and I would catch each other’s

52 Gifting eye, and smile at each other, and nod. Good job, brother. We did this. This Fitzcaraldo-scale folly that wows and delights and moves and shelters and hydrates all these people with deliciousness. We built this together. And then a phrase, repeated so often it may as well have been our mantra—a phrase we would use a lot during Dan’s long battle with pancreatic cancer: “I could never have done this without you.” And part of the beauty of it was, none of these people could really understand or know the backbreaking work, the tears, the failures, the joy we had shared building, and then bringing this thing out to the playa for them to enjoy. And we didn’t really need them to. We just loved doing it for them. Our friends, sure. But mostly, complete strangers. Just having a moment with them, where we handed them a cone, or played their favorite song, or helped them negotiate that tricky bottom step, or made them laugh, or blew their minds, or changed their lives. That moment of “thank you,” of wide-eyed wonder, of fleeting (or-not-so fleeting) kinship and fellow human-ness. Emphasis on the fellow. It made it all worth it. Tu es ergo sum indeed. I got the gift of giving. And I got it, understood it, on a primal level, for the first time as well. I got the gift of making people happy. And I got my community, my people, my Frosty family. The camp continues, the Frosties continue, even after Dan’s passing. That’s the gift that Dan gave me, too. The cones were a gift of the most precious commodity out there, when you think about it. Water, the cones, and our mission—the giving, the sharing, the delighting of others—it draws us together and keeps us together. And now we have a new generation coming up. This is gonna be FUUUUUUUUUNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Calum Grant, March 6, 20156 The phrase, “back-breaking, blood-drawing, bank account-draining labors of love” could be the antithesis statement for capitalism as all-powerful raison d’être. It is motivation rooted entirely in altruism, energy, and ambition garnered from little outside the desire to give. In traditional capitalist society, the producers of commodities, the laborers, need understand nothing more than the performance of conversion of their labor into a symbol of exchange-value, usually money. They go to work, they get paid, and they can spend their money on commodities that have actual use-value, such as food and other requirements for survival. The emotional disconnect that arises from homogenization of their efforts need never enter their minds in order for the system to continue to function. The commodities, or realization of their labor, never come under their possession in a meaningful way. Labor is converted directly into money. This is some measure of success, for they can exchange money for necessary commodities that have use-value, but they are prevented from

Gifting 53 direct participation in the realization of their efforts because labor and fruits of that labor bear little resemblance. For example, if one works all day at a computer, and the wage earned from that labor is used to purchase food, the use/consumption of that food does little more than sustain them sufficiently to continue working on the computer. They may set aside savings to spend on more elaborate pleasures, such as a ticket to Burning Man, but this still presumes that the escape to Burning Man itself will work to reinforce the system of saving and spending that validates a cycle in which they possess no agency. The back-breaking work that Calum and Dan devoted to building the mutant vehicles, aka “art cars” to take to Burning Man demanded as much or more labor than customary, paid work, but that labor was not performed with the expectation to accumulate capital for its exchange value, to be converted into something unrelated. That labor consisted of pleasure in the act itself, for each other, as well as the anticipation of personal involvement with its results. Bringing their creations to Black Rock City as gifts to the community offered satisfaction in the form of more immediate participation in the formation of a culture that places emphasis on the other. The benefits of this undertaking go beyond happiness in receiving gratitude, as well. Calum learned practical skills in construction and drafting. Dan learned how to communicate ideas that could be visualized on paper and transformed into building plans. The acquisition of competence in formerly uncharted areas of useful production are a practical gain by any standard, even if they come about as a tertiary result of the gifting act. The friendship that evolved out of mutual dedication provided immeasurable comfort to each participant when they had to face the harsh circumstances of Dan’s terminal illness. “Good job, brother. We did this.” Calum’s use of the phrase tu es ergo sum, “you are, therefore I am,” pushes his story further, out of its original context into an ongoing project with much broader implications than the pleasure derived from building mutant vehicles to deliver snow cones to Burners on the playa. Full disclosure: I coined this phrase several months ago as a rebuttal to the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” I share this concept with friends in conversation, through art that spells out the message in objects ranging from sea shells to trash on the streets, through blog posts on the internet, and it ripples outward ever so slightly to the point that it occasionally comes back to me. It is a way of expressing that meaningful progress never takes place in a self-centered continuum, but depends upon a self acknowledging that it cannot exist without the other. Calum’s claim that the fruits of their labor will now be passed to future generations illustrates a persisting theme of participants who will continue learning the value of giving rather than having.

54 Gifting My second case study on gifting originated at Burning Man 2014, yet grew into a small but powerful movement months after that year’s event had ended. A young girl named Kaisa had traveled with her parents, Huybert and Brenda, from Amsterdam to attend Burning Man in 2014 for the first time. The three of them formed such close ties in Black Rock City that, months after their return to the Netherlands, a call to the Burner Community for help resulted in an overwhelming response. The following passage comes from an internet post on “Burners.me,” a Word Press blog that does not claim any official connection to the Org but promotes itself as a site “Where our opinions, Burner culture, and Burning Man come together.” Most of the posts on this site are written by an individual who goes by the handle, “burnerxxx,” but there are occasional guest posts by those who receive permission to use this popular site to spread the word. On December 5, 2014, guest writer Nicole Sparkleton used this opportunity to call upon the Burner community: Now, can we talk about a Burner in need? There’s a rad girl, her name is Kaisa, and she camped with BMIR, and she’s sick. I’ve asked The People of Burning Man to help me send a book to her (I’ll pay for it, no problem), but all she wants is cards from Burners. Here’s where we need your help. Kaisa is back in the hospital and has to be there through the holidays and all of January. It would be amazingly awesome if you could send her a card, some cool Burning Man swag, just a little note to let her know her playa family is thinking of her. Here is the address … The post included the picture below Figure 2.1. I became aware of Kaisa’s condition through this blog post, and perhaps because she bore such a close resemblance to my own daughters, who had also attended Burning Man for the first time in 2014, we were immediately moved to send her some tokens of affection. My daughters, my husband, and I wrote letters to her and her parents and sent them a care package containing little gifts to remind her of the playa. Knowing that the family must be overwhelmed with Kaisa’s treatment in the hospital and keeping their lives going under such stressful circumstances, we had no expectations of hearing back from them but we hoped that the package would offer some support. We also put out a call on our Camp Frosty Facebook page to let our friends know how they could help if they so desired. Our friend Frank immediately responded with a picture of a beautiful, personalized Swiss Army knife that he had engraved with her name and an image of the Man, asking where he could send it. I was thrilled that people seemed to be catching on, that they could take a moment to embrace the gifting spirit among their community outside of Black Rock City just to help someone they had never met. But I had no idea how fully the Burner network had gotten involved until I saw another Facebook post the following day. It was of Kaisa’s father, his arms loaded

Gifting 55

Figure 2.1  Kaisa on the BMIR Mascot. Photo credit: Huybert van de Stadt, 2014.

with packages, nearly spilling over. Subsequent posts and comments revealed the incredible array of gifts that people had felt moved to send her from all over the world. Burners were sending letters, cards, handmade gifts, and items that obviously represented significant personal value. Given freely. According to Kaisa’s parents, Huybert and Brenda, the hospital staff had never seen

56 Gifting anything like it. And all of us watching the story unfold were given the greatest possible gift when we learned that Kaisa was able to leave the hospital months earlier than planned, her progress meant she could go home and would soon be able to return to school and resume the normal activities of a healthy eight-year-old. Kaisa’s story does more than point to a chance for individuals to step outside of their culture momentarily and rehearse new behaviors through alternate forms of exchange, it also demonstrates that small gestures by individuals take on powerful momentum when combined with many other small gestures. Behavior embodied in Black Rock City withstood the transition into daily life, prompting spontaneous acts that bore little resemblance to the well-known ideological values of competition and accumulation. It stands to reason that the more frequently communities repeat such acts, the more habitual they become. Even the smallest shifts in motivation, from the cycle of means and ends to open-ended acts, are forms of resistance that change deeply stratified social structures. I cannot claim that I received nothing in return for our original gift to Kaisa’s family. Our families have formed intimate friendships, and our yearly reconnections with each other number among the major highlights of our family Burning Man experiences. Who knows how much we would have in common in the default world, or if we would even have become friends in other circumstances? Like Calum and Dan’s mutual commitment to their labors of love, these exchanges are not means to ends. Each gesture toward the other further opens the spaces of possibility for new forms of social interaction, resisting a deeply embedded economic system that is often glorified through popular rhetoric, but easily pulled apart within individual acts. Subverting the culture of empire, epitomized. Something that surprised me at first during the pandemic, when the 2020 and 2021 official burns were cancelled, was how much Burners still desperately needed to gift. Clearly, they still wanted to make and give things to other Burners, something that we could do through the postal service even if so many other constantly changing rules restricted us from doing these things in person. It felt far stronger than a need to gather around a campfire or see amazing, large-scale art or even party like it’s 1999. The desire to give things away was so very powerful, but this ceased to shock me as soon as I realized how comforting it is, as Calum put it, to float in the abundance of giving things away. I once had a therapist explain to me why I found it so relaxing when her bulldog Daisy would fall asleep and snore loudly during our sessions; dogs are so hyper-attuned to protecting us and raising the alert, if they are comfortable enough to fall into deep sleep then we know everything is okay for now. Similarly, when you have enough wonderful stuff that you can give it away gladly to total strangers, even as the world is upside-down and backwards and

Gifting 57 dangerously shaking itself out, gifting does tend to make enough room for a deep, loud sigh of relief.

Notes 1 Fred S. Kleiner, ed. Gardner’s Art Throughout the Ages: Non-Western Perspectives, Thirteenth edition (Boston: Wadsworth, 2010), 231. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 104. 3 Fenton Johnson, “Burning Man, Desire, and the Culture of Empire,” Tikkun Vol. 27 No. 3 (Summer 2012): 20–63. 4 Johnson, “Culture of Empire,” 23. 5 Johnson, “Culture of Empire,” 62. 6 Calum Grant, email communication with author, March 6, 2015.

3

Decommodification In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience

We have brought our kids to Burning Man for years. A lot of people have a LOT of opinions on this, mostly people who have never been there, particularly with regard to protecting them from the harsh realities to be found both inside and outside of Black Rock City. However, they are 17 and 16 years old as of this writing, and I can’t think of a more “harsh reality” than they currently experience as adolescents in American school, whether it’s the gun violence, the pandemic, the opioid crisis, or the mental health crisis. So you’ll have to excuse me if we don’t balk at them encountering colorful language, encounters, and situations in an atmosphere where we’re there to guide them as they navigate the mostly caring and supportive community of Burning Man. We love to make each other laugh and we delight in gifting that laughter to the community. One of our favorite ways to do that at Burning Man is to transform commercial logos and branding into really, really good jokes. My favorite so far is an adventure from 2019, when we decided to plaster signs bearing the word “ANAL” onto rented vehicles that were just begging for mischievous alteration: What’s not to love (Figure 3.1)? In “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Theodore Adorno claims that human beings need only three things for emotional survival: freedom, creativity, and happiness. It is alienation and fetishization that disrupts the flow of these real human needs by substituting commodities, both material and cultural. In order to encourage a participatory ethic as opposed to one

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-4

Decommodification 59

Figure 3.1  Messing with a Uhaul truck. Author, 2019.

of accumulation, the Third Principle of Burning Man calls for a sweeping decommodification by discouraging barter of goods and services as well as the exchange of money for goods, apart from coffee and ice, which are available for purchase at designated places and times throughout the city. Also, participants are encouraged to cover or alter any logos, slogans, or other symbols of commerce that may be visible on the supplies they bring into the city. The antagonistic phrasing of the third principle, “We stand ready … We resist,” sounds very much like a surface level rejection along the lines of, “We don’t like your logos and we will totally shame you if you bring them into our pristine space.” Black Rock City may be a space of illusion, but it cannot provide much more than self-affirmation if it devolves into a space of delusion. Denying the presence of corporate symbols does not change the fact that many Burners who create Black Rock City do so with products of the systems they may strive to subvert. Obscuring the mimetic mirror of ideology only amplifies the fact that it remains intact behind a curtain. There are, however, methods of dealing with these signifiers that do not involve closed-off denial, but rather harness the inertia of representation and open it out into ludic experimentation. In this spirit, many participants choose to alter logos instead of hiding them. This is often done in the spirit of détournement—literally, “misappropriation” or “hijacking”—a technique pioneered by Lettrist International and adopted by Situationist International as a method of subversively turning symbols of capitalism against the things they represent. For example,

60 Decommodification a 7/11 sign is still very much recognizable as the thing its familiar, graphic symbol represents—a convenience store that is always open—even if those graphics are altered. Détournement might alter the symbol to read “9/11,” leaving the integrity of the symbol sufficiently intact to reference its originally intended signified while simultaneously inviting viewers to consider 9/11 as a convenient excuse for buying the falderal of a corrupt government. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord describes the effectiveness of this tactic: Détournement is the opposite of quotation, of appealing to a theoretical authority that is inevitably tainted by the very fact that it has become a quotation—a fragment torn from its own context and development, and ultimately from the general framework of its period and from the particular option (appropriate or erroneous) that it represented within that framework. Détournement is the flexible language of anti-ideology. It appears in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any inherent or definitive certainty. It is language that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or supracritical reference. On the contrary, its own internal coherence and practical effectiveness are what validate the previous kernels of truth it has brought back into play. Détournement has grounded its cause on nothing but its own truth as present critique.1 Détournement occurred on an epic scale at Burning Man 2012 with artist Otto Von Danger’s installation, “Burn Wall Street.” The 72-foot-high replica of New York City’s Wall Street and Zucotti Park included: “A fake New York Stock Exchange building complete with a daily bell-ringing, the Bank of Un-America, Goldman Sucks, Merrily Lynched, and Chaos Manhattan, where fake tellers charged attendees for using a pen, standing, or breathing air.”2 By re-naming Wall Street’s most well-known institutions and re-imagining their functions as built structures prior to the burn, participants were permitted to play with the artistic spaces rather than resorting to outrage, which often ventilates frustrations without productively critiquing them. “Bank of America” on its own, for a general audience who desires decommodification, signifies corruption, deceit, and barely veiled exploitation, especially in the wake of America’s 2008 government bailouts. “Bank of UnAmerica,” the détournement twist, is a metacommunicative frame that supplies participants with implicit guidelines for an alternate reading of the phrase. By engaging in play with the Bank of UnAmerica, such as willingly offering forms of payment to “tellers” to breathe air or use pens, one might perform commonly exploitative transactions, such as incomprehensible bank fees, in an attitude of shared recognition instead of alienation.

Decommodification 61 Sarcastic play is often addictive, pushing participants to perform bigger and funnier reactions to raise the bar of the game. Because it is a game, fear and anger are removed from the encounter, facilitating a kind of rehearsed transgression without risk or loss. It is a creative response to injustice as opposed to being overwhelmed by the multitude of predatory conditions foisted upon the masses by institutions that seek increasingly centralized market control. In place of a zero-sum dialectics on opposite sides of monologic authority, one is left with a deeper, more creative relationship to economic hegemony. While resisting commerce and hijacking corporate signifiers provide effective methods of decommodification, it is perhaps the Burner’s direct engagement with the spectacle within Black Rock City that most powerfully deconstructs relationships to a parasitic ecology of simulation in the default world. A fundamental thesis of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is that: “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation3 … the decline of being into having, and having into appearing.”4 Essentially, Debord’s impassioned manifesto is a call to recognize the spectacle that has replaced the real, and to deliberately reject that substitution by engaging in patterns of being rather than accumulating. In Nader Vossoughian’s article, “The Temporary City: Camps, Cowboys, and Burning Man,” Burning Man is called out as a self-consciously inauthentic space in which society proudly parodies itself.5 Invoking Robert Venturi’s seminal work, Learning from Las Vegas, Vossoughian accuses Burning Man participants of addiction to risk and distraction. He (forgivably) generalizes burners into two main camps: those who believe in the authenticity of a great social experiment, from which society can learn valuable lessons about self-organization and decommodification; and those who believe that the spectacle of a mind-blowing social gathering yields its own rewards, perhaps as a valuable lesson for society in self-reliance and inclusiveness. This division into just two possibilities is too limiting, however, for Burning Man does more than parody the spectacle of society. It burns the spectacle of society. One could argue that Burning Man is but another simulacrum that overlays a reality crumbling from disuse. Its characteristics as a heterotopia, however, suggest that it is the direct opposite, a heterotopia of compensation that not only replaces a simulacrum that no longer represents what was once reality, but deliberately recognizes and destroys the simulacrum. Desperate for compensation from the alienation of a life made of spectacle, burners do not replace the default simulacrum with a constructed new reality and then wait for the simulacrum to crumble away; rather, they burn the simulacrum in a symbolic, ritual purification of their heterotopia to make room for being present in the moment. Deleuze defines simulacra as “those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity,

62 Decommodification no internal resemblance.”6 This emphasizes the portability of such a simulacrum; with no need to directly reference its origins, it can be built and rebuilt ad hoc and then burned with no more than a superficial material loss. Calling the loss superficial is not an intention to delegitimize the symbol of the burn, however, for the creative act is not lost as the spectacle is incinerated. Rather, the act of destruction and regeneration is embodied as the material signifier of an empty signified quite literally turns to ash. Few would argue that the surface spectacle of an epic fire and pyrotechnic display constitute a persisting simulacrum of illusion; rather, its sheer excess brings a shared understanding, even if it may be fleeting, that possibilities exist outside the realm of our familiar world of representation. A Theatrical Parallel Discussions of simulacra and representation often gravitate toward semiotics. The Saussurian vocabularies of signifier/signified/sign, or langue/ parole in performance, provide such productive structures because their logic can be just as readily breached as it can be established. Such a narrow lexicon with which to navigate limitless potential meanings makes for a simplified process of recognizing patterns and reshuffling possibilities. Performing the spectacle burn works much like a traditional theatrical performance; if the common goal is a creative act, then these types of performances share many of the same benefits as well as challenges. Both rely on levels of active participation by both audience and performers. They make use of recognizable signifiers that often come from established canons. It can be far more difficult to breathe new, creative life into deeply textualized performances than to simply reproduce a reliable formula and assume audiences will consume it with no further demands. For example, the crowd that watches a massive replica of Wall Street burn will be treated, no matter what, to an extraordinary light show, fireworks, and fire punctuated with preset propane explosions. Large-scale burns have a built-in dramatic arc, from ignition to ash, not to mention the inherent fascination with fire. In “The Psychoanalysis of Fire,” Bachelard describes fire’s primal allure: Less monotonous and less abstract than flowing water, even more quick to grow and to change than the young bird we watch every day in its nest in the bushes, fire suggests the desire to change, to speed up the passage of time, to bring all of life to its conclusion, to its hereafter. In these circumstances the reverie becomes truly fascinating and dramatic; it links the small to the great; the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of the world. For him destruction is more than a change. It is a renewal.7

Decommodification 63 The baseline technical sophistication involved in most of Black Rock City’s large-scale burns is virtuosic enough to inspire powerful, cathartic release for most people who are close enough to feel the heat. Subjective internalization of such a performance amplifies the ego and resolves in satisfaction, a shared validation by fire as symbolic renewal. Similarly, audiences who attend Shakespeare productions at international festivals often know to expect dazzling iambic pentameter filled with eloquent phrases that they may silently mouth along with the performers, even if that verse is handled clumsily as often as it is capably. The verse itself is so packed with metaphor and potential that, for the most part, it only reifies within misguided delivery. Even the most confounding Shakespearean plots swell into action and conflict, endings resolve into emotional and intellectual relief. Expectant audiences will usually find plenty to consume. But consumption is not participation, and decommodification is not achieved solely through exciting pyrotechnic displays or theatrical showmanship. Consumption versus participation depends on ways of being in the performance, no matter if one identifies with the role of performer, audience member, or both. If participatory experience requires decommodification, to put it in terms of the third principle, then subjective consumption of self-affirming performance cannot contribute to creative participation. Perhaps in order to participate, one must change. In Theatre and Ethics, Nicholas Ridout compares modern, subjective experience of performance with a Levinasian notion of the face-to-face encounter: Levinasian ethics seeks to replace an ethics based on the freedom of the individual (modern) or the realization of individual potential (ancient) with an ethics oriented entirely toward the other. Performance conceived in relation to Levinas’s post-modern ethics encourages the spectator to stop seeing the performance as an exploration of his or her own subjectivity and, instead, to take it as an opportunity to experience an encounter with someone else.8 In Chapter 1, Radical Inclusion, I posit inclusion of an other as key to how heterotopia transforms ideological dialectics into dialogic creativity, or the state in which individuals embody truly creative insights and act in ways previously unimagined. Levinas’s theory within performance also includes the other as essential to ethical encounters, if ethical can be taken to mean that which rejects direct representation and instead points toward the infinite possibility of an other. Including the other assumes a responsible orientation toward the other that does not negate the self, but reorients it. To clarify, I am not assigning the role of “self” to performer and “other” to

64 Decommodification audience or vice-versa, for in this closed cast the self might only recognize its own image within other-as-mirror. Althusser characterizes this recognition as the “familiar, well-known, transparent myths in which a society or age can recognize itself but not know itself, the mirror it looks into for self-recognition, precisely the mirror it must break if it is to know itself.”9 In order to situate this comparison between Black Rock City performance burns and theatrical performance, these events can be reduced to a semiotics of performance by the terms langue (language) and parole (speaking). To clarify my use of “langue” and “parole” in this context, langue would be the system of abstract symbols that function in theatre the same way systems of signifiers function within language. They mean nothing on their own, but positioned appropriately they point to a world of potential meanings or translations. Parole is langue realized while it is in motion, doing the work of not only signifying, but falling into being as it points to all its potential meanings as well as its most likely meanings in the moment. The exchange is as sensory as it is intellectual. At the most basic level, both Burning Man and canonical theater’s langue and parole denote their performative elements—fire, text, narrative—and the acts that animate those elements—burning, speaking, acting—respectively. Parole is what gives meaning to langue just as spectacle delivers transformation by fire and actors give context and emotion to Shakespearean verse. However, even if a performer is acting “for an audience,” any autonomous, ego-centered act takes langue as known, rationalized and monologic. Parole offers no chance to encounter the other in this setting, only an experience to be consumed by an audience who will in turn perform a solipsistic rendering of parole into affirmation. Similarly, a crowd that merely anticipates a spectacular burn will be validated by the event but not changed by it. The principle of decommodification clearly states that consumption should not replace participatory experience. Bodies accustomed to consuming experience will make that experience their own; even new concepts that arise out of shared communication will be grappled with and categorized into familiar terms, a conditioned instinct to make sense of the world and attain closure. As Elin Diamond states, “In Lacan, identification, always in the register of the imaginary, is narcissistic—the perceived other is always a version of me. Difference, contradiction, are all occluded in the subject’s initial and continuing capture in the mimetic mirror.”10 However, the time-bound heterotopia of Black Rock City may provide space for embodied change, the opportunity to break the mimetic mirror and rupture the closed circuit of the Cartesian “I am,” because there is no self-affirming, monologic ideology to narrate what transpires. If Burning Man’s langue becomes detextualized spectacle, its parole is gifted without reciprocal anticipation, the other is radically included, and its unresolved

Decommodification 65 ideology relates to difference by means of difference, then there can be no consumption. Not because its parole is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but because it rearranges langue until it points to an infinite other. In keeping with the analogy of theatrical production, disrupting monologic authority is a very different sort of work. The theatre is often considered a space of illusion, but I would argue it is rarely a space of otherness. Though it is temporally bound, it unfolds within such an established convention of assumptions in which even deliberately subversive theatre often operates mimetically, revealing immanent contradictions but no radical alterity. Ideological meta-narrative inflects dramatic narrative so that langue and parole reproduce the same conditions ad infinitum, commodifying performance itself. In The Theatre and its Double, Artaud criticizes this process: Let us leave textual criticism to graduate students, formal criticism to esthetes, and recognize that what has been said is not still to be said; that an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, that a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another, and that the theatre is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.11 Only when text speaks in such a way that it erases textuality can it include an other without attempting to make it familiar. Performance that points to radical alterity by remaking itself in the present cannot be immanently resolved nor consumed. While this chapter has thus far primarily alluded to general parallels between Burning Man performance and theatrical performance, I now return to Otto Von Danger’s “Burn Wall Street,” the specific case study that brings a semiotics of performance into the realm of a specific event that demonstrates successful acts of participation rather than consumption. As previously discussed, “Burn Wall Street” makes critical use of détournement by utilizing widely known and deeply contextualized titles of financial institutions to reorient viewers away from reactionary behavior and toward an attitude of play. These titles function like a canon of economic corruption, carrying the textual weight of unimpeachable authority, yet with a simple turn of phrase that authority is recast into difference. For example, “Bank of America” represents not only a specific institution with questionable lending practices, but also a commodified conception of a particular kind of America. “Bank of UnAmerica,” however, points to different possibilities, such as a site of undoing predatory acts, or more broadly, an unmaking of the America simulacrum.

66 Decommodification In addition to their rearranged names, the fact that the structures are all deliberately manipulated replicas of real buildings highlights them as tangible, touchable things rather than ideological constructs. Their temporal space sublimates monologic authority into direct encounter, offering opportunities to re-imagine ways of sensory engagement. Burning the objects does not necessarily ventilate a desire to burn the actual buildings of Wall Street—an act that could only be symbolic at best in its execution—instead, the knowledge that they will be transformed by fire at a designated time characterizes them as objects presently in-the-making. The temporal nature of the space they inhabit is doubled by the temporality of material itself. Langue—in this case titles, architecture, logos, and fire—is retextualized even as it retains allusion to its canonical signifiers. “Burn Wall Street’s” parole encompasses far more than its climactic burn, as well. Participants are invited to encounter the installation on multiple levels in the time preceding and following the burn; they may banter with “tellers” and “brokers,” climb the walls, dance inside the buildings, take a nap at the feet of the “Merrily Lynched” bull; any gesture that orients them toward alternative modes of participation. Subliminally aware that the space is not a simulation of the real but a re-imagining of relationships to canonical textuality, individuals behave in relation to a detextualized present as opposed to habitual, hegemonic contingency. The standing invitation to play eliminates notions of behavior as a perpetual means to an end. The game does not end in victory because one masters strategy; it ends because it is time to go home. While the burn does not necessarily constitute the most significant part of this piece’s performance, the burn event holds a specific space for embodied insight to mingle with a meta-narrative of transformation. Rendering solid forms into ephemeral ash underscores the presence of an unquantifiable other, made more fully present by its visibly impending absence. The structures that once referenced a tactile record of time inhabit the infinite other by releasing their presence into limitless time. The event space within heterotopia performs its act of heterochronia by signifying that it will always be simultaneously there and not there; then and not then. While participants may subsequently turn experience into memory, and rationalize memory into strategies of self-affirmation, the moments wherein performance reveals defamiliarized selfhood—when the self is made strange in its encounter with the other—cannot be consumed as commodity because its value is made in open-ended acts rather than cumulative results. It had to be the last outing of an exhausting week, Lemur and Stardust needed to return to school the following day and my husband and I had to get back to work, ahh, those the default-world responsibilities. We told the girls that this would be our last hurrah for Burning Man 2019, and they could choose their own adventure.

Decommodification 67 Stardust asked, “Do we have any of those ‘ANAL’ signs left?” I giggled as I dug through the strata of our tent that always winds up in a shambles, however we strive to keep it organized throughout the week, and produced the last three signs, white poster-board with large black letters that we had painstakingly penned with Sharpies a couple of weeks ago. Moms really can find anything. “Let’s go!” With signs and tape secured in my basket, we hopped on our bikes and rode out into the streets of Black Rock City to stir shit up. As is typical at Burning Man, we found countless other distractions along the way in our mission to bust up those corporate slogans; Lemur and Stardust “Talked to God” via a phonebooth on K street (I still cannot figure out how they hook that thing up!) and Tijuana and I enjoyed margaritas made in a blender powered by a bicycle. The girls climbed a giant steel structure that would have had me in the throes of a full-blown anxiety attack in the default world, but somehow seemed par for the course in Black Rock City. We hit the “Foam Dome,” a geodesic dome full of foam bits that you can comfortably plummet into from fifteen feet above. We performed some Shakespearean monologues. Typical day, you know, but again, we were on a mission. We found our first mark in a U-Haul truck bearing the slogan, “BEST MOVE (ANAL) FOR THE MONEY,” almost too easy … sigh. The next one was an RV with the model name, “(ANAL) Cyclone.” Ouch. We needed a really, really epic one to go out on. We found it on the radial two o’clock street. There stood a twenty-foot structure with a sign at the top stating, “Voted Best.” Perfect! Lemur swung her way up the wooden scaffolding, true to her name, and proudly taped the sign in place. I was just there to hand her supplies. “Voted Best ANAL.” It wasn’t a corporate logo, and we made no cutting statement. However, this hard-core camp had obviously invited us to play with the very idea of being voted as the best of something, as if it’s more comforting to receive an accolade that positions you outside and above your fellow humans than to connect with them. GAME ON. Notes 1 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970), Thesis 208. 2 Meredith Bennet-Smith, “Burn Wall Street: Otto Von Danger’s Interactive Installation Sends Message at Burning Man Festival,” The Huffington Post, September 4, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/04/burn-wallstreet-otto-von-danger-burning-man_n_1855745.html. 3 Debord, Thesis 1.

68 Decommodification 4 Debord, Thesis 17. 5 Vossoughian, “The Temporary City,” 118–130. Hunch magazine’s selfproclaimed goal is to “reconsider the evolving disciplines of the built environment to seek alternative modes of production and consumption.” https://www.academia.edu/3127370/The_Temporary_City_Camps_Cowboy_ Urbanism_and_Burning_Man. 6 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (Columbia: Columbia University Press 1968), 299. 7 Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 16. 8 Nicholas Ridout, Theatre and Ethics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 8. 9 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 208. 10 Elin Diamond, “The Violence of We: Politicizing Identification,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 409. 11 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 75.

4

Radical Self-Reliance Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources

To underscore the normative dimension of liminality, I have come to call it “liminal-norm.” More generally, the liminal norm operates in any situation where the valorization of liminal transgression of resistance itself becomes normative—at which point theorization of such a norm may become subversive. (Jon McKenzie, “The Liminal-Norm”)

A Subjective Genealogy of the Sublime The radical self-reliance principle is often a major factor in participants’ decisions to attend Burning Man, whether for the first time or the twentieth time. The idea of camping for a week on the playa, which is notorious for scorching days and freezing nights, blinding dust-storms that last for hours or days, and near total lack of live organic matter, offers quite a temptation for those who like a challenge. It is a prime opportunity to test will and endurance, and it very quickly makes fools of those who take its inherent dangers too lightly. Surviving one’s time on the playa almost certainly includes times in which creative problem-solving is the only thing standing between relative pleasure and very real pain. Mediating these extremes at Burning Man is one example of performing radical self-reliance that often reduces experience from a collection of trivial nuances to moments of pragmatic life-decisions. For example, sometimes it is necessary to forget about what outfit to wear to that night’s revels and focus on taking shelter and hydrating. Moments huddled in a tent that is being blasted by 60 mph winds tend to mark time that one can get inside of; truly inhabit, stop performing. Confrontation with this brand of self-awareness—presence at life’s liminal moments—illuminates the contrast between these and the stretches of time in which one barely notices his or her own life going by. It is, if not permanently transformative, a powerful reminder to engage.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-5

70  Radical Self-Reliance This surface-reading of the principle of radical self-reliance aligns with a linear reading of the Sublime, a theory conceived in traditional Enlightenment aesthetics that seems designed primarily to reinforce the superiority of reason over imagination by conceiving the self as legitimate only to the extent that it can be rationalized. The traditional Sublime works on feelings of fear and awe brought on by the unknown, an easy parallel to draw with the often-overwhelming conditions of the Black Rock Desert. Life-affirming, Sublime moments temporarily alleviate the fear of diminished selfhood that plagues so many individuals in search of meaning. Recognizing patterns wherein individuals respond to limitlessness, with an anxiety that is only alleviated by constructing limits, reinforces a cultural habit of making sense of experience by rationalizing it or reducing it to something already known. Traditional aesthetics directs the Sublime into a linear, formulaic presentation, splitting reception into binaries of reason versus imagination or known versus unknown. These opposing forces engage in dialectical conflict across the concise barrier of difference; a trench warfare of ideologically divided mental faculties. Fear and awe enter the battle as imagination points toward the limitless, and relief affirms the self when reason redraws the borders between known and unknown, reorienting the self toward a reproduction of its own ideological map. This traditional Sublime reading happens completely within the subject, an internalized, immanent event from beginning to end. For my MA Thesis, “The Re-presentation of Stonehenge: Curatorship of a public monument within evolving theories of the Sublime,” I had reworked traditional Sublime theory into a convenient, five-part formula so that I could apply it empirically to reception within specific, event-based case studies. The formula acknowledged a measure of contemporary scholarship while retaining its Enlightenment roots by implicitly acknowledging the rational as superior, even if it depends upon the imagination in order to exercise its authority: 1 The Sublime is a term that refers to the experience of transcending familiar levels of reality and the realization of the self at the limit or lintel of human experience.1 2 It is necessary to undertake the process of imagining what lies beyond the limit in order to locate the limit.2 3 Sublimity is not a fixed characteristic of an object or event; the Sublime object or event is that which encourages a Sublime experience in the subject.3 4 When imagination fails to contain the magnitude of an object or event and all its implications, because of its physical or temporal vastness or both, reason orders the experience by placing it within a frame that separates the known from the unknown.4

Radical Self-Reliance 71 5 When reason triumphs, the location of the self in relation to the frame— in the known—substantiates the notion of one’s place in the world, reaffirming the preservation of the self.5 As a green scholar, to me this theory felt complete, impenetrable, but subsequent academic mileage revealed many flaws. For one, this included the assumption that conceptual frames are capable of cleanly dividing inside from outside. I had hijacked Derrida’s parergon to establish a binary while ignoring the primary argument of the parergon; a frame cannot absolutely separate inside from outside because it always includes both. However, there was some utility in my Sublime theory because it amplified a peculiar human instinct to make frames and overlay structure in order to hold space steady. For example, a surface-reading of the principle of radical self-reliance paints a clean picture of conditions in which fear and confusion must be conquered by using what could be called the rational imagination, or the faculties of applying knowledge to previously un-encountered conditions in order to perceive them as known. It is a process of presuming that the unknown will fold comfortably into the known and affirm the conquering self. Problem-solving in threatening conditions requires improvisational skill when the usual preparatory measures prove insufficient, and most improv performers will tell you that their finest work comes out of conditions in which their options are specifically restricted and they have honed their technique through extensive rehearsal. Drawing frames and making difference is a method of expanding perceived limits by locating them, crossing them, and re-drawing them. The Black Rock Desert’s harsh, often life-threatening conditions come with a meta-narrative to conquer pre-rationalized fear. This narrative operates both logically and poetically, for the move toward perceived risk involves both pragmatic problem-solving and a need to categorize experience into risks that have already been taken, overcome, and described by powerful metaphors and imagery that privilege the recollection of a thing over the thing itself. Reason and imagination grapple in a performance for the meta-cognition of an observing self that seeks affirmation. My intention is not to be reductive, by way of a sweeping assumption that all participants possess the same motivations for attending Burning Man, but a certain amount of generalization is necessary for the sake of argument. My overall project centers on embodiment, and I cannot responsibly speak for any body other than my own, but comprehensive data collection on all subjective opinions would be impossible; even a representative sampling could not possibly account for every individuals’ perpetually shifting points of view. Quite literally, the best information I have comes from the experience of talking with many different burners over the years, and the overwhelming affirmation that: yes, dust storms are scary

72  Radical Self-Reliance but amazing, the harsh conditions of the high desert are an important part of Burning Man, and “Plug and Play” camps only diminish the experience with illusions of safety and luxury.6 In the above, five-part formula, the emphasis is clearly on the oftenunwitting separation of reason from imagination as irreconcilable forces in Western minds conditioned by the reign of the unimpeachable rational. In this ring, the two impulses spar and take turns dominating until reason triumphs in the form of release from the mind’s unbounded journey into imagination. If it is possible to zoom out from the micro to the macro lens—the individual to the collective—the gates of Black Rock City could be considered, if not a separation between the realms of reason and imagination, perhaps a move toward temporary, conceptual blending of these faculties that are so readily broken into binaries. The difference between the known reason and the unknown imagination need not isolate the self within a cocoon of illusory security on the “safe” side of rational. Within a heterotopia compensating for the alienating effects of day-to-day life, the principle of radical self-reliance might open out the potential for difference to be embodied as a liminal space of the infinitely possible instead of a liminal barrier between known and unknown. A Sublime grounded in rationalizing fear is generally linear, dialectic, and short-lived, possessing a perceived journey into the unknown that often avoids actual, radical encounter with the other. The presence of monologic ideology prevents this encounter; presuming that reason will prevail to unveil an intact mirror of self-recognition. This is the domain of canonical ritual, established rites of passage, and self-conscious repetition. A Sublime where one might embody limitlessness, however, must acknowledge that any frame that separates reason from imagination actually contains both. This frame is not a border to be crossed, but a space in which to linger, where nothing has been decided because reason and imagination are just chilling together instead of arguing. In From Ritual to Theatre, Victor Turner argues for a distinction between different forms of liminality, the liminal and the liminoid. The fundamental distinction between the two forms is that liminal occurs within the total social process, while liminoid occurs outside the central economic and political processes.7 While Turner’s theories are primarily concerned with how ritual constructs and reinforces total social identities versus behavior that occurs within the margins of these societies, I find these distinctions useful in combination because participants of Black Rock City are so often engaged in both. The liminal/liminoid argument splits the concept into communal versus individual; ritual versus creative; transition versus transcendence. At the same time, a combination of the two might suggest a sheltering space of ritual in which it is safe to enter a directionless exploration of unknown, where movement becomes more varied and complex

Radical Self-Reliance 73 as it simultaneously negotiates structure, chaos, and the absence of both. Structure and chaos are mutually constitutive, but their absence destabilizes the encounter between self and other. Acceptance of all, including absence, introduces the possibility for imagination to do more than sacrifice itself. Turner’s work on liminal/liminoid turns to the work of Arnold Van Gennep to locate “rites of passage” in his own project, in particular to establish and examine the three phases Van Gennep calls, “separation, transition, and incorporation.”8 Turner places the most focus on the second phase of traditional rites of passage; the transition, in his chapter on “Liminal to Liminoid.” It is within this ambiguous, liminal space that transformation occurs, where individuals, societies, objects, or even concepts inhabit something both directionless and multi-directional; trajectory is not so important as constant movement, be it toward, away, over, under, or through the liminal. However, while Turner co-opts Van Gennep’s articulation of rites of passage and mines the concept of liminal to the extent that his discussion conceives the new term, “liminoid,” Turner expresses a fundamentally different attitude than Van Gennep toward this particular phase of the ritual process. Turner calls Van Gennep’s term, limen (Latin “threshold”) “negative in connotation, since it is no longer the positive past connotation nor yet the positive articulated future condition. It seems, too, to be passive since it is dependent on the articulated, positive conditions it mediates.”9 Van Gennep’s limen does not constitute a space in and of itself, and it is important to clarify here that this term also precludes negative space, for “negative” implies movement away from nothingness as opposed to the absence that separates negative from positive, as both negative and positive have the potential to fill space. It is not possible to linger within nothingness; within this linear Sublime there is no room to undergo change or to be present in any state except that which is already known nor unknown. One merely finds refuge on one side after wandering or stumbling or deliberately crossing into the other. There are no options beyond these binaries. Within this frame, Sublime connotes “up to” the threshold, or being right at the boundary without being in it, for event-based liminality or the subjective, mimetic Sublime depend on re-articulation of unchanged time and space. Turner goes on to describe the ways in which inhabitants of liminal space display not only active rather than passive tendencies but also protraction and transformation of the space itself, for example, when the threshold becomes a tunnel, cunicular rather than boundless. The space and its inhabitants are not simply marking a relational in-between; they are in action, contrary to Van Gennep’s limen of absence or nothingness that is no longer the condition that has passed, but not yet the condition it will become. Turner’s limen is a space of becoming, where infinite possible

74  Radical Self-Reliance outcomes and conditions are both constituted and negated simultaneously; charged with both potential energy as well as kinetic in-between-ness. This space of becoming is the domain of Performance Studies, the macrolens of this book through which all its critique is filtered, a space that has so long been categorized as transformative, marginal, and/or in-between, McKenzie argues that it has become normalized, the liminal-norm.10 Because the word “performance” itself is an essentially contested term,11 the concept of Performance Studies must depend heavily upon the concept of transgression to distinguish it as always in motion, never static, and having no fixed structure. It is only universal in its contingency, continually diverting focus toward something else and crossing into liminal space where it may encounter yet several other versions of itself. As such, traditional readings of Sublime can find little purchase in Performance Studies, for actualization of the Sublime is located at (up to) but not in the liminal. And a normalized liminal does no more to complicate the traditional Sublime than the traditional Sublime does to move radical self-reliance beyond the realm of mimesis. However, in the interest of finding ways to indulge a suspicion that limits might generate some potential insight that allows “radical self-reliance” to transcend the subjective assumptions packed within the phrase itself, the following discussion explores not just a contemporary version of the traditional Sublime, but a strategic misreading of the Sublime. In dialogue with Turner’s liminal/liminoid, mimesis, and several of Bakhtin’s theories, I endeavor to recast the Sublime as a way of embodied becoming, rather than a closed process of self-affirmation. There are many important distinctions to make within Turner’s theory before it can be applied to an alternate reading of Sublime, so I will first discuss its basic characteristics and applications. As noted, Turner separates liminality into two separate categories with the following definitions: Liminal phenomena are centrally integrated into the total social process, forming with all its other aspects a complete whole, and representing its necessary negativity and subjectivity. Liminoid Phenomena develop apart from the central economic and political processes, along the margins, in the interfaces and interstices of central and servicing institutions—they are plural, fragmentary, and experimental in character. Within these definitions alone, liminal refers to the collective, perhaps a crucial function in the continuation of a society that is made up of individuals who share common goals, traits, customs, and needs. The liminoid indicates the individual; even as those individuals generally belong to a collective social network, in the margins there is no particular social

Radical Self-Reliance 75 underpinning or structure. The systems within which individuals function are critiqued—not propped up or reinforced—by liminoid phenomena. From a phenomenological perspective, liminoid events move between the borders of such systems and work at the spaces in which they are received and made into individual perceptions. One common way in which these two sides of the liminality coin have been differentiated is into liminal/ modern versus liminoid/postmodern, though I believe it is more accurate to say that the liminal is more modernist than the liminoid, which is more postmodernist than the liminal. To call the liminal categorically modernist would necessitate privileging a romantic ideal of innocence or primitivism, in short, greatly diminishing its usefulness as a tool for serious critique. Conversely, it is inappropriate to suggest that the liminoid occupies only pure postmodern fragments of an impossibly fractured whole. It can retain its ludic origins while moving through spaces more collective, streamlined, or universal than would normally align with structures more concerned with choice than with obligation.12 An important feature of liminality can be found in the difference between choice and obligation, for Turner claims that the liminoid is only possible in a society that makes a distinction between work and leisure; an unknown concept in pre-industrial societies. This is not to say those societies had no concept of play, but rather play was not a privilege to be earned through hard enough work, as leisure is considered today. In other words, these more “primitive” social organizations both worked and played as necessary, rather than banking away the toil of one activity to spend on the pleasures of another. A society that functions on the idea of the “necessary” will more likely enter spaces of transformation within a form of “restored behavior,” or performance that has a consciousness of itself through repetition, such as rituals of church, schools, canonical theatre, or established rites of passage.13 A society that views work as necessary and play as privilege, creating a fraught and complicated duality between two separate and distinct activities, contains more limited and contained self-reflexivity and therefore more potential to exploit the need for society to watch itself repeatedly reproduce its own environment. However, cognizance of ideological structure also permits its intentional transgression, activity that opens up the margins in between familiar spaces. Turner found the need to rearticulate liminal space within these margins as “liminoid,” in order to distinguish it from spaces of society’s familiar rituals, which imply a single trajectory, path, or tunnel in Turner’s view; a mere threshold in Van Gennep’s. Turner’s liminoid is creative and experimental. It is also a space in which performance becomes fantastic if it can keep itself from getting stuck there. The liminal, on the other hand, is the domain of the ritualistic or rote, the reification of transformation. It does little to challenge the status quo

76  Radical Self-Reliance but gains its power in the act of crossing a threshold to attain relief from an action completed. It is traversing rather than transversing, driven by necessity even if it constitutes a creative solution to fulfill the needs of the collective or the individual answering the collective call. The comforting patterns are embraced and the formulaic journey to the known by way of temporary “unknown” is completed, the terrain traversed, often within the sheltering spaces of church, school, and ritual. This parsing of Turner’s theory emphasizes the need for action within the margins but does not fully account for the relational nature of structures and their absence in society. Movement into the margins references the structures they seek to subvert, and generally occurs with the assumption that an opening margin will close when it is explained and brought into the known. Time inside of liminoid space is presumably enclosed by time outside, a liminal journey to and from or into and through, limits. Here is where the term Sublime comes into play as a location on the edge of the liminal, at the limit. This position is usually considered to be of a temporary nature—a resolution following linear motion—but perhaps it is possible to recast the Sublime as a more persisting place of potential where the liminal is not shut down by reason, but opened out by imagination. In order to accomplish this, reason and imagination must not be dueling forces but rather inhabitants of the same frame; the parergon that contains both of the elements it would otherwise separate. If a body is that parergon, moving in spaces of otherness, it is possible that limits distinguishing inside from outside of heterotopia can work to locate the body in a prolonged state of Sublime, at the limit by bringing known and unknown together. In previous chapters I have discussed the utility of play as an alternative engagement with structures of power, suggesting that ludic behavior opens up creativity instead of reinforcing rote response. The Situationists’ dérive (drift) is a prime example of reimagining these structures. For example, a performance such as holding a ballroom dance in full formal dress in the middle of a bank lobby can temporarily destabilize the role of austere, impersonal architecture designed to cow those who might otherwise reject its authority. Such acts create liminoid space where performance rewrites habitual narratives, but with the likely caveat that hegemonic meta-narrative dictates the event as escape and then return. However, if one moves outside the limiting meta-narrative, events that reorient the known toward the limitless unknown could also conceivably open out the known into limitlessness, collapsing the two spaces upon each other in a state of coextensive selfhood; an engaged, creative body in-the-making. Radical self-reliance in this arena takes on new meaning. It is more than accepting responsibility to sustain the self in threatening conditions, it is looking inside the self to consider the otherness within. Jaques Alain-Miller’s blog about Lacan describes this as “extimacy,”

Radical Self-Reliance 77 a notion that “at the very heart of your being, the very core of your selfhood, there is an exteriority, an intimacy that comes from outside.” Levinasian ethics might frame this within a notion of responsibility to extimacy, or awareness of a metaphysical orientation toward the other. If self-reliance implies responsibility for the self, perhaps radical self-reliance includes responsibility for the other. This could be accomplished in the act of playing with the other, amplifying the imagination rather than sacrificing it. The following case study, “Hamlet by Two,” is intended to explore the possibility of such a space where the Sublime can be embodied rather than accomplished. It also calls into question whether radical self-reliance must be event-based and ego-led, or if it could also indicate a variation, self-reliance that is so radical because it calls for willingness to release former convictions into new re-imaginings of self. The study begins with a narrative description of the performance, and subsequent analysis utilizes re-imaginings of the Sublime and radical self-reliance as they might function within an ecology cultivated by heterotopia. “Hamlet by Two, Burning Man Style” In August 2009, I along with Scott, a long-time partner from prior, theatrical performances of “Hamlet by Two,” decided that our incarnation of my slapstick-style Hamlet two-hander had reached a point at which it made sense to put the show to rest. It had been a terrific ride, including multiple different casts over several years, but the time had come to go out with a bang. Because Scott and I were both avid Burners, we seized upon the idea of making our final exit in the Black Rock Desert, in the form of a rogue performance culminating in a sacrificial burn. We planned the event over drinks and much laughter, envisioning the burning set pieces and the celebratory atmosphere. It would be simple enough to take the show on the road, as our original concept had involved mobile, bare-bones set and props, and the symbolic destruction of those would be a fitting pyre for art that is by its very nature made increasingly potent by inverse proportion to the proximity and scale of its impending exit. It would most certainly be easy, amusing, and memorable. However, what had seemed like a fun, frolicking project in conversation became rife with problems, as these things so often are, in its execution. We had planned to use microphones to overcome the constant ambient noise of Burning Man, but our technical support did not come through. Dust storms abounded that year at the festival—Burning Man 2009 was posthumously nicknamed the “Dust Bowl”—and our event kept getting

78  Radical Self-Reliance delayed, losing momentum with each cancelled performance. Our original location did not pan out, and we were forced to set up our stage next to an installation piece called “The Death Guild,” one of the largest, consistently noisiest, brightest, and most crowded spaces at Burning Man. And, because of the constant delays, we had no time for rehearsal in the new space, which ultimately resulted in a vicious stage-combat accident. After four days of delaying the performance, we finally decided to go ahead with the show in spite of unfriendly weather conditions. We were determined to do what we had set out to do, even if our original vision had to be modified. At 11 p.m. Thursday night, we blared pre-show music over a set of powerful speakers, and began our pre-show ritual of painting each other’s bodies with symbols of crowns and serpents. By the time a crowd had gathered, yet another dust storm had kicked up, and we made our entrance into a veritable wall of dust so thick, we could barely see our audience. We screamed our lines, exaggerated our bodily movements to compensate for the necessary mask-like goggles that obscured our facial expressions, and even as over half of the spectators gave up to go find shelter from the storm, we soldiered on. Looking back, it is difficult to believe that the two of us, both seasoned combat professionals, abandoned caution to the point of swinging swords at each other in such dangerous conditions. We knew we were losing our audience because of the sheer distraction. It was impossible to continue asking them to believe that we inhabited a different time and place in our story because we were all, performers and audience alike, choking on the dust together. So, rather than fight the elements to uphold a failing illusion, we invited them into the space with us by improvising two lines that drew the biggest laugh of the night. They were not tremendously funny, but allowed a moment of respite so that all participants could redouble their efforts to continue to the end. In the Mousetrap scene, where Hamlet and Horatio plot to ensnare the King in his own treacherous web, Scott was in the role of Hamlet, and said/ shouted his line as usual, “Give him heedful note/For I mine eyes will rivet to his face/And after we will both our judgments join/In censure of his seeming.” Grabbing the opportunity to release an overabundance of tension, I replied with, “Heed him I will try, milord, but how the fuck am I supposed to see him through all this dust?” Scott, after a fleeting look of shock, a slight smile, and quick recomposure, came back with, “Aye, it is beyond strange to see such a storm INSIDE OF ELSINORE CASTLE, but as I said before, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The obvious reason for the resulting laughter and cheers was the gratitude of our audience for allowing them in on the joke.

Radical Self-Reliance 79 By the time the fifty-five-minute show reached its final scene, the storm had cleared enough so that we decided in the moment to go ahead with our plan to burn the set, prepped with wicking and colored solvent. We had only to complete the final fight sequence and light the wicks. However, that final sequence had never been rehearsed in the new space, and one of our stage platforms was half the size we were accustomed to, bringing us and our swords far closer together than usual. It is hardly surprising that in a final pass, Scott’s elbow collided with my nose so forcefully that I was knocked backwards off the four-foot platform and into the dust. I got up and uttered my final lines as blood streamed down my face and Scott lit the set pieces on fire. As we all watched the set burn in bright flames, it occurred to me for the first time that the life-sized, wooden stick figures we had used to represent other characters in the play were in fact giant crosses. Yes, we went out with a bang; dust storms, blood, and burning crosses. I believe the audience’s enthusiastic applause and cheers were more in appreciation for our sheer stubbornness than for our skill. As I watched the flames engulf our set, pressing a cold can of beer against my nose and consciously feeling the warm, wet blood on the front of my shirt with a kind of sick satisfaction, I felt unexpectedly somber. Though almost nothing in the show had gone according to plan, I had still hoped that our anticipated sense of relief would come to fruition in the flames. It did not. Watching a row of burning crosses bookend what had been a long, successful run of my precious play was just plain bizarre, I cannot put too fine a point on it. So we joined the audience members who had come forward to gather and warm themselves around the impossibly slow-burning crosses, chatted for a while, cleaned up our set, poured ourselves each a shot of Jameson, and had a silent toast on the open playa, knowing but not saying that everything had changed. I would characterize the “Hamlet by Two, Burning Man Style” performance as a textbook case of that which prompts people to wonder why performers put themselves through such extremes. To be sure, as I held an ice-cold can of Pabst against my miraculously unbroken nose after that performance, I was wondering the same thing myself. My Burning Man street credit soared that night, but that had nothing to do with my original intention, nor with the reason that I kept going even after being injured. To explore this specific question, why put myself through this, I return to my original, five-part Sublime formula with the intention of locating and supporting its alternate version through this performance case study. 1 The Sublime is a term that refers to the experience of transcending familiar levels of reality and the realization of the self at the limit or lintel of human experience.

80  Radical Self-Reliance A traditional reading would place the symbolic life-limit at the stage, whether physical or conceptual; the customary difference between actor and audience. The setting of our stage within one of nature’s most terrifying displays, a desert dust storm, added elements often connected with the Sublime; feelings of terror and the desire for relief. Combined with the uncanniness of doubling embedded in performance, the sense of danger heightened the unbounded nature of temporal experience. A less literal limit could be found in the emotional friction prior to and continuing on throughout the performance of seven separate Shakespearean characters. The tensioned connection between actor and character has no beginning or end; within every moment lies infinite possibility, and a division between the self and the character is underscored by every specific choice in the moment that both acknowledges and erases that possibility simultaneously. The traditional Sublime is sought within the promise to release that tension, promised by the actor’s commitment to continue performing a character that is neither the actor nor the interpretation of the written word through voice and movement. The performance often brings infinite possibility into a subjective, sensory experience in which the audience might recognize themselves. This scenario culminates in self-affirmation, making the other understandable in order to gain relief. However, it does not account for the effect of the dust storm that complicated the process by refusing to let an assumed narrative run the show. As performers and audience coughed up dust particles together, the limits between known and unknown were obscured because an ungovernable other had entered the scene and commanded attention. The improvised dialogue about the strangeness of a dust storm in Elsinore castle made peace with the other without defeating it by bringing the audience and performers into the same space with the other. Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt is applicable here in its interpretations as both “making strange” and “alienation,” for the elusive limit had become strange, resulting in defamiliarization of self in both performer and audience. Sensory bodies opened to the other and all its possibilities, even if only to temporarily consider where it might take them. 2 It is necessary to undertake the process of imagining what lies beyond the limit in order to locate the limit. In traditional theatre it is often the case that what lies beyond the limit is the performance to come, a performance which has not yet articulated the unknown in such a way that holds up the mimetic mirror for both audience and performer. The act of articulation is often one of delivery, handing the audience a representative story within an intact, recognizable frame-as-limit. However, within unfamiliar conditions, self-recognition may be expected but unattainable. If the self is

Radical Self-Reliance 81 not attuned to an ideological meta-narrative, but moving in relation to unresolved cultural conditions, distinguishing known from unknown is less a process of creating binaries and more along the lines of fragmentation. Even a reified selfhood can fall apart alongside the other; the senses of familiar and unfamiliar are both still present but might enter into dialogic communication rather than active separation, constituting a kind of liminal-self. Perhaps, in the heterotopia of Black Rock City, performance in and of a Shakespearean dust storm positions the Sublime as embodied; self as the limit rather than at the limit. 3 Sublimity is not a fixed characteristic of an object or event; the Sublime object or event is that which encourages a Sublime experience in the subject. This is the statement that solidifies a linear Sublime; if the experience happens within a contained self, the imagination must be sacrificed to remove the threat to what is known. Adorno’s description of Kantian reason states: “What Kant saw, in terms of content, as the goal of reason, the creation of humankind, utopia, is hindered by the form of his thought, epistemology. It does not permit reason to go beyond the realm of experience, which, in the mechanism of mere material and invariant categories, shrinks to what has already existed.”14 This valorization of knowledge is a driving force behind the desire to know via rationalization, to legitimate thought and action in a succession of repeatability. A performance that ended with slowly burning crosses was not what was intended for “Hamlet by Two’s” last incarnation, but once they were lit, we had no choice but to accept it. Closure would not come in the form of a choreographed blaze, but instead elude us indefinitely in a painfully slow burn. Scott and I even shrugged at each other at some point and I muttered, “Hey, it’s Burning Man, just go with it.” We understood somehow that, had this been one of our performances in the default world, we would have crawled away in shame. But, because we were at Burning Man, some audience members left to find mischief elsewhere while others entered the space to warm their hands by the fire and chat with us. There was no clear indication that the show was over, merely a general impulse to move on to something else. It was not without awkwardness, but that was quickly replaced by engaging in play with the unexpected situation. In the absence of fixed expectations by which to gauge social relations, participants who had been brought together by this event took the opportunity to bypass a moment usually reserved for rational internalization—the end of the performance—and continue with creativity in-the-making. A performance that could have been resolved and consumed, as knowledge accumulated in service of an endless cycle of means and ends, was instead allowed to change and remain in motion. No one had to understand why a play had turned

82  Radical Self-Reliance into an intimate campfire, they wanted only to warm themselves. Even my director ego, grappling with frustration over things going differently than I had envisioned, found no space to vent that frustration and eventually enjoyed letting it go. The meta-cognitive self was released into the immediate unfamiliar, a radicalized self. 4 When imagination fails to contain the magnitude of an object or event and all its implications, because of its physical or temporal vastness or both, reason orders the experience by placing it within a frame that separates the known from the unknown. The phrase “imagination fails” could be the thesis statement of the traditional Sublime. In a culture increasingly conditioned to value only that which can be explained, where even traditions based on “faith” are argued by insisting on their logic, it is vital to reassemble activities of the imagination into productive knowledge. Unbounded imagination throws experience out of balance unless it is abandoned into alterity, outside of rational ordering. I turn again at this point to the encroaching dust storm that rumbled our attempts to deliver the polished, witty performance to which we had been accustomed, for there was no discernible end to the storm that we could sense and our instinct was to battle it. Relief did ensue, but not because we overcame the storm; it came in the moment we accepted and joined forces with the storm. Securing our goggles and shouting our lines were attempts to separate ourselves from it, to keep the performance’s known structure intact in spite of it. Giving up the ruse and acknowledging the presence of an unknown was to acknowledge that the other is always present, even when you cannot literally feel it forcing its way into your nasal passages, and that reorienting toward it diminishes neither the self nor the other; it beckons both into an attitude of mutual reliance and new possibility. The imagination need not sacrifice itself so that known can be separated from unknown; it can move alongside reason into embodied liminality.15 5 When reason triumphs, the location of the self in relation to the frame— in the known—substantiates the notion of one’s place in the world, reaffirming the preservation of the self. This form of reaffirmation presumes an amplified but prefigured self that shrinks what is unknown into what has already existed. It is an experience not without value, for a validated self is in many ways an empowered self that possesses a furthered intellectual awareness of potential, but even in the act of revealing what was previously not visible, the self is not coextensive with that which still remains obscured. The preservation of self seems so instinctual, or at least so habitualized by mimetic social development, that even deep desire to change often succumbs to a

Radical Self-Reliance 83 pattern of reconstituting finished versions of the self rather than revealing a changing self. A defamiliarized self might produce feelings of anxiety or loss, the unfamiliar might appear dauntingly complicated, when in reality it is less likely a loss than an enrichment and a move toward balance as opposed to unnavigable confusion. This fear of loss and being lost may be the most profound factor influencing the desire to keep the self intact. But in spaces of otherness, where ideology is not experienced as an absolute force that checks the threatening contingency of existence, the self is positively destabilized by difference and moves within a community of relative support. Individuals may inhabit and embody difference rather than locate themselves in relation to it. Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque is an appropriate frame to describe Burning Man here, for it suggests a timeless creative force that is manifested and perpetuated in difference. Other, narrower notions of carnival often characterize these spaces outside of time as release valves, themselves contained within dominant ideology, where frustrations are ventilated so that participants may return to daily life with renewed vigor, accepting unjust conditions as endurable until the next escape.16 Bakhtin’s work, however, posits the carnivalesque body as one that deconstructs its own relationship to order. It is not a temporary social inversion so much as an alternate social space where the body acts creatively in a constant state of renewal, where all its aspects are brought into dialogue on a sensuous, physical level. Carnivalesque performance connects the fleshy body to the world, often with particular emphasis on the grotesque, which celebrates the orifices as sites where elements pass through and matter moves in and out. Eating, defecating, and fornicating, for example, are physicalizations of a broader notion that sustenance comes from outside the self. The body itself “comes to represent the cosmos, and in the hyperbolic comic images of gargantuan feats of eating, defecation, sexual exploits and misadventures, terror is mocked, transformed, and mastered.”17 If a hypersensualized, biologically proliferating body alleviates the fear of a diminished or extinguished self, the carnivalesque body is presumably an ideal site for Radical Inclusion of the other. In the final component of this Burning Man performance case study I must clarify that no eating, defecating, nor fornicating occurred in “Hamlet by Two,” but two physical elements of the carnivalesque that presented themselves were: the all-encompassing dust and copious amounts of blood and sweat. Just as conceptual relationships to otherness involve a generative connectivity between self and other, palpable sensual contact between the fleshy body and its surrounding environment underscores their intense interdependency; the realization that bodies require entire ecologies of sustenance, and in turn contribute to sustaining their ecology.

84  Radical Self-Reliance In the Black Rock Desert, Burning Man participants respond to playa dust in many different ways, but those reactions can broadly be categorized as either resisting it or accepting it. Do you want it or not? Even in perfectly still weather, playa dust permeates everything, and people either constantly try to wash it off to no avail, or let it coat their bodies and belongings and make peace with the sensation. In dust storms, most people take shelter and wait until conditions clear, but some individuals enjoy putting on goggles and masks and strolling right into it. I am one of those individuals who loves to wander in the blinding dust and feel it move over my skin. During our performance, however, I resented its presence. I was accustomed to creating illusions with theatrical performance at the time, and the intruding storm kept breaking the illusion. Screaming dialogue over the roar of this storm and excessively swinging swords through its particles were our futile attempts to maintain the integrity of our theatrical space, to fortify the boundary between known and unknown. To gauge its volume and mass and then adjust our actions to compensate was an attempt to rationalize the dust and contain its limitlessness by pushing it into a space outside of ours. Several things occurred in the moment that we implicitly agreed to include the dust by bringing it into our narrative. The audience relaxed into laughter after the stress of trying and failing to stay with us inside a faltering illusion. The closed, theatrical present opened out into a detextualized present-in-the-making. We admitted that we could feel the dust moving on us and in us, that our bodies were no more or less than sensing things having tactile encounters with other things. Thingliness has a profound impact on fear of the unknown because it removes the instinctual necessity to reinforce limits; it recasts the other-as-limitless to the other as another thing in the same space as a thingly body. There is no need to rationalize materiality of the body, of dust, of fire; these things are connected and articulated through the senses. The second element that I indicated as carnivalesque—bodily fluid in the form of blood and sweat—presents the same form of material connectedness to the other, but one that originates from within the body as opposed to its surrounding world. While bodily excretions are an essential part of its maintenance, these functions have been, in the words of Bakhtin, “transferred to the private and psychological level where their connotation becomes narrow and specific, torn away from the direct relation to the life of society and to the cosmic whole.”18 In the default world, bodies are only supposed to perspire at designated times and places, otherwise that process must be avoided, masked, or at the extreme, shamed. A bleeding body takes that notion to another level and in multiple directions, two notable examples being menstruation and injury. Menstruating bodies are so socially intimidated into keeping blood private that many

Radical Self-Reliance 85 will accept insertion of a foreign object in an effort to prevent blood from leaving the body at all, that is, until a time at which it can be methodically removed and discarded. A body bleeding due to injury does not necessarily elicit shame and denial equal to a body producing sweat or menstrual blood, but its propensity to connote hyperbolic externalization of a private interior often leads to disproportionate prioritization of cleanup over healing. In the “Hamlet by Two” narrative I described a way of regarding my own bleeding body with a kind of “sick satisfaction.” That particular narrative was written almost exactly five years prior to this analysis, a time at which that two-word phrase felt accurate, but from my current perspective it seems a form of apology for a pleasure that I did not understand. Almost anyone who has been struck in the nose can probably attest to the intense pain that peaks very quickly and then subsides into a dull soreness; like many injuries, it is only debilitating for a moment. I felt no urge to clean it up. After the pain had passed, the warm, wet sensation of flowing blood fascinated me and did not appear to repulse anyone else. In the default world, I am certain that my bloody face would have shocked those who were nearby and prompted me to immediately wash it to remove the disturbing image of a wounded body sharing too much of something that is supposed to remain inside. In our defamiliarized performance space, however, it was not a condition of vulnerability but an unexpectedly deep sensory phenomenon. A carnivalesque reading of this response suggests that blood flowing in a non-threatening and socially unobtrusive situation casts the body as an organic thing in a constant state of renewal. Its blood, which usually remains unseen, holds in its sudden exterior presence the ability to bring out the interior other. Bodies rely on their othered, interior systems just as the self relies on its deep, though rarely conceptualized, intimacy with the other. The pleasure in that event did not come from a sense of withstanding pain and messiness, in effect rationalizing or ordering fear, but from bringing together what might otherwise be considered the inside and outside of the body and acknowledging that limits between the two are arbitrarily constructed. Loss and Being Lost The analysis in this chapter has focused primarily on complicating the Sublime and implying that its non-linear applications avoid the ultimate goal of self-affirmation in favor of revealing a changed self-in-the-making. It must be acknowledged, however, that this alternative conceptualization is not intended to serve as reassurance that relocating a rationalized self-at-the-limit to a defamiliarized self-in-the-limit creates conditions for creative acts without fear. While I assert that the self is not diminished by

86  Radical Self-Reliance including the other, the fact remains that awareness of an evolving self can bring on the sense of losing a former, more understandable version of the self. The final image of our burning set pieces—the irony of them being crosses is not lost on me—crystallizes that sense of unspecified loss in an irrational attachment to objects for which I had developed an affection. In that moment they were not just wooden forms but all the Hamlets, Horatios, Gertrudes, and Ophelias that I had played with for seven years, slowly and visibly becoming ash. By burning them, I had released what was once known into difference and accepted that the structure I had imposed on them was always already absent.19 It was, though not conceived in this way at the time, an allegory for a self that was never actually known by the limits I had established to surround it and protect it. It is also likely that the uncanny nature of fire elicited notions of annihilation rather than transformation, a total loss as opposed to a change. The anxiety that so often accompanies radical change is ubiquitous, most easily comprehended in processes such as aging. For example, parents observing their children’s growth, while they may regard a child’s progression through stages of development with pride, often struggle with feelings of loss because that child in the midst of adolescence will never again be the infant they once nursed. This may manifest as existential anxiety by sensing, if not articulating, that stage of childhood as having been always already absent. However, if a growing child is constantly in the process of erasing its former versions, it must follow that it is also always in a state of becoming. Similarly, a self that sacrifices what was once known is also always in-the-making. In this reading of liminality, the Sublime is inverted by demanding former structures of reason as its sacrifice instead of imagination. Again, reliance on a radicalized self within heterotopian conditions is not effortless. Change may be felt as loss or being lost even if it desired. The utility within heterotopia is not that it removes fear but that it makes meaning out of action rather than consequence. Because the space itself is always already absent and continually in-the-making, it need not be closed by bringing it into the known. At Burning Man in particular, the fence that literally frames its geographical space simultaneously unframes its ideological space. The constant presence of fire as well as frequent, communal celebrations of fire convey material manifestations of a self sustained in difference. While a linear Sublime could be argued for events such as largescale burns—particularly the climactic Man Burn—due to their energizing and life-affirming effects, they are also powerful symbols of the potential to transform one’s relationship to the unknown; opportunities to linger in it without making sense of it.

Radical Self-Reliance 87 Notes 1 Tsang Lap-Chuen regards the instantiation of the sublime experience to begin with the process of realizing the self at a life-limit: “When the subject experiences that which is sublime about an object, and about himself, he construes himself to be realized at the limit of his being, that is, preserved against nonbeing, being affirmed at its utmost, or being in equilibrium in its domain.” Lap-Chuen Tsang, The Sublime: Groundwork towards a Theory (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1998), 96. 2 George Hartley, in The Abyss of Representation, discusses the diverging theories of Kant and Hegel on the sublime. If both theories can be understood in terms of the “gap” between discursive understanding and the world of phenomena, then Kantian perspective would place emphasis on the process of temporarily bridging the gap by organizing phenomenal experience into empirical reality by ceasing the faculty of imagination and commencing the separate and distinct process of reason. Hegelian perspective does not accept Kant’s formal separation of reason and imagination. Rather, the faculties [of intuition, imagination, understanding, and reason] are not to be represented as independent and coexistent actors but as moments of a dialectical process.” George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (London: Duke University Press, 2003), 62.   The intersection between these two theories lies in the impetus to comprehend the phenomenal; to bring an experience of the imagination into the limits of discursive understanding. The process must begin with imagining beyond that limit. 3 This statement is basic to all sublime discourse, beginning with Kant’s reworking of Burke’s theories. It is important enough to mention here, however, because this a point at which almost all sublime theory converges, and is vital to analysis of case studies in sublime experience. 4 This points to an intersection between Thomas Weiskel’s interpretation of Kant, and Derrida’s discussion of the perergon. Weiskel regards the Kantian take on the sublime through the lens of contemporary psychoanalytic theory: “the cause of the sublime is the aggrandizement of reason at the expense of reality and the imaginative apprehension of reality. [Reason] actually requires the imagination’s failure in order to discover itself afresh in an attitude of awe.” Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 40–41. 5 Tsang, Sublime, 96. 6 A “Plug and Play” camp, or “Turn-key camping” is Burner jargon for participants who do not take care of their own basic needs on the playa, such as cooking, cleaning, accommodations, and music. These camps are run by organizations that profit by curating high-end, all-inclusive, Burning Man vacations with steep price tags for those who wish to participate in the festival while employing the service of others. In recent years, the growing number of celebrities and the wealthy 1% at Burning Man has sparked heated debate on this topic. See: http://blog.burningman.com/2013/09/afield-in-the-world/ welcome-to-the-burning-man-media-frenzy-heres-how-we-win-it/. 7 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 54. 8 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 24.

88  Radical Self-Reliance 9 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 41. 10 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001), 50. 11 Dwight Conquergood, “Of Caravans and Carnivals: Performance Studies in Motion,” in TDR Vol. 39, No. 4 (Autumn 1995): 137. 12 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 55. 13 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35. 14 Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 21. 15 In Disunified Aesthetics, I interpret Lynette Hunter’s term “alongside” as a similar description of this process of revealing the unknown or making present what was absent. Hunter defines her “alongside” to say: the “unsaid is made in the making of difference which is an unending process of making present.” Lynette Hunter, Disunified Aesthetics: Situated Textuality, Performativity, Collaboration (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 9. 16 David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 54–55. 17 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), 227. 18 Bakhtin, The Bakhtin Reader, 236. 19 In Writing and Difference, Derrida describes signifiers within “sovereign writing” as that which cannot represent an original presence, but within a chain of signifiers, alludes to that which is “always already absent.” Extending this language to include objects as signifiers contextualizes our set pieces as having never actually been the symbols I had assigned to them. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 266.

5

Radical Self-Expression Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient

In an effort to understand what motivates Burning Man artists to devote countless hours, energy, and resources to the elaborate construction of artwork that will ultimately be reduced to ash, I interviewed veteran burner Lewis Zaumeyer, architect behind many of Burning Man’s large-scale installations. Zaumeyer’s thoughts on Burning Man Art suggested a significant difference between the way ideas of self-expression work for artists at Burning Man and for projects in the default world, changing the attitudes and actions of those who make it and encounter it: As an architect, I’m fascinated by the idea that I usually put huge amounts of effort into building things that will be around permanently, but I love the exhilaration of building something just to burn it. Maybe the mistakes you make will go away; the idea that it will ultimately be destroyed is absolutely embedded in the process of building it. The year we built the “Temple of Chance,” it became clear that what we were doing was sacrificial art.1 When pressed on the notion of sacrifice, Zaumeyer explained it as an ultimate rejection of “the man,” not as in the effigy of the Man that burns in the festival’s main event, but the man that symbolizes a capitalist society within which individuals often feel they have become trapped. I interpreted Zaumeyer’s concept of sacrifice in these terms: though ideological structures restrict freedom and creativity, they do provide a form of self-assurance, even affection, in a Stockholm-Syndrome-esque way. A symbolic sacrifice of capitalism in the default world might usher in the DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-6

90  Radical Self-Expression responsibility for filling the void that lingers in its ashes and trigger a very real loss of security, for beyond the boundary of any crumbled ideology lives the fear of negotiating unfamiliar space. The difference between unfamiliar space in daily life versus Burning Man, however, is that there is no need to resolve the ideological space of Black Rock City by making it work. At the end of one week, the festival is over and the space resolves as it is methodically and meticulously disappeared. Perhaps this is one of the more compelling reasons that artists gravitate to Burning Man to create radical art; in Black Rock City, it is rare to encounter consequences for dealing with that which has been made strange, or emotional responsibility to fix what has been ruptured. When motivated by the desire to reveal contradictions and difficult questions that plague society, artists may serve faithfully on a clear, forwardmoving trajectory: reveal, rupture, and hold the space where assumptions may safely fall apart. But when those suddenly visible contradictions start demanding resolution and the ruptures need a way to heal, varying degrees of disillusionment almost inevitably ensue. Artists who desire social change succumb all-to-often to the alienation inherent in being able to see and externalize problems while lacking the power to instigate solutions, a veritable Cassandra complex of inadequate resources. However, just as artists hold space for assumptions to fall apart, Burning Man can hold space for artists to fall apart. Maybe it is in relative safety within both the spaced time of a week and the timed space of a fenced-off, Temporary Autonomous Zone. There are no partisan policy-makers attempting to push new legislation, no oppressed masses who need immediate relief. Stripping away ideology leaves no one bare, out in the cold. In a temporary community where radical self-expression is a relative requirement, art may loiter indefinitely in the domain of the imagination; it need never turn pragmatic. And, equally as encouraging to the politically conscious artist as this permission to rip the fabric of society without having to stitch it back together, the presence of thousands of other artists and their works that prop up, decorate, and substantiate the Black Rock Cityscape provides a network of support on a massive scale. This safety, this support, is quite possibly Burning Man’s most valuable gift, a practical application of Radical Self-Expression. As do most of the Ten Principles, Radical Self-Expression naturally refers back to an anti-capitalist interpretation of Burning Man’s core values. As such, some might argue that this kind of temporary society creates a carnivalesque release valve by which its citizens may blow off the steam that increasingly pressurizes in daily life and inhibits their need for freedom and autonomy by permitting temporary, free reign to burn away frustrations. In Ritual, Politics, and Power, David Kertzer discusses how, rather than effect social change, these rituals often reinforce the status quo:

Radical Self-Expression 91 “Through such ritual, people are able to ventilate their natural resentments of occupying inferior places in society and, in doing so, allow the system to continue.”2 In other words: escape, express yourself, build, burn, rest, recover, and return to regular life renewed, because it is easier to bear the toil of being a good worker if one can cling to the anticipation of the next great escape. In this regard, it must be acknowledged to some degree that escape to heterotopia constitutes its own origins, and return accepts those origins. However, to say that this acceptance equals defeat or precludes the possibility of social change belies a cultural bias toward historicized, event-based revolution. For even if participants have not outright rejected the conditions that they temporarily left behind, they may have rehearsed beliefs and behaviors that could survive the transition between heterotopia and the default world. In a place where it is neither expected nor encouraged to sacrifice the imagination, but rather to sacrifice the ego, one might foster a radically altered vision of self-expression’s utility. The possibility of heterotopia as a space in which the self might rehearse new behaviors that are predicated upon sacrifice of the ego demands reevaluation of what traditionally constitutes selfhood. In the culture with which I am most closely familiar, selfhood—or identification—to me involves more a process of defining that which one is not, rather than what one is or the possibilities that one could become. This identification via difference is often a practice of not only excluding, but in many cases negating, any versions of identification that do not resemble what is known. The embodied insight made possible by an experience like Zaumeyer’s, the “exhilaration of building something just to burn it,” the total lack of responsibility to rebuild, and the making of spaces where mistakes just go away, breathes a different kind of vitality into notions of what might be possible to the process of designing a structure that must conform to legal building codes and almost always reflects the authority of its culture. The very idea that mistakes are not actual mistakes in the traditional sense because there will be no consequences, no demands for solutions, and no repercussions as long as the artist maintains a mindful attitude toward safety, is largely a foreign concept outside of Black Rock City. The opportunity to act and react in a space that never moves across the threshold from rehearsal to performance changes the bodies that move within that space. Values are made and unmade differently within an ecology of drastically shifting frames, which can vanish just as readily as the imperfect relics of creative acts that are destined to be burned. They don’t need to operate in relentless contingency to a hegemonic meta-structure. Whether these values are expressed through architecture, other forms of visual art, traditional concepts of performance, or individual acts of creativity, selfexpression assumes a different set of consequences within heterotopia than within the default world.

92  Radical Self-Expression In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault characterizes the nature of power as “not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others.”3 If power is a fluid process of constant negotiation and interpretation, then even meta-structures of power are constituted by those who modify thought and action in relation to them. An individual faced with the temporary opportunity to imagine alternatives to a perceived status quo must alter behaviors in order to unframe the status quo. If this new behavior facilitates freedom, creativity, and happiness, Adorno’s hat-trick of emotional survival, the individual might logically be more inclined to continue some version of it even outside of the alternative temporal space, thus reconstituting meta-structure through both perception and action. According to Debord scholars Antonello Pierpaolo and Olga Vasile, Adorno and Debord reached opposing theoretical poles on avant-garde art in the 1960s. Debord thought that art needed to be integrated into life in order to reestablish immediacy, and Adorno insisted it must remain separate, useless, in order to be apolitical.4 In other words, Adorno’s art must serve as an autonomous sphere of compensation for the dearth of ideologically unfettered creativity in daily life. This intentional separation of art from life, while providing an outlet for relief from systems that require widespread subjugation, does not necessarily allow creativity to provide more than temporary recompense for the culture that depends upon coveted escape in order to validate return. Debord’s call to reintegrate art into life, as well, disrupts perceived social structure but responds to the culture in which it appears, generally inhibiting any action that is not responsive to its cultural conditions. A space outside of ideology, possessing a culture that is evolving without specific direction and without the need to be fixed, is a space in which art is integrated into life because the art does not rebel against its circumstances, but rather contributes to the creation of a vibrant ecology of sustenance. The proliferation of art in Black Rock City is, at its best, expression without identification, invention rather than representation. At Burning Man, the Principle of Radical Self Expression implicitly grants bodies permission to change; to try and fail spectacularly with little to no repercussions. Within changing bodies it is possible to realize that we are not forever bound to acknowledge a fixed meta-structure even in attempts to reject it; but rather, by every creative act by every individual, even if that act is infinitesimally small, we might re-imagine fluctuating frames. In this process heterotopia is not just a separate space of otherness; it is transduced by the creative body into revolutionary acts. While a body does not necessarily serve the sole purpose of transferring unmade ideology from one space to another, it does change through the process of rehearsing unrationalized behavior in spaces of otherness, in effect learning

Radical Self-Expression 93 to behave creatively rather than through behavioral modification as means to an end. Unpacking the Self and the Other: Does a Self Assume an Other? In previous chapters, I have made room for duality through language, explored relationships between notions of “self” and “other” as arbitrary distinctions that are often forged in efforts to protect ego-centered selfhood and to affirm individuals’ meaningful existence within ideological space. Much of my research and performance has centered on the attempts to articulate these spaces where difference between self and other is made, unmade, shifted, and redrawn, because those infinite variables that inflect representations and semiotizations of self and other are ingrained in us from an early age. For example, my two young daughters have brought home drawings from school on a daily basis, and most often these are of themselves, their family, friends, and beloved animals. The drawings have become more detailed and sophisticated as they continue to grow and assign meaning to a variety of formal elements in visual art, but from early on in their quests to complete assignments with the goal being, “Draw a picture of yourself,” these images have been comprised of the same basic shapes: a round circle for a head, dots for eyes, a line for a mouth, and stick-figured torsos, arms, and legs. As they began to notice and add more details to these drawings throughout the years, such elements as individual lines for fingers and toes, yellow hair, and blue-circle eyes appeared. They have been learning to represent themselves visually and focus all their efforts on the shapes that symbolize their bodies. Whether they naturally view the self as a system of signs, or accept teachers’ instructions as the correct way to represent the self, the notion of self-as-limited-body takes hold; the fleshy body is the self, that which resides outside the flesh is other, and these deliberate distinctions are continually reinforced through such phrases as “personal space,” “self-reliance,” and “self-worth.” By bringing in the personal example of children’s drawings, I am by no means assuming a stance where I detail my experience of self-semiotization as a universal truth, for concepts of self and other vary from individual to individual and culture to culture. When I invoke terms such as “we” and “us,” I refer only to the society in which I was raised, where I first learned to sense a continuous culture that bound “us” together.5 I grew up drawing pictures of myself as a collection of symbols, and those of “us” who share similar experiences may have similarly ingrained views of self and other: We know who we are; they know who they are. Even as I investigate performance as articulations of making and unmaking difference, my compulsive tendency to draw that difference dominates from the outset. I do not believe I am alone in this respect; in my opinion, the gaps

94  Radical Self-Expression between self and other are often forged more deeply in the quest to “find ourselves,” by locating that which makes us unique, or special, or different from others. Within this frame, the common term “self-expression” suggests performance of a self bound by ego, contingent to ideology, and made in difference. Burning Man’s principle of radical self-expression offers the opportunity to re-read expressions of selfhood through the particular qualifier that appears in three of the ten principles: radical. A radicalized self is “offered as a gift to others.” It offers an alternative to identification, a self that is not constituted in difference from others, but rather constellated in creative acts with others. The case studies in this chapter are intended to compare and contrast some of the properties and possible utility of “self-expression” versus “radical self-expression,” by examining performance both outside and inside of heterotopia, as well as the potential for facets of a unified performance narrative to travel between these spaces. However, I will first make a case for the construction of self—in particular, identification, both communal and individual—as a performative act of self-preservation that often takes the form of aggression. Not only does the fortification of one’s own ego favor the reduction of imagination to repetition, but it reinforces a culturally ingrained habit of assigning known, pre-rationalized, oftenridiculed categories of selfhood to the process of identification. There has been extensive attention to this personal and social process in the field of Performance Studies, and I believe this is based on widely held assumptions that performance is first and foremost a form of self-expression, and that the intention behind performance is often to raise questions or make statements about what it means to identify—individually and socially—a self that effects more positive than negative outcomes. However, because identification generally takes the form of negation, its process strips selfexpression down to a process of revealing a “true” self, or accessing a unique core of selfhood that arrests the potential to change. In this case social change has little room to negotiate new territory. In the simplest of terms, traditional self-expression reinforces difference, while radical selfexpression gives it room to breathe. Yet, how is the self actually performed? Is the radical expression of self, that which according to the Fifth Principle of Burning Man is offered as a gift to others, the true self? Notions of truth and performance are nearly inextricable, and no matter the scale, from the individual to the global, the process of identification can manifest as aggression, both internally and externally. As Elin Diamond states, “In Lacan, identification, always in the register of the imaginary, is narcissistic—the perceived other is always a version of me. Difference, contradiction, are all occluded in the subject’s initial and continuing capture in the mimetic mirror.”6

Radical Self-Expression 95 For example, one of the most fundamental categories of identification is gender, with the important distinction between sex versus gender being the difference between anatomy and social construction, respectively. Judith Butler argues that gender is always performed, but not in the simple sense of a person constructing their own identity and performing that for subjects who receive and experience that identity in the same or at least similar ways. Butler positions the formation of gender identity—and by association, total identity, but with the main focus on gender as the first characteristic assigned to the subject as an ongoing process in play outside of the subject—as identification that is formed differently by every person who encounters that subject. In the Hegelian sense, this suggests that identity is always becoming but never arrives; not because a subject is constantly reinventing or adjusting identity, but because that identity can never be fixed in the way it is received. This notion of the performance of gender must be purely phenomenological, for if the performance happens outside of the person whose identity is under construction, there can be no truth, correctness, or even agency originating within the gendered subject. Subject becomes object. While studies in a performative self assume varying degrees of, to total rejection of, the potential for truth or correctness, Derrida, particularly in his overall argument in Limited, Inc., seems to argue for some form of transcendental truth However, he cautions that we cannot have access to it.7 Derrida accounts for contradictions, or moments of deferral that obscure truth, with his neologism: diffèrance. Truth is by its nature something unreachable, even in the most relentless quests to reveal it. Articulations of truth depend on an insufficient system of semiotics, unable to defy language that, for this purpose, would rely on an end-game of fixed signs. It is easier to understand, metaphorically, what the self is not. This negation as identification is what relegates self-expression to the domain of knowledge production, a system in which validation is achieved through repetition. A major problem I see with expressing the self through difference is that this is a process of reification that runs contrary to human beings’ natural state of flux. Even if the self is often considered safely and privately ensconced in the body, the body exists in continual relation. As Donna Haraway states in When Species Meet, “The body is always inthe-making; it is a vital entanglement of heterogeneous scales, times, and kinds of beings webbed into fleshy presence, always a becoming, always constituted in relating.”8 If this posthumanist view of the body holds true, then a self as that body must be constituted in relating, also a vital entanglement; contingent and referential, a perpetually creative act. If the self and the body, or the body-self, are continually evolving, then gaps or barriers between self and other must constantly shift and slip. Notions of

96  Radical Self-Expression where the self may begin or end might diverge from the body, slide further inside, or extend beyond. It is worth restating here that I personally see no separation between mind and body, but I acknowledge a powerful sense of Cartesian dualism in cultures, predominantly my own, that encourage self-affirmation through competition. Perhaps when the goal is not simply to create, as in ludic activity that encourages raising the bar, but to win outright, such competition presumes a resolution even before it begins. This fortification of self is intimately tied to rational thinking that separates reason from imagination, fiction from non-fiction, known from unknown, order from chaos, and inside from outside. Even in situations where imagination is considered desirable, that notion is often tempered by insisting upon distinctions between truth and fantasy. Playtime is encouraged for various reasons in children and occasionally in adults, but it must be separate from work time. Chaos is useful only if it amplifies subsequent, calm, order. The binaries that drive such existence are nearly schizophrenic, it is no wonder that unfamiliar is quickly abandoned into unknown; obscure aspects of being cast off into radical otherness in the attempt to preserve a rationalized self. When conceptual difference is made between self and other, it parallels the binary between reason and imagination, for reification of perceived selfhood may be equated with self-preservation, which requires a frame to make sense of the infinite unboundedness of imagination, the “true” self finding purchase in the vastness by disowning potential selfhood. Beingness resides inside, outside, and within the frame all at once, but the known/self is reified on one side while the unknown/other inhabits the other side. I believe that making this binary in writing can be useful because it provides a vocabulary to explore the ways that many kinds of performance work on that distinction, its making and unmaking, as long as it is clear that this binary is only a temporary and narrow lens through which to view difference. Difference is crucial in discussions of self-expression or identification because a self constituted in difference can only find purchase in its resistance to change, and the unchanged self cannot fully participate in actively changing its culture. As discussed in the introduction, heterotopia is a cosa mentale space that deconstructs language without posing a threat to those who would otherwise feed the impulse to reconstruct it. The compulsion to territorialize space is postponed within heterotopia’s temporal limits, the negating process of signifiers delayed within an absent call to order. The case studies that follow will serve as examples to compare the impact of creative processes as self-expression/radical self-expression both inside and outside of this space. The first performance I will analyze is a scene from a Dance/Performance Art/Theatrical piece by Keith Hennessy, entitled “Crotch (all the

Radical Self-Expression 97 Joseph Beuys references in the world cannot heal the pain, confusion, regret, cruelty, betrayal, or trauma …),” for which I will focus on one scene that took place at the Dance Center Workshop in New York City in 2009. The second performance case study was not a production in a theatre but does contain theatrical elements in its resemblance to both ritual and narrative arc; the “Man Burn” at Black Rock City, 2011. The most obvious distinction between these two case studies is that one took place in a traditional theatre and my own participation was limited to viewing it on video, and the other unfolded in the heterotopia of Black Rock City, where my participation was personal. I am deliberately avoiding theatrical case studies that involve psychological realism because the expected outcome of this form is usually catharsis, and I do not want to confuse cathartic release with the othering of a self that seeks relief. “Crotch” provides opportunities to consider concepts of self-expression, and perhaps the desire to bridge the gap in-between self and other, on many levels due to its implicit themes of intimacy and empathy. The entire piece vacillates wildly between humor and pathos, virtuosity and self-effacement, as Hennessy executes complicated, improvisational dance moves while wearing a “Scream” mask and green boxer shorts, invites others to come onto the stage and play with an array of seemingly random objects, and takes the audience through a hilarious lecture on a possible genealogy of philosophy leading up to the current cultural moment. In the final scene, Hennessy literally sews himself to three audience members and calmly rocks back and forth, making himself as vulnerable as possible. It is this final scene I will analyze, foregrounding the agitated, liminal space between performer and audience as they are deliberately stitched together into the unfamiliar. Hennessy begins the final scene of “Crotch” by setting up a chair downstage, fairly close to the audience, and explaining how the last minutes of the performance will require their participation. He removes his clothing, leaving only his legwarmers, and invites one audience member to become a “performance assistant.” Accompanied by a soundtrack of harp music and gentle lyrics, the performance assistant participates by helping to break up and soften chunks of vegetable grease and handing them to Hennessy, who cakes the grease into his exposed crotch until his genitals are completely covered. Thus costumed, he invites the audience to gather round him on the stage, with three volunteers to sit on chairs that face him from just a few inches away. Hennessy passes a threaded needle through the clothing of the three seated audience participants, connecting himself to them by also piercing his own skin with the needle several times and drawing the thread until the lines between them are taut. The music changes to Nirvana’s slow, grunge ballad, “Something in the Way,” as the thread is tied off and Hennessy sprinkles himself liberally with glitter and inserts a

98  Radical Self-Expression grotesque mouthpiece with fake, pointed teeth underneath his upper lip. He picks up a stuffed rabbit, a poignant allusion to Joseph Beuys, and tenderly rocks back and forth with it as a stagehand quietly, unobtrusively places a soft blanket over his shoulders. Hennessy holds the gazes of several different audience members in turn as he rocks until the song ends and the stagehand cuts the threads. The piece concludes with Hennessy turning his back and walking off stage while the audience applauds around his empty chair. This final scene from “Crotch” could easily have become more than slightly comic. Hennessy went out of his way to make himself ridiculous— the glitter, bucked teeth, stuffed bunny, and grease-caked crotch all indicate elements of the absurd—but the juxtaposition of sad music, Hennessy’s wistful expression, and the undoubtedly painful piercing of his own skin instead endowed these material elements with a profound heaviness. His self-effacement seemed to push the extent to which one human being will sacrifice ego in the desire for closeness. I read this as a deliberate attempt to garner empathy in the audience, both physically and emotionally, for watching someone pierce his own skin will almost invariably evoke an empathetic cringe, and when that piercing becomes a physical connection; i.e., the thread linking him to other human beings, that empathy deepens into pity with the realization that his sacrifice for the sake of that connection is greater than theirs. I mentioned “bridging the gap” in my introduction to this case study, so it is worth invoking Bert States’ “bridge of recognition” here, as information that works intertextually to reveal something previously unseen.9 However, the term “recognition” implies something closer to excavation than conception, so I must clarify that in this case it refers to recognizing that something is unfamiliar as opposed to assimilating something as familiar. In “Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion,” Susan Foster discusses empathy as a process by which one imagines the self inside the body of an other.10 If imagination is engaged in this case, one might draw upon one’s own experience of having their skin punctured, and the physical pain involved. The connecting thread could also serve as a material signifier of that which binds or stitches together, and the imagination might take on other narratives. Rhonda Blair’s work on conceptual blending and empathy also implies that the imagination takes the participant on a narrative journey,11 in this instance blending together narratives of one’s own attempts to connect with the narrative of Hennessy’s needle and thread, forging a new story that combines these acts into a meta-narrative including signifiers of all desire for connection and intimacy. The keyword here is imagination, for while it is traditionally considered to be reason as that which makes sense of situations, in moments of performance where empathy is invited, it is the imagination that initially

Radical Self-Expression 99 addresses theatrical signifiers. Imagining the self inside the body of another, whether intentional or not, is often the empathetic response engendered by a performer who reaches across the gap between self and other, into unfamiliar, liminal space. While not exactly a “rational” act, it does involve the making of difference. In this particular type of performance, difference is made on many levels; the division between performer and audience, the risk of one as greater than that of an other, and the notion that it is the performer who takes on responsibility for bringing the story to a close so that comforting resolution may displace uncomfortable questions. Assuming that audiences who enter in to a relationship with a vulnerable performer are also attempting to make some connections by attending that performance, it is compassion for the other that allows the self to reach toward liminal space in-between. The audience-member-self senses familiarity within moments when the performer experiences pain, joy, or confusion, for they are emotions that work on the senses in various ways, but are recognizable to most human beings. Because a performance of this nature takes place in a designated theatrical space and includes the basic, semiotic parts of performance—performer, text, and audience—difference is assumed from the outset, but the opportunity to reach across the barrier of difference is what evokes empathy and the opportunity for self and other to come together within the liminal space of performance. In Hennessy’s “Crotch,” this difference is made when the audience takes their customary position in the house full of darkened seats while the performer takes the stage, acknowledged as he invites them to reach across and become participants, difference opens from threshold into shared space as his actions evoke empathy and the audience imagines elements of the self within the performer/other. Hennessy’s ridiculous costume, grease-smeared crotch, and materially symbolized desire for intimacy send the audience’s imaginations into unfamiliar narratives in the attempt to find common ground, particularly within the kinesthetic empathy of witnessing his physical pain. However, because the performance is bound by known theatrical conditions, even its nontraditional elements eventually respond to ideological authority. The performance draws to a close. The threads are cut. The audience is told, unambiguously, that the story ends in loneliness or abandonment as the price of closure. However, even if the moment resolves in a theatrical ending, it would be simplistic to argue that the performance never crosses the threshold from self-expression to radical self-expression, simply because it happens in a professional theatre rather than radical heterotopia. Hennessy went beyond the performance of symbolic sacrifice into the ambiguous space of actual flesh sacrifice, for the kinesthesia of closely confronted physical pain registers in the realm of the real as opposed to representation.

100  Radical Self-Expression Theatrical forms of self-expression are not incapable of changing people or their circumstances on their own, but that change generally operates within conditions that do not anticipate the opportunity to evolve outside of rational knowledge production. Even when conceptual blending sets new narratives in motion, these narratives allude to a familiar pattern of reinforcing difference. The utility in such experience is not an ability to unmake difference, but rather to curate a particular way of experiencing, questioning, and relocating difference. The narrative arc does not create new forms of self-expression, but the physical sacrifice as an offering to others throws focus on the alienating effects of habitual identification. My second case study involves a contrasting type of performance, for there is no assumed separation of performer from audience member; all who attend are performers. In the “Man Burn” that marks the climax of the Rabelaisian atmosphere of Burning Man, most burners are not spectators, but participants. After an exhausting week of negotiating space outside of the familiar, default world, the Man Burn is the moment within which spectacle is acknowledged, celebrated, and then released, delight in pure spectacle is ignited and then consumed by fire, and amplified imagination releases the self from its need to locate its presence within ordered time and space or to define its role in cultural production. In the week leading up to the Man Burn, burners will have generally experienced an unprecedented range of emotions, for Black Rock City is a space where play is serious, work is practically necessary but culturally scorned, and the inversion of cultural and societal norms are the given circumstances in which creative acts unfold. Pranksters reign supreme and authority somehow obeys. The citizens of Black Rock City congregate for the Man Burn anxious for chaos without subsequent order. The Man burns in a glory of pyrotechnics, sometimes punctuated by massive explosions from preset propane tanks, and by the time the Burning Man finally falls into a pile of ashes, the crowd’s frenzy has peaked and they are off to create the rest of their night in an attitude of ignited potential. The making of difference here contrasts with the methods by which difference holds space in the default world. Burners are already different than the identity they perform outside of Black Rock City, so the making and unmaking of difference operates within time-bound rehearsal that need not produce a finished product in order to justify its process. It cannot be sustained interminably; it is a valued moment. The difference is communal, shared, and agreed-upon when one passes through the gate separating Black Rock City from the default world. How Burners inhabit and assign meaning to that difference is the process by which the Man Burn is performed. In that moment it feels exclusive to those who have endured the tests of surviving in the desert and wish to celebrate having created a unique, Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Radical Self-Expression 101 Man Burn, 2015 Almost our entire camp has decided that we will attend the Man Burn together this year. No problem, right? 40 people in various stages of exhaustion, cognitive dissonance, and relative elation, attempting to adhere to a schedule, making the long trek/bike ride to the center of Black Rock City amid a crowd of 60,000, and sticking together in the chaos. A dust storm has been raging all evening and even the veteran Burners are parroting, “They won’t do the burn tonight, it’s too dangerous.” I keep insisting that the same thing happens every year and the dust has never not cleared in time for the burn, but still, only three of us have arrived at this particular spot as the starry sky breaks though its previous opacity and ushers in a clear, almost sleepy, night sky. It’s perfect. It always is. My husband, my best friend, and I cheer as the man’s arms begin to rise, signaling the beginning of the burn. The pyrotechnics start blasting into the sky in showers of colorful sparks, somehow they seem to find rhythm in the not-so-mad beats thrown down by the DJ in the art car nearest to us. This is the biggest man we’ve ever seen, standing at almost exactly 100 feet tall. I’m pretty convinced this one will outlast all others that came before through its sheer volume. As always, I trust that the creators of this experience have a solid plan for preventing fiery shrapnel from exploding into the crowd. Must trust fire science. As we cheer on the fireworks, a man next to me hands me a pair of glasses with heart-shaped rims and excitedly tells me to put them on. When I do, every part of my being erupts in delight—the lenses have been treated so that every point of light becomes a heart! Thousands of multicolored hearts are winging their way through the space. I cannot contain my excitement, I start passing the glasses to others just to watch their faces break wide open into joy. The man with the glasses laughs, hands me another pair, and says, “Here, they’re yours! Keep it going! Keep it going!” I love it. My burn has become a quest to gift moments where lights become little hearts. My two companions and I diligently work the crowd with our newly acquired, heart-shaped spectacles, As I’d anticipated, the burn goes on and on as the sheer mass of the Man resists total immolation. Burners are getting tired, sitting down. Our immediate surroundings are taking on the feeling of a mellow campfire that may well go on indefinitely. One by one, we reinvigorate our fellow participants by sharing the heart glasses and feeding desire for things we have never before seen. It’s small, but it’s enough. And then we notice that people are actually turning away, leaving to find some new source of fun because the Man will not fall fast enough. My husband suddenly turns toward the man, smoldering in relative silence after its explosive beginning, and screams, “Fall, you fucker!!!”

102  Radical Self-Expression Unbelievably, perfectly, spectacularly, at that very moment the entire structure relinquishes its integrity and collapses to the ground. The response is insane, deafening, filled with laughter and triumph. The music swells again and we all reach out to hug, shove, dance with, scream at the Burners surrounding us. It’s done! We did this together! We revel in the impossible magnitude of shared energy, of the satisfaction that can only come from proving that we did not have to preserve this thing, this incredible feat of imagination, construction, and reception in order to love what it gives us. We are here with each other, for each other, and we’ll do it again (Figure 5.1). There are several elements at play in the distinctions between self and other at the Man Burn. Everyone, by this time, is generally coated with playa dust, as well as having inhaled this inert matter into their lungs. The dust storms cannot be outsmarted; they will not even surrender to the possibility of being remotely predictable. Work and play have lost their definitions and collapsed upon each other, and a temporary, dialogic autonomy has displaced any ideology that might govern Burners in the default world. The privileging of commodification over participatory experience has

Figure 5.1  The Man Burns. Photo credit: Huybert van de Stadt, 2015.

Radical Self-Expression 103 found no persisting home inside the Black Rock City gates. Selves have become naturally coextensive as they reach toward others, but not with the desire to find familiarity, so much as a heightened sense of security that the unfamiliar poses no threat. The default world feels very, very far away. Even if only for the duration of the Man Burn, Burners are free to behave in ways that make absolutely no recognizable sense. This communal sense of selfhood still draws distinctions, but it includes those who might be others in alternative situations. While the Man Burn can be deeply personal and unique to each individual, for many Burners this moment of self-expression extends beyond the limits of the body and temporarily includes the other in a collective rejection of the status quo. Difference surpasses the designation of bodies as individuals and ignites in a common goal: respect for the ultimate authority of chaos even by those who would, in almost any other situation, attempt to contain it. A giant, unbounded liminality is called into being as burners embody the practice of transversing the barrier that separates humans from what they could and would become if not for fear of the unknown. In the moment that fear goes up in flames, selves are limitless because there is no other. One instant of total freedom. Even a self that has been deliberately or unwittingly othered, by serious trauma or the alienating effects of quotidian existence, can participate in taking on the tactile flesh of collective desire to declare beingness as inextricable from the intertextuality of all individual experiences. In such a moment, heteroglossic bodies have unlimited access to voices outside their own. While this narrative clearly describes a time-bound, limitless self, it does not succumb to self-affirmation because it is communal and carnivalesque, an exclusively sensory phenomenon. If difference must be relocated rather than extinguished, it can only come to rest between the “us” and “them” that make the Black Rock City gates their ultimate caveats; after all, it is only a moment in the vastness of being. The riotous Man Burn provides the opportunity, for those who fully participate, to see each other as potential aspects of different selves within possible pasts and futures, rather than attempts to know these parts of each other. That which the self imbibes is simultaneously always already absent and always already becoming. We did this together … we’ll do it again. There is no “I” in such a moment, nor does the literal “we” invoke any sense of narcissism moving into entitled appropriation of communal space. If heterotopia undoes ideological/linguistic authority, or articulations of identity as absolute and resolved, then this temporal heterotopian space serves as ostensible evidence for a time in which ego sacrifice poses no threat to the security of selfhood, no intrinsic dualism between known and unknown. Though the relentless pedagogy of capitalist culture runs deep, there is no denying that what has been learned through omnipresent authority cannot be

104  Radical Self-Expression untangled and re-imagined through unfamiliar behavior in spaces of difference. These spaces suggest a gentle departure from aggressive defense mechanisms of identification and enter into the wide-open space of selves, communities, re-imagined pasts, and future ecologies of those who not only include the other, but anticipate something offered by the other as an asset that otherwise could not have come to bear on the future of one’s community. Hennessy, following his sacrifice within the realm of theatrical representation, would necessarily have been tasked, after every performance, with contemplating what it meant to reveal the vulnerability embedded in every personal sacrifice. Likewise, his audiences had to process the fallout of creative acts that rip apart the reassuring fabric of a seemingly inescapable ideological space. Difference has been revealed, but within a familiar cultural present. A common defense mechanism in such cases is often an impulsive search for truth, by both performers and audience-participants, for a discernible solution to the problem that has been revealed. If and when none are found, or if those possible solutions bear undeniable similarity to tactics that have already been attempted without resulting in actual change, the alienation of inadequate resources to help, to contribute, to fix what is broken, resolves into stillness. At the Man Burn, however, the creative event results in jubilation rather than alienation because the participant’s current social circumstances do not require solutions. Burning the spectacle acknowledges that there is no truth to be revealed, no reality behind the spectacle, no definitive signified-self. It dismisses the negating ritual of identification because the burning spectacle offers no truth in its ashes. It does not resolve by insisting on a reality to replace the incinerated simulacrum, but foregrounds the sensory experience of witnessing a monumental work of art that was always already ash. Burners do not need the Man to be rebuilt, bigger, better, and stronger; they simply need each other, and there are tens of thousands of bodies available to fulfill that need. In “Relational Form,” Nicolas Bourriaud states: The 20th century was the arena for a struggle between two visions of the world: a modest, rationalist conception, hailing from the 18th century, and a philosophy of spontaneity and liberation through the irrational (Dada, Surrealism, the Situationists), both of which were opposed to authoritarian and utilitarian forces eager to gauge human relations and subjugate people.12 These forces continue the struggle in the twenty-first century, consistently at odds yet trudging alongside each other, as rational critique responds to irrational authority and irrational art tears open the margins of a would-be,

Radical Self-Expression 105 rational culture of Enlightenment. Again, the most significant argument threading through my work is that there is utility in heterotopia, for it constitutes space in which artists and thinkers can work in the absence of dueling forces; to make art that responds to neither the rational nor the irrational, and to rehearse new habits that include the unfamiliar without threat of alienation. While Black Rock City cannot permanently suspend the forces of authoritarian and utilitarian subjugation, it functions well enough as a glorious, temporary space for radical self-expression. Notes 1 Lewis Zaumeyer, interview in Reno, Nevada, February 11, 2011. 2 Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, 54–55. 3 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. eds. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 218. 4 Pierpaolo Antonello and Olga Vasile, “Introduction” SubStance, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1999): xxi. 5 By an immanent ideology, I refer to my interpretation of Adorno’s “Cultural Criticism and Society,” whereby societies are formed and bound by ideology, not in the sense that it represents an absolute, but in the way that ideology appears to the people who are bound by it, as in thinking of themselves as inside or outside of it. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 161. 6 Elin Diamond, “The Violence of We: Politicizing Identification,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 403. 7 Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993). 8 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 163. 9 Bert O. States, “The Phenomenological Attitude,” in Critical Theory and Performance. ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 377. 10 Susan Leigh Foster, “Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion,” in Critical Theory and Performance. ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 248–249. 11 Rhonda Blair, “Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy,” in The Drama Review, Vol. 54, No. 2, Summer 2010 (Boston: the MIT Press, 2010), 102. 12 Nicolas Bourriaud, “Relational Form,” in Relational Aesthetics, trans Simon Pleasance and Franza Woods (Dijon: Presses du reel, 2002), 12.

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Communal Effort Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote, and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction Costco Membership: The Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet is a membershiponly store. Membership applications are available at all locations, including our main Black Rock City store location. To qualify for membership, customers must bring a “Soulmate-Compatible” friend to trade. “This keeps our inventory in balance,” stated CEO Emeritus Rico. There are no other membership fees, but this is negotiable. We are always willing to accept food, massage, good stories, magic tricks, cocktails with funny names, and ballpoint pens. Membership applications consist of a completed questionnaire personally designed to embarrass and humble each applicant. Applicants are asked to attend a membership interview where their soulmate eligibility will be assessed. At the end of the interview, a membership card will be issued. Soulmate Pickup: After a membership card is issued, members may pick up their soulmate after an hour or more. Members will be issued information about their new soulmate, another resident of Black Rock City. Unlike other soulmate chains, the Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet keeps costs low by eliminating charges associated with stocking and delivery. “Rather than delivering soulmates,” said Rico, “we tell customers where they can find their soulmate, and they track them down.” We refuse to be undersold, and that’s why Costco offers TWO soulmates for the cost of one. Act now, and when you receive one soulmate to track down, another soulmate will receive your information to track you down. (Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet official website at csto.org)

Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet, or “Costco Camp,” is comprised of the most empathetic group of people I have ever met. This Burning Man camp, whose membership numbers average approximately 42 individuals each year (yes, the meaning of life, for those who know), is made up of participants who feel moved to help their fellow burners have meaningful DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-7

Communal Effort 107 conversations and adventures with other burners who express similar desires to find someone to whom they can open themselves up on a deep level. Costco camp members, aka “employees,” wear bright red, logo-blazed shirts as they distribute questionnaires and conduct interviews, making the process as recognizable as default-world performances of exchange value with a heavy dose of ironic humor. Costco Camp interviewers are trained to listen carefully, press significant points during conversations, and deflect any questions from interviewees that might turn the flow of these communications away from a complete focus on themselves toward a traditional exchange in which one invites equal contributions to the conversation. It is a chance for one person, the interviewee, to be seen and heard in a way that does not often happen in the default world outside of something like therapy sessions. Whether or not their efforts lead to finding a soulmate, they will gain a memory in which their Costco interviewer had no desire to talk about themselves; they just listened in an attitude of respect and community. Because we are so often conditioned in the default world to participate in conversations not to listen, but to anticipate our own responses, the role of the Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet interviewer is an improvisational performance from the beginning. Interviewees expect their stories to be reciprocated with anecdotal support or conversational responses in the form of someone else’s stories, and they are often overwhelmed when this expectation is not realized. In talks with several Costco camp members, I have heard many different stories of their interviewees’ attitudes changing before their eyes. Burners come to Costco camp to take part in the process from many different angles. To name just a few, they range from pranking, ironic play, desire to “hook up,” true belief that they may find a meaningful connection, to simple curiosity. More often than not, they are surprised and pleased by the interactions they have during the interview process, in fact they are quite taken aback by the abilities of their interviewers to actively listen and keep the thread of conversation directed toward things they may not have realized they needed to say. Having volunteered as a Costco interviewer myself, I can confirm that the experience of simply listening to a stranger without feeling the need to inject myself into the conversation is beautifully bizarre. To be clear, the term “improvisational performance” is not meant to cast Costco Camp members’ efforts as glib, unethical, or shallow. Rather, this space of communal effort simultaneously offers both parties in the interview process the chance to step outside of the ordinary and familiar process of meeting another person. One person is encouraged to express themselves fully and unconditionally, talk about their reality, and be heard. The other party rehearses the gratifying performance of listening

108  Communal Effort without intent to express themselves in any other way apart from being a generous and responsive audience. Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet holds the space for Burners to inhabit roles that retain their shape in the transition from rehearsal to performance. Unselfconscious communication can become a habit. So can deep listening. Because Costco Camp creates a theatrical space, this seems a good point at which to talk about it in the most theatrical way possible with the written word: a script. Members of Costco camp improvise much of the conversation during interviews, but they are adamant about sticking to the overall script. Much like any interview in the default world—be it for a job, to gain deeper understanding from an expert on a certain topic, or even to decide whether individuals should consider dating—it starts with a list of questions. Tangents may abound as conversations take on lives of their own, but in most cases one always returns to the script. Conversations/interrogations/performances all have this in common, they open and then close. This is not to say they must end, but within scripts are certain demarcations such as Act, Scene, and Curtain. For example, a Costco Camp soulmate performance might begin something like this:

SETTING:

AT RISE:

ACT I The stage is covered in light grayish dust. It is sunny and extremely hot, all characters wear bright red shirts with a Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet logo. White camp tables and folding chairs clutter the area with controlled chaos, several clipboards with paper forms and pens on each table. The remnants of breakfast are being cleared away as Costco employees prepare to welcome the day’s applicants. The bar is up and running, a long queue has already formed. The soulmate hopefuls start making their way into the space as the workday begins, each Costco employee turning attention to their individual scripts.

The above description follows a typical format for the beginning of Act I. Because the playwright has followed certain conventions, the reader may relax into the story. One might picture a bustling proscenium stage, the lights are bright to imitate the mid-morning desert sun, perhaps the actors are coated in dust and without stage makeup, looking extra-rough. Fun music may set the scene and cross-fade into the opening dialogue. The framework gives us a well-worn and well-loved place to begin that leads to actual, physical performers and audience members, who conspire to create experiences together, trusting that the stage and the script will keep things moving toward a satisfactory close.

Communal Effort 109

Figure 6.1 Four Costco camp members proudly raise their sign. Photo credit: Espressobuzz.

Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet, with its bizarre presence of corporate, box-store signifiers dropped into the midst of a huge party in the desert, functions similarly. There are rules, there are queues, there are forms to fill out, disgruntled-but-smiling employees, and goods to be consumed. Most people in our current culture, though they might feel insecure entering a new situation, will know exactly what to do if handed a clipboard and pen with a form they must fill out. This is why, when I prepared to interview members of Costco Camp via Zoom, I first offered a list of questions to Josh, Maus, and Wes, and we did our best to stick to the script. While the three acts of the following “stage play” have been edited for brevity and clarity, I have done my best to remain faithful to the original script (Figure 6.1): BURNING MAN BOOK INTERVIEWS, CHAPTER SIX

SETTING: AT RISE:

ACT I A beautiful, quirky, rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco. JOSH and LINDA sit on the couch, preparing to start their interview. LINDA is frantically looking for something in her backpack but gives up, laughing. She takes JOSH’s proffered iPhone and starts tapping at it.

110  Communal Effort LINDA Okay so we’re recording now, we’re in Josh’s living room, and I have lost my printed questions so I’m looking at them on Josh’s phone because I am not the most organized person you’ll ever meet. Now I have to ask, do you consent to this interview being recorded? JOSH I do. LINDA You do? I’m so happy! JOSH Where’s my ring? LINDA Oh … I forgot it. JOSH Nooooooo! LINDA I’m sure it’s with the printed questions at the bottom of the Pacific ocean. Do you consent to me transcribing this interview for publication? JOSH Yes. LINDA Lovely. My first question is can you introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about who you are, what you do, and where you’re from? JOSH Yeah, my name is Josh, born and raised California, born in San Diego, been living here in SF for 13 years now which is exciting. I’m very done with it, but kind of trapped here because rent control is a hell of a drug. LINDA When did you first participate in Burning Man, and what brought you there? How did the actual experience align with your expectations, if any? I first went to Burning Man in 2015, Carnival of Mirrors was the theme that year, and it’s really interesting having lived in SF for as long as I had and not having gone, especially being part of theatre and queer and artistic communities my entire time here, and feeling like pretty much everyone I knew was going to or had been to Burning Man. I’d gotten really good at telling myself that it’s not for me. It’s for all those assholes out there in the desert. LINDA Did you have FOMO when you saw the RVs leaving on Highway 80 or were you truly that much of a curmudgeon? JOSH I was really good at pretending to be that curmudgeon. But eventually, my boyfriend at the time had decided to go with a group of friends I was growing to know and trust. A couple years before that, he had taken me

Communal Effort 111 with that group of friends to Coachella, and that had been my first time really letting loose and experiencing play. I still told myself I hated Burning Man in the desert. LINDA Did you hate Coachella before you went? JOSH Probably. LINDA I probably hate Coachella too. I’ve never been to it. JOSH Coachella’s totally hateworthy. Yeah, so he was going to go, and it was about a week and a half before Burning Man, and I was feeling really awful about him going for a number of reasons but eventually it clicked on, the reason I hated he was going was because I wasn’t going. So we woke up in the morning and decided I’m going. And it was very much a lifechanging experience. LINDA Do you have any thoughts on the Ten Principles in general, and the sixth Principle of Communal Effort specifically? JOSH Yeah, the Ten Principles is one of the smartest things that Burning Man has ever done. It’s one of the only forms of structure that the city has. In an area where in theory anything can go—there’s still federal and state law, regulations and some structure, but with such a big point of Burning Man being about freeing ourselves from all of the constraints that our already-programmed world forces upon us, if you are to shuck all of those off altogether, what world can you create? I think that’s the most beautiful thing about Burning Man. That freedom to re-create from the ground up, your vision of Utopia, or Hell, or whatever it is, but you have this clean slate to build it. But then what keeps us a community? If everyone out there is just completely doing 100% their own thing, who goes? Who gets attracted to this event? Having the core of the ten principles gives us that, as we’ve literally now seen with our own eyes, that black hole that pulls in things toward it. This central force of not everyone of course, but for some reason people are attracted to go and it might just be the party in the desert, for some it might be the communal effort. It might be the immediacy, the decommodification. If you take all of those and roll them up into one kind of sensibility, and from that point forward tell everybody, “And then AFTER that, everything goes,” what is possible? And I think it’s genius. LINDA Right, it was actually because of Regional Burns that Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004. He realized that this network was expanding, and if we want to keep the thread of what organically started

112  Communal Effort happening here in Black Rock City, he set them down, a great baseline to start from and create your vision of it. JOSH I love the idea of that, we want this to spread. LINDA So you went that first time with no expectations other than you had to quickly get your shit together. That makes me want to ask if you find yourself comparing year over year? Like this was my favorite year, this was the best year … JOSH Absolutely. LINDA And have you been disappointed in a particular year because it didn’t live up to previous years? JOSH I kind of do that on two different levels. One is just my overall experience, and I feel really, really lucky that every year I have learned more about myself and the people around me than the year before. Not just cumulatively, but that year I learned more than I had in the previous year. Not more than I already knew. And that’s really cool. I also do that with the art. I definitely compare the art. The Art Historian brain in me can’t help but be like, “Aw man, this year’s art is nowhere near as cool as last year’s art, when are they gonna bring back that fucking cool tree again?” LINDA The Tree of Tenere? I want the Tree of Tenere forever. JOSH I just want the tree back. For ever and ever. And I definitely can’t help but look at some of the designs for this year, 2019, and think, “Okay, Ikea …” You came in a flat pack, didn’t you? So yeah I do compare year to year, that’s definitely how I grow as a person, through contrast and comparison. LINDA What about the Principle of Communal Effort Specifically? JOSH Yeah, so Communal Effort for me is the most important of the principles because without communal effort there wouldn’t be Burning Man. You could have Burning Man without things like Immediacy, and most of the other elements, honestly. It would not be as good or as rich, but I think you need Communal Effort literally to make Burning Man happen. Not just the obvious that it needs to be built and it takes a lot of people to do that. That’s the easy answer. But that for me Communal Effort is both the how and the why of Burning Man. It is the effort of all these people deciding to go and do this impossible, stupid thing in the desert, to put

Communal Effort 113 all of our time, energy, love, money, resources, into going into a dead, poisonous lake that’s trying to kill us, so that we have a chance to restart something new. We’re doing that together, not just in the hours and the efforts given, we’re doing it for each other. Would any of us go into the desert and do this on our own? If Black Rock City existed but there were no people there, would anyone want to go? LINDA What if we didn’t have to build it? What if it was just this destination spot where you could come once a year? JOSH Now we’re talking Manchu Pichu where you find these old historic cool-ass ruins, let’s just go hang out there for a day or two. But unlike being a tourist, where you’re there just to see the thing and then go back to your hotel, it’s not about that. It’s not about seeing the thing, it’s about being there with the people, and it takes the community, it takes everyone to build it and everyone to be there to make it the place that it is. LINDA What made you want to participate in Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet? JOSH A friend of mine had been camping with this weird little fucked-up camp called Costco and I’m like, Okayyyyy, you’re all just hanging out pretending to be store employees and there’s something about soulmates, but you’re working all day long. That sounds really exhausting, when do you guys just play? But he talked me into it, he said just try it out. I was really nervous, I didn’t know anybody there except for my one friend, but I decided to go and camp with them and the more I learned about them and what they do and their mission, I was like, this is what I’ve been wanting. I’ve been wanting not just the place to play, but the place that mattered, the place that meant something. The place where we gave back, not only to each other, not only to ourselves, but potentially to every single person in the city that wants it. And it’s something that can’t be gifted by having pre-bought it on Amazon. LINDA Were you nervous about joining the camp? JOSH Oh, terrified. I was just out of a horrible breakup, I had zero self-esteem, zero empowerment, and I was still in that mindset of telling myself I’m not an extrovert. Yeah, you go to Burning Man, and you’ve learned how to talk to people a little bit better, but that’s really not your comfort zone, it’s not something you’re very good at, and this camp is all about talking to people. How are you going to do that? You don’t know anyone there, you don’t have your own support network, you just have this one anchor point and that’s it. So absolutely terrified. Not because of them

114  Communal Effort being Costco, but just being such a big departure from anything I would have done before, and not many people there to support me. LINDA So you broke up with your previous camp that was completely disorganized and didn’t really have any connecting factor except partying, and don’t get in my way, I’m partying, with a built-in community … JOSH Based on body image, which is my FAVORITE way to relate to people. LINDA Everybody’s favorite, really. So you went from that camp that fell apart, to Costco, where structure seems to be what they want to provide, that’s the way they make a safe space for the community? JOSH Yes! We have RULES here, it’s COSTCO. You have to do this in a certain way. We have store hours, there’s a membership agreement that you have to sign. Absolutely. Yeah, completely different world. So yeah, there is structure there, but there’s also the delight in abandoning the structure. Except when you do it too much. So there’s this tug o’ war between how much freedom and personal license do we give versus the rules that need to be followed. We have store hours, we do open at 11 and we close at five, except when we don’t. LINDA What was your first year at the camp like? JOSH First year was eye-opening and completely transformative. I hope that was my last year of me holding myself back from being who I am. I got to go from a flat-out abusive camp, to a camp of empathetic, loving, nurturing, hood-rats and shenanigan-makers, and see how they interacted together, how they supported each other, how they pranked each other, how they did this thing together that is really, really hard. And I don’t just mean being at Burning Man, not just being in the Black Rock Desert, which is itself already hard, but the work that Costco does, the space that we hold, is frequently challenging. And draining. And exhausting. And without the right group of people to be that empathetic, to hold that kind of space, and support each other simultaneously, it would fall apart. I got to see what the experience of giving back feels like and how the community did that. I got to undo the narrative that as an introvert my only way to recharge my batteries is to be apart from everybody else and go on my own and recharge alone because that’s the classical definition of an introvert, right? You recharge alone versus with others. What I was seeing was another group of introverts recharging together by having built a safe nest and a community with each other. I had never seen it work like that before. So that first year I was very intimidated.

Communal Effort 115 LINDA Do you want to describe the interview process between Costco camp members and would-be soulmates? How does it work and how has it gone for you? JOSH I’ll disclose as much as I can without revealing our corporate secrets. What we are is Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet. We have a hell of a deal! What you’re able to do is bring yourself and any other still-living or viable enough soul with you—it can be a friend, a lover, a random person on the street—but you bring them in, you trade their soul, and you’re gonna leave with two new soulmates. What that means is when you come into our tent, there will usually be a large, surly, angry man who’s gonna yell at you and berate you and give you a really delightful personality questionnaire to fill out, and you’re going to get to tell us some things about you, your favorite books, draw a portrait of yourself, what’s your favorite vegetable to have inserted up your anus, like all kinds of the really need-to-know stuff, to know who you are, because we want to find you a quality soulmate. Not just a random, rubbish soulmate, we have plenty of those in life already so we want to find you a really good match. So you come in, you fill out this personality questionnaire—which is really fun by the way, I sometimes fill them out just for shits and giggles— and then you go out to our lounge. In that lounge we provide a few things, we provide shade, we provide cheap-ass boozy slushies, because it’s important. We provide people. In our store lounge we’ll have anywhere between 20 and 300 people all hanging out in what is stage two of the process, the sitting there and waiting. Sometimes people will be waiting there a couple hours. Even when we can, we don’t like to get them in and out the door in less than an hour. Even if we’re fully staffed and we’re just kicking around, we want people to wait. That is another opportunity for them to make bonus soulmates. There’s this incredible feeling of coming out from the kitchen tent or whatever and just seeing 300 people in this little shade structure with crappy ass boozy slushies, loving it. And just about every single person that comes to Costco is there for a single premise, connection. We facilitate connection. LINDA Are you trying to match them with someone who mirrors their personality? JOSH Not necessarily. The computer has its own mysteries, we define soulmates not as someone you’re destined to spend the rest of your life with, we’re not trying to match you with “the one.” For us a soulmate is someone that you have something to learn from in that moment. So a soulmate could be a new lover, your future husband or wife, could be a new best

116  Communal Effort friend, absolutely. So we try to match people with someone that they have something to learn from. LINDA And what is it like for you conducting these interviews? JOSH The interviews are beautiful, and joyous, and painful. My very first interview I did, right out of training, I was super nervous because again, I am an introvert and therefor I lack the ability to talk to people, the story I used to tell myself. My very first interview was with this amazing girl, young, perky, very happy, had this glowing energy around her, had this super smiley energy around her, and this warm and pleasant, all of the lovely things you’d like to see in a person that you’re being introduced to. And we start doing the interview and I start asking how’s your day going, what have you been up to, just to kind of break the ice a little bit. She’s been having a great day, it’s her first burn, she just had her first free grilled cheese, she’s in heaven, like, it’s amazing. And within about 60 seconds the entire interview took a turn. I didn’t ask anything other than to me what were natural follow up questions to these things. After a few things, she had made some kind of alluding comments like, “Oh I’m so happy I’m here and it’s so great, I’m just trying to forget the things back in the default world.” So I was like, “Oh, like what? Why do you need to forget those things?” And she just immediately looks at me and she starts crying. I ask if I can hold her hand, and we do, and eventually she starts talking about how she is trying to be so happy and so uplifting, because that’s what is expected of her. We’re supposed to be at this place and we’re supposed to be happy and she doesn’t want to be the bummer among all her friends, who are nice enough to bring her to this really cool place that she’s been wanting to go to forever, but what she has not been able to bring herself to tell them is that on the way into the city, on the drive from wherever she’s from, on the drive in she found out that her dad had committed suicide. Her dad who had run out on her and her sister when they were little girls and she hasn’t spoken to him in 20 years, has tried to spend her entire life never thinking of him again. But she found out that he had killed himself, and she didn’t know what the fuck to do with that knowledge. And the only thing she’s been able to do is not tell anybody, because that would not be happy. This was my first interview. It mirrors a lot of things I was going through as far as holding myself back, my own relationship with family suicide and losing parents early on, abandonment and things like that, and just synchronicity, man. There’s no quicker way to get me out of my shell telling me that I’m not able to connect with people than having this girl, literally within five minutes of meeting her, literally tell me her deepest, darkest self. And then me just being able to sit there and hold her. Literally

Communal Effort 117 hold her, with consent, just hold her, not try and make it better, not say it’s okay, or just think on the bright side or anything like that, just hold her. And let her have someone she can share this with because we don’t have enough opportunity in life to share things in a way that isn’t filtered for someone else’s response. We spend so much time thinking about what our response is going to be next, and we know that everyone else does that, that the things we do say and share, not only are we halfway checked out of what the other person is saying but we’re crafting what we’re sharing in preparation for how they’re gonna craft that and bring it back to them. And to not do that. To let it be entirely about her and her feelings and what she’s experiencing, and me just be there with her and not run away. Not say, well that’s sad, let me go get your membership card. LINDA Do you know if she ever found a soulmate? JOSH I don’t, that’s the thing, but I do remember that I requested the system to get her a really good soulmate. LINDA You know what’s uncanny about Burning Man though? In five years, if you told me, “I just ran into that woman on the playa this morning!” Not only would I believe you, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. JOSH You would be zero percent surprised, you’d be like oh yeah, of course! You’d be surprised that it took five years. LINDA And it would be exactly when you both needed it to happen. JOSH Yeah. When we both just found each other again. LINDA Do you feel that Costco aligns with the principle of Communal Effort? JOSH Absolutely. That’s the entire point why that camp is there, to help facilitate connection in what was originally that whirling bustling city in the early nineties of what, a few thousand people, who on earth could possibly find ways to meet and connect with one another? So let’s found a fuckedup corporate parody camp to help people meet each other. LINDA And that mock corporate structure, you don’t have to feel like you’re being needy going in there, you’re just playing. That is the actual goal but it gives you rules to know how to play with those people? JOSH Exactly, and it’s a game that unfortunately we all know how to play. We know how to go to a store and buy stuff, we know how to fill out

118  Communal Effort forms. Who doesn’t go to Costco? I mean you need your five-gallon jug of mayo! Yeah, they get to come in, we get to yell at them and berate them like a surly customer service person, and just, “Fill out the application, don’t forget to sign at the bottom, come back when you’re done and I’ll give you a number.” Or however you want to play it. We play it all kinds of different ways. But it is play. We go into some deep places, but I think we only get to go into the deepest places because of the play. Because it’s a performance that we’re all performing together. Not just our camp, but every single person there is performing this collaboratively. Just not everyone knows that they’re doing it. LINDA It’s so much easier than going “on stage” and not knowing what you’re supposed to do. When you’re given the role, you’re coming for an interview and this is Costco, this is corporate America and you know exactly how that works. JOSH We don’t even have to give them the rules because we know the rules already. I mean the rules there are just made up—but Pro Tip—the rules were always just made up. LINDA First of all, that’s genius. Second, we’re just about done here, do you have anything you’d like to add? JOSH Yeah, I think in terms of how it relates to Communal effort, and just really emphasizing Burning Man itself and Costco as an emblem of this, that Burning Man is not just a physical place that we are building together. That’s one element of Communal Effort, but it’s the performance of the space that we are all doing together. It’s really fascinating getting to see such a cross section of people. Costco is not appealing just to any one demographic or sector of the city, we’re pulling people in from all over the place. And it’s really cool to see how so many people choose to perform community in their own way, to see how people are either bringing their most unabashed, unrealistic, superhero alter-ego, fairy vision of themselves, or they’re using the format of Burning Man to perform their most authentic selves. And all of the ways that we, even out there, either choose for that to happen with no filter at all, or all of the filters at once. Rarely is it a moderation in between. It’s great to see that at Costco because it is the space where we perform community together, and in performing it we actually create it. LINDA And you’re planning to continue camping with Costco going forward? JOSH Probably until the day I die.

Communal Effort 119 Or Burning Man dies?

LINDA

JOSH Yeah … that seems increasingly likely the scenario. LINDA Yeah, maybe we should touch on that a little bit? I don’t know if you knew this, but I’m writing a book on it. JOSH NO. WAY. This has the power to drastically change things. LINDA Of course, this could be the last year. JOSH Theoretically. LINDA Every year could be the last year, in fact I think Larry Harvey was quoted as saying that. JOSH Yes. This year could always be the last year, you never know. But of course we’ve got this massive regional network, it’s become a worldwide cultural phenomenon. LINDA Which is amazing, and it’s the principles that tie that together. JOSH Right, just because Black Rock City is no longer the thing, doesn’t mean that AfrikaBurn won’t keep going. LINDA Maybe this is part of the growth, of the Ten Principles and of Burning Man, that ultimately this original event has to die, and becomes just the diaspora. JOSH I agree but probably for a different reason than you. I think that whatever innate energy might be in that place, of its own accord, the decades that Burning Man has been happening there has imbued it with more. What I like about going to the Black Rock Desert is its hostility. I like that it’s hard. I like that it’s trying to kill us. I like that it’s poisonous dust. I like that. And not because I like to suffer, but because I think we need something that is that tough and that challenging. It’s hard, and we shouldn’t be there, and we can’t be there for very long, but in that time where all of the trappings of our outside world can potentially be erased, what do we bring with us? Not just our physical things, but our ideas, our ambitions, our goals, values. What do we bring with us there? What do we build brand new out there? And then what do we bring back home. I don’t think doing that in a place that is convenient makes the stakes high enough to make the most use of that opportunity. It’s like to get the clean slate you

120  Communal Effort

Figure 6.2  Ducky at Costco Camp. Photo credit: Espressobuzz.

have to sandblast it a bit. It’s like we went to a school that used not just whiteboards but actual chalkboards and no matter how much you use that dusty-ass eraser on that chalkboard, that chalkboard has permanently absorbed some of that dust. So it needs to be power-scrubbed in order to have that clean slate again. LINDA And even then you’ll still have a palimpsest, the ghost of what was there before. JOSH Right. But this violent, hot, windy, poisonous, dusty, dead lakebed kind of power washes us to the bare basics of our humanity. You have to fight to have water, you have to fight to have food, you have to struggle for everything. And because of that, everything has meaning (Figure 6.2).

SETTING:

AT RISE:

ACT II We are in a small home office, painted in bright orange and blue that is somehow equal parts garish and awesome. The walls are covered in pictures and artwork, barely any blank space. LINDA sits at her desk, her laptop open, coffee and snacks within easy reach. LINDA stares at the screen nervously until the familiar sound of Zoom connecting rings out. The image of MAUS appears on her screen and they both smile.

Communal Effort 121 Heyyyyyy

MAUS

LINDA Hi! Nice to see your face! Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me. MAUS Of course. LINDA The first question is can you introduce yourself and tell me about who you are, what you do, and where you’re from? MAUS Sure. I am Maat Pittman, “Maus” on playa, I’m a massage therapist, massage teacher, I’ve been doing that for almost 30 years. I started doing it to pay for college. And then made it through college and realized I’d already found out what I wanted to do, so … I’ve been doing that ever since. LINDA Is there anything you want to add? I’m just seeing your décor back there, it’s gorgeous. MAUS It turns out you can buy a five-bedroom Victorian in coastal Oregon for $250K. I know, I know! To be clear we got a pretty good deal on this place, I think because it’s super haunted. LINDA I think I’m going to need a tour before we proceed … MUAS takes LINDA on a tour of the haunted Victorian via projections against the upstage screen, drawing them both into the beautiful, creepy space together with the audience. After a minute or so they stop giggling and get back to the business of discussing the Ten Principles. LINDA Do you have any thoughts on the Ten Principles in General, and the principle of Communal Effort specifically? MAUS I think having a clear set of rules, a clear ideology, allows people the opportunity to decide whether they’re going to ignore them. Take small children, for example. Small children need boundaries, right? And let’s be clear, a lot of us out there are small children, we’re not at our most responsible, so I think that having a simple rule set, like our commandments, you can decide whether you’re going to sin. In our culture, we have too many rules. Too many laws, you almost never know whether you’re breaking one.

122  Communal Effort When we have a set of small and manageable rules to follow, then we can make decisions whether to take or break them. We have a simplified set. Our Costco principles are: If you can climb it, climb it. And yes, the answer is yes. We are an extreme version of Communal Effort, we ask people to come in and do emotional labor for us. We’re there to receive it, we’re there to hear the story everybody needs to tell, and they still have to do the work of telling us. LINDA Have you ever had clients at Costco Camp who were unwilling to do the work? Maybe those who came in and only wanted to mess with you? MAUS All the time. LINDA Really? All the time? MAUS All the time. People who don’t want to believe we’re not a dating camp, people who are only interested in hook-ups, they don’t want to do that work. The story is changing. It used to be that people just didn’t believe us at all, but now we’ll hear people in line telling each other that it’s not a hook-up camp. When I took over managing Costco, I made some significant changes to the interview process. Before, it was kind of a wink and a nod thing, but now we tell people, we have a motto. If you can’t get laid without Costco, you’re not going to get laid with us. but that’s not what we’re for. So we absolutely have people who come in, get through the whole process, and still don’t believe us. Our country and our world is so much about what kind of mask you’re going to create, how do you look perfect? We don’t want your “perfect,” we want your ugly. We want the complicated, gritty, sharp, not-fun parts of you, because if we’re gonna find you a soulmate, we need to find one that resonates with, or at least can handle those things about you. We want you to have connection. LINDA How long have you been a part of COSTCO, and in what roles? MAUS For the first few years, I just went. My fourth year they had a vacancy in HR, they needed someone to do the hiring, so I did that. I did that for probably three years. It was great because that was still in the early phases of interviews, so we were just figuring out who we were looking for. Instead of just friends and friends of friends, we started to look at people we’d never met before. 2008, we had a store manager vacancy, so I stepped into that. We’re really busy, there are a lot of parts of us that really run like a business. So we have two facilities managers, one off playa and

Communal Effort 123 one on, we have a kitchen manager, the kitchen job is kind of like the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, it never lasts more than a year or two, it’s awful. We have a bar manager, we have a store manager. My job as the store manager is to make Costco itself go. Facilities manager makes sure our structure is secure. Kitchen makes sure that we’re fed. The bar makes sure that we’re socially lubricated. There’s the finance manager whose job is mostly done off playa. My job is to make sure that the store runs, that everyone is trained and everyone understands our process. LINDA What was your first year at Costco like? MAUS Oh, it was a MESS. Messy. We had just changed the way we worked. On the back of the application there’s a part where you draw a picture of yourself. We used to take photos and then print them out and stick them to the app so you would know exactly what they look like. And that was the year it didn’t work. That was the year that it broke down, the computers all broke, so we asked people to draw a picture of themselves, thinking they would draw something lifelike, that sort of looked like them, and that’s not what happened at all. We got bumblebees and fruit trees and flowers and rabbits, which ended up being better than a photo. There were far fewer of us that year, maybe 20 of us, and we were on the Esplanade, so we were worked-ragged. We had much less of our community figured out, what it meant to all of us to be there, a bunch of people didn’t want to do the new work. We had decided to work instead of just being a fuckoff camp. We were just clowns, just messing around before that. And that was kind of the first year that we had started to think, maybe we could actually do this thing. Maybe there are soulmates and maybe we can actually facilitate that meeting. For me, because I was so new, this work was everything I’d been looking for. I’m not afraid of work when the end result is beautiful. I’m a connection addict. I don’t even want to talk to you if we can’t connect. I don’t have time for that, so it was everything that I wanted. And it was in a process of becoming something I found really exhilarating. I’m a Gemini, we like liminal things. You’re gonna make me cry now. LINDA I actually do like making people cry! Not by being mean to them, obviously, but that’s a sign that someone’s cracking open. You know? I think as you were describing, I’m a total connection junkie as well. MAUS In terms of what we do and how successful we’ve been, I think we’ve changed utterly. We realized the joke we were trying to perpetrate was real. It’s kind of like realizing that the play you’re performing is actually real life. Someone told me it’s like going to church and then realizing that

124  Communal Effort

Figure 6.3  Maus at Costco Camp. Photo credit: Espressobuzz.

god is real. You don’t have to have faith, there’s actual data to support the existence of this thing (Figure 6.3).

SETTING:

AT RISE:

ACT III We are outdoors, the sound of cicadas is almost overwhelming. LINDA is sitting on a rickety chair outside with a laptop, obviously very tired. The smoke from the most recent California wildfires hangs in the air. The familiar sound of a Zoom connection rings out as LINDA and WES introduce themselves. When the conversation starts, she clearly perks up.

LINDA Hi Wes, I’m so glad we were able to get in touch! Can you give me a brief overview of who you are and what you do? Like how you got started with Burning Man, that sort of thing? WES Absolutely. So I think, you know how you have friends who go to Burning Man and they try to talk you into it and you’re like yeah, well, I’m working, I don’t know, and then they go and they come back and tell you how amazing it was? Exactly that situation. My friend Philip hung out with all the cool kids who knew all the cool things, and participated in

Communal Effort 125 some of the Cacophony Society stuff, told me cacophony was doing this weird thing where they go out to the desert and build a big effigy and burn it and I was like, I’m a pyro, that sounds super fun. And then I wasn’t able to go that first year, that was 1992, but he came back with tales of how wonderful it was. I think there was like a central café, a biggish tent and there were a few organized things, I remember that at a certain time everybody met at the man and pulled the man up together, it was right on the ground. One thing I remember that really sticks with me is that when I went in 1994, my 2nd year, the café, the central café such as it was—and it wasn’t an organized thing—it was just like, there’s people who wanted coffee, and nobody had the wherewithal to bring their own coffee setup, so if you could provide coffee, you were like, the man who controls the coffee controls the world out there. And so there was this tumble-down, PVC, shitty dome that was all put together wrong and falling apart every time the wind blew. And there was a big banner hanging on it that said, “No Spectators.” And so for years that was the only principle I remember carrying with me and taking to heart. Everyone here is a participant. But after 1996 the BLM was like okay, party’s over, it’s been fun, you guys are done. It was a fucking mess because that was the first time Burning Man really hit the mainstream, there were too many people there for the infrastructure to support. There were no limitations on who could come, who could be there, and everybody left a ton of mess and on top of that there was a really huge rain storm just as everybody was leaving so people felt lucky to get out with their lives, their cars, but maybe not their couches and tents and whatever they left behind. Leave No Trace was real, so that’s one that’s been with us for a while. What are the other ones? LINDA Principle of Communal effort, that’s what this chapter is about. I think the idea of not messing with people’s shit is embedded in that … WES Right, when you have just 100 people in a group, those people are accountable to each other. It isn’t Libertarianism, it isn’t that there are no rules, it is simply that people are accountable to each other. You could say there’s a rule of not punching people in the face, because the other 99 people won’t like you. Don’t shit in the water supply, because we all drink that. So there are plenty of rules, it’s just a matter of when those rules become codified into rules versus what we foolishly call common sense. I’m a person who has done more or less nothing except collective organizing and projects for the past 25 years, all deeply informed by my Burning Man experience. In some ways I think of Burning Man as an anarchist experiment. Anarchy not in the popular term, but in the term of collective action of collectivized action combined with social responsibility.

126  Communal Effort LINDA What made you want to start Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet? WES When I was making plans to go with a friend in 1997, we talked about what were the things we want to see and do? He was a super shy person, still is, I’m kind of a closet introvert—nobody ever believes me when I say I’m an introvert—spending a day with people is fine, I am highly social but man, after that I’m about done. It’s so obvious to me. Being a hermit would be fine. Being with people 24/7 would be a bad Sartre novel. So we wanted something that allowed us to interact with people on our own terms while increasing the possibility that they would connect with each other. We talked about various things, like what if we had “Connection Camp?” Where people could like make friends, or whatever? And we realized pretty quickly that if we were too earnest, it’s just too much like the guy who comes up to you saying, “I WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND!” Oh my god, you need to leave. We didn’t want to be that guy. So we talked about what would be the antithesis of something personable and human that allows you to meet people, like a big box store or something, right? And so we came up with Costco, this idea that it was really just in the business of soulmates. That we didn’t give a shit about the people, we didn’t care about them, we were just going to match them up and they were gonna go through the process, because one thing we observed was, similar to enculturation where people who enter another culture want to know what are the rules, what is the culture? How do I not be a dick? How do I fit in here? How do I play with these people who are already playing? And so we decided to create rules for ourselves, for people who were coming in. And even though it was very anti-consumerist, we assigned their roles being like a consumer. It was just a role that people already know how to play in consumer culture, while at the same time not taking it seriously. LINDA I love that origin story. If I saw “Connection camp” I’d probably cross to the other side of the street to avoid it. But Costco camp … yeah, I could jump in and play with that. WES It wasn’t until several years into it when we realized we were actually creating so much more. It was a soulmate trading outlet so people would have to bring a soulmate to trade, and that opened up another space if that person is a stranger, then they’re meeting that person, and they’re meeting the person at the door, the Costco Employee, and then they sit and wait, and while they’re waiting they meet people, and they’re filling out their applications. Later the applications started having like, referrals or testimonials, which increases the number of people you meet. Then you

Communal Effort 127 get interviewed and you get this really intense, personal connection with the interviewer, right? And this is all before you ever even meet your “soulmate.” And then you come in with your card, you sit and meet some more people, and then you find out the information on your soulmate and then you go to your soulmate’s camp and maybe they’re not there. They’re off seeking out a soulmate or partying or whatever, and you meet their campmates, who love you … or don’t … and somebody is trying to find you and that’s a different person, and that’s another connection, so we just realized, we didn’t merely open up a single space for people to connect, we opened up at least a half dozen spaces for people to connect with each other. We give permission to step outside of the familiar zone and encounter other people. LINDA One of the things in that other piece that I sent you, I was talking about how this was my first year participating in Costco camp, it was as an interviewer, it was my friend Josh who I’m sure you know, who brought me in. He said “This is so you, you’re such an empath, you’re gonna be perfect at this.” Then in the training they explained that you’ve got to keep turning that conversation back to the person you’re interviewing. It’s not a normal give and take where you share anecdotes because then … I guess in normal conversation you’re often waiting for your chance to speak. You can be listening, but you’re also thinking, okay, what’s my response going to be? So for me it was not only a lesson in deep listening, it was a lesson in the fact that if you really offer somebody your entire attention, they have so much that they need and want to give. WES Who does that in our lives, right? Our friends? Lovers? Our parents? LINDA Nobody. Right. So I was blown away. I worked a three-hour shift for the first time and I had to go lie down for the rest of the day. I was overwhelmed, it was so intense. And every single person I interviewed cried at some point, because it’s just incredible to have somebody’s actual, full attention. WES The people who I think are most successful at interacting with folks at Costco are people who are all those things. They’re a cook and an artist and a teacher and a corporate drone, and handy, and have some cultural history, and they’re a parent, and all these things and able to connect with people on lots of different levels. It’s really satisfying both as an interviewer and an interviewee. Something I don’t think I realized until I started talking to you about this is that my 18 or so years as a Costco interviewer has probably contributed directly to what I do as a career in my life. My art, I do what

128  Communal Effort could broadly be termed as social practice work or art in history, oral history work. So I float down the river, which is the sexy part, but the part which is just the nuts and bolts of what I do while we’re there is talking to people and just listening to their personal stories. Occasionally people will try to tell us something like, “You know in 1883 …” and I

Figure 6.4  In this Body, On this Earth. Photo credit: Wes Modes, 2023.

Communal Effort 129

Figure 6.5  Rico at Costco Camp. Photo credit: Espressobuzz.

tell them I’m less concerned with 1883 than 1983. When you’re here. I’m interested in YOUR personal stories. YOUR stories of your grandpa, your memories, tell me how you’re personally connected to this place, to this river. LINDA How are you personally connected to the playa? WES I took a walk and I was naked, and I wanted to just feel present with the place, something I don’t get to do at Burning Man. So I was padding my bare feet on this soft, chalky surface, it felt really soft on my feet, and hearing my feet crunch, crunch, crunch, on the playa surface, and I had this epiphany that I wasn’t a bundle of abstract thoughts moving through the world, but I was literally in a body, this body, I won’t ever be in another body, and I was literally on this planet, I won’t ever be on another planet, and so a thought occurred to me, “In this Body, on this Earth.” And that was my first tattoo (Figure 6.4). There’s a direct line from that experience of being there, not just the dust storms but the rain, and the rainbows, and the storms and the bright sunny days and the clear blue skies, to that experience of being there, to a reminder to myself every day that I’m in this body, not some other body, not abstractly, and here on this planet on this surface (Figure 6.5).

7

Civic Responsibility We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state, and federal laws

We all perform innocence or rebelliousness to some extent. Burning Man is patrolled by the nonviolent, conflict-resolution trained Black Rock City Rangers, but it is also patrolled by the following United States law enforcement agencies: Federal Bureau of Land Management Rangers, Pershing County Sheriff’s Office, Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, Nevada State Department of Investigations (NDI), Nevada State Health Division, and Nevada Highway Patrol. According to the official Burning Man Website: It is not the mission of these agencies to police your lifestyle or inhibit self-expression. They fulfill the same function as the police in any city. In the past, they have conducted search and rescue missions and assisted us in evictions. It is also their duty to respond to any infraction of the law that is brought to their attention or is in plain view.1 On the surface, the Principle of Civic Responsibility reads more like a caution than a principle, offering participants such warnings as, “It’s okay if you’re an anarchist, just try not to let it land you in jail, but if you must, try not to take everyone else down with you,” or “Organize responsibly, do not (get caught) break(ing) the law, and look after your fellow citizens.” For an event of this size and scope, it is no surprise that its organizers feel the need to state the obvious. However, the implications of law enforcement at Burning Man with regard to personal safety and liberty are DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-8

Civic Responsibility 131 just as ambiguous as they have traditionally been in the default world. For example, it is illegal at Burning Man to engage in “open and gross lewdness,” just as it is in all other public spaces in Nevada. The interpretations of such laws, however, have changed drastically throughout history. We must not forget, to offer a well-publicized and frequently quoted example, that world-renowned swimmer Annette Kellerman was once arrested on Boston Beach, in 1907, for wearing a one-piece swimsuit, and it was only due to public dissent that that particular perception of “lewdness” was eventually changed.2 It must also be acknowledged that contemporary interpretations of public lewdness vary from location to location; while it is still illegal to expose one’s nude body in public, with the exception of a few localities, I have never heard of that rule being enforced in Black Rock City. Nudity is a fairly unremarkable state at Burning Man; even my own children, who had never before seen fully nude adults walking around, ceased to notice them at all after their first day on the playa. Many laws have a history of lingering in systems and spaces long past the time at which they are still useful to the culture they are meant to serve and protect. As such, social change often entails a wide range of efforts either to change the law or re-clarify the ways in which it is appropriately interpreted and enforced. According to the “Lawyers for Burners” organization, law enforcement wrote 365 citations in 2012, 253 of which were drug related (approximately 70%). Of those, 11 arrests were made for distribution/ trafficking of drugs. The majority of drug-related citations were for possession of marijuana for personal use, and most of the remaining citations were for motor-vehicle-related infractions. The official position of Lawyers for Burners is that the organization “believes that arrests should be limited to those people who are dangerous or disruptive to the Event.”3 Anecdotal evidence suggests that most Burners hold the same opinion and that law enforcement treats the event as more of a payday via citations than a dedication to serving and protecting. As a result, there is an undercurrent of resentment that such crimes as rape and other forms of violence are treated as less important than drug-related crimes. It is beyond the scope of my research, given the dearth of reliable statistics, to investigate these incidents of reported violence quantitatively, but ostensible evidence such as blogs and articles suggests that while the frequency of such crimes could be considered proportionate to the size of Black Rock City’s population and duration, the response of law enforcement and resources for victims are, comparatively, severely lacking. This is not to say that productive conversations and alliances cannot be formed between Burners and law enforcement in Black Rock City. In keeping with the position of Burning Man as a heterotopia, it is plausible

132  Civic Responsibility that Burning Man’s infrastructure encourages alternative choices for the individual, not because its legal system is drastically different than that of the default world, but because the heterotopic body in a state of rehearsal, or infused with expectations to improvise alternative modes of engagement, can become a more creative site of resistance and transformation by imagining the new instead of resisting the old. On a micro-level, this improvisation can be transformative for engagement with legal structures and other forms of power hierarchies on both sides of any conflict. Bodies are sites of resistance; they are sites of complicity, cruelty, and repression; but they are also sites of compassion, imagination, and creation. It is pragmatically unproductive, if social change is desired, to simply contradict behavior that one perceives as unjust. The rule of law is not absolute; it relies on the interpretation of a judicial system comprised of feeling, sensing, human beings. Arguments are won and lost in the arena of emotional appeal couched in logic and legal precedent. In Chapter 4, Radical Self-Reliance, I discuss John McKenzie’s “The Liminal-Norm,” as an argument claiming that previously subversive concepts of liminal have been normalized in Performance Studies, as a discipline that depends upon transgression even if it becomes a repeated representation of transgression. Asserting that it has become the norm to say we are on the margins, in a continual state of transformation, McKenzie posits two different forms of efficacy within this space: 1 Face-to-face encounters, site-specific events, the co-presencing of individual and social bodies—these instantiate the transformative power of performance in the first decades of Performance Studies, prior even to its appellation. 2 Mediated encounters, parodic appropriations, bodies constructed by and through discourse: increasingly (though not exclusively) these have come to make up the efficacy of performance in the past two decades.4 In these forms of performative activism in the default world, even ludic bodies must operate contingent to familiar systems of authority, where encounters often result in opposing forces battling to control space. In the heterotopia of Black Rock City, however, while the laws of the land remain constant, the enforcement of those laws is often radically destabilized because there is no ambiguously “neutral” space to claim. Burners have the same rights to protect private spaces on the playa as they do in the default world, such as their tents, cars, or even their pockets. Officers have the same rights to maintain order and enforce laws, to use force to protect that duty when absolutely necessary, and to exercise their civic obligations without threat to their safety. One of the important distinctions in the process of exercising these fundamental rights, between methods in the

Civic Responsibility 133 default world and in Black Rock City, is the cultural space in which these interactions take place. There is no denying difference and tension between Burners and Law Enforcement at Burning Man, but the fact is that both of these social groups are negotiating unfamiliar space. Through a Performance Studies lens, I would call the most encouraging interactions between Burners and law enforcement an improvisatory, yet cautious dance in pursuit of expanding the potential to change communication that is typically fraught with anxiety and resentment. Whether that relationship is manifested by the freedom to transgress hegemony by choosing to enter ludic activities or states, or by rejecting one hegemonic structure in favor of another, “freedom” is still the product of a sharp distinction between various modes of social behavior. It depends on choices made within continually fluctuating systems of logic, with multiple moving parts, in a space that de-normalizes the liminal-norm through acts of invention rather than representation. Another significant aspect of authority/subject relationships at Burning Man is a subtle, yet ubiquitous notion that we are all in this together. While every individual’s motive for attending Burning Man is unique, and likely at odds with the motives of many others, creating Black Rock City requires everyone’s participation. Every body, whether or not it represents authority, is having a shared, unfamiliar, sensory experience that tends to de-center even the most fortified self. The following passage is a repost from Facebook on September 3, 2013, which describes an event that, for many who were present or subsequently heard the story, temporarily externalized a very positive expression of shared, unfamiliar experience between Burners and Law Enforcement: On Thursday afternoon out at the temple, I suddenly heard police sirens and then saw scores of police vehicles with lights flashing heading down the promenade towards the temple. It looked like at that moment every LEO on the playa was descending on the temple. Many of us stood stunned, not knowing what was happening, as these law enforcement vehicles slowly arrived and fanned out around the temple, as officers got out of each car. It looked like some kind of planned raid, perhaps a drug enforcement spot check. As they all got out of their cars and lined up on either side of the entrance to the temple, they took off their hats. Soon, a woman was being escorted down the path towards the temple, accompanied by someone holding a plaque. It became apparent that a fallen officer was being honored here at the temple, and that his family members were being escorted inside for a ceremony and placing of the plaque. As the officers went inside, crowds of burners followed, and everyone stood in respectful silence as the eulogy was read, and the plaque placed

134  Civic Responsibility on the altar. Gongs quietly rang in the background, as desert dust gently blew through the temple. The capacity crowd stood in rapt silence. Afterwards, the crowd erupted in applause as the speaker finished up, and the assembled officers and family members filed out of the temple. It was an emotional and unifying scene, and though different people have had varying experiences with police on and off the playa, in that moment we were all part of the same shared experience.5 (Steve Gorman) Such unifying events do give one reason to hope, if not for radical change, then at least for more frequent moments that diffuse the tension between authority and object. Black Rock City’s evolving culture encourages alternative choices for the expression of individual liberty by those who are subject to legal authority as well as those tasked with implementing it. Obviously, not all civic exchanges demonstrate the kind of overwhelming communal harmony that occurred in the above example; in fact, there are countless examples of Burners or Law Enforcement or both parties simultaneously engaging in deliberately antagonistic or negligent behavior that has proven counterproductive or outright dangerous. I personally consider most of my interactions with Law Enforcement, since my first burn in 2000, to be respectful and thoroughly pleasant, especially during the 2021 Renegade Burn. I witnessed so many exchanges between Burners and Law Enforcement that year, and the overwhelming sentiment from LE was, “Be safe and enjoy your federal land!” while Burners expressed sincere gratitude for the job they were doing. I have also experienced occasional incidents in other years that, by domestic legal standards, clearly violated basic civil rights. This can hardly come as a surprise, though, because bodies in motion, negotiating unfamiliar territory—or, more accurately, deterritorializing space—are going to blunder even with the best of intentions. Black Rock City may invite us to explore experimental dissent, but it certainly does not exempt us from conflict or misunderstanding. Many movements and events outside Burning Man, such as “Reclaim the Streets,” which is the second case study in this chapter, also encourage a kind of embodied revolution through immediate and intimate participation with hegemonic authority, but these tend to be site-specific, carefully planned, and more overtly psychogeographical. RTS action usually involves the temporary take-over of a highly traveled motorway and refusing to allow cars, the symbol of anti-environmentalism and anthropocentricism, to traverse the dedicated area, transforming the roads, signs, and other objects into spaces for ludic activity and celebration. The premise is that the environment too often becomes a geography of institutionalization; a

Civic Responsibility 135 stranglehold on individual freedom by the association of symbols, such as streets and buildings, as that which dictates human behavior. RTS’s most obvious similarity to Burning Man is the notion of these events as temporary, a place to rehearse different ways of value-making and try on varying aspects of autonomy. Law enforcement is present, persistent, and insistent on remaining within the laws of the land, but one may find more utility in the absurd, the playful, or more human ways of communicating in the desire to exercise autonomy. Tactical performance becomes the narrative. In order to explore the way desire for liberation can be realized through various performative action both inside and outside of heterotopia, I will juxtapose two case studies: one RTS event from 1996, and a personal anecdote involving Law enforcement at Burning Man. These examples are not meant to serve as proof of lasting change as a result of playfully circumventing the system, but as progressive, embodied insight in continual but modified relation with systems of authority. Traditional views of liberation tend to privilege event-based revolution, such as overthrowing oppressors in order to make room for a new and better world, but too often the new world simply returns to the patterns of the system it critiques. Consideration of incremental, playful, and personal tactics for social change, foregrounds the role of individual social encounters in performing radically different versions of liberation by dismissing the cycle of revolution, which by its most basic definition suggests a circular pattern of repetition, in favor of decentralized evolution that refuses to resolve. Utility in Absurdity: “Anyone Want Some E?” This case study calls upon a personal anecdote from Burning Man 2012 in order to posit different ways of engaging with law enforcement when tactics require precarious navigation of existing laws. While some actions find their most potent impact by deliberately breaking local, state, or federal laws, experimental or alternative societies can often prove counterproductive and self-destructive if participants do not take care to protect themselves against the punishing ramifications of disobeying these laws. Very few Burners would be willing to sacrifice their time on the playa by putting themselves in the position of actually being arrested or ejected. As long as individuals are intimately aware of how far that law can reach, and astute judges of how actions are being interpreted in-the-moment by various law enforcement agents, locating and mining that subjective point right at the edge of the law can sometimes break down the social barriers between “us” and “them.” At Burning Man 2012, my campmates had for some reason become obsessed with the board game, Scrabble. We played Scrabble more than

136  Civic Responsibility we played with the art of the playa, perhaps because many camp members were addicted to “words with friends,” a virtual form of the classic scrabble game that one can play on one’s mobile phone, with many opponents simultaneously. There is no reliable cell phone reception on the playa, so all Words With Friends battles had been put on hiatus. Some players took the return to a traditional scrabble board game seriously, but I just enjoyed stealing people’s letters when they weren’t looking because I have no patience for board games. One day, after a very active round of scrabble-sabotage (hmm … Scrabotage?), I wound up with a pocketful of scrabble tiles bearing many different letters, and forgot about them until many hours later, when a group of us were out on the Esplanade trying to find a good spot to watch a series of CORE (Circle of Regional Effigies) burns from around the world, scheduled for 11 p.m. We were all dancing, chatting, and having a grand time, until we noticed a stream of burners trudging in a somber line away from the Esplanade. One young woman turned toward me tearfully and said, “If you’ve got anything on you, get rid of it. They’re searching everyone. They just took three of our friends.” I knew I didn’t have anything on me in the sense that she was referring to, but I compulsively jammed my hands into my pockets to check whether there might be anything offensive to a hungry under-cover agent in there. When my fingers touched the mound of Scrabble letters, I pulled them out and saw two E’s in the pile. Because there were several obvious undercover agents coming my way, I could not resist grabbing the opportunity to ask if they wanted some E.6 As I’d anticipated, two men and one woman stopped and focused on me like hunters after their prey. I held out my hand and said that I only had two, and the woman and one of her male partners both reached out. I pressed the tiles into their hands and said, “Have a great burn.” The initial reaction was one of obvious frustration over the foiled drug bust and, I imagine, contemplation of detaining me for a less-than-friendly search because I had interrupted their apprehension of lawbreakers by distracting them with law-abiding activities. But after a moment, one of the men rolled his eyes, laughed, and said, “Okay, that was pretty funny.” His partners took that as a sign to let their guard down, and we all wound up having a rather pleasant conversation about the CORE burns. Our encounter culminated in hugs, and I do not think it outside the realm of possibility that they might have kept my “E” tiles as the gifts I’d intended them to be. In Gregory Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” the potential for playful subversion either to offend or to invite rests on the reaction to non-truth, in this case irony, depending on the context of the interaction: “We face then two peculiarities of play: (a) that the messages or signals

Civic Responsibility 137 exchanged in play are in a certain sense untrue or not meant, and (b) that that which is denoted by these signals is nonexistent.”7 By playing with the law officers in Black Rock City, where responses to their presence ranges from outright anger to genuine affection, I temporarily invited them into our turf without disrespecting the infrastructure that governed their turf. Because my perceived transgression was revealed to be untrue, we could share space and form productive alliances without breaking each other’s rules. A Foucauldian interpretation of the value of this brief exchange might involve the constitution and dissemination of power as temporarily dislodged from its context. The human symbols of authority as victims of a prank had no technical foothold to retaliate, so this brief, carnivalesque inversion of power removed agency from the realm of the legal and placed it into the social; if one is not breaking any laws, the contest might take on a different character, a friendly battle of wits. A spontaneous choice to interrupt the flow of hegemony, on however small a scale, called the customarily uneven distribution of power into question and made it strange. The joke was on them, and relative social conditioning steered them toward a self-effacing response by admitting that they had been tricked, and cleverly so, for their experience in Black Rock City thus far had probably attuned them to the advantages of refining their ability to perform socially as burners. In this case, the cultural authority of the law-abiding prankster displaced the relative authority of law enforcement, but because it was presented as an invitation to perform in an attitude of play rather than refusal to obey, the gesture offered a space of diminished risk for both parties to maneuver away from a hierarchy into temporarily, comparatively even ground. “Reclaim the Streets: M41Motorway, Shepherd’s Bush, London, 1996” While Reclaim the Streets shares similarities with Burning Man in that they both claim space on a temporary basis and engage in experimental modes of interaction with power systems, the drastic difference between the two is that Burning Man goes to great lengths to obtain the necessary permits, provide insurance, and comply with all local, state, and federal laws in order to hold its annual event legally, and Reclaim the Streets begins by breaking the law with its premise, to block traffic on busy motorways. Burning Man and Reclaim the Streets both flesh out temporality with carnivalesque characteristics that invert cultural norms, but while Burning Man separates itself from the default world in temporary, heterotopic isolation, RTS seeks to remain a visible part of that world. As

138  Civic Responsibility L.M. Bogad states, in “Carnivals against Capital: radical clowning and the global justice movement”: Movement organizers and writers use the term “carnival” to label these explicitly oppositional events, at which flamboyant costumes, dance, puppets, tricksterism, samba bands and other musical groupings can all be seen. They also seem to refer to ideas about carnival that may, to some scholars, seem romantic or overly idealist: nevertheless, these activists are attempting to deploy the ideal of carnival in a practical, experimental way on the street, to create a new, twenty-first century kind of carnival that is not calendrically nor spatially circumscribed or permitted by the state but declared and embodied by a movement that identifies itself as global, anti-corporate and anti-authoritarian.8 While I have never witnessed a Reclaim the Streets action first-hand, YouTube has many videos, ranging from carefully edited, professional-quality documentaries, to brief clips of raw footage of RTS events, affording viewers the opportunity to observe some details of one such event; “M41Motorway, Shepherd’s Bush, London,” which took place on July 13, 1996. What separated this performance from many others available on YouTube was for me not its delay due to several attempts by the police to prevent RTS members and their invited audience—essentially, anyone in the world who wanted to join in the party—from taking over the streets, but their sheer courage and ambitious methods: When the jubilant crowd finally descended upon the desired stretch of the M41 Motorway, the ensuing party looked even more flamboyant than usual, perhaps for that day having been hard-won after repeated obstacles. But eventually the crowd took over the street as planned, smoothly executing a most ambitious plan to plant trees in the middle of the M41 fast lane. Stilt-walkers cloaked in massive, wired skirts concealed activists armed with heavy drills to penetrate the asphalt, alongside “arborists” ready to deposit trees into the drilled areas. This radical reimagining of a street as temporary home/host to large, living plants did not solve many issues pragmatically, yet the pure nerve involved in its execution would be enough to give almost any observer pause. When familiar surroundings suddenly, unexpectedly turn unfamiliar— when a busy motorway is quickly transformed into an urban garden— casual observers as well as authority figures are tasked with considering how to behave in present circumstances that have no direct precedent. While such a happening might foster resentment or annoyance by those who depend upon an unobstructed motorway in order to reach their destination on a specific schedule, or anxiety in law enforcement agents over

Civic Responsibility 139 deciding how to proceed in efforts to maintain order, it also opens up a space in which all affected individuals must improvise. I would argue that the creative act of improvisation, rather than repetition, is more effectively embodied in situations where the destabilizing event is performed in an attitude of invention rather than contradiction. Simply blocking the motorway with physical barriers, such as bodies or large objects that overtly signify resistance to authority, disrupts the inertia of succumbing to habits dictated by one’s familiar environment, but fails to offer any newly imagined ways to engage with that environment. Radically re-casting space into a temporary but new ecology—a motorway into a place where living trees put down symbolic roots of relative permanence as opposed to a physical structure that serves no purpose beyond facilitating a commonly frantic need to be somewhere else as quickly as possible—creates a sensory experience alongside a political experience. No one is told why; they are invited to imagine possibilities for themselves. In the words of many excellent writers, “Show me, don’t tell me.” Contentious resistance is often as reductive as a list of succinct demands backed only by familiar threats, but imaginative action, while still resistance, has the potential to stimulate stories that do not mimic the past but set the scene for an alternative present. I have witnessed and participated in many forms of political resistance throughout my life, from sit-in Gulf War protests in the 1990s to “Occupy” events on the UC Davis campus, the most memorable being the infamous pepper-spray incident on November 18, 2011.9 I acknowledge and admire the role of organized protest in raising public awareness and calling for widespread dissent in response to unjust policy. These movements have the power to demonstrate the magnitude of citizens’ unwillingness to submit quietly to authority, and perhaps even cause others to rethink their political beliefs. However, because they generally operate within conditions that prevent participants from maneuvering outside their familiar culture, it is difficult to translate political critique into policy change. Demand for change tends to occur as direct refusal by an existing, disenfranchised, culturally identified group to accept structural subjugation by modifying the practices of a dominant group, rather than reimagining ways in which the ideologically opposing forces might relinquish or alter their performance of being perpetually at-odds. Ludic performance as resistance, however, can bring the dialectic into the dialogic; RTS planting living trees sprouting in the M41 Motorway is just strange enough to assume that it will elicit at least some reaction in those who encounter it, and arrest ideological momentum long enough to consider other directions it might take. Civic responsibility involves far more than knowing and abiding by existing laws; it absolutely requires relentless critique of societies’ structures of power and the methods by which that power is exercised. In the default world, it is generally assumed, and justified by a linear perspective

140  Civic Responsibility of history, that these structures remain constant unless massive, radical action is taken to overpower them, whether by legislative negotiation, peaceful demonstration, or outright force. In the absence of massive action, individuals are often left with few choices: subscribe to the system and do your best to thrive within it, resist the system by way of minute yet personally meaningful acts while still attempting to thrive within it, or distance yourself as much as possible and only acknowledge the system when absolutely required to do so. I believe one of the most significant motivations for activist individuals and organizations, such as Reclaim the Streets, is to penetrate, however subtly, the alienating barriers between groups who practice different methods of coping within ideological space, by introducing possibilities for new ways to perceive culture and perform relationships. After all, it is not the direct relationship between authority and subject that evolves during an RTS action, but limitless relationships among masses of individuals involved in the constant process of evaluating their roles in performing their faithful versions of what is ultimately an absolute abstraction. Extrapolated to this extent, the sudden presence of a garden on a busy motorway might seem no stranger than, say: A group of people dressed in a rather comical costumes and hats, blowing whistles, armed with batons, paid a salary drawn from public funds to tell other people what they can and cannot do, supported by a small group of people who possess a disproportionately large amount of money, handed a sentimental mission to serve and protect within an actual obligation to control and punish, granted license to use force when necessary to enforce the law, but not to exercise measured autonomy and informed choice based on extensive experience while serving their community, with the assumption that transgressing that arbitrary law justifies stripping away one’s basic human freedoms even if they did not pose a threat so much as an inconvenience to others. And the powers that dictate those laws—the ones invoked in order to morally justify the use of force— they often change those laws when persuaded by organizations that have enough money to buy the votes of a large group of elected officials who are still performing a tragically archaic system created to perpetuate a culture that is accustomed to choosing sides as if participating in a struggle that can actually be won. While logic might label this a redundant, defunct system, as its community’s perceived success depends upon simultaneous defeat of members of the very same community, current capitalist culture lives and dies on its ability to keep this never-ending, progress-defeating cycle of mutually destructive antagonism intact. But obviously these things are all a matter of perspective. Even if large-scale, highly imaginative forms of resistance provide brief escapes from a culture predicated upon territorial conflict, it is difficult if not nearly impossible to expect many individuals to change their behavior

Civic Responsibility 141 sufficiently to destabilize deeply ingrained, hegemonic habits. It is one thing to witness ludic performance that succeeds in revealing societies’ carefully obscured injustice among its members; it is quite another to willingly accept responsibility for those imbalances and not only commit to maintaining awareness, but to abruptly cease behavior that reinforces the unjust system. Revolution does not come with a book of instructions for neatly and systematically rebuilding ruptured ideology. Dissent within the default world does not simply respond to the rule of law, but also to the pressures of a deeply stratified society that has little to no opportunity to move outside its own space. Even if monologic authority is disrupted, there is little room to breathe life into alternative possibilities when the majority of affected individuals have accepted lifelong conditioning to cling to the path of least resistance. The best that most know how to hope for is either that the familiar societal structures will remain in place but will be overseen and implemented by more honest and fair leaders, or that the existing structure will be replaced by a system that has already been proven to work well for others. The fundamental distinction between evolving power relations inside Black Rock City versus the default world, specifically during interactions between Burners and Law Enforcement Officials, is that the citizens of Black Rock City are not actively participating in the perpetuation of a familiar social structure, but in the continual reinvention of a culture of the present. While both Burners and officers still must respond to the authority of the law, they enter any such exchanges within surroundings that seem to deliver a relentless message that one can only fully appreciate Burning Man if they are willing to let themselves change. In many ways, the omnipresent relationship between Burners and Law Enforcement provides much more opportunity to re-imagine and rehearse new values than would a heterotopia without the presence of law enforcement; not only for the obvious reasons such as public welfare and safety but also for the chance to experiment with unfamiliar motives and attitudes of communication. Gestures that originate from a place of playfulness rather than suspicion recast the body from an act of resistance-as-contradiction to one of resistance-by-invention. Within this spirit of invention, one can fully understand that while it is impossible to predict exactly what a better future must be, one cannot move toward a different future by continually reinforcing the same sets of circumstances; it is necessary to modify behavior in the present. Creative, ludic space is often successful in encouraging the practice of demonstrating what could be possible instead of only criticizing what is not working. There is much to be gained by re-imagining space, whether the radical activities in that space extend as far as intentionally breaking the law or to form new authority/subject relationships within the bounds of the law.

142  Civic Responsibility As one officer cheerfully stated in the M41 Motorway video, “If it has to happen (RTS’s tactical performance), this does seem a very good space for it.” I would offer a similar endorsement for Burning Man; the playa seems a very good space for its community as a whole to allow themselves to change. Notes 1 “Official Burning Man Website,” http://www.burningman.com/on_the_playa/ le_feedback.html. 2 “Herstory: Annette Kellerman,” The Dawn. No. 54 (March 2004). 3 “Lawyers for Burners,” lawyersforburners.com, https://sites.google.com/site/ lawyersforburners/. 4 John McKenzie, “The Liminal Norm,” in Perform, or Else (New York: Routledge, 2001), 26. 5 This quote was pulled from a Facebook post for which I cannot track the original source. Privacy settings have prevented much further interrogation as to how I might fully attribute that quote, but I believe it speaks, along with the accompanying image, most directly and succinctly to what happened on the playa at the Temple of Whollyness, 2013. 6 “E” is a common name for the street drug “Ecstasy” or MDMH, or methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Other common names are “X” or “Molly.” 7 Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (London: MIT Press, 2006), 319. 8 L.M. Bogad, “Carnivals against capital: radical clowning and the global justice movement,” Social Identities, Vol. 16, No. 4 (July 2010), 537. 9 Though I regularly walked among the encampment on the UCD quad and brought my daughters with me to deliver homemade baked goods to protestors, I was not present at the time Campus Police Officer Lieutenant Pike arrived with a SWAT team and illegally assaulted a group of peaceful protestors with pepper spray.

8

Leaving No Trace Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place … to get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. (Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”)

The principle of leaving no trace seems to address the Burning Man community as a whole more than it addresses each individual personally to experience change. While keeping Black Rock City “clean” depends upon individual behavior, there is a distinct sense of total civic pride in this ideal that plays upon ecological aesthetics as expression of selfhood. As such, it could be considered individuals’ performances for each other, for the appearance of a space in which it is unacceptable to forgo stewardship of one’s immediate environment without relinquishing belief in the mutually agreed-upon illusions that reflect our most treasured ideals. As long as the playa is eventually returned to a state that appears similarly pristine to its pre-Burning Man conditions, participants’ environmental obligations are considered to have been fulfilled. It is notable that, while Burning Man expresses pride in being a “Leave No Trace” event, it does not claim to be a green event. While participants are encouraged to embrace environmentally responsible practices inside the city, there is no explicit ban on items such as gas-powered generators that leave significant carbon footprints. Burning Man’s “Go Green” policy can be found on its official website and is often disseminated through blogs, social networks, and newsletters. The “Greening Your Burn” issue of The Jackrabbit Speaks, Burning Man’s official newsletter, provides the DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-9

144  Leaving No Trace following seven tips as basic guidelines to prepare for an environmentally friendly and Leave No Trace burn: 1 MOOP (Matter Out Of Place) is bad. Don’t drop it. If you see it, pick it up and take it with you. Don’t let the wind take it. 2 Pack it in, pack it out. Include ALL your clean-up needs in your Burning Man plan. 3 Conserve energy. Use renewable energy sources (solar, wind, biodiesel). 4 Buy minimal and environmentally friendly supplies. Reuse stuff instead of replacing it whenever possible. 5 Try to make most of your waste recyclable. After the event, recycle it. If you must pack out landfill trash, dispose of it responsibly. 6 If it wasn’t in your body, don’t put it in the potty. Make a plan to deal with graywater. 7 Spread the word. Clean up with your neighbors.1 Respect for the environment through sustainable practices is a real, if somewhat peripheral, cultural concern for Burning Man organizers and participants, but the lack of explicit attention to it in the Ten Principles, as well as the relatively complacent treatment of waste within Black Rock City, belies an unsettling attitude that mimics the default world. As long as the environmentally harmful byproducts of the event are removed to a separate location where negative impact need not be witnessed directly, Burners can justify their dedication to leaving one place, seven square miles of playa, in an immaculate state even though that accomplishment depends upon suspending that same, noble value with regard to the places where all its trash is ultimately dumped. A common justification for Burners’ excessive contribution to Nevada’s landfills is that the nearby communities receive a sizeable economic benefit by setting up disposal stations where Burners can deposit waste for prices averaging between $3 and $5 per trash bag. Similar to the logic that dominates the default world, this practice is based on alleviating personal responsibility by citing a surface-level cycle of means and ends that provides immediate benefits while compounding long-term problems. I believe it is unnecessary in this context to lay out an explicit argument for the ways in which sustainable practices would ultimately provide much greater economic and environmental benefits to the surrounding communities; suffice it to say that it would be to everyone’s much greater advantage for Burners to take on the responsibility of not only reimagining relationships to power structures, but their relationships to an ailing environment that extends far beyond what is not immediately visible to them.

Leaving No Trace 145 How many of us have visited a landfill operation personally? I can attest that I have done this once in my life, and it was not a pleasant experience. In 2016, my husband and I moved to a new home in Northern California that held rooms so full of hoarded detritus that we felt we had no choice but to do a clean sweep, with the help of friends, to make space for our own stuff. As we drove to the city dump, my anxiety levels rose steadily until we arrived at the spot to unload the things we had paid to dispose of. As we pulled the truck full of items out and deposited them, my anxiety shot through the roof. The trash repository looked like some post-apocalyptic planet-scape with a guy behind the wheel of a bulldozer waiting to bury it in vast hills of human waste. They plant grass over the hills of debris as they go. From far away, it almost looks pretty. Underneath, it’s not. Much of it will never decompose, but it’s out of sight. Brian Doherty, in This is Burning Man, details the painstaking process of the after-burn cleanup, during which members of the DPW (Department of Public Works) spend weeks sifting through the loose playa dust with their bare hands and makeshift equipment to eliminate every last bit of debris. After approximately one month of DPW clean-up, a team from the Bureau of Land Management investigates randomly selected areas of the site to determine whether or not they have met their cleanup obligation. In 2003, Dave Cooper, the Bureau of Land Management’s manager for the Black Rock Desert National Conservation Area, announced in a press release: Black Rock City LLC has once again exceeded BLM’s cleanup standards and expectations. The organization not only practices good public land use ethics, it also teaches this ethic to all participants at the event each year. This makes Burning Man the largest “Leave No Trace” event in the world.2 This stance against trashing the playa is reinforced among the crowds at Burning Man via the term, “MOOP,” an acronym for “Matter Out Of Place.” It is the personal responsibility of each Burner to embrace MOOP patrol, meaning Burners not only take care of their own trash; they accept responsibility for any waste they might find on the ground. Perhaps because the term itself sounds so whimsical, MOOP patrol takes on a sense of pride in looking after one’s temporary, playa home, rather than the typical reaction of disgust one might feel encountering someone else’s waste in the default world. I have witnessed its influence, multiple times, in my daughters’ reactions to litter in the default world as they declare: “MOOP! MOOP!” and then pick it up to dispose of it in a designated receptacle.

146  Leaving No Trace I find it likely that the MOOP impulse only persists in some individuals, such as highly impressionable youths, in a truly transformative way outside of Black Rock City, given the fact that waste disposal is a powerful industry that depends upon continued belief that generating waste is acceptable so long as one facilitates its removal to a space outside of one’s immediate surroundings. However, just as heterotopia offers ample rehearsal space in which to embody creative acts within a radically different societal environment, its socially enforced attitude toward stewardship of one’s ecology, which I have often witnessed extend to outright shaming, encourages at least a somewhat broader perception of the efforts involved in the practical process of waste removal. It is a requirement that everyone pack out their own trash and legally dispose of it outside Black Rock City, and that usually entails an opportunity, however brief, to recognize the sheer mass of matter destined for landfill that one has produced in the space of a single week, finding space to transport it alongside more permanent equipment that will be re-used, and negotiating the task of relinquishing responsibility for it. Repeated acts and reminders to pick up trash in Black Rock City are absolutely habit-forming, and at the very least might prompt moments of pause when one might be tempted by laziness, fatigue, or disgust to ignore the physical and emotional distress caused by littering the terrain outside of Black Rock City. However, I admit that I find the Leave No Trace Principle to be the most challenging aspect of Burner culture by which to argue that this desert heterotopia encourages radical rethinking of familiar behaviors. Perhaps this is due to the fact that our default culture of disposability is so efficiently run that individuals rarely feel its consequences outside of rhetorical pleas to educate themselves on its far-reaching, long-term effects. Sensing bodies might briefly perceive the material visibility of excess in the process of performing their duty to Leave No Trace, but that extraneous matter is removed from Black Rock City and only dealt with after its dismissal and return to an established system dedicated to obscuring both its immediate and long-term consequences. The consuming frenzy that precedes Burning Man traditionally completes its cycles at its participants’ points of origin. Because “Leaving No Trace,” by its summary phrasing, claims alliance with respect for the environment, my first impulse is to continue a polemics of a principle that accepts its execution through continuing habits that reinforce a familiar system, one which has been scientifically, categorically proven to contradict the environmental ideals expressed in that principle. While the consumption and disposal of commodities that Burners bring to the event are transactions that take place outside of Black Rock City, the fact remains that the behavior responsible for increasing environmental impact occurs within a heterotopia that claims to encourage environmental respect while resisting capitalist excess. However, because a fundamental theme I have adopted in rereading all Ten Principles is the value of

Leaving No Trace 147 imagination over negation, such a takedown would demonstrate the opposite of that. I argue that significant change comes out of creative acts rather than repetitive reaction, therefore, from this point onward, my re-reading of the 8th principle resists an easy critique of questionable practice, in favor of identifying unfamiliar territory through imaginative critique. To this end, I will set up a comparison/contrast of two different versions of heterotopia, both of which aspire to Leave No Trace, in order to tease out aspects that identify their utility rather than dwell on their inevitable shortcomings. For this purpose, my inquiry must shift toward the possible benefits of keeping production, consumption, and disposal of goods outside the frame of heterotopia that resonate more deeply than simply alleviating the hassle of shopping for the things one wants while enjoying time away. Perhaps there is some perspective to be gained within the necessary compartmentalization of accumulating enough things to sustain oneself for a specific duration, then disposing of the things that have exhausted their usefulness at the end of that time period. Most significantly, that brief respite from commercial transaction might move individuals beyond propping up the illusion of a commerce-free society into radical modification of behavior; offering those who desire a different relationship to economic authority, the possibility to rehearse spending periods of time without the need to purchase goods or services. Individual acts produce one’s cultural space, a space of accidents and happenings, whether they occur in heterotopia or in the illusory circumstances of stratified societies. In Architecture and Disjunction, Bernard Tschumi states, “As with the contemporary city, there are no more boundaries delineating a coherent and homogeneous whole. On the contrary, we inhabit a fractured space, made of accidents, where figures are disintegrated, dis-integrated.”3 There is no truth in the way societies perform for their mirrors, even if its members’ instincts encourage them to perceive themselves as unopposed to reality; if not reality of the way things are, then perhaps the way they “should” be. When individuals’ acts do not include commercial transactions, their cultural space must logically reflect a community that is not obsessed with consumption. Such would be an ideal place to break unwanted consumerist patterns. Thus far, this project has assumed a specific interpretation of Black Rock City’s heterotopia as one of two distinct versions as characterized by Foucault, the heterotopia framed by duration: Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporary. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities …4

148  Leaving No Trace But Foucault’s other version of a space outside the familiar, one that relies on maintaining difference that is not defined by temporal limits, but by its attempt to refrain from mimicking the conditions from which it seeks to escape: There are the heterotopias of time which accumulate ad infinitum … creating a sort of universal archive, the desire to enclose all times, all eras, forms and styles within a single place, the concept of making all times into one place, and yet a place that is outside time, inaccessible to the wear and tear of the years …5 Like the temporal heterotopia of Burning Man, this version does not claim to achieve ideological perfection, but maintains its allure by compensating for the distorted ethics of society’s familiar spaces. Both versions aspire to be different; spaces created in relation to a set of implied or overtly stated principles and located physically and/or temporally outside the realm of familiar values that perpetuate cycles of means and ends. They are ruptures in the patterns of ad hoc adherence to the path of least resistance, which is most often behavior that reinforces the status quo. Inclusion/exclusion seems essential, as if one must earn the right to participate in making a space that exceeds the possibilities of the space from which it escapes. There are many such spaces that would suffice as examples of common attempts to step away from the exhausting patterns, which repeat the same basic stories curated to reinforce ideologically sacrosanct narratives, such as campsites, hiking trails, and beaches, just to name a few. For this comparison with Burning Man, however, I am inclined to use a heterotopic “escape” that, through its history and its architecture, represents a deliberate and carefully designed attempt to foster a re-imagined community that could exist as a permanent place of otherness: The Sea Ranch, California. It is, and always has been, sold on its premise as a radical rethinking of society and the built environment resolving in a mutually beneficial relationship with the natural landscape. The principle of leaving no trace is embedded in the constitution of both Burning Man and The Sea Ranch; both are predicated upon the absence of commercial transactions as a defining characteristic of what distinguishes them, favorably, from other spaces. Both represent conceptual attempts to avoid ultimately disrupting the “natural” environment. The temporal heterotopia of Burning Man and the Sea Ranch heterotopia of accumulation provide contrasting, yet complementary cases through which to re-read both the physical and conceptual paradox embedded in the very notion of leaving no trace. In particular, it is worth noting that while each represents almost a direct theoretical inversion of the other, they both set up similar levels of inclusion/exclusion zones. It is

Leaving No Trace 149 as if the space within is only worthy of being kept pure, away from the very real economic and social transactions that might spoil the illusion of otherness by giving spectacle something to signify, if it demands significant effort to enter. These two communities are, each in their own ways, temporary heterotopias only for those who go above and beyond to reach them, understanding that they must leave footprints no more permanent than memories. A notable contrast between these examples is in the way they might be perceived by those who enter them, as described by Doreen Massey in “For Space”: “Unlike time it seems you can see space spread out around you. Time is either past or to come or so minutely, instantaneously now that it is impossible to grasp. Space, on the other hand, is there.”6 Any counter-community predicated on temporality, such as Black Rock City, implies a desire to create space that does not refer beyond itself. That said, change must always leave its trace; lack of human impact is an ideal to be realized only through varying levels of willing participation in illusions. As Charles Moore claims in Body, Memory, Architecture: “… the world is rich in successful examples of the connection between our image of our own internal landscapes and our recognition of it in the world outside.”7 While there is, I believe, some room for the comforts and lessons of illusion in the process of rehearsing new behaviors, these become far less effective when they reach the point of delusion. If the prizes of social change include greater equality, increased freedom, and more prevalent happiness, it is vital to acknowledge that these aspects rarely evolve communally through self-regulation alone, but maneuver within carefully constructed and controlled social arenas that ultimately perform politically. However, if the built environment serves to externalize our sense of embodied order, then the inner-self leaves its trace on the environment just as our surroundings continue to shape and re-shape fluctuating senses of identity. There can be no exchange without leaving at least this form of trace. As two distinctly experimental societies, there are inevitably as many setbacks as there are gains within the relative histories of Black Rock City and the Sea Ranch as far as realizing what they set out to accomplish. Which is more “successful” in these case studies is unimportant, for there is something to be gleaned from the striking similarities between two such vastly different approaches to creating communities that implicitly reject the status quo. It is likely more often than not with some sense of relief that many people leave heterotopia and return to familiar, urban settings, where street-sweepers might chug loudly by on a set schedule to pick up the copious residue of urban environments, removing considerable responsibility from individuals’ needs to actively participate in leaving no trace, by having those traces removed for them. However, due to the encouraging and community-building nature of the Leave No

150  Leaving No Trace Trace principle, and the fact that violation of the same is not met with punitive action beyond playful, social shaming, the antistructure of the Burning Man community facilitates embodied insight that transcends the surface performance of environmental ethics, inspiring a more inclusive sense of social obligation-cum-transformation. Similarly, the Sea Ranch atmosphere might discourage acts of littering due to its clean, hard-won, triumphant aesthetic. Under the most desirable circumstances, social contracts of mutual support and largely unenforced reciprocal responsibility provide opportunities for individuals to choose behavior they feel is right, without lingering overly long within the realm of what others might deem righteous. Creative acts—both spatial and temporal—that reflect or encourage change in current, socially directed values, carry the weight of their present cultural conditions as well as multiple visions of different futures. As Martha Rosler says in “Place, Position, Power, Politics:” “For me, as a child of the sixties, the questions of how engaged, how agitational, how built upon mass culture, how theory-driven (my) art should be have been ever-present, the answers never settled, since the terms of engagement themselves are constantly being renegotiated.”8 Creative action, whether making visual art or building a heterotopia— similar acts at their core—responds to the cultural ecology of its maker, but it is the individual participant who ultimately negotiates its terms. For my Burning Man case study narrative, I draw upon the memory of a single, brief interaction that I witnessed on the playa in 2014. While it may seem somewhat insignificant as far as its potential impact, I assert that such close, personal interactions lie at the root of transformative change. Again, there need not be a large-scale event of historical note in order for change to occur; social change must happen in individual bodies before it affects others. Whether the cosa mentale spaces for such experience live within single individuals, their built environments, geographical locations, or the physicality of their microclimates, it is the personal horizon of experience one brings, to mediate the relationship between form and consciousness, that instigates revolution. At Burning Man 2014 Camp Frosty, which has been my Black Rock City home base for two years, about 35 of us burners happily divided our time between individual or small-group activities and collective camp activities, which entailed driving our “coning cart” out into heavily populated areas and gifting gourmet snow-cones to hot and thirsty burners. The satisfaction of watching adults and children gape at such simple treats, as if all their Christmases had come at once, was a constant source of delight. The hours of preparation, the expenses of purchasing supplies, and the toil of hauling everything to the playa and carting it around just to give it away, was a perfect example of why burners choose to give with little thought toward recompense. The only thing we asked in return for

Leaving No Trace 151 the snow-cones was that people disposed of their compostable cups in our designated receptacle. We were, understandably, accustomed to our gifts being received with grateful smiles and hugs as customers slurped down the exotic, flavored, crushed ice and then tossed their compostable cups into the bag. However, on one particular day, one man decided to accept a snowcone, consume it, and then toss it into our bag along with his own contribution of handfuls of his personal stash of cigarette butts. One of our founding camp members, a woman of approximately 90 pounds, immediately grabbed the bag and yanked it off the cart, tied it up neatly, and shoved it into his hands. “Here you go!” she exclaimed. “I assume, since you felt so comfortable using this as your own personal trash bin, you’re happy to take care of packing it out.” As she smiled at him, she somehow appeared much larger than this fully grown man, who stuttered and stammered before eventually turning around and walking away with his newly acquired bag of trash. While this brief exchange became a hilarious story in its many retellings at camp that year, I did not think much more about it until I saw a post on Facebook that made me wonder if it had not persisted long past the initial interaction. While this person’s claim, that “some chick from a penguin camp got sassy with him,” does not exactly line up with what many of us witnessed, and of course may refer to a completely different event, I could not help but wonder how many burners had experienced similar communications that stuck with them for many months afterward, and how they chose to deal with them. It seems that there are many instances in which playful admonitions, if not immediately acknowledged and appreciated with humor or contrition, engenders outright resentment. I had perceived the exchange as: we gifted you a snow-cone and you gifted us your cigarette butts; but it is possible that the person on the other side felt that he had made a simple mistake and was punished rather than educated. Even my camp member’s playful banter (as I perceived it, because I know that she is a kind and generous person who is deeply committed to environmental responsibility), may have resonated with others as elitist posturing, I saw it as a person defending the things she cared about in a place she considers home; he may have seen it as a petulant person seizing an opportunity to feel superior. Such deliberate teaching/learning experiences are the substance that reminds us that Burning Man is a project that works to proliferate beyond the week-long event, but that practicing its principles is much different in the default world than in Black Rock City. My camp leader’s actions were not premeditated, nor were they based on any specific agenda; she was playing. But her personal commitment to leaving no trace did not, in

152  Leaving No Trace that moment, seem to align with another individual who did not stop to ponder alternative concepts of etiquette. I would wager he did not consider disposing of his butts in what looked like a typical trash bag to be a transgression against someone else’s ethics of composting, he only knew he was not tossing them on the ground. This possibility is an important consideration in the action and reception of leaving no trace, for as I noted previously, personal negotiation of moral space is far more transformative than response to righteousness. In the default world, ethics are often dictated by a dominant, if conflicting, ideology. Heterotopia’s utility may be at its most efficacious when it makes room for playful engagement that allows all parties involved to create together rather than receive deliberate instruction from each other. Respect for the environment is already a concept shrouded in holier-than-thou baggage; it seems reasonable to assert that banter in relatively detextualized settings could further such a cause much more effectively than well-trodden paths of proselytizing. The Sea Ranch, an unincorporated community on the coast of Sonoma, California, the second component to this comparison/contrast, is a case study intended to interrogate the most effective examples of how heterotopias foster atmospheres of increased responsibility that persist beyond their origins. In its design, created to blend unobtrusively with the splendid California Coastline—or at least inspire its residents to do so within a landscape of extraordinary architecture—the paradox of Foucault’s heterotopia of accumulation is present in its intention to appear timeless while referencing a very tactile and present record of history: … the idea of constituting a place of all times, that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity.9 Even in The Sea Ranch’s quintessentially poststructuralist “Condominium One,” where contingent and referential architectural space runs roughshod, signifiers of a unified history abound. The landscape and soundscape of The Sea Ranch in many ways achieve a narrow interpretation of an accidentally perfect community. Buildings are designed to “blend” with the environment, and the sound of the surf and wind harmonize any ambient noise into a comforting hum. In this way it contrasts dramatically with Black Rock City’s built structures, which actively serve to disrupt the austere playa, and the auditory experience of Burning Man that includes a perpetual disjunction of voices loud and soft, music of all varieties and volumes, motors, generators, and explosions, with nothing to soften the discord but sheer overload.

Leaving No Trace 153 While the original vision for the Sea Ranch was not necessarily a rejection of all current social spheres, it was intended to inspire a better way of living in harmony with nature, a declaration that human beings’ relationships to their ecologies need not establish a system of perceived dominance. Rather than a proscription, I believe it was intended to be a reflection of human desires, as expressed in Moore’s Body, Memory, and Architecture: “The landscape of the human inner world of landmarks, coordinates, hierarchies, and especially boundaries, we believe, as the only humane starting point for the organization of the space around us, which, more than, being perceived, is inhabited by us.”10 While our familiar, built environment often serves to perpetuate the capitalist cycle of alienation, by separating, categorizing, and polarizing spaces into work vs. leisure, private vs. communal, and frankly, “good” vs. “bad,” the Sea Ranch appears to avoid associations with such distinctions by sublimating the community-scape into permeating spaces of difference. These separations are left behind in the long, arduous drive to reach the craggy cliffs of this unincorporated area of Sonoma County; so much effort goes into reaching the space that it remains quite distant from association with daily life. Though its structures are “permanent,” the experience remains largely transient, awaiting, unchanging, within present visits as well as anticipation of future ones. My first-hand knowledge of the Sea Ranch is much thinner than my intimate relationship with Black Rock City. I have journeyed to this Oceanside settlement just twice, and the vertigo-inducing drive on Highway One was enough to deter many subsequent trips, so my phenomenological narrative must necessarily be limited to a one day-trip, including a smattering of conversations I had with Sea Ranch weekend residents on Saturday, February 4, 2012: As we pulled into the parking lot of the Sea Ranch Lodge, I was struck by the lack of people walking about. Situated on the Sonoma Coast of California, where the waves crash against the dramatic cliffs as far as the eye can see in a staggering performance of nature’s glory, the Sea Ranch landscape is as sublime as it is beautiful. On that Saturday afternoon, there was not a cloud in the sky, the breeze blew gently, and the temperature was warm enough to stroll comfortably in jeans and a tee shirt. It was the kind of weather that California travel brochures fawn over, a backdrop begging to appear in the latest Hollywood romance. And the paths, meadows, beaches, and cliffs, were empty of human beings. My travel companions and I could not help wondering aloud, repeatedly, why is no one out here enjoying this? We hiked the cliffs, we wandered through the landscape, and we enjoyed a delicious lunch with fine, local wine in the Sea Ranch lodge. However, apart from our waiter, we spoke to no one until I briefly addressed

154  Leaving No Trace a local resident who was pulling weeds in front of his home. He gave us directions to the pool, then went about working in his private garden. Not until shortly before sunset, as we made our way back to the lodge parking lot, did we encounter a small group of people gathered outside a home under renovation. They had a dog with them, so I exclaimed over how cute it was as a last-ditch conversation-starter. They let us pet the dog for a while as they discussed their plans for the house, and I heard the name “Turnbull.” “Oh, is this a Turnbull house?” I asked. And suddenly, we were welcome. Once the residents learned we were a group of graduate students taking a seminar involving their exclusive community, they effused pride, affection, and incredible amounts of knowledge on every aspect of the history of the Sea Ranch, their place in it, and their plans for it. The owners of this most recent Turnbull house, whose primary residence was San Francisco, gave us a detailed, guided tour of their home and encouraged us to experience every view from every window, veranda, and possible vantage point to appreciate what they had helped create, largely by finding resourceful ways to get around the original Sea Ranch building codes as if negotiating a field of land mines. They said they enjoyed coming there on the weekends to escape from the pressures of work and city life, that the brilliantly subtle architecture just seemed to blend right in with nature, and one could focus on being in the moment rather than worry about what was going on in the rest of the world. I could see what they meant; after all that sentiment aligned perfectly with Al Boeke’s original vision for Sea Ranch; a settlement that would harmonize with the beauty of the coastline, rather than destroy it.11 However, we were standing next to a six-foot, flat-screen TV as we discussed this. I had gathered that Boeke had gone to great lengths to ensure the plan for Sea Ranch would be realized in the ultimate mediation between nature and architecture; ideology and lived reality. He had hired the best, most environmentally conscious team he could find, including landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and architects Joseph Esherick, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, and Richard Whitaker, to conduct studies and formulate plans for years before construction began in 1964.12 By almost all accounts, the project was, aesthetically, a roaring success. The unobtrusive hedgerow houses, the sloping roofs that mimicked the angle of the wind-formed trees, the natural, native building materials, all combined to form that which they set out to create: architecture that did not spoil the landscape, but worked within it. Condominium One, designed by the architectural firm of MLTW (Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, and Whitaker), won the American Institute of Architects 25 Year Award in 1991.13

Leaving No Trace 155 While Sea Ranch is widely considered a formally aesthetic coup, it did not appear on that day to create or facilitate a sense of community; rather, it seemed to encourage solitude. I must reiterate here that my own perspective cannot possibly represent an objective cross-section of reception across the decades that the Sea Ranch has been home to its residents, but I definitely got the impression that we were witnessing a typical day of second-home owners largely remaining inside of their prized dwellings. Not that there is a specific problem with seeking solitude, but it is ironic that the plans for Sea Ranch included so much intentional communal space, seductively landscaped grounds, and an unparalleled setting on the coast, and the manifestation of those plans produced a place where the sun comes out while the community stays in. The notion of living in harmony with nature apparently extended only as far as buildings pleasantly situated in their surroundings, but not to people interacting in those surroundings. Of course it is futile for me to say I may state this with certainty, for I spent a two afternoons there and I am feeding off general impressions and a few casual comments from the residents I spoke with, but it is no small stretch to suggest that a warm, sunny, Saturday afternoon in other, less-planned and more chaotic communities might have produced a more playful, spontaneous atmosphere. The isolating aspects of the Sea Ranch expressed in this narrative raise pointed, philosophical questions on happiness, since it is presumably a vital ingredient in any potential recipe for a better way to live. Sea Ranch residents on average pay between $500K and $2M for a home that they will most likely inhabit for a small percentage of their time,14 so they are obviously purchasing more than shelter in which to live; they are buying the dream community packaged in with their cleverly designed residences. Perhaps this desirable dream can be realized through something other than lived experience, by embracing that which can only ever point toward the thing it aspires to be. If the Sea Ranch simulacrum constitutes real happiness in the form of relief from alienation for its residents, it may very well compensate for the dearth of satisfactory experience outside this heterotopia. The Sea Ranch makes no overt claims of decommodification, but apart from its small souvenir shop and a restaurant in the Visitors’ Lodge that cater to tourists, it does not boast a single market; no location for the purchase or exchange of goods and services. In this way, the Sea Ranch restaurant and shop mirror the town of Gerlach, Nevada, the final outpost of commercial exchange available to those about to enter Black Rock City. These places serve visitation as opposed to permanence, the sense of one last opportunity to grab what you need before entering another kind of space. Both Black Rock City and the Sea Ranch are intentional escapes from the market economy in that one must bring along with them all that

156  Leaving No Trace they need for comfortable survival. Consumerism must be performed in advance, reserving the time spent inside the community for other activities. And while the Sea Ranch, as a heterotopia of accumulation, cannot possibly aspire to “Leave No Trace” pragmatically, the philosophical intent to blend unobtrusively with nature belies a deep desire for intimacy with the tactile world that cannot conceivably manifest within more urban environments. In this case, leaving no trace operates on a more aesthetic or psychosomatic level than a material one. The fact that its human-generated waste is removed and processed by services outside the community allows its members to wash their hands of responsibility for it while in residence. At this point, these diverging heterotopias of transience and accumulation intersect in a phenomenon where neither preparation nor stewardship constitute radical alternatives to consumption of goods or production of waste, but they hold space for embodied performance of temporal realities in which individuals rehearse unfamiliar behaviors. Buying, selling, and disposal of goods are suspended. Because the prices of Sea Ranch homes fall into a relatively expensive category, though not by San Francisco Bay Area standards, by and large it is presumable that these are units owned by those familiar with material wealth. It requires economic success or a sizeable inheritance to afford that kind of luxury in a second home. Of course one can achieve the Adorno trifecta of freedom, happiness, and creativity in a cozy aedicule with a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean, as long as one enjoys relative segregation from the surrounding community. However, while there are no shops, car dealerships, or even convenience stores in which to spend money and acquire commodities at the site itself, there is plenty of commodification going on within this site-specific architecture. For example, the couple who owned the Turnbull house, and kindly gave us the tour and history lesson, mentioned money at least a dozen times. They were redesigning several rooms, and listed the cost of cabinets, fixtures, and furnishings. The people they had been chatting with outside, who joined us on the tour, fired back with a list of costs for the improvements to their home. It was a familiar ritual, one I have witnessed inside of many suburban homes in the default world. It Parallel Utopias, Richard Sexton writes: By moving to the suburbs, the bourgeoisie sought to escape the city. Though they remained dependent on it—the husband tended his business, the wife shopped, and the children were educated there. The goal of their newfound community was to provide a life of privilege in a setting that was calmer, more pastoral, and ostensibly superior for child-rearing, than the city.15

Leaving No Trace 157 Life at Sea Ranch might just be continuing and heightening this pattern that began hundreds of years ago; a life that imitates the aristocracy, but one that still must be maintained by returning to the very cycle one purports to escape. A truly “calmer” existence does not necessitate expensive cabinets, but so ingrained is the fetishization of commodities that one’s place of escape often becomes one’s place of repository. And, while there is a positive aspect to materialism, in that it potentially facilitates pleasure in relief from the familiar toil of work and commerce, unfortunately that pleasure slips easily into the anxiety of accumulation. The most prominent similarity between Burning Man and the Sea Ranch, as far as principles put into action, the overall point of this heterotopic comparison, is in the notion of living in harmony with nature; leaving no trace. Though each community interprets and enacts the concept in unique ways, they both take great pride in leaving the smallest possible footprint on the environment so long as that environment is within the city limits. Even if that metaphorical foot leaves a sizeable print elsewhere, the landscape within remains relatively clean. And it must be acknowledged that, while the Burning Man organization takes pride in being the largest Leave No Trace event in the world, this impulse also comes from the knowledge that meticulous clean-up is absolutely essential to attaining all the necessary permits to continue the event each year. Within the Sea Ranch, this is realized via impeccable design and maintenance, enforced by a litany of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions.16 Obviously, the refuse generated by human presence has to go somewhere. It is up to Redwood Empire Disposal and Sonoma County Annapolis Transfer Station to remove waste from the Sea Ranch premises and ensure that it does not disrupt any delicate illusions of harmony.17 This is typical of any suburban dwelling; as long as the waste produced goes elsewhere, it is easy to maintain a façade that the environment has been treated in a healthy and sustainable fashion. Because my intention is not one of a dismantling critique, however, I must include one additional point of comparison between the coastal environments of the Sea Ranch and the high desert of Black Rock City, and how these affect the immediacy of personal experience; the desiderata of heterotopia. If specific characteristics of these cityscapes create respective tendencies to gravitate toward solitude, or motivate people to interact with the community, it may be that their psychogeographical spaces have some measure of influence on the behavior of participants. A phenomenological analysis of these sometimes-contrasting, sometimes-similar heterotopias must include what it actually feels like to be there. The haptic experience of high desert and playa dust is very different from the sounds and smells of moving through air coming off the tides of the Pacific Ocean.

158  Leaving No Trace In the ocean-infused air of the Sea Ranch, everything smells clean and fresh because the breeze never allows the air to go stale. The restorative effects of visiting ocean beaches are commonplace; constantly breathing in the humid air gives one a feeling of effortless hydration and refreshment. The sound of the surf, which is easy to stop noticing after a short while, has a lulling, soporific effect, and the urge to doze off is powerful, even while engaged in physical activity. The dampness and dull roar also tend to separate individuals from each other, but not in an obtrusive way. It is more like being wrapped in individual cocoons, quite okay with being as close to others as within the units of Condominium One, but just as disengaged from others as inhabitants of units separated by walls. As soothing as the playa is harsh, the coastal environment in all its vastness seems to turn focus inward. The playa tends to have the opposite effect; because one is coated with its fine, flinty dust from the moment one enters, a physical connection among bodies is present from the outset. A Brechtian perception of bodily awareness within creative space dominates what could otherwise cause individuals to succumb to a predominantly introverted, reflective state. There is so much art and activity to behold in Black Rock City, the sheer volume could easily overwhelm even its most extroverted participants. But because the shared physical matter of playa dust is so prevalent, the separation of the Black Rock City heterotopia from the default world does not fluently extend to division between bodies within its parameters. The otherworldly atmosphere of the playa, the omnipresence of dust that distinguishes it so completely from familiar terrain, are the same qualities that make it impossible to inhabit this space among others without everyone leaving shared, tactile traces upon each other. Performers and other artists are often inhibited by disillusionment that accompanies lack of communal support or productive environments in which to experiment with either alternative action that runs contrary to the status quo, or deliberately seeks to rupture habitual reinforcement of power structures. Heterotopias such as Black Rock City, in which participants are encouraged to try on broader, more engaged concepts of community, function as sites of transformative social change in many ways because they hold space for the participant to embrace more responsibility rather than to escape it. At the Sea Ranch, my overall impression was that its psychogeographical qualities encourage solitude rather than dialogue. However, even this “alternative” community that mimics many spheres of influence from which it allegedly provides relief, offers space in which to embody brief respites from commercial transactions, our familiar system that fundamentally aspires to leave a perpetually increasing trace, as opposed to the lightest possible impact. Even if one’s cultural conditioning prompts recourse based on capitalist validation, verbiage that

Leaving No Trace 159 demonstrates appreciation of exchange value over use value, a spatial and temporal pause away from the transactions that substantiate such habits can compensate for the consumerist frenzy that weighs heavily upon familiar behavior. Much like in a traditional theatrical production, the participant/performer often takes risks in rehearsal that would not be considered acceptable in performance. While my aim is to make sense of situations that change human beings’ actions by occurring in different places, at different paces, I do not believe it is necessary for individuals to justify their unfamiliar actions in the moment, it is only necessary to begin practicing them. It is likely that personal experimentation engenders a much more profound impact, a greater opportunity to change, than social performance of appropriate behavior.

Notes 1 Will Chase, “Greening Your Burn,” in The Jack Rabbit Speaks, Vol. 18, No. 28 (July 2014). 2 Doherty, This is Burning Man, Kindle edition: Location 4335 of 4856. 3 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 217. 4 Foucault, “Of other Spaces,” 7. 5 Foucault, “Of other Spaces,” 7. 6 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 117. 7 Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture, 104. 8 Martha Rosler, “Place, Position, Power, Politics,” in The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 1994), 351. 9 Foucault, “Of other Spaces,” 7. 10 Moore, Body, Memory, Architecture, 77. 11 “Al Boeke, Architect Who Sought Ecological harmony, Is Dead at 88,” New York Times, November 16, 2011. 12 “History and Description of The Sea Ranch.” The Sea Ranch Association Official Web Site, http://www.tsra.org/news.php?viewStory=139. 13 “Sea Ranch Condominium,” greatbuildings.com, http://www.GreatBuildings. com/buildings/Sea_Ranch_Condominium.html. 14 “Al Boeke, Architect Who Sought Ecological harmony, Is Dead at 88.” New York Times, November 16, 2011. 15 Richard Sexton, Parallel Utopias: the quest for community: The Sea Ranch, California, Seaside, Florida (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995), 13. 16 “Sea Ranch Restrictions: A Declaration of Restrictions, Covenants, and Conditions” details an incredibly long list of what is not allowed to exist, or be visible, on one’s property and the communal grounds, http://www.tsra.org/ photos/Restrictions.pdf. 17 “Sea Ranch Association,” http://www.tsra.org/news.php?viewStory=70.

9

Participation Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart If there is anything that can be said about dreams and longings, it is that they … are hard to express. It is difficult to transmit into words the oddness of an image, the comic-grotesque distortions of inner time and space, the weird amalgams of feeling that leave people perhaps a little more aware of their deepest responses to life and a little more unsure of the artifice with which they so often cover themselves. (Donald Spotto, The Dark Side of Genius)

The frame of heterotopia that I have put forth thus far suggests a relatively “safe” space for participants to embrace the unfamiliar, include the other, and reject habitual impulses to curate behavior in a way that either avoids conflict with opposing forces or accepts that contradicting those forces will engender the very real effects of alienation. I do believe that the utility in a heterotopia like Black Rock City is found within its collective attunement to creativity in the moment, within an ecology that largely supports this frame. But it would be remiss to embark on such an argument without acknowledging that no system is absolute, and Black Rock City as a consummate experiment in the alternative, the radical, requires individuals to assume that full participation necessitates a fluctuating, but undeniable measure of risk. This can range from superficial moments of DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-10

Participation 161 mild frustration, to physical battles between life and death, to metaphysical challenges that can have no definitive outcomes. I have always considered myself a willing participant in Burning Man because my personality seems to thrive on opening up and moving outward on the playa, but I am all-too familiar with the occasional, negative consequences of such willingness, even as naturally as it comes. For example, in 2014 I was stung by a bee at Burning Man, an event for which I was not prepared because I had never before seen insects on the playa. My severe allergy combined with absence of my EpiPen—it was half a mile away, in my car—put me in mortal danger that would never have occurred in the default world, where I take pains to protect myself against the known threats of my environment. Social, emotional threats operate similarly; even a heterotopia that overwhelmingly encourages creative risk cannot avoid the occasional transgressions that come from a place of aggression rather than compassion. These are unfortunate realities inherent in any community, be it a small group in the default world or a temporary metropolis of over 80,000. The Principle of Participation also might well be the biggest challenge for the Burner with regard to translating embodied insight from Black Rock City into modifying behaviors in the default world. At Burning Man, it is not uncommon to witness a fully nude octogenarian, two firebreathing dragons dueling on the backs of flatbed trucks, and a parade of psychedelic clowns within the space of a 100 yards at four o’clock in the morning. Laughter and awe abound; sometimes the “heart opens” out of sheer inertia that makes one’s surroundings so strange, yet strangely anticipated. While participation and “actions that open the heart” often come readily, naturally, among tens of thousands of fellow burners, the transition back to the settings within which one moves on a daily basis often causes a severe shock to the system. The unavoidable return to lives full of work and family and corporate armor replace the colorful costumes and sets. There is no fire, no musicalmaniacal soundscape, no impossibly gigantic Man at the center of the city, presiding over a grand experiment so full of excess that it would be impossible to sustain indefinitely. When boundaries and structures and increments of time are metaphorically yanked back into place, the resulting cognitive dissonance has proven such a common phenomenon that it has earned the widely recognized name: decompression. As a linguistic term, decompression cannot but peripherally allude to depression, yet it also deliberately points to a process rather than an ongoing mental state. Even those who participate in Black Rock City without reservation and find nothing short of overwhelming reciprocal support, must eventually return to the default world and confront the reality of cars racing past, people racing past, the world racing past too quickly to see. Sometimes the risks

162 Participation inherent in radical participation implicate bodies that change effortlessly in heterotopia but are profoundly unsettled when they return to daily life and its wide buffer of mimicry. The largest official Decompression event happens annually in San Francisco, approximately one month after Burning Man ends, and according to the official website, “Decompression is, at its simplest, a reunion. But more significantly, it is a powerful way to bring Burning Man inspiration to our home towns.”1 Standard ticket prices for decompression events range from $10 to $20 and the duration is generally around 12 hours, sundown to sunrise. For many, such events work well enough as a quick fix to alleviate the sense of alienation in transitioning too quickly between radically different systems of support. However, to say that a decompression event is anything remotely close to spending a week on the playa is like suggesting that a high school reunion dinner is the same thing as being back in the old hallways again, heading to a mathematics exam. While a small percentage of the original community is present, there is no substitution for the haptic memory of the temporary spaces and times of Black Rock City. The Participation Principle is present at decompression, but as a faint trace of the sensory carnival of Burning Man. Those who have endured the conditions of the playa and offered their comforting competence as a sacrifice, in the process of risking security in favor of change, can find some measure of relief in decompression. These events briefly hold space to reassure participants that Black Rock City was not a dream, but a real place in which it was temporarily possible to behave and find satisfaction in ways previously unimagined. In Chapter 4, on the principle of radical self-reliance, I explore the idea that a key motivator for artists to participate in Burning Man is its established network of support within a community that numbers in the tens of thousands. Artists who work toward social change in the default world often inhabit phases of relative isolation and inundation, enduring arduous emotional extremes. The triumph in seeing one’s grand project come to fruition can quickly transition into relative despair when the public moves on to the next thing that captures its tiny attention span, particularly in the overwhelming undertow of today’s social media riptide. Just as Burners frequently undergo the disillusionment of reconciling with an outside world that cannot understand because they were not there, many artists cannot find lasting relief in the empathy of their peers who share their passion for calling out economic inequality one minute and then cheerfully shop at Walmart the next. Maintaining efforts for social change in the default world requires rare tenacity and a thick skin; the ability to stick it out in the face of adversity and indifference sufficient to cull all but the most formidable from the activist crowd. Unfortunately, this can result in alienation of individuals who possess talent, insight, creativity,

Participation 163 and motivation, who effectively find themselves rendered mute simply because they lack the requisite support to weather the slings and arrows of a cynical public who are, subtly but completely, as addicted to distraction as they themselves are to participation. In an event where “Everyone is invited to work,” and “Everyone is invited to play,” participants are theoretically free to join a generative dialogue as opposed to a battle. Burning Man’s radically participatory ethic assumes that individuals will not only contribute their own efforts in creating Black Rock City, but will actively encourage the efforts of others. It is this participation and innovation of Burners that has transformed what was once a small, spontaneous event into a worldwide phenomenon. The participation principle is perhaps its most directly effective tactic to inspire innovative ideas that do not subscribe to any overarching values beyond the belief that progress is easier to achieve when everyone participates. The decompression events and regional burns, which originally evolved out of a desire to continue and grow the experiment in more accessible formats for the general public, are promising evidence of intent to keep Burning Man in motion rather than arresting its power for the purposes of political leverage. This model of increasingly broad invitation generates opportunities for potential participants, who might not otherwise act on unfamiliar impulses, to enter the dialogue and make meaning in ways they had not considered before. While this invitation suggests a willing repository for all potential influences to find a safe haven where they might enter productive dialogue, the active practice of self-sacrifice—as in a self able to relinquish its habitually protective ego—also assumes responsibility for emotionally fraught repercussions, reactionary response, and an infinitude of diverging effects; welcome or unwelcome. While Burning Man encourages a deeply participatory ethic, it makes no promises as to what might ensue as a result. Radical action generates unpredictable consequences, whether it occurs in familiar circumstances or ecologies that facilitate diminished risk; even heterotopia that resists dominant ideological repercussions is not without its specters of all-too-human fear. Just as Black Rock City honors the manifestations of joy and potential released by its creators as they experience change, it must also acknowledge the less welcome, but equally valid, contributions that demand different, differential, and difficult, transformation. For the purposes of analyzing the unpredictable, uncanny, and volatile qualities of the energy offered by those who fully embrace the Principle of Participation only to realize that some of its aspects result in powerful, ungovernable results, I turn now to the performative language of ghosts. Traditional conceptions of ghosts tend to linger in spaces of fiction or fantasy, but in Performance Studies there has been fascinating scholarly attention to these concepts as useful premises upon which to deconstruct certain

164 Participation sensory phenomena that resists rational ordering. This chapter’s case study and subsequent analyses cannot aspire to withstand traditional, empirical critique, for the vocabulary of ghosts depends upon language’s inherent failure to reduce sensory experience to critical analysis. Instead, the study relies on poetics to express the contradictory phenomenon of doubling, to serve as a frame by which to explore the unquantifiable reality of how human action can sometimes produce unanticipated, and unwelcome, results in the act of radical participation. It is intended as a counterpoint to my fundamental premise of heterotopia as a “safe” space for creative acts. Commitment to explore the truly unfamiliar, to include the unknown other as a glimpse into limitless selfhood, and to sacrifice habits of egoled self-affirmation are among the most advantageous opportunities to be found within Burning Man’s continually evolving culture, but no ideal— however inclusive and overtly positive—is free from risk. Ghosts at the Temple Physics shows you that the closer you look, the more nothing you find, until you are looking at environments that are only imaginary (the language of quarks, so on, is formally poetic, back to the Greeks where there were no separate words for fiction and non-fiction). We are ultimately unable to look at a thing in itself; all things are only the possibility of themselves. (Erik Ehn, Eschata-Logos Word and Ruin) This physics-based example of things’ capabilities, extending only so far as they indicate the possibility of metaphysical parameters, is a powerful metaphor for the way language works, or rather tries to establish its own cognitive limits. It can no more assert truth through negation than it can claim a “correct” path of constellation. No narrative description, poetic recapitulation, nor critical analysis can survive any interpretation with an original concept intact, however perfectly its vocabulary has been selected and arranged. Ideas expressed through writing contain both the drawback and the distinct advantage of operating in perpetually variable relation to signifiers that are as immortal as they are historically relative. Efficacy of language, as well as recourse in precedent, augments logic only so far as it can be allowed to rhetorically evolve. Repetition and invention lose momentum only when they are forced to diverge from what must be a symbiotic relationship. I stand by the practical value of poetic textuality, but I must admit that I am disturbed by my own impulse to defend poetics as a logic system no less appropriate than deductive reasoning. It seems poor form to suggest it as a “substitute” for traditional critique, in effect conceding that

Participation 165 perceptions gained through imagination and senses must be sublimated into repeatable reason in order to be serious, relying on metaphor only for those subjects that fail tests of reason. While all language must technically be metaphorical, some of its vocabularies are currently considered more legitimate than others for particular purposes. For example, academic culture in the humanities demands that even the most irrational, yet undeniable observations survive translation into deductive reasoning, even if such data seems to warrant syntactical expansion as opposed to reduction. Scholars are urged to apply formulaic systems even to phenomena that fundamentally destabilizes those exact same formulae, because they inhabit states of radical contradiction. I believe these phenomena are more adequately described by a vocabulary of metaphor; not the metametaphor of symbols themselves, but the poetic strand of metaphor that arranges language specifically to release it from authority. The term “ghost” has long lived in rational spheres as a subcultural binary; as if there can only be acceptance or rejection of ghosts, based on willingness to suspend disbelief in a concept that by its very nature moves fluidly in and out of rationality. “Believing” in the possibility of ghosts often seems to imply a very specific type of disassociation from reality, rather than reasonable skepticism of a rationality that, even by written historical standards, represents a relatively young system of formal logic; a logic based on the assertion that truth can only be accessed by proving every other possibility of truth to be false. This provocative challenge to the rational is exactly why I call upon ghosts to enter this specific dialogue, perhaps to create a space where many sets of a possible Performance Studies Venn Diagram might converge. One of those sets might open up territory within which negation and contradiction can meet on even, if shaky ground. For my purposes, ghosts inhabit the liminal space between reason and imagination, not as spatial threshold but as timed, linguistic heterotopia. In the following narrative, a personal case study of one specific Burning Man event, and its subsequent analysis, this term can only work critically if the signifier, “ghosts” is situated as such a marker for the inevitable moment at which language fails to explain the phenomenon of doubling. “Temple Burn, 2010” Wow, it’s cold. I’ve been whining about the heat for days now because I couldn’t wear my full-length, faux-fur, bright blue coat I made especially for the burn this year, and now I’ve got a hundred sweaters layered underneath it. BRRRRRR!!!! Gwen, Roo, and myself are the only ones left in our once-large camp, everyone else having packed up to head home earlier in the day. We’ve already seen the man burn, and once the crash hits, it’s impossible to shake off. For some, the Sunday night Temple burn is Burning Man’s raison

166 Participation d’être, for many others it is painfully anticlimactic. They’ve already started fantasizing about showers and heaters and real beds, angry at the layers of playa dust that were easier to make peace with while Black Rock City was still bustling with activity. But it’s also easy to get tired out here; it is, after all, a wrestling match with the desert and the dust storms. None of us has a watch, but time functions differently at Burning Man; we sense when it’s time to start walking. We force ourselves to put out our campfire and follow the masses, trusting that we are all heading in the direction of the Temple. Roo is limping badly after a fall from his stilts, but he soldiers on. Gwen is bitching about something as usual but I’m in a bit of a whiskey haze at the moment and their words are all running together. My first drink in six months, in the pursuit of keeping warm, had quickly spiraled into consuming half a bottle of Jameson. Even as I lament this overindulgence, I want one more sip. Everywhere Burners are pulling out flasks to share. I swallow hard and keep on averting my eyes. It’s slow going, between Roo’s sprained hobble and my drunken stumble, but the inertia of thousands of people pushes us forward in our willing-if-not-merry band. We link arms and try singing a song to garner our energy but none of us seems to be able to agree on the lyrics to “Lean on Me.” We dissolve into giggles and then quickly regress into tired silence. I’m starting to question why I wanted to stay for the Temple burn so badly, and I kind of wish Gwen would start ranting again. I’ve come here to say goodbye to so many things. I’ve been alone all week in my little corner of camp, yet crowded in my own space. I’ve got a lot of ghosts following me, and though there is much distraction to be found at Burning Man, there is no escaping them. This year, it’s just me and my patient ghosts. And I want to watch them burn. This will be one crazy performance to watch as they set the temple alight. I’ve visited it just once during the day, wandering through its maze of passages with Gwen, trying for some sense of solemn respect, but … when they pointed out that it looked like the ice planet Hoth from Star Wars, I had to agree. I’d left my grandma’s letters, my marriage license, the collar of my beloved dog who was euthanized a few months ago, in a space that had suddenly invited the ghosts of the freaking cast of Star Wars. Must Luke, Leia, and Han Solo take part in this performance, too? For the love of God, I hope the fact that I find that intensely humorous doesn’t make me a bad person. We find a good spot; well, much better than the spot I had for the Man burn, anyway, when an enormous, Viking-like creature was so determined to stand right in front of me, but I digress … We can all see the spooky, white structure of the Temple clearly. There is a bit of wind but the dust is mysteriously behaving, remaining underfoot. It’s always like this for the Temple burn. I’ve stopped questioning it.

Participation 167 I’ve also stopped questioning the phenomenon I know is coming. It happens every year, and no one I’ve ever discussed it with knows why. I’m sure there is a logical explanation, but it’s not something for which I want to dig too deeply. If it is an illusion, then let me have it. Let me have my fiery, dust-devil ghosts. It’s why I am here, to watch these stars of the night make their grand entrance so that I may have my magic. We’ve got an agreement, you see. I watch this massive structure burn until some crazy trick of physics pushes tornados made of dust and embers out of the flames and right to the edge of the crowd, where miraculously, no one gets burn, not that I’ve ever had the urge to stand any closer than I am right now. In exchange, I watch slack-jawed and teary-eyed, and imagine all the stuff inside of me that I want out, oozing through my skin like black oil. It evaporates and somehow feeds the fire. Flux/Hoth is burning now … how long have I been spaced out??? I was so focused on the black oil that I forgot to watch them light it. I’ve had too much whiskey. My buzz is killing my buzz. Okay, focus! Pierce the fire with your gaze and make the magic happen. What do you want to get rid of? Oh, right: Your fucking ex-husband. Your recurring sense of panic over single parenthood. Your fears of failing at something you haven’t even started yet. The impossibly unfair death of little H, whose warm, furry body you held until long after it had gone still and cold. Into the fire with all of you! On fire, this thing looks even more like the fictional planet of Star Wars’ Hoth. How is that possible?? Hoth was an ice planet! I turn to Gwen to whisper this—I don’t want to disturb the delicate silence by speaking loudly, as that sort of thing can get your ass kicked during the Temple Burn—but then I see the moisture on their cheeks, their chin wobbling. My sassy friend who mocked this from beginning to end is now overcome with emotion, and I can’t even properly quell my urge to giggle. That’s when my ghosts appear. And I’ve never seen so many, hundreds of dust devils, each one bigger than the last, swirling out of the flames in our direction. My arms are still linked through Gwen’s and Roo’s, and I pull them in closer. They cling back even more tightly to me. We squeeze each other harder and harder until at last, the show is over. Flux/Hoth is crumbling, and the last, fiery specter burns out. We silently disengage, and turn around to begin the long, slow journey back to camp, where we’ll catch a couple of hours of sleep and then head home. The ghosts have arrived, and one wouldn’t want to stay too long at that party. Even though I invited them, I’ve realized l cannot force them to behave. I gave them my relics to burn; they were supposed to give me some tears, closure, peace, relief … something, but that’s not what happened. I don’t know what happened. And now they are here and I don’t know what to do with them.

168 Participation Like many aspects of Burning Man, unless one has been there, it is difficult if not impossible to fully grasp the curiosities of events such as the Temple Burn and the motives involved in moving tens of thousands of people to congregate in an unfriendly desert for an entire week to watch works of art being set on fire. I, along with countless other Burners, am comfortable explaining what Burning Man is not; but the attempt to categorize what it is almost always prompts an involuntary reaction to invoke evasive rhetoric. It is and is not a hedonistic free-for-all, it is and is not the aphrodisiac of pyromaniacs, and it is and is not the desire to take control of one’s own self-destructive tendencies by externalizing and defeating them through creative acts. It is … so much more. It beckons metaphor to be its advocate, because there can be little practical logic found in the act of building an architecturally breathtaking structure only to burn it. Just as with the citizens of Derry, Northern Ireland, whose own Temple Burn left indelible impressions that I discussed in Chapter 1, it is difficult to do justice to communicating the logic of such radically unfamiliar experiences. It is much easier to describe what one observed and acknowledge its powerful strangeness, than to pick it apart and explain how it all worked. It is and is not exactly what is needed by those who conspire to create it in each moment. A Temple burn is completely different for everyone who participates, and yet at the center of all this difference is an actual thing, feeding a fire, that is going to do exactly as it will. Somewhere within these contradictory happenings exists an evolving idea that relies just as strongly on the simple, tactile quality of playa dust as it does on a sense of metaphysical humility. Such irreconcilable forces are the tinder for a Temple burn that motivates participants to invite solemn acceptance of death and loss while simultaneously offering space for chaotic, inarticulable outrage. Sometimes you just want to take all your problems out and burn them. Perhaps one of the most practical aspects of the Temple burn is its resistance to explanation; full participation in this creative act is not guaranteed to resolve neatly into familiar patterns of cathartic release. In large part, these uncanny aspects apply more appropriately to the Temple than to other Burning Man art works, for with few exceptions, the Temple has always referenced traditional architecture in its forms; for example, houses, palaces, and spiritual sanctuaries. The traditional ghost seems designed to haunt buildings, as opposed to other objects, for these are not only imbued with the materiality of memory; they seem perfect habitats for ambiguous specters to animate the syntax of space. In Dominions of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison states: If a house, a building, or a city is not palpably haunted in its architectural features—if the earth’s historicity and containment of the dead do not pervade its architectural forms and constitutive matter—then

Participation 169 that house, building, or city is dead to the world, dead to the earth, and closed off from its underworlds. For that is one of the ironies of our life worlds: they receive their animation from the ones that underlie them.2 Again, the apprehension of experience, the translation from feeling into structure, relies on the ability of language to bring together what is simultaneously there and not there. In Chapter 5: Radical Self-Expression, I touch on cognitive linguistics, suggesting that the melding of two or more previously unrelated concepts is a creative act. Metaphorical language generally invokes conceptual blending that harnesses both logical and emotional instincts to explore fleeting insights without absolutely nailing them. Even as such blending might cause anxiety as it departs from reassuring patterns of representation, its compensation may be a space that requires no traditionally, empirically “provable” explanation.3 “Ghosts at the Temple,” which I wrote just a few days after Burning Man 2010, is filled with the imagery of “ghosts,” called into conversation at a time before I had become acquainted with the work of scholars who had already been playing with such a term in order to deconstruct experience that is simultaneously inexplicable and absolutely visceral. In Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre, Alice Rayner discusses the vocabulary of ghosts as a flexible concept that can be applied to the phenomena of performance in the following ways. Ghosts:

• • • • • •

Test the limits of intelligibility Reveal what is missing Question time and history Create lived experiences ghosted by the past Relate material objects of the present to the effects of absence Demonstrate the uncanniness of appearances themselves4

By her own characterization, Rayner’s list is both incomplete and lacking definitive conclusions within her subsequent, individual case studies. Rather than prove specific points or formulae by invoking said case studies, however, Rayner’s project serves an unconventional logic by inverting typical, empirical methodologies. Contradiction is not pulled apart in order to serve formal logic, but instead functions as a frame within which it might be possible to make sense of phenomena that does not subscribe to deductive reasoning. Ghosts tend to appear in spaces where reason holds little sway. For example, from a Brechtian perspective, this might be a house full of people in a theatre, so immersed in their embodied encounter that reason need never enter the scene to explain away the inconsistencies

170 Participation of doubling. While a ghost can be sensed, it cannot be proven nor explained unless it is translated into something different and consistent. Margery Garber, in Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality, quotes a sequence of lines from Hamlet that crystallizes the nature of ghosts in just a few words: “‘Tis here! ‘Tis here! ‘Tis gone!’ It is the nature of ghosts to be gone, so that they can return.”5 Around and within a similar frame that accepts this uncanny nature of ghosts, my analysis of “Ghosts at the Temple Burn” will explore several measured threads of inverted logic: materiality of the temple as transformative space, appearance versus production of ghosts, and finally, the introduction of the unwelcome ghost. Materiality of the Temple as Transformative Space The Temple Burn is the final act of a week-long production upon Burning Man’s concluding set. While this implies a lengthy build-up that would test the limits of most attention spans, I must preface by saying that the experience is nothing like trying to sit through a full production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in order to hear the payoff at the end of Götterdämmerung. It is understood and expected that the Temple “stage” will be home to hundreds of thousands of entrances and exits, spread out among tens of thousands of performers. The space transforms gradually, almost imperceptibly, from a site of mourning and reflection to a site of release through the introduction of material objects filled with potential energy, which Alice Rayner characterizes as doubling of objects, or objects as signs: “The stage consistently takes such worldly objects as chairs and converts their phenomenological presence, their raw materiality, and their social particularity to its own purposes. That conversion, which turns the object into a sign, effectively doubles the object.”6 Because all objects on this stage will eventually burn, in joining the space they are auto-endowed with layers of meaning that mingle with their already multivalent aspects. In Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Bert O. States discusses the reading of such material props versus reading the written word: In reading the eye is an anaesthetized organ, little more than a window to the waiting consciousness on which a world of signification imprints itself with only the barest trace of the signifiers that carry it. In theatre, however, the eye awakens and confiscates the image. What the text loses in significative power in the theatre it gains in corporeal presence, in which there is extraordinary perceptual satisfaction.7 States’ concept of the unavoidable loss inside of written text finds an interesting home in the Temple props, for physical pieces of writing occupy

Participation 171 relatively equal space as other, three-dimensional objects. Text is not only activated in the anticipation of the Temple Burn, but also animated throughout the act of setting the scene. Texts are composed and read during the long, gradual setup, just as objects are placed, observed, and handled. One may “read” an object left as offering, with nothing but its placement to set it apart from countless other objects, in much the same way one may read the literal text. It is in the placement of the object/text that the ghost of materiality is introduced, and this ghost shifts and changes with every subsequent encounter. In reading the text, touching the object; even glancing at either, the double of the person that placed the object comes together in the same space as imagined memories attached to the object. Narrative unfolds, not only of ways in which these objects could represent people, but in forms that the offspring of blended metaphor may take. And, while the mingling mourners and the departed begin drafting narratives, it is the permission to realize their ontologically interdependent presence, summoned by a corporeal object, that truly invites limitless points of view. In fact, I would suggest that the act of seeing text in this situation is more liberating—if one’s desire is to be changed by the grieving process—than reading text. The culture of words often reduces them to representation, but writing as object—ink, shapes, imperfections—is also tangible matter that “starts to resonate not only with significance but with usefulness and materiality.”8 Because one could argue from a physics standpoint that material objects are, in their smallest known components, made up of exactly the same matter as ghosts—energy that “binds” particles together = energy that connects thoughts—lines becomes blurry in the attempt to separate the idea of a thing from a thing itself. In this setting, it is not indefensible to say that a physical letter on paper, offered to relieve the pain of losing a grandparent, is some version of that grandparent, that a dog collar placed in some private corner of the Temple is an incarnation of the pet that had to be euthanized. This concept is not intended to be dismissive or disrespectful; I am not suggesting that a sentimental idea of a ghost-as-creepy-specter is physically “trapped” in any object. I cannot possibly entertain the relationship of ghosts to material objects in space without at least a nod toward the problematic tendency to divide the philosophy of space from the science of space,9 but my desire is to avoid this trap not by forcing philosophy and science to agree, but by calling them to work together in the same space, through dialogue rather than dialectics. I am not exactly using the dog collar as metaphor—the collar is the dog is not quite right—I must insist that the collar is also not the dog. Perhaps it is more understandable to grasp such an encounter as memory that cannot consistently hold space for a

172 Participation deceased pet without allowing at least one set of memories that center on empty collars as images of absence. This is not an attempt to compress the concept of a ghost in the object as one resembling a genie in a lamp. But, because these objects written and placed at the Temple all occupy a space that will soon transform through mass-destruction/creation, they are places where ghosts do become trapped in a sense. The Temple, when it serves as a site specific to mourning, suggests that many objects placed there point to not just something absent, but specifically something that died. It is difficult to ignore the ghostly images that occasionally spring to mind like transparent versions of living things, the beginnings of coldly mysterious, autonomous entities, condensed and attached to objects prior to their release through the transformation of fire. Just as often, however, the trapped ghost is much more like an object that is contextualized by the site of mourning, providing individuals who encounter it a metacommunicative frame through which to read themselves in relation to it.10 That said, even if “trapped,” these ghosts are anything but predictable. Narrative delivered in the form of signs, such as the interpretation of a text-based object, conveys reconstitution of memories in varying degrees of ability to bring words-as-signifiers into the realm of the senses. Reading the words, “I remember all the walks we shared together,” for example, may invite the image of a person walking their dog and smiling in that memory, and the physical relic of the act of writing act on the temple surface transfers the image from one context to another: a person making that memory, then recalling that memory from a place of loss. It brings written words into sensory imagery, but tends to remain in the domain of the familiar because language often emphasizes increasingly limited interpretation. An object placed at the Temple via someone’s hands might also invite familiar readings, but because it does not call upon words to deliver memory, nothing can be lost in translation. Every possibility can be included within seeing or perhaps touching an empty dog collar, for it is bound in imagery that is only reductive in the broadest sense. A dog collar points to domestic dogs with human companions, and its placement at the temple foregrounds loss, but offers all possibilities of dogs and all ways of experiencing loss as it works on the senses more immediately than the encroaching intellect. A human hand wrapped around the collar leash, a canine body that bore the effects of aging as well as ailing, the way they both moved differently when they moved together; within their affective relationships and sustaining ecologies, the corporeal and conceptually deceased bodies still communicate. It is not exactly via singular voices that these ghosts call out to be remembered, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father; rather they speak by opening

Participation 173 out to infinite versions of themselves, co-extant alongside an empty collar. It is the ghosts of these versions that share immediate space instead of existing as projections into some other timed space within a narrow, articulated memory of the past, whether on a walk or in the moment that collar was removed for the last time. Hence, the uncanniness of acknowledging the presence of unpredictable ghosts within immediate, yet unfamiliar surroundings. Text alone may readily paint a vivid picture, but objects—including ink applied to a surface in the act of choosing text—tend to summon the ghost directly into a space. It is no surprise that every year the Temple seems overfull with ghosts who are, in the words of Joseph Roach, “ordering memory and imagination to define and do their duty.”11 What does it say, then, that all of these objects have been brought to a place of mourning with the intention to burn them? The symbolic performance of release needs little poetic language to make sense of it; destruction need not be the end of a thing, but a transformation. If one’s objective is to transform a ghost by somehow releasing it, then the object to be burned must be a projected version of the ghost or, perhaps more accurately, of the deceased. Placing an object at the Temple, therefore, might be an attempt to hold space for its preconceived “final” performance, the kind which one might have become attached to by observing a multitude of deliberately curated “final” performances within contemporary media’s hypnotically repeating rhythm. And, unlike the theatrical prop that persists in charged limbo between performances, the Temple prop holds the added charge of verging on its final performance of irreversible transformation. To anticipate that a ghost is about to make its last exit in a particularly cathartic setting is to intentionally change it forever; to rip open a space that was painful but familiar and accept that it may become unrecognizable. Based on philosophical insight and personal experience, that “final” release of the ghost is often anything but; it simply serves to complicate the ways in which one reaches toward it. While the duration of the burn provides a spatial and temporal window in which to bid ghosts farewell, the ghost cannot be suddenly gone, extinguished from thought when the object turns to ash, for it was not trapped inside the object but in the space between thought and object. The object is only changed, the thought is not burned, and relationship is not undone; it simply accepts additional layers between thought and the object as always already absent, perhaps begging the question as to what the transformation of a ghost looks like when it is no longer attached to a specific object, but sensed by bodies and loosely actualized in unresolved thoughts. Is it a mutation, as in when genetics negotiate challenges by changing suddenly, often resulting in either advantageous traits or dangerously unstable states? Perhaps because fire

174 Participation invokes such a dramatic sense of transformation, this specific loss/absence that inspires mutation of a ghost can move in different directions, into new spaces. The ghost becomes the force by which a space of otherness—a parallel heterotopia that temporarily declared simultaneously infinite and radically unknowable possibilities of pasts and presents to move among sensing bodies—is torn open. It is no longer held steady and separate from spaces where common rational practices demand safe distance between the self and the unknowable in order to explain and promptly dismiss fear. But, because the body transitioning abruptly between these spaces has not suddenly stopped sensing, the ghost is still very much present. There is not much that is rational to be done with it apart from acknowledging confusion and fear, because in the domain of reason, a thing cannot simultaneously be there and not there; sensed and yet absent. If the vocabulary of ghosts is allowed as signifier for the contradictory, the uncanny, that which is both familiar and unfamiliar, it may serve well enough to penetrate some of the ambiguous aspects of the Temple Burn without plucking out the heart of its mystery. The ghost may be the thing that appears when material objects; those that previously held space for mingling memories, begin to burn. The ghost may also be a signifier capable of bridging two contrasting rhetorical systems by suggesting that the only thing separating them is the extent to which language fails when it cannot locate common caveats. The ghost is a rare caveat that offers possibilities as opposed to limits, insulating memory from imminent danger. As Peggy Phelan writes, in Mourning Sex, “It reminds us that we may survive. By ‘possessing’ the memory, however insecurely, we witness our own survival. The danger, the blow that ends our previous way of being, can be survived—but at a cost.”12 Appearance of Ghosts versus the Production of Ghosts Because the Temple burn takes place on Sunday, Burning Man’s official, final night, many would-be participants have already left, pulling down its infrastructure in fragments to complete the systematic unmaking of Black Rock City. A once-bustling community becomes a temporary ghost town, full of relics alongside empty spaces. The atmosphere is one of not only overwhelming absence, but also acts of abandonment. After the Temple Burn, Black Rock City’s “stagehands” begin the task of removing the remaining sets and props to return this piece of desert to a playa palimpsest; in the short space of time that divides those who leave from those who stay, ghosts could not find a more inviting set to haunt, as participants transform Black Rock City into increasingly ghostly versions of itself.

Participation 175 While the fragments of Black Rock City that remain after the postTemple-burn exodus are not exactly ruins in the traditional sense, these echoes of sets, props, and characters behave similarly to ancient ruins by inviting imagination. As the perpetually deteriorating remnants of ancient structures stimulate the unbounded activity of imagination, the need to make order out of chaos prompts reason to counter unstructured thought with lists, limits, and frames. Derrida’s parergon alludes to such a frame; the physical frame that separates the traditional work of art by what is inside versus what is outside, much like the conceptual divide between reason and imagination, must contain elements of both.13 At that frame, or in this example the prop that is crumbling all over its context, is space where reason and imagination come together in various manifestations of the uncanny. For example, a single, broken bicycle with Hello Kitty strapped to its handlebars, tipped into the desert dust on the once-bustling Black Rock City grid, can summon infinite narratives ranging from delightful to macabre, and the person doing the imagining may attempt to master the resulting imagery almost instantly, placing it within a grid of causal possibilities if not a linear timeline. Ludicrous implications of Hello Kitty aside, such an object is fairly bursting with metaphor that is simultaneously relevant and totally ridiculous. Attempting to divide the act of sensing this object into separate categories, some more personally legitimate than others, would be an exercise in futility. The stuffed, dust-covered, detextualized toy is there, capable of inspiring reactions ranging from infinitesimal pause to mind-bending revelation. Alice Rayner’s Ghosts includes a section on the theatrical production of ghosts, referencing Angelo Ingegneri’s sixteenth-century treatise on theatre. Ingegneri painstakingly details the necessary elements of stagecraft to produce particular types of ghostly theatrical effects in terms of darkness versus light: “One sees everything that happens behind it in a mysterious way, and the hellish monster, which ‘must spread around its darkness just as the holy figures shed light,’ conveys to the spectators an illusion.”14 The preparation for the effect involves setting up black scrims, appropriate costuming, and candle light; techniques used to create a result that worked within his contemporary audience’s expectations of how ghosts should affect the senses. Continuance of tradition reassures even as it frightens, for even as “darkness spreads,” this specific audience would have known that what they witnessed followed how a ghost on the stage should behave. Tradition is also, perhaps unwittingly, embedded in the “production” of Temple ghosts. Nearly every year, when the burning Temple reaches a certain level of intense heat, some trick of physics causes giant, glowing dust-devils, filled with embers, to appear. The fiery specters always seem to enter right on cue, and ride the edge of thrill versus actual danger. It is no

176 Participation less significant that the ghosts are expected if not intended. To express the process in language similar to Ingegneri’s Treatise, in order to achieve the illusion, the following actions must be taken:

• The Temple must be built of material that burns hot enough to create • • • • • •

vortices in combination with the cold air The props must be gathered gradually about the stage The “house” must display artifacts of absence The dust must settle on schedule Participants must invite their own ghosts to animate the scene It must be relatively dark It must be relatively silent

When the above preparations are complete, the house may open, the crowd may gather, and the Temple may burn. The glowing specters will enter on schedule because they are the result of all our work, and we will have our illusion. Unlike Ingegneri’s ghostly effect, however, ours does not “spread around its darkness just as the holy figures shed light.” When the fiery dust-devils take shape, they gather light and lift it upwards and outwards, a spectacle equally befitting the ghost. And these glowing vortices can only be actual ghosts, rather than material representations of ghosts, in the spaces and moments in between thought and object. Introducing the Unwelcome Ghost This chapter has up to now focused primarily on ghosts either as excuses for or improvements upon language, but with a crucial qualification; though they are expected, welcome, and even fun, they are also painful, problematic, and contradictory. They sometimes repeat in time/space with reassuring frequency and behave according to our desires if not our logic. But what of the ghosts that refuse to behave? A traditional “haunting,” such as specters that appear in absolute space, for example, the ghost of someone once-living appearing as a mysterious entity in one’s home, disrupts the flow of logic within life, or plot within fiction. Similarly, a visit from an unexpected ghost who gate-crashes the Temple Burn may de-center the self sufficiently so that balance becomes unrecoverable. This is one specific chink in the armor of reason, which is generally set on recovering balance by re-centering, through which ghosts may rush in and come to linger. Thus far, I have briefly discussed material objects as symbols of ghosts and/or ghosts themselves, as well as the production of ghosts in the sense of stagecraft, but this short list fails to address the instinctive separation of “welcome” from “unwelcome” ghosts that are, paradoxically, natural

Participation 177 mates. The Temple Burn as transformative event depends on so many different kinds of ghosts, moving through fixed objects, traveling back and forth within psychosomatic energy, and mingling with each other over an extended period of time, it lends itself to analogies of mating, offspring, and genetics. If ghosts are as complex as their human doubles, then their offspring must necessarily be as unpredictable as the genetic combinations that make human beings. Within the conceptions of multiple ghosts in multiple generations, previously hidden traits are bound to reveal themselves, just as recessive genes find their counterparts and rise to dominate. The ghosts mutate and misbehave, the comfortably unfamiliar becomes violently overwhelming. The choice to engage or disengage with the ghost is no longer an option. Performance is and is no longer theatre. Life is and is no longer art. The ghost is there and is no longer not there. From a psychoanalytical perspective, this could be considered a moment of crisis; while change is still indicated, it may not necessarily take the form of growth, but of relapse. If a ghost and its double are versions of each other, there may likely be a moment at which one begins to consume the other. The pain is not of space opening but of space collapsing upon itself. One of the unwelcome ghosts in this case study, recurring addiction, might effectively be described in terms of a traditional stage play. As the stage, set, and props are integral components of theatrical performance, so is the cast; not the list of characters in a text but the group of performers who work together to pull movement out of stillness. Ghosts accompany these individuals just as they do fixed objects; existing within them and moving among them. The creation of characters plus the projections of individual selfhood constellates ghosts in states of continual evolution and resolution, the mingling and mating of several generations and their unpredictable offspring. To reduce the phenomenon to a single act, one could take the hypothetical situation—not specific to any particular play but definitely prevalent across many different texts—of a human actor in recovery from problem drinking whose task is to play the role of a heavy drinker. A version of the ghost of self-destruction is probably always present in the actor’s life, but let us assume in this study that it is projected safely outside the self as a guardian rather than a tormentor. It is made of memories that serve to protect, instruct, and caution. But that role may change when this specter mingles with the tactile sensation of holding and raising a bottle; a necessary prop for the character. In the process of transforming the object into the character’s symbol of self-destruction, ghosts brush together in the performance space where the actor physically touches a bottle of liquor for the first time in years. Perhaps, in that mix, we may throw in other ghosts: the smell of painted flats as a palpable reminder of the past, when theatre was equated with over-drinking as fun; the resentment of other

178 Participation cast members whose own guilt is thrown into focus by the presence of one who has learned to manage that which they can scarcely acknowledge in themselves; the potential for a moment of respite from an ongoing battle. Enter: the ghost of temptation; the double of a past version of the actor, called back from the dead only to find it was never gone, but in limbo. Performance is and is no longer theatre. Life is and is no longer art. This ghost has been called to the space and is free to linger; to invade others; transform and consume. This is not meant to reduce the nuance of ghosts interacting in such a performance to anything as flat-footed as: addiction + temptation = relapse. My intention is to work backwards from such reductive formulae in order to unpick their underlying complexities with a different set of vocabulary. In the case of the Temple Burn, we could begin with the simplistic: grief + release = catharsis. Obviously it is not that straightforward, so we could add: one’s own grief + others’ grief + unwelcome thoughts + absence + fear = catharsis − relief + new fear − comfort + the unknown. Because the structure of an equation requires it to balance, however, this one cannot serve any rational purpose. The two phrases do not cancel each other out; they multiply, unevenly. To further the analogy of the conception of ghosts as genetic offspring, I return briefly to the idea that increasing frequency of ghostly appearances/doubling compounds the probability of recessive traits finding their matches and suddenly becoming dominant. Deeply buried pain may dramatically enter the stage in unfamiliar, unsettling attire. A ghost that was to be released may not wish to go, a possibility that must be acknowledged if we are to claim that ghosts are as convoluted as their human doubles and have their own volition. In defense of the “supernatural,” however, I would claim that it is just another word that serves a purpose easily grasped within conceptually blended concepts. For example, there is no denying that sometimes, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” but there is no singular word available to bridge all occasions where this phenomenon takes place by clearly identifying a common characteristic. In ghostly phenomena, “uncanny” and “supernatural” come close. Perhaps this is because the term suggests a certain autonomy that is not separate from, but also not under the control of human beings. In the case of unwelcome ghosts, I would take this a step further and say that the ghost is both not under control and completely out of control. Knowing that a thing is not behaving according to one’s will is a different issue than realizing that the thing has become indiscriminately destructive, or at least, as Joseph Roach describes the ghost of Hamlet’s father, “rising to reproach inaction and demand justice … as a surrogated double, an efficient way to remember the otherwise obsolescent dead.”15

Participation 179 When mourners invite their ghosts to participate in the Temple Burn, as willful entities they are bound to change as energy is released. One who hoped to release a specter of the dead from one’s own psyche by burning a fitting object as symbol, may have been counting on the participation of a loving, supportive crowd in the house. But, the ghostly version of Black Rock City itself may have mingled with the ghosts of other participants, resulting in new versions of ghosts that turn what could have taken the form of loving support into something entirely unexpected. Typically unwelcome emotions, like resentment and anger, may fortify the present ghosts, and their ghostly doubles may recognize these traits within each other. Then, when the fiery dust devils enter the stage before a hostile audience, they are no longer fascinating spectacles but vessels capable of absorbing hostility and throwing it directly back, tenfold, from where it came. In the form of an empty dog collar, an unwelcome ghost is unsettling enough; towering over the crowd as a 50-foot high wall of flame is sufficient to make one turn and run in terror. The size, the heat, the smell, and the potential physical danger—if this is indeed a ghost as opposed to a fascinating trick of stagecraft—just may haunt someone for the long run; willing to disappear, but only so that it may return. To view the Temple Burn through the lens of ghosts and doubling is, for me, to see it for the first time. I have participated in enough burns to have forgotten more details than I remember, but I would never presume to tell participants how they should approach their own experiences. The only assertion I make is that things are never exactly what they seem, and one would be well-served to look more closely at what they think is real, as well as the habits to which they cling in order to separate safety from risk, or welcome from unwelcome. One of Burning Man’s most compelling traits may well be its subtle invitation to experience both the real and the imaginary in the same space without being at-odds. Here is where the uncanny allows contradiction to converse and constellate rather than negate. This is how ghosts make room for experiences that require space to tangle with bodies and senses and imagination before they can offer such provocative trysts within realms ruled by rational logic. Herein lies the “logic” that begs individuals to obey their urges for radical participation, yet asks in return for a sacrifice of ego that may be too great to survive the transition from creative space back to mimetic space. I have overwhelmingly framed heterotopia as a safe space in many respects thus far, but it is a destination that presumes return to spaces less radical, more forgiving; it will open the welcoming gates to all who endeavor to enter, but makes no promises as to what they will find inside. This space, in its refusal to succumb to rational ordering, becomes the extraordinary setting in which ghosts might make their appearances with far more than a theatrical flourish.

180 Participation Notes 1 “Burning Man Official Website,” http://www.burningman.com/blackrockcity_ yearround/special_events/decompression/. 2 Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 36. 3 Rhonda Blair, “Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy,” The Drama Review (Vol. 54, No. 2, Summer 2010): 94. 4 Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre, summary of introduction. 5 Margery Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), 174. 6 Rayner, Ghosts, 112. 7 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the phenomenology of theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 29. 8 Rayner, Ghosts, 73. 9 Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 2. 10 Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” 188. 11 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 34. 12 Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge, 1997), 166. 13 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15–18. 14 Rayner, Ghosts, xi. 15 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 101.

10 Immediacy Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience For Derrida, in order to fully critique metaphysics, to escape its economy and its discourse circling forever around presence, one must take one more step. That step is the one of disappearance, of (self)erasure, which is to say, the step of the trace. Derrida writes: “The trace is the erasure of selfhood, of one’s own presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irredeemable disappearance, of the disappearance of its disappearance.” (Andre Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance”1)

In 2009, I was working full-time as an actor. I will never forget playing the role of Agnes in Tracy Letts’ Bug; I had been a stage performer for over 20 years at the time and was accustomed to feeling quite comfortable on stage, proficient in the craft of doubling, revealing character and story while remaining firmly rooted with the audience in the historical present. When I really started moving in rhythm with the character of Agnes, however, particularly in her final monologue when things were really going off the rails, I distinctly remember a sense of inertia that displaced my familiar comfort as an actor, pushing me into a state that I can only describe as having disappeared. There was the character, there was the play, there was the audience, but there was no observing self making decisions. It lasted only minutes, but much like the experience of highway hypnosis, I had no DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-11

182 Immediacy recollection of the journey from point A to point B. Perhaps such a phenomenon is one form of immediacy, the point at which performance falls away. Things are simply there, happening, coexisting completely. The notion of the ego-led self falling away in a positive attitude, oriented toward the other, dominates much of this book. Extimacy, the sense of otherness within, has been discussed as an essential element of radical change. There is much to be gained through awareness of the sensory, thingly body as opposed to body-as-repository for a self identified in difference and affirmed by ego. However, this is not to say that unmaking the ego is always going to be comfortable, painless, or pleasantly surprising, even in a heterotopia that affords its participants equal parts welcome distraction and supportive community. Even dealing with the falderal of unexpected repercussions, there is some sense of closure or at least climax in an event like the Temple Burn. The change from recognizable, material relics into ash can definitively mark an overall intention to move on, to be done with a particular set of perceptions in order to make room for others. This chapter, the Principle of Immediacy, is predicated upon the principle of participation, but concerned more with acts themselves rather than their consequences. My discussion will take into account two separate case studies. The first is a dance/theatrical performance, And the Snow Fell Softly on all the Living and the Dead; and the second is a piece of performative writing, “Becoming Marionette.” I have chosen these in order to interrogate the relationships of thingly bodies in various modes of “performance,” but rather than a traditional critique of reception, sensory affect, and interpretation, I will look at those moments in which performance falls away. Materiality is an essential element of both, the prospect of haptic memory as inextricable from the habitus of bodies. These studies move across worlds of the theoretical, the theatrical, and the absolutely tactile, and by focusing on qualities of sensory immediacy I hope to make a case that the macro need not be separate from the micro; the metaphysics of changing value is equally present inside of playa dust and human perception, materiality and temporality. Social change is often considered to be a change in ideology, even to the extent of paradigms shifting, but it cannot occur without things themselves changing. While there can be many logical interpretations of “immediacy,” I am deliberately avoiding the path of immediacy as intimacy; namely, perceived connection between human beings who have recognized their similarities and found common ground on which to build relationships. The language of this principal seems to warrant this move: “barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves … contact with the natural world exceeding human powers.” This is not simply a call to put oneself out there and engage with other people. Perhaps immediacy is the

Immediacy 183 most essential riposte to Cartesian dualism, a plea to unmake the separation of mind and body, to cease the disidentification of self by assuming difference between aspects we choose whether or not to claim. It is both a social activity and a personal one, dialogic and intensely sensual. An immediate self is its body, it is not separate from the matter within which it moves. Andre Lepecki discusses the thingliness of human bodies as, “corporeal consequences, investment on intense motions instead of movement as spectacle … stretching a moment into an endless temporality … when body and environment align.”2 I am inclined to call this state of alignment “unmaking difference,” but must clarify that this is not based on the assumption that difference exists a priori, or that it is recognizable only by generating an other. Difference can be made as a defense mechanism, often it is self-separation as identification. Whether it is ideological difference—privileging certain monologic systems of authority over others—or a constitution of distance between the familiar and unfamiliar, this process gently but steadily alienates individuals from the immediate circumstances that are present whether they acknowledge them or not. Paradoxically, I believe that the making of difference calls forth an almost instantaneous impulse to unmake difference by reaching across the gap, toward the other. The gap is simply a mechanism for recognizing; ordering rather than sensing. Erin Manning, in Politics of Touch, writes: Friendship must be thought as an eruption in time and space, a rupture in movement, rather than a point on a grid. It is an interruption because it leads bodies in motion in new and unexpected directions, in a suspension that calls forth an other. Friendship is a movement of desire that threatens to make us lose our balance. It is a movement that eludes consistency while redefining this very concept. Friendship is a relation of permanence that defies the permanent, a presence that must remain an absence, an existence that grows bifurcated like a rhizome erupting at the frontiers of chance and necessity. Friendship is a politics of touch not because it incites us to touch, but because friendship knows no other way of taking place than in contact, than in a placing of one’s self into the space-time of an other, reaching for an other’s place, a touching of that place initiated in the process of reaching out.3 If friendship can be read as a kind of immediacy, then Manning’s metaphorical imagery suggests that making difference between self and other is often undertaken with the ultimate intention of somehow bridging a navigable gap; difference does not preclude the desire for immediacy. Manning invokes Deleuze and Guattari by comparing the bifurcation of existence

184 Immediacy to a sprouting rhizome, a root system whose primary shaft grows horizontally while its branches reach out to find nourishment vertically.4 The reaching act is key; whether a rhizome branches through time, space, or matter within space, it is a movement toward an other. Whether that other was once considered part of a self that split under the pressure of dividing experience into that which is familiar or unfamiliar, or is perceived as having always been radically, fundamentally different, the rhizome does not reach toward its own, horizontal base to imbibe nutrients that fuel its growth. It reaches through soil toward the potential for a symbiotic relationality, rather than a point of arrival. However, while this metaphor incites very pretty visual imagery, the fact remains that I cannot speak for the intentions of an actual rhizome. I can only posit a possible symmetry with human beings in its behavior, whatever the subtle or dramatic variations in motive. When I picture this particular strand of plant life growing and branching through dirt, my imagination turns branches into human arms. I consider what the human root structure might look like as it gains strength and girth by its increased ability to reach outward, or how its presence may be diminished by insurmountable obstacles that its branches fail to negotiate. Obstacles, chaos, and confusion are those elements that human beings simultaneously constitute and convolute, other and reach toward, abandon and yearn for. The difference that is made between self and other is most completely actualized in the desire to rupture that difference. The rhizome, which moves toward and outward without arriving, boasts no system of signification, recognition, or resolution, but sustenance via a continual becoming. Perhaps the nonsignifying rhizome is an apt visual metaphor for some of the ways in which heterotopia undoes language; reaching without arriving, becoming without resolving, space that extends itself without intention to refer beyond itself. The image of a rhizome reaching out through dirt naturally evokes a simple narrative of a thing existing in relation to other things, différance that does not require difference because if it has a language, it is one of sensing as opposed to signifying. The intimate entanglement of soil and plant life is a familiar notion; the soil often contains decomposed organic matter very similar to that of the plant, they are entities made out of the same materials. By this logic, because the human body is made of matter and energy that closely resembles the rest of its environment, it also might be said to exist in intimate entanglement with this environment. The spaces, including the matter within spaces, that conceptually separate self from other become less foreign, less othered, when the human state is one of thingliness, sensing bodies as things in relation to other things, both equal parts matter in motion. As Manning refers to the formation of friendship as eruption in time and space, reaching into

Immediacy 185 the bifurcation of difference becomes less a rupture of difference and more a state of being strange when the body orients toward co-presence with the environment that constitutes it. Certain moments within performance, often difficult to curate but easy to spot, position the human as fleshy-body and fleshy-body as thing, easing the potentially cumbersome movement toward the other through a self-erasure that is simultaneously a becoming-self. In my first case study, And the Snow Fell Softly on all the Living and the Dead, I believe the final segment of act one presents not only a heartwrenching scene of a woman responding to her own, encroaching death, but the materiality of death overtaking and assimilating a living body. The setting of this performance—an auditorium that separates audience from performer with a proscenium arch—draws an obvious symbolic difference between self and other, but my intention is to focus on the materiality of the body in performance as that which can dissolve conceptual gaps between self and other, whether across a proscenium or a barely distinguishable amount of space between bodies, both human and non-human. A discussion of this piece requires at least a brief prefacing of the conditions under which it was conceived and then performed. Ellen Bromberg, artist-in-residence at UC Davis, and Della Davidson, Professor of Dance at UC Davis, collaborated on this piece along with members of Davidson’s Dance community, “Sideshow Physical Theatre,” a troupe of dancers with whom Davidson had worked for years, and in some cases decades. Della Davidson died in 2012 after several, prolonged battles with breast cancer, well into the planning stages of And the Snow Fell Softly. Bromberg and Sideshow members took over the production of the show, transforming its performance into a memorial of Della Davidson’s life and work. Thus, the circumstances of the scene in question were known to the director, performers, and audience members who had either read the accompanying program or heard the background story through some other channel. I think it appropriate to note that I personally knew Della Davidson as both a performer and mentor, for that context informed my reception of her tribute. The final scene of act one was a moment in performance that would be difficult to forget. The act, up to that point, had been full of references to Davidson’s work and her collaborations with Bromberg. Her friends, colleagues, and admirers had honored her memory thus far with respectful homage and inspired pieces that evoked her style, warmth, and quirky humor. The final scene, however, seemed to cast off any pretense of bravery or self-deprecation, and boldly asked the audience what it might feel like for a body to experience death, with no comforting philosophy or guiding faith, but a mound of dirt waiting dispassionately to become its tomb. A lone dancer in the dirt moved grudgingly at first, encumbered by its weight

186 Immediacy and growing increasingly agitated by its lack of cooperation with her desire to glide gracefully through space. Mild agitation gave way to fury, and after a minute or so of trying to move without displacing too much matter or making a mess, the dancer resorted to unfettered, unchoreographed improvisation, the goal apparently to throw off the dirt that kept restraining her, but the path toward that end unclear. Again and again, she dug down and scooped up armfuls of dirt, throwing it off and reaching for more. For every load she hurled away, more dirt seemed to crumble around her ankles to take its place. Working against time, the ultimate end to the act, the lone dancer could barely make a dent in the giant mound surrounding her before the lights went down. She collapsed, exhausted, face-down. The most profound aspect of this piece was that there seemed to be no difference between the moving body and the flying dirt, no clear distinction as to where one ended and the other began. There was no negotiation, no hesitation, no anticipation between the human body and the dirt tangling and moving together on the stage, both finding a chaotic but rhythmic relationship to the music. The frustrated grunts and sobs of the dancer blended with the music and the sounds of dirt hitting the stage floor; neither human nor dirt found productive movement within multiple, possible tangents, and fell into almost-stillness simultaneously. Only in the submissive act of perceived defeat could the human being find rest, but I believe that in the moment of defeat—“failure” to separate the body from the dirt; the self from the encroaching other—the human being actually came closer to being human by succumbing to the precariousness of its carefully made difference, the frailty of its great fortresses. All bodies must ultimately relinquish the separation of the self-body from the frightening unknown when consciousness can no longer maintain the conceptual difference. Because this was a theatrical piece, there is no avoiding semiotization of the things on stage, for even flying dirt on some level represents all possibilities of dirt, an uncharacterized human body is still a stand-in for every past and future body. In “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” Umberto Eco asks whether any object or event on stage can escape being a sign: “Is there a difference between signification by means of intentional and artificial devices (such as words or road signals) and signification as inferred from natural and unintentional events such as symptoms and imprints?”5 I believe this is possible to some degree, for things become representations only by those who interpret them by looking beyond them. The selferasure of performance, the performative trace, is a step taken when the performer is no longer making signs. The body and the dirt, in this way, destabilize representation in their actions, if not in their reception. While this analysis of And the Snow Fell Softly focuses on a situation in which audience members are not direct participants, as they cannot know

Immediacy 187 the sensory experience of the performer’s body, my second case study involves a multitude of bodies sharing the tactile sensation of playa dust. “Becoming Marionette” (whose author wishes to remain anonymous) is written from the perspective of one woman, describing traumatic events that took place somewhere relatively distant in time and space from Black Rock City, and then a seemingly healing event, which she closely connects with the playa dust that surrounded her once she arrived at Burning Man. The distinguishing feature of this piece, while it speaks to thingliness, identification, and semiotization, is that it goes beyond a habitual tendency to affirm the self through difference. The writer actually conveys the experience of separating her self from all that is familiar, and becoming the other in a total depersonalization of her own body. “Becoming Marionette” These are things I feel like I need to tell you. Not sure I want to tell you, because of in the opening up of a story to let it mingle with others … It may not play nicely. What was this tall and gangly marionette, this collection of flesh and bones and smiles and mucous and hair that’s never quite there? Where was I while it walked around and made sound? While it took the hits and tightened up and pushed away feelings and ate and ached and rocked sweaty little children to sleep while its heart split from being too full? Where was I, indeed? It’s nice to be back. I don’t know where I was but I can recall parts of the day I left. I don’t really remember waking up that morning; the first glimmer of a thought I can recall is pulling open the sliding glass door of someone’s house and stumbling into someone’s bedroom, opening the closet, and grabbing a pair of jeans. I stole a pair of jeans and put them on because mine were gone and I was near frozen. I wondered why I had been outside. I realized I had been lying in gravel. I realized that my hands hurt terribly so I looked at them and there was a lot of gunk under my fingernails. It would take several more hours before I realized it was someone else’s blood. Odd that I checked my hands first because later I would realize that everything hurt. Not just my hands. Everything goes blank for a while after that and then I was driving home, the sun was coming up. Somehow I made it home. I opened the front door and my then-husband was sitting on the couch with his laptop, my daughter wasn’t awake yet. He looked right at me and I’m not sure what he saw, for his eyes were on something in my direction, but it was not the blood in my hair. He shrugged and looked back down at his computer as I headed straight to the shower because I was freezing and wanted

188 Immediacy to warm up. Or throw up. The shower in a few words: hot, water, dirt, blood, bruises, hurt. I finally got warm and crawled into my bed with my dog and cat curled against me. My daughter wandered in after a while, as she does every morning, and snuggled with us. Then she looked me deeply in the eyes. She started crying and when I asked her why she was sad, she said she hated that I was sad, and reached out to touch my face, and somehow that made her hand wet. She went back to her room and got her favorite doll, brought it back and placed it in my arms. I slept then, for a very long time. I never went to the police, but two months later I went to the doctor to confirm that I was pregnant. A week later, on New Years Eve, I miscarried. Physically, I was in extreme pain. Emotionally, I was relieved. But that relief could not thaw what I later recognized as a profound sense of loss in the midst of the soundless chaos. I kept it all very quiet. Somewhere in-between the silences, I found out about the other woman, and I kicked out the husband-carcass of the Man Who Was Not There, and for a fleeting moment I felt my feet underneath me again. But I was still just pulling the strings of Marionette, the elegant shell who impressed the rest. Burning Man this year was where being really started to happen again, maybe because life is so much bigger there, and enough time has always gone by, and my toes are never cold, or maybe it was the playa dust that yanked me back into things. I could feel my body changing, as it always did on the playa. I could almost see the moisture wicking off my skin. I wiggled my fingers and the alkaline coating wrapped itself around them, encasing all of my skin. And something started to ache And hurt And dry out And sink And move It was painful work but I was there And I didn’t know how to go on except to follow the crowd to the burn. Giggling my face off in such a way that tears might squeeze out at any second. We watched the burn and wandered through the night, all of us, there, laughing fit to burst. What had happened? I kept waving my hands in front of my face and wondering how they were animated by my very own will. At about 3 a.m. everyone went to bed. I slept about three hours on my cot and awoke just before sunrise, still flying, my face hurt from smiling. As I reached out for … something, my fingers curled around a fistful of the playa dust, and in my next breath, the playa entered into me; not the

Immediacy 189 marionette. To this day, I believe I, the puppet master, am the only one who noticed the shift. Whenever I need to come back, I curl up in those arms of the playa and think myself inside again, and my breath stops coming out of that gangly, gorgeous marionette and starts entering into me.6 Because this piece seems to unfold in three distinct stages, the following analysis is divided into three parts: (1) Making difference, (2) othering the self, and (3) unmaking difference. Making Difference In the introduction to this piece, this first stage is described as depersonalization, so it is important to clarify that the processual reality of such a happening is very different to self-erasure. Self-erasure is synonymous with change, but relies on a becoming self in its ongoing process. My interpretation of depersonalization involves not only detachment, but devaluation of one’s own right to existence. In Unmaking Mimesis, Elin Diamond discusses certain motivations for the self to appear or disappear: Historically women, especially lesbians and women of color, have struggled to appear, to speak, be heard, and be seen. In the history of Western metaphysics, the female body is figured as both crude materiality and irreparable lack. The essence of her “being,” then, is appearance/disappearance: a dangerous form of her fabled duplicity.7 The duplicitous feminine versus the visible masculine is a concept that goes at least as far back as Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” casting the mysterious womb as the place where the world is turned upside-down. The feminine body practices constant renegotiation of visibility within a world that suspects its motives. From early on, it often becomes a site of habitual apology. Bodies form memories even when consciousness fails to assign them to causal narratives. A body that bears evidence of violence may just be too overwhelming for a self to interpret, a site that would only tell stories too horrific to entertain by a radically destabilized psyche. While I claim no expertise in the field of psychology, my theoretical hypothesis, from the perspective of a performing self, is that one might be moved to delay unbearable pain by total disavowal of the rational processes usually employed to guard against erasure. However, even a self that has “disappeared” can continue its performance. It need only pull the strings to animate a marionette-extension that, even if others interpret its entire existence as a series of signs, means no more to the performer than spectacle. Spectacle has the paradoxical ability to appear meaningful while signifying nothing.

190 Immediacy While the body’s fleshy presence is universally contingent and referential, a perpetually creative act, the impulse to tell its unique story carries the inevitable weight of distinguishing fiction from nonfiction, real from imaginary; these distinctions are largely inseparable from ideological narratives that frame the ethical boundaries of society. Its many integrative and generative chapters can move through sequels and spinoffs and reinterpretations that offer no conclusion, no deus ex machina to dictate how the story ends, even while the pages of its manuscript contain mirrors to replace a story that must erase itself. While the sense of a self having briefly disappeared in performance might be thrilling, the possibility of a self having made its performative exit is anything but. Creating frames and boundaries, pulling order out of chaos, and reason triumphing over imagination have all framed the realm of the rational, ever since Enlightenment philosophers gave form to the concept of liminality. Those of us who might arguably be considered spawn of the Enlightenment Era, often find comfort within our ability to fashion various systems of order because these structures direct our gaze into the mimetic mirror. It is a way of recognizing our selves through a frame around placeless mirror-space that would not otherwise hold our image. Foucault discusses the mirror as utopia: “In the mirror, I see myself where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.”8 From the moment we first begin imitating those around us, at a very young age, the rational begins its journey toward reification in our participatory bodies. We learn to transform sensation into thoughts, thoughts into words, to articulate the world around us by explaining it, and embrace multiple levels of structure so that we not only see ourselves in the mirror, but also in others. The narrator describes a fraught and unsuccessful process of locating her familiar structure because trauma has rendered her unwilling to connect cause and effect: I wondered why I had been outside … there was a lot of gunk underneath my fingernails … everything goes blank. She cannot navigate the memory of traversing the past into the present; she has embodied certain actions but cannot account for the events by which these acts became bodily memory. There is no relief to be found in causality—usually a crucial step toward rationalization. Perhaps she has never before devised a difference between self and other in which the self did not include her body, at least to the ends of her fleshy limbs. The doubling of unexplained past in the presence of present circumstances is too uncanny to reconcile because in that moment it could only serve to compound pain, and an injured body is more likely to seek relief. Rather than locate the mimetic mirror through an external frame, the self is othered by becoming the mirror, embodying its placeless space.

Immediacy 191 She reached out to touch my face, and somehow that made her hand wet. She is not denying her senses; she has taken refuge in the ability to acknowledge them without signifying them. Her ego-self, displaced by placeless space, does not include tears, it only accepts wetness. The physicalization of actions that wounded her is not technically unknown to her; this is a brave and creative act of disowning them. The othered self is aware of its sensing body, yet there is no present and reliable ego to make meaning out of it. Othering the Self The narrator calls herself “Marionette.” But I was still just pulling the strings of Marionette, the elegant shell who impressed the rest. Years ago, I took my children to see a show called “Puppet Pandemonium,” after which the puppeteer took time to explain and demonstrate how he crafted his marionettes. They were beautiful pieces, which he created and manipulated like extensions of himself. In order to make his “Fats Domino” puppet sing and dance, he had only to move his left hand up and down slightly where it gripped the crosspiece, and tweak two individual strings with his right hand, and yet the puppeteer danced with his entire body, including the wide grin on his face, as Fats Domino danced. The performance required the puppeteer’s complete focus, his own somatic rhythm, to move the performing object with sufficient expertise so the audience might let his presence disappear into the character. Performing the marionette requires a light touch but total involvement in order to convince its audience. Our protagonist moves and breathes and feels the heaviness of a sleepy child in her heart that split from being too full but remains separate from the body/other that life happens to. Just a shift here, a tweak there, and the marionette body performs. Thus, a bifurcation of self from body need not be the death of volition, it is simply a way of not occupying the body. No one suspects the performance because the self has been othered; if the performer manipulates Marionette convincingly enough, then there is no doubling, only erasure. The performance is the character. The body is the other. The self still operates, but only as mirror. Unmaking the Difference I have extensively argued that Burning Man is a heterotopia in which bodies are safe to rehearse radical forms of change, but there are of course no instructions, particularly for a disembodied, intelligent narrator that describes a depersonalized body to the world. An othered self can hardly orient toward the other and embrace dialogic communication; it cannot embody a multiplicity of voices if it has no access to its own. Even Black Rock City’s community of sensual, carnivalesque bodies, while

192 Immediacy disengaged from knowledge production, still assign some level of meaning to their sensory experiences. There is, however, an element that even a marionette-body cannot avoid dialoging with: playa dust. As I reached out for … something, my fingers curled around a fistful of the dust, and in my next breath, the playa dust entered into me; not the marionette. To this day, I believe I, the puppet master, am the only one who noticed the shift. Short of donning hazmat suits, burners cannot escape playa dust. From the moment one gets near the place where organic, modern earth ends and prehistoric, dry lakebed begins, one is instantly, completely coated. No matter how many times one showers, wipes down, and soaks the skin in vinegar, the fine, chalky coating reappears the instant their skin is dry. It is an inevitable, common trait among all to be “playafied.” Dust-filled hair, clothing, and supplies are the reality of life on the playa, and the sooner one makes peace with the unfamiliar sensation, the easier it is to become accustomed; even attached to it. Bodies alter their colors and textures profoundly, physically blending with the landscape of Black Rock City. In This is Burning Man, Brian Doherty’s poetic description of the dust captures something worth sharing here: You will live on its terms, according to its nature. Because of the intrusive omnipresence of the finely powdered dust created once the playa crust is broken, you become within minutes a creature no longer simply human, but a playa-human chimera, a new skin of pale chalky white settling and attaching and growing over you. And it doesn’t just take over your surface; your every breath takes in an endlessly refilled air-and-playa dust cocktail that invades your lungs and nasal passages. The lungs take it in, the skin takes it on, and in return exfoliates its own cells back into the dust. The phenomenal, transformational qualities of playa dust begin the moment the body senses something strange, and often it is perceived as uncomfortable until willing participants give way to acceptance, even affection. It is a shared sensation that everyone must acknowledge to varying degrees; everyone is coughing a little, everyone looks a bit rough, and bodies do not exactly smell foul, but they definitely smell unfamiliar, less sanitized. It is nearly impossible to retreat into an alternate emotional space because one is constantly dealing with this reminder that we are all made of fleshy bodies that persist in the quality of being things, rather than as placeholders for a disunified set of political gestures. Playa dust seems to conflate space with time. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin defines the chronotope as, “The intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships … Time, as it

Immediacy 193 were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time ….”9 While Bakhtin’s chronotope centers largely on the novel as artistic form, and how text thickens time by fleshing it out, a provocative extrapolation of the chronotope might extend to playa dust, since in most cases it is completely nonrepresentational. Playa dust literally takes on flesh; does that flesh carry its text? The question can also be reversed: human skin takes on playa dust like a strong adhesive; does that dust bring with it the possibility of a complete absence of textuality? “The Fire and the Ash,” a short film made at Burning Man 2013, provides some interesting testimonial about playa dust. To clarify, by quoting dialogue from this film I do not intend to analyze the visual object itself, it is simply a way of witnessing dialogue about the dust, recorded during a time that the speakers were in fact covered in it. Thus, my brief description of the film’s imagery is only to illustrate that playa dust figured prominently in its production. There are shots of overwhelming dust storms as well as calm weather, so it is clear that the human bodies in these scenes move with awareness of strange sensations. They cannot be human masters of nature but appear as beings who are constituted as much by an unfamiliar environment as by their actions. I selected the following four quotes from “The Dust and the Ash” to illustrate how burners often internalize and articulate their relationship to the dust with obvious affection: I’ve heard that the playa dust molecules are so small that your lungs can’t move them out, so that in some way they stay there permanently, and I would say that going to Burning Man does affect people permanently. It makes me feel healthy to have the dust on my skin and in my eyes, get a little grimy, get all sweaty … it’s amazing. I remember having a sandbox when I was a kid, and in the sandbox you could build your own castle, you could make a volcano, you could do whatever you wanted. And here is the world’s biggest sandbox. It’s this constant reminder of dust to dust. Not only is all of this art going to be disappeared and just a bunch of charred embers, but so are we.10 It is astounding, but true, that it often takes either extraordinary circumstances or profoundly strange sensations to remind us that human beings actually enjoy being human bodies. The sensations of sweat, dust,

194 Immediacy and discomfort at Burning Man privilege a Brechtian engagement with the environment; the tactile and messy reminders that we are present and participatory parts of the world, rather than separate and superior observers or orchestrators of that world. If we are making castles in a sandbox, that sand is also making shapes in us. Playa dust’s verfremdungseffekt is its power to pull the body out of illusory space and into its own flesh (Figures 10.1 and 10.2).

Figure 10.1  Jaxx in the dust. Photo credit: Huybert van de Stadt, 2014.

Immediacy 195

Figure 10.2  Ninja and Stardust. Photo Credit: Dan Perlea, 2015.

To borrow Brian Doherty’s term, the “playa-human chimera” needs no philosophical parsing of the technical difference between living and dead, offered mainly to settle the difference between doing and undoing, for the body in its persisting state of becoming is always already ash while simultaneously always already being born. We are always witness to our bodies aging, but often fear loss of the self-consciousness by which we make sense of this process. Perhaps a typical aversion to death is rooted in the notion that it marks a moment at which we can no longer rationalize our bodies. The heterotopic body, particularly the dusty, Black Rock City body, can serve as temporary liberation from socially constituted opinions on how

196 Immediacy bodies should feel and behave, recasting their relationships to order, to the embodied resistance to the unknown. Whenever I need to come back, I curl up in those arms of the playa and think myself inside again, and my breath stops coming out of that gangly marionette and starts entering into me. The playa dust taken on by the narrator’s body became a somatic memory, just as a traumatic event had done, but without posing a threat. Wounds are familiar sensations for almost any body, for they provoke instant association with pain, but playa dust is a distinctly unfamiliar sensory experience. Its strangeness is not a threat, yet one cannot help but maintain acute awareness of it in a heterotopia that lasts roughly one week. This brief span of time is enough to grow accustomed to the dust, but not to forget that it is there, making shapes, moving through the air, and clinging to every body. When the narrator sensed wetness on her cheeks and saw moisture on her daughter’s hand, she managed to fortify her self against interpreting that wetness as tears, to avoid naming the thing that would lead to assigning tears as an indication for pain, pain as a signifier for the effects of trauma, and so on, into the infinite possibilities of signs. This defense mechanism, which denied her ability to see herself as a body intimately entangled with the space beyond her flesh, must have required a magnitude of will to maintain. Any slip, any instinct to translate feeling into structure, would weaken her system of deferring pain. It took an accidental moment of profoundly strange sensory experience—unfamiliar enough that it could not escape notice—colliding with the realization that this matter referred to nothing beyond itself, to provide relief that she could not have anticipated. The playa dust offered a gritty, sensual, human, visceral feeling of being in the world, but because its presence was too ubiquitous to separate into cause and effect, it removed the burden off her efforts to avoid making it mean something. There was no need to deflect its presence into Marionette, thus her body had the opportunity to remember the act of sensing without fear of where that might lead. Her self was safe as a dusty thing, among so many other dusty things, unburdened from sparring with thoughts that threatened to attach themselves to her senses. “Becoming Marionette” and The Snow Fell Softly are both examples of unmaking difference without a conscious re-centering of self. Their stories are located somewhere in between bodies and matter that are so closely integrated, they leave no room for signification within the moments of creative acts. Meaning may be assigned as critical afterthought, but in these circumstances, change itself is not relative to choice. Things, both human and non-human, do not imply absence of feeling; it is more a complete immersion in sensing, a total lack of resistance to otherness. Things do not decide to unmake difference, nor do they decide to bridge or fill in gaps, or

Immediacy 197 pull down barriers; there is no moment of connection because it is apparent that there was never an actual separation. Such an intimate, embodied state of immersion in the most elemental apprehension of selfhood, the most basic testament to the frailty of ego, is quite possibly heterotopia’s most precious gift. Notes 1 Andre Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance,” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 132. 2 Andre Lepecki, Lecture for Davis Humanities Institute “Embodiment Series,” February 2, 2011. 3 Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 35. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 16–17. 5 Umberto Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance” in The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 21, No. 1 Theatrical and Social Issue (March 1977): 112. 6 The original written piece has been edited down to represent a spoken version that was subsequently given at PSi 19, the Performance Studies International Conference, Stanford University, July 2012. 7 Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on feminism and theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), 152. 8 Foucault, “Of other Spaces,” 4. 9 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 84. 10 Aaron Freeder, The Fire and the Ash, https://vimeo.com/50126842.

11 Conclusion

We Are All in This Together “Zone Trip #4” by P. Segal, included here with the permission of the author: The caravan of ill-assorted vehicles assembled at the baseball diamond in Golden Gate Park as a late-summer dusk promised a fine night for entering the unknown. Our ringleader, John Law, would drive the huge Ryder truck always rented for our larger absurdist escapades. It would be hours before we’d actually get into the vehicles and begin. As always, when a Cacophony Society Zone Trip called adventurers to leave San Francisco, the stragglers came late, and the last-minute preparations detained us further. This Zone Trip was different from most; usually, when a Cacophony member proposed an excursion of this kind, the participants had no idea where they would be spending the weekend. This was the element we liked best, the surprise of going somewhere completely unexpected. We might find ourselves on a tour of the mid-California missions, or at a convention of spiritualists who received their messages from other planets. Wherever we went, that place was the weekend’s Zone of the Unknown. This time, everyone needed to know in advance; our destination was wild terrain, where there would be no food or water, and the weather could be blisteringly hot or miserably cold within a single day. Unlike most Zone Trips, this one would take us beyond easy grasp of a Motel Six, restaurants or corner stores, to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. What we didn’t know, on that balmy night in 1990, was what we would make of this weekend. Most of our Cacophony exploits did not take up an entire weekend, but just a few hours. We would do midnight walking tours of the Oakland storm drains, in full formal dress and hip waders, write a novel in the fashion of the Exquisite Corpse, play midnight urban golf, read from our favorite works of fiction by candlelight during a midnight stroll through the park, climb bridges or have cocktails in some urban wasteland. Most of the events were purely for amusement, but one of them, my own event, DOI: 10.4324/9780367808815-12

Conclusion 199 gathered a group of 40 people together to read Proust. John Law staged a counter-event to mine, the Charles Bukowski Support Group, that met at the racetrack, or in sleazy bars. This time, our joint adventure had a purpose. In the back of the 30foot long Ryder truck, the disassembled figure of a man, with a wooden exoskeleton and a Japanese lantern head, awaited its demise at the desert. When the figure was assembled, it towered to 40 feet above the ground. It would rise in the sublime emptiness of the Black Rock, and stand for two days. On the third day, at nightfall, it would be burned. Four years before, our friends Larry Harvey and Jerry James had cobbled together a much less impressive figure, a haphazard man of only ten feet. On Memorial Day weekend, they had taken this figure down to Baker Beach in the city.1 As the sky transmuted from Maxfield Parrish blue to a deep Persian, they ignited the figure, and watched it burn against the glints of light on the evening water. The flaming construction drew people from all over the beach. Everyone responded to the archetype, man struggling against the powers of destruction, and watched with equal fascination until only embers remained. Larry and Jerry, observing the crowd’s fascination, decided that the next year they would build a bigger and more beautiful structure. In rebuilding the man, they would turn this archetype of struggle and defeat into a celebration of life, death, and renewal. For three years, on the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend, Larry and Jerry brought an increasingly ingenious man to the beach. The Cacophony Society was always well represented in the crowd that came to see it, and as the man grew larger, Cacophony’s most qualified members worked security for the project. Their task was to circle the cliffs surrounding the beach, armed with walkie-talkies, and inform the ocean-side crew if the police were coming. Like so many Cacophony events, this one broke a few rules; if caught, one of us would glibly keep us all out of jail. In 1990, the fourth year of this tradition, there had been no rain, and residents in the area grew wary of fires. The well-to-do, in their cliff-top Seacliff residences over Baker Beach, where the south tower of The Golden Gate Bridge was rooted offshore, had come to expect that on the Sunday of this weekend, those strange people would be having another Satanic ritual on the beach. The police were called, of course, and Cacophony security saw them coming. The officers approached the hard way, climbing down the steep cliff. John Law rushed to meet them. John always began interactions with the authorities with utmost civility. “Well, I suppose you’re wondering what we’re doing,” he continued, chuckling amiably. “This is an annual art event, usually much smaller. We like to burn it, but this year we’re deeply concerned about potential fire hazards.” Relieved that their perps were merely socially conscious artists,

200 Conclusion and not satanic, they told us not to burn it, and left. The crowd, of course, pushed for immolation. “Burn it, burn it!” they chanted. Larry retreated into deep reverie. I tugged on his sleeve, trying to get his attention. His cogitations are vast and visible. “Larry,” I said, whether he heard me or not, “Let’s take it to the Black Rock.” “Larry,” John Law said, after dispatching the authorities, “I think we should take the man to the Black Rock Desert.” The contemplative artist, known for his piercing wit and verbal acuity, looked up at John and said, “What?” That summer, Cacophonists planned Zone Trip #4, the adventure of The Burning Man. Those of us who’d experienced the Black Rock tried to prepare everyone for a wilderness experience unlike anything else they’d ever seen. As we often did for our bigger adventures, like sneaking a 100 people into an abandoned building for a theatrical, post-apocalyptic cocktail party, we rented the huge, yellow Ryder truck. In it would be the wooden figure and the tables, tents, rugs and tools we would need for the event. We warned everyone to bring at least four gallons of water with them, and enough food for four days. We made lists of essentials, like sleeping bags, tents, head covering, garments for all weather, sunscreen, and beer. We knew in advance that the difficulty of this trip would limit the number of people willing to go. At the Black Rock Desert, a person could walk endlessly without seeing anything or anyone, but after a day without water, they would simply die. By 11 o’clock that night, at the baseball diamond in the park, the last trips to the all-night Walgreen’s and markets had been made. John and I conferred as the unexpectedly large group climbed into their questionably road-worthy vehicles. “Did you get a head count?” John asked me. “Yes, I counted eighty-nine. More than I expected.” “Good. I counted eighty-nine, too. We want to make sure that we leave with as many people as we came. You know what I mean.” “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.” “It’s the best idea we ever had!” John laughed maniacally and slapped the side of the truck. We all gossiped and dreamed, driving through the foothills of the Sierras after midnight. Around us, the black forest stood in silhouette against the dark gray sky, surreal and enveloping. Sometimes we rode in silence, hearing only the chunk-chunk of the road beneath our tires, and seeing, in our minds’ eyes, the Black Rock ahead. Around four in the morning, we pulled into the parking lot of Circus Circus in Reno. The caravan trailed behind, happy to get off the road

Conclusion 201 and have one last semi-civilized hour before we reached our destination. John and I, and our friends who had been there before, warned the rest that once at the desert, we would hardly sleep or eat. Our party of 89 had diminished by the time we reached the casino’s all-night coffee shop. Half of the travelers were sleeping through the Reno stop, and a fair percentage opted to drink their meals and play roulette or craps instead. We made short work of rubber eggs and polyethylene sandwiches, and got back on the road. Right outside of Reno, a tiny, rutted highway goes left and north from the freeway. We would be driving 100 miles on this road, through cattle country. Cow warnings appeared, but no lights, convenience stores, houses or signs announcing civilization ahead. Nothing appeared at all, except sagebrush burned black by the night, and the long, meandering dashes of white separating the two lanes of traffic, or no traffic at all. Not a single pair of headlights suggested that there was anyplace ahead to come from, as though our caravan approached the void. I opened the passenger window and rested the back of my head on the window frame. Above, every galaxy in the universe seemed to vie for space in the sky. In a place where electricity had no use, universal light tinted the night gray. “Unbelievable!” I shouted to my friends, above the grinding din of the vehicle and wind in my face. As always on Cacophony missions, we obeyed the traffic regulations; we were odd enough, and had no need of attracting any unwanted attention. Even out here, there was the possibility that around some bend, or behind some sagebrush, a highway patrol car waited patiently to make some money for the state. We kept to the speed limit, and drove well over an hour. One hundred miles from Reno, we saw the very first sign suggesting that human habitation lay ahead: the flagrant misnomer, Empire, 7 miles. Empire, population 246, boasted the only store within a 100 miles, and a corporate mine, the source of a major ingredient in wallboard. All the residents of Empire worked there, or at the store, which was closed. We passed through this moribund hamlet, and soon after, saw another sign: Gerlach, 5 miles. In Gerlach, population 234, we counted one casino, 5 bars, no churches and no stores. It did have a gas station, and we would all stop there on the way out to fill up for the ride home. At this hour, shortly before dawn, the gas station was closed. Everyone in the caravan consulted odometers. We were going to drive 23.7 miles out of town, and look for the pile of tires off to the side of the road. The false dawn covered the bumpy road before Empire with a gray light that brought the endless sagebrush and distant purple hills in sharp focus, but as the last vestiges of civilization slipped behind us in sleepy Gerlach, the first real light came over the horizon. The road,

202 Conclusion now smooth and flat, rounded a bend, and off to our right, the inconceivable playa of the Black Rock Desert gleamed and twisted with dawn mirages. “This is the only place I’ve ever been,” I said, “Where there was absolutely nothing.” “Four hundred square miles of absolutely nothing. Not a pebble, or a drop of water, weed or a cactus. No wildlife. The biggest nothing in North America,” my friend said gleefully. “And almost absolutely flat.” “And my favorite part, not a single bug.” The increasing light revealed the fullness of nothingness; the dawn mirages now showed themselves as shadows in the surface, which was flat, but not entirely. Where the clay playa floor lost all its moisture to the sun, the cracking surface rose or fell a fraction of an inch at each rupture. We kept our eyes on the odometer. Up ahead we saw the tires, and slowed down. Trucks that had gone out earlier to find the best dry ground left rutted tire tracks to guide us to the pre-ordained spot. This desert, once a gigantic inland lake, Lake Lahontan, flooded every winter, becoming a lake once again. In spring, it dried out. By late summer, the entire surface was the dry, cracked clay we had all seen in car commercials; in some places, however, the cracked clay concealed an oozing subterranean morass of mud, a very bad place to camp. We were headed for terra firma, 5 miles in, and 3 miles to the north. The caravan wobbled over the edge of the road, following the tire tracks heading to our destination. As we sailed along the desert floor, kicking up gigantic flumes of dust behind us, Michael Michael, the slim, silver-haired Texan who would become the playa’s Danger Ranger, pulled up beside us. “Stop!” he yelled through his open window. We stopped and got out of our vehicles. Michael took a stick out of his car and walked along, marking a long, straight line on the playa floor. This was an old Cacophony tradition of entry into an unknown territory. When the line was long enough to accommodate everyone, 89 people joined hands, and as one, stepped across the line and into The Zone.2 Burning Man made the transition from Baker Beach to the Black Rock Desert that year, the event that would forever transform it from a onenight, beach bonfire into an extended Zone Trip that would eventually encompass the entire week preceding Labor Day annually. Whether the original participants had any idea that this modest celebration of temporary autonomy would grow into a world-wide movement is impossible to say, but it is clear that the culture of Burning Man found its niche in the combination of a communal, artistic ritual, within a space outside familiar levels of reality.

Conclusion 203 Between 1995 and 2010, I lived in Sparks, Nevada, for a combined total of eight years, and made several trips to the Black Rock desert outside of the official Burning Man week to hike and camp, and once to collect mason jars full of playa dust for art projects. Even without the cacophony of Black Rock City, the playa on its own is other-worldly, transformative. It is of course not the only playa, for there are many ancient, dry lakebeds in North America, but it is the one that happened to become home for hundreds of thousands of burners over several decades. With or without the presence of burners and their art, it is both profoundly strange and strikingly beautiful. Burning Man 2015 By Frank Tyneski, included here with the permission of the author: To my beloved friends at Camp Frosty, What a gift it was to share in the Burning Man experience with you! Thank you for the precious memories. Many people ask me what it’s like out there and how could I begin to explain it to them? For my friends who have never been, let’s just say it’s much deeper than what you’ll find colorfully portrayed on YouTube. And yet I have no words to accurately describe what Burning Man is really like or why we keep coming back to this inhospitable climate. What I can tell you is this … we wake each day dust covered and exhausted, vulnerable to every emotion under the sun. This multidimensional experience provides us a place to party, dance, laugh, share our love of art and music and, oftentimes, simply an opportunity to cry on one another’s shoulders. The temple, a beautiful and original work of art created anew each year, is a sacred structure and a special place for spiritual reflection and self-awareness. It is seldom mentioned in conversation or in the media. For veteran burners, the temple is there to remind us that no heart travels through this lifetime unbroken and, by simply caring for others, somehow our own needs will be magically provided for. And how can I begin to describe what it feels like when you leave the temple and the aperture of your heart widens to its fullest capacity. There you are … defenseless, empathetic and open, yet joyfully optimistic. In less solemn moments, there’s the excitement of anticipation as your soul gets up and goes for a walkabout on the playa and all you can do is passively follow yourself around. How strange and yet how natural it feels to follow your own consciousness as it mixes and mingles with others in this dreamscape. And then suddenly you find yourself deeply connected to complete strangers. Time becomes your own and there are no schedules to keep when the commoditized world is deconstructed for a week-long escape. In this time and place, a person’s character is their social currency and there’s no hiding behind your stuff. In this way we’re all naked at

204 Conclusion Burning Man and, when the vastness of the universe seems to reveal itself, in these rare moments, we’re reminded that we’re all connected, all of us. There is much comfort knowing that there are other like-minded people to be discovered in Black Rock City. To be among such visionary people is priceless, including talented artists, musicians, builders and volunteers who build this amazing prototype city, improving it year over year. How lucky are we to live among these great architects of culture, if only for a week. They impart on each of us a blueprint for a better, more sustainable world. One that’s predicated on love and cooperation. I sincerely hope that the Burning Man ethos will shape our future world. Beautiful, brilliant and talented people who are open to developing honest, meaningful, symbiotic relationships within a society that has no place for war. For those of us who attended, the light inside of us was both amplified and personified through our kindness and service to others. Black Rock city reminds us that all will be remade again after the Man burns. And now we must go back into the default world carrying the proverbial torch, burning brightly and warmly in this other world of ours until we meet again next year. Onward through the dust of reality …. It is almost as if the Black Rock Desert ecology has attracted, in addition to others, a particular type of creative human being who relishes the more challenging aspects of extreme survival, while maintaining awareness that this survival would be meaningless without the shared experience of playing and making art together. Built structures and geographical gridding, and eventually a monetary charge for admission that has increased every year, would strongly declare Black Rock City a changed sort of exclusion zone. It is astonishing that the project in general has resisted succumbing to political and economic pressures to commodify and cash in. To this day, while there is impassioned debate over whether Burning Man still faithfully practices what it preaches with regard to the principle of decommodification, an organization that could easily make a lot of money by commercial branding or even an impressive, worldwide IPO, seems determined to stay just small enough to keep things somewhat accessible. Perhaps this is based on a suspicion that it is best not to disrupt one of those rare coincidences in which all elements conspire in a phenomenon that would not only be impossible to duplicate, but could only lose its currency with repetition, the act by which so much of rational knowledge production establishes value. In Architecture and Disjunction, Bernard Tschumi states, “The architecture of pleasure lies where concept and experience of space abruptly coincide, where architectural fragments collide and merge in delight, where the culture of architecture is easily deconstructed and all rules are transgressed.”3 Transgression as an attitude toward pleasure and play seems to be the key; in the strangeness of heterotopia it is a more easily achieved

Conclusion 205 feat to break away from notions of authoritative dissemination of monologic forms, both spatial and conceptual, that constitute familiar, lived reality. Any questions of who or what designs the structures that inform these spaces and the actions within them can fall away, or at least find pause, in the presence of sensing bodies that know what it feels like to create together within the immediate circumstances available to them. There is ample room for creative acts in heterotopia that need not allude to anything beyond themselves. Art that might otherwise be made in order to fortify familiar notions of self, to identify or disidentify within dominant ideologies, or to respond even unwittingly to those structures, can be offered as a gift without the anticipated return that moves the creative act into its present circumstances in an attitude of representation. One might even say that heterotopia alleviates many human beings’ desperate desires for freedom from the unrequited labor of performing the symbolic exchange of value, in favor of embodied, sensory, unarticulated value. Even a monumental artwork that is completely literal can invite the most radical form of participation; don’t think, just play (Figure 11.1). As has been proven time and time again, all the deductive reasoning in the world cannot fundamentally change the behavior of individuals who are conditioned to reactionary response within their tightly controlled

Figure 11.1  Family playing on the LOVE sign. Author, 2014.

206 Conclusion political arenas. A society that has no idea how to get out of its own space, however dissatisfied its members may be, cannot move into new space if it presumes an already-articulated vision of that space. It takes something profoundly strange, embodied insight that transcends familiar levels of reality, to change even the most conscientious, socially oriented individuals sufficiently to re-imagine a future that does not mimic the conditions it seeks to undo. Burning Man, a magnificent accident wherein cultural momentum collided with just the right mixture of bizarre ecological conditions at precisely the right moment, is just one example of a recurring opportunity to rehearse behavior that does not respond to ideology because it requires no justification, nor interpretation, of creative acts in the moment. While history may decide to explain the scope of its impact on social change in the default world in quantifiable terms, its phenomenal quality of changing the bodies that move through its incredibly weird, yet strangely welcoming space, is the source of its absolute utility, its unconditional gift to those who need to change.

Notes 1 While this narrative indicates that the original, Baker Beach burns took place on Memorial Day weekend, other accounts indicate that it was the Summer Solstice. 2 P. Segal, “Zone Trip #4,” http://laughingsquid.com/p-segal-zone-trip-4/. 3 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 93.

Index

Pages in italics refer to figures accumulation 10, 15, 24, 56, 152, 157 Adorno, Theodor 37, 58, 81, 156; “Cultural Criticism and Society” 105n5; emotional survival 92 aesthetics 70, 143, 150, 155–156 AfrikaBurn 18, 33 Alain-Miller, Jaques 76 Alarcon, Norma 43 Althusser, Louis 35, 64 American Labor Day 8, 10 anthropocentricism 134 anti-environmentalism 134 antithesis 15, 52, 126 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition 49 Artaud, Antonin, The Theatre and its Double 65 art cars 8, 31, 53, 101 Artichoke Project 18, 38–39, 41, 46n7 arts-based event 6 authorial voice 36, 45 Bachelard, Gaston, “The Psychoanalysis of Fire” 62 Baker Beach, San Francisco 6–7, 202, 206n1 Bakhtin, Michael 12, 193; carnivalesque body 12–13, 25, 36, 83–85, 90, 103, 137, 191; chronotope 36, 192; dialogic 12–13, 36–37, 45, 103; heteroglossia 12–13, 18, 36–37; monologic 12–13, 18, 36–37 “Bank of America” 60, 65

Bank of UnAmerica 60, 65 Bateson, Gregory, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” 13, 136 Best, David 18, 31, 38–43, 45; interview with BBC 41 Beuys, Joseph 97–98 Black Rock City (BRC) 1–3, 6–10, 15, 18, 21–26, 32–33, 39, 41, 48–49, 53–54, 56, 59, 61, 63–64, 67, 72, 81, 90, 92, 97, 100–101, 103, 105, 131–134, 137, 143–144, 146, 149, 151, 158, 160, 174–175, 179, 195, 203–204; aerial view of 26; geographical space 6, 15, 32; “Man Burn” 21–22, 30, 86, 97–105, 102 Black Rock City Rangers 23, 47, 130 Black Rock Cityscape 90 Black Rock Desert 4, 6–7, 27n4, 70–71, 77, 84, 198, 200, 202, 204; National Conservation Area 145 Blair, Rhonda 98 Bliss Dance sculpture 47 body-self 95 Bogad, L. M., “Carnivals against Capital: radical clowning and the global justice movement” 138 Bourriaud, Nicolas, “Relational Form” 104 Bromberg, Ellen 185 Bureau of Land Management 23, 145 BURNDAC compay 22

208 Index Burners and Law Enforcement at Burning Man 133–134, 141 “Burning Man Gifting Guild” site 19 Burning Man, history of 6–17 Burning Man Organization (Org) 17, 34, 54 Cacophony Society 21, 125, 198–199 Cacophony Society Zone Trip 198–201 Camp Frosty 150, 203; Facebook page 54 capitalism 15, 19–20, 59, 89 capitalist society 16, 52, 89 carnivalesque 12–13, 25, 36, 83–85, 90, 103, 137, 191 Cartesian dualism 9, 96, 183 case study: “Becoming Marionette” 26, 182, 187–189, 196; “Crotch” 97–98; on gifts/ gifting: Calum Grant 50–53; Kaisa 54–56, 55; “Hamlet by Two, Burning Man Style” 77– 85; law enforcement 135–137; “Reclaim the Streets” (RTS) 23, 134–135, 137–142; RTS event (1996) 135; And the Snow Fell Softly on all the Living and the Dead 182, 184–185, 196; “Temple Burn, 2010” 165–168 Charles Bukowski Support Group 199 civic responsibility 22–23, 34, 139 climactic Man Burn 8 collaboration 22, 34, 40 commercial transactions 24, 147–148, 158 commodification 15, 102, 156 communal effort 22, 107, 111–112, 117, 121–122, 125 “Condominium One” 152, 158 consciousness 35, 75, 189; differential consciousness 44 consumerism 156 consumption 15, 20, 24, 53, 63, 65; vs. participation 63 consumption vs. participation 63 Cooper, Dave 145 CORE (Circle of Regional Effigies) burns 8 cosa mentale space 9, 96, 150

“Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet Camp” 22, 106–109; camp members 107, 109, 120, 124, 128, 129; interview/ interviewers/interviewee 107–129; soulmate performance 108 COVID-19 pandemic 1–2, 10, 20, 56 Dance Center Workshop, New York City 97 Davidson, Della 185 “The Death Guild” 78 Debord, Guy 92; Society of the Spectacle 15–16, 60–61; spatial/living alienation 15–16 decommodification 20, 59–61, 63–64, 155 decompression 161–162 Deep Playa 49 default world 7, 9, 14, 89, 91, 100, 107, 132–133, 141, 144, 152 Deleuze, Gilles 183; on simulacra 61 depersonalization 189 Derrida, Jacques 14, 44, 95; Limited, Inc. 95; parergon 71, 76, 87n4, 175; Writing and Difference 88n19 Derry-Londonderry Temple 41, 44–45; website 39 Derry, Northern Ireland 18, 38–41, 46n17, 168 destabilization 11, 26 détournement 59–60, 65 dialectic model 12, 14, 61 dialogic communication 12–14, 36–38, 81 Diamond, Elin 64, 94; Unmaking Mimesis 189 differential consciousness 44 Doherty, Brian: “playa-human chimera” 145, 192, 195; This is Burning Man 145, 192 Dolan, Jill, Utopia in Performance 5 dominant ideology 9, 13, 15, 35, 37 doubling 25, 80, 164, 170 DPW (Department of Public Works) 145 “The Dust and the Ash” 193 “Dust City Diner,” Deep Playa 49 dust storm 30, 47, 50, 82

Index  209 ecological aesthetics 143 Eco, Umberto, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance” 186 Ehn, Erik, Eschata-Logos Word and Ruin 164 embodied otherness 13 embodied revolution 50, 134 emergent disidentification 43 Enlightenment 70, 105, 190 epistemology 81 Esherick, Joseph 154 event-based liminality 73 event-based revolution 4, 91, 135 “Everyone is invited to play” event 163 “Everyone is invited to work” event 163 exclusion zones 18, 32, 34–35, 148 Exquisite Corpse 198 extimacy 182 Facebook 20; post 133–134, 142n5 face-to-face encounters 63, 132 Federal Bureau of Land Management Rangers 130 fetishization 15 “The Fire and the Ash” short film 193 Foster, Susan, “Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion” 98 Foucault, Michel 1, 10–12, 14, 24, 137, 147–148, 152; “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” 1, 10–11, 27n10, 143; The Order of Things 11; “The Subject and Power” 92 friendship 183–184 Garber, Margery, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality 170 gender 95 geodesic domes 8, 30, 67 Gerlach, Nevada 155, 201 ghosts 25, 163–172; appearance vs. production of 174–176; performative language of 25, 163; unwelcome ghost 176–179 “Ghosts at the Temple” 164–170

gifts/gifting 19, 21, 34, 40, 48–50, 94; case study: Calum Grant 50–53; Kaisa 54–56, 55 “Go Green” policy 143 Grace, Andie 34 Grant, Calum 50–53 “Greening Your Burn,” The Jackrabbit Speaks 143 Guattari, Felix 183 Gulf War protests (1990s) 139 habitual identification 38, 100 Halprin, Lawrence 154 haptic memory 26, 49, 162, 182 Haraway, Donna, When Species Meet 95 Harrison, Robert Pogue, Dominions of the Dead 168–169 Hartley, George, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime 87n2 Harvey, Larry 7–8, 111 Hegel 15–16, 35, 87n2, 95 hegemony 12, 14, 61, 66, 76, 91, 133–134, 137, 141 Hennessy, Keith 21, 104; “Crotch” 96–99 heterochronia 66 heteroglossia 12–13, 36–37, 45, 103 heterotopia 5–7, 9–14, 16, 18, 21, 24–26, 27n2, 34, 37, 44, 49, 61, 63–64, 66, 72, 77, 81, 86, 91–92, 94, 96–97, 99, 103, 105, 132, 135, 143, 146–151, 156–158, 160–162, 164, 182, 191, 195, 201 Hualapai Playa 7, 27n4 Hunch magazine 68n5 Hunter, Lynette, Disunified Aesthetics: Situated Textuality, Performativity, Collaboration 88n15 identification 13, 21, 33, 64, 91–92, 94–96, 104; habitual 38, 100 identity-in-difference 43–45 immanent ideology 36, 105n5 immediacy/immediate experience 25–26, 40, 182–183 improvisational performance 107 inclusion zone 148

210 Index Ingegneri, Angelo 175–176 Instagram 20 James, Jerry 7 Johnson, Fenton: “Burning Man, Desire, and the Culture of Empire” 49; “Dust City Diner” 49 Kant, Immanuel 9, 81, 87n2, 87n4 Kellerman, Annette 131 Kertzer, David, Ritual, Politics, and Power 90 kinesthesia 15 knowledge production 5, 11–12, 95, 100, 102, 192, 204 labor 52–53 Lacan, Jacques 35–36, 64, 94; extimacy 76–77 landfills 24, 144–146 langue (language) 64, 66 Lap-Chuen, Tsang, The Sublime: Groundwork towards a Theory 87n1 large-scale burns 62–63, 86, 140, 150 Law Enforcement (LE) 23, 130–137, 141 Law, John 198–200 “Lawyers for Burners” organization 131 “Leave No Trace” event 24, 143, 146, 156–157 leaving no physical trace 23–24, 40, 143–159; guidelines 144 Lepecki, Andre 183; “Inscribing Dance” 181 Lettrist International 59 Letts, Tracy, Bug 181 Levinasian ethics 63, 77 liminality 72, 74–75, 86, 103, 190; liminal/liminoid 72–76, 99, 165 linear Sublime 81, 86 lived hegemony 12 living alienation 15 Lorde, Audre 43–44 lottery system for ticket sales (2012) 34 Lyndon, Donlyn 154

“M41 Motorway, Shepherd’s Bush, London” 137–142 Manning, Erin, Politics of Touch 183–184 Marriage, Helen 46n7; interview with BBC 44 Marxism 15 Massey, Doreen, “For Space” 149 McGlynn, Darran 39, 41 McKeever, Jennifer Smyth 38, 41 McKenzie, Jon, “The Liminal-Norm” 69, 74, 132–133 mediated encounters 132 meta-narrative 76, 81, 98 metaphorical language 169 methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMH) 142n6 MLTW architectural firm 154 monologic authority 13, 18, 25, 36–37, 61, 65–66, 141, 183 MOOP (Matter Out Of Place) 144–146 Moore, Charles, Body, Memory, Architecture 45, 149, 153–154 Munoz, Jose, Performing Disidentifications 43 “Mutant Vehicles” 8 Nevada Highway Patrol 130 Nevada State Department of Investigations (NDI) 130 Nevada State Health Division 130 Newsom, Gavin 2 normalized liminal 74 Northern Ireland 18, 38, 41–42, 44 Northern Nevada 24, 39 nudity 131 Orr, Graeme 46n17 other see self and other otherness 2–3, 9–10, 12–13, 15, 18, 24, 26, 32, 34–37, 65, 76, 92, 148–149, 196 parergon 71, 76, 87n4, 175 parole (speaking) 64, 66 participation 25, 40, 66, 161–163; consumption vs. 63; radical participation 25 Performance Studies 21–22, 25, 74, 94, 132–133, 163, 165

Index  211 performative language of ghosts 25, 163 Pershing County Sheriff’s Office 130 Phelan, Peggy, Mourning Sex 174 physical challenges 7 Pierpaolo, Antonello 92 Plato, “Allegory of the Cave” 189 playa 23, 24–25, 29–31, 39, 47, 50, 69, 131–132, 135, 142, 158, 161–162, 192 playa dust 25–26, 29, 47, 182, 187, 192–194, 194, 195, 196 “Plug and Play” camp 72, 87n6 pre-rationalized 14, 71, 94 Protestant Waterside 41 pyrotechnics 62–63, 100–101 radical change 4, 25, 86, 134, 182 Radical Inclusion 17–18, 29, 32–34, 37–38, 63, 83 radicalized self 45, 82, 86, 94 radical participation 25, 89 radical self-expression 10, 21, 89–92, 94, 96, 99, 105, 169 radical self-reliance 21, 69–72, 74, 76–77, 162 Rayner, Alice, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre 169–170, 175 Redwood Empire Disposal 157 Regional Burns 2, 7–8, 10, 33, 111 Regional Network of BM events 40 revolution 4–5 rhizome 184 Ridout, Nicholas, Theatre and Ethics 63 Roach, Joseph 173 Rosler, Martha,“Place, Position, Power, Politics” 150

selfhood 21, 25–26, 43, 45, 66, 70, 76–77, 81, 91, 93–94, 96, 103, 143, 164 self-preservation 9, 94, 96 self-recognition 64, 72, 80 self-sacrifice 21, 163 self-semiotization 93 self-separation 183 semiotics 61, 64–65, 95, 99 sensing body 13, 36, 146 sensory experiences 15, 26, 80, 104, 187 sensory knowledge 9 Sexton, Richard, Parallel Utopias 156 “Sideshow Physical Theatre” dance community 185 simulacrum 61–62, 65, 104, 155 site-specific event 7 Situationist International 21, 59 social change 1, 4–7, 12, 15, 38, 45, 90–91, 131–132, 150, 158, 162, 182 social media 19–20, 162; see also specific companies Sonoma County 153 Sonoma County Annapolis Transfer Station 157 space and time 9 Sparkleton, Nicole 54 spirituality 42 Spotto, Donald, The Dark Side of Genius 160 States, Bert O., Great Reckonings in Little Rooms 170–171 Sublime theory/Sublimity 70–74, 76–77, 79–81, 86, 87n1, 87n3; linear Sublime 81, 86; traditional Sublime 70, 74, 80, 82 symbolic sacrifice 21, 89, 99

Sandoval, Chela 43 Sea Ranch community 24, 148–150, 152–158 sectarianism 41 Segal, P. 198 self-affirmation 16, 18, 59, 63, 66, 74, 80, 85, 96, 103, 164 self and other 93–100, 191 self-awareness 69, 203 self-erasure 185, 189 self-expression 94–97, 99–100, 103

Temple Burn 8, 25, 29–32, 39–42, 44, 48, 165–168, 177–179, 182; 2016 32; AfrikaBurn 18, 33; “Ghosts at the Temple” 164– 170; materiality of temple as transformative space 170–174 Temporary Autonomous Zone 18, 23, 90, 100 “Ten Principles of Burning Man” 5, 7–9, 11, 15–19, 24, 33, 37–39; see also specific principles

212 Index theatrical performances 4, 8, 62, 64–65, 77, 84, 177, 182, 186 theatrical production 17, 65, 159, 175 theatrical representation of sacrifice 21 tickets for Burning Man 33–34, 53; 2011 ticket disaster 34; lottery system for ticket sales (2012) 34 Topinka, Robert, Foucault, Borges, and Heterotopia: Producing Knowledge in Other Spaces” 10–13 “Top of the Hill” 41 total freedom 12, 37, 103 trade-in policy 22 traditional Sublime 70, 74 transformative change 25 transgression 61, 74–75, 132–133, 137, 161, 204 trash fence 15 The Troubles 42, 44 truth 35, 95 Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and Disjunction 147, 204 Turnbull, William 154 Turner, Victor: liminal/liminoid 72–76; From Ritual to Theatre 72 “Turn-key camping” 87n6 2020 Rogue Burn 20 2021 Renegade Burn 20, 23, 134 Twitter 20 Tyneski, Frank 203

UC Davis campus 139 Uhaul truck 59, 67 unselfconscious communication 108 Van Gennep, Arnold 73, 75; limen (threshold) 73 Vasile, Olga 92 Venturi, Robert, Learning from Las Vegas 61 verfremdungseffekt 80, 194 Von Danger, Otto, “Burn Wall Street” 21, 60, 65–66 Vossoughian, Nader, “The Temporary City: Camps, Cowboys, and Burning Man” 61, 68n5 Washoe County Sheriff’s Office 130 Webb, Nicky 46n7 Weiskel, Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence 87n4 Whitaker, Richard 154 Williams, Raymond 15; Structures of Feeling 12, 14, 36 Zaumeyer, Lewis 89; sacrifice 89 zeitgeist 14 Zone of the Unknown 198 Zoomers 2