‘BECOMING’ IN A CAGE: TECHNOLOGIES OF THE ‘SELF-’, RELATIONALITY, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE PERFORMING

ARTS FESTIVAL AT BRAINCHILD 2013

Aitan Ebrahimoff Girton College, University of Cambridge Undergraduate Dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology May 2014

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To the Brainchildren for letting me into their world. To Gareth

for re-affirming my excitement for life at every turn. To my parents for keeping their children warm. To Bee for taking the

sting out the tail. And to a laptop for persevering through those gut-wrenching moments.

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ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic data of Brainchild 2013, a performing arts festival, I describe this

assemblage following Jacksons’ phenomenological approach to ethnography. Building on

this methodology, by reconciling ‘affect’ and ‘subjectivity’, I create the analytic of

technologies of the ‘self-’: firstly to emphasize how the performing arts festival requires us

to focus as much on the rhizomatic-strivings that generate these event spaces, as on how

these strivings attach to and generate other multiplicities; and secondly to acknowledge

that affect may be beyond perception but not conception and elaboration. By critically-

engaging descriptively-vivid anthropological insights from the fields of performance,

ritualized spectacle and ecstatic-celebration, an anthropology of the performing arts

festival—hitherto neglected in the literature—is offered.

Word Count: 9,692

I declare that this dissertation is substantially my own work and does not contain material

that has already been used to any substantial extent for a comparable purpose. Where

reference is made to the works of others the extent to which such work has been used is

indicated and duly acknowledged in the text.

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LIST OF FIGURES

Front Cover Brainchild’s official Logo, courtesy of the Brainchild Team.

*Top+The Brainchildren come together for a choral singing workshop. The ‘mindbodies’ in the centre of the circle resonate from the intensified vocal-vibrations emanating from the vocal-cords of those on its periphery. Performers, audience-members and co-ordinators, hold hands and share the same ground, immersed in a sea of sound.

[Bottom] A graffiti-artist at work. Graphics and ‘tags’ (or the pseudonym of the artist) have to be sprayed at immeasurable-speed; if not the paint drips down the canvas and the fine-lines of the craft are sabotaged.

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Fig. 4.0. The plateaus of stringed-multiplicities assembling this art installation, layer, converge and attach to one another, inviting (only the right kinds of) multiplicities to attach to it.

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Fig. 4.1. Those just in front of the band, mirror and feed-off of the vibrations being cast out into Steez Cafe; ploughing them back just as quickly as they come. One dancer maintains a captivated stare at the musicians as they weave through solos, continually brushing sweat from his forehead to not detract from his concentrated-de-individualizing.

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Fig. 4.2. Steez Cafe crammed full of Brainchildren, communing through dance, slipping into singularity, to generate the Steez Cafe Jam.

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Fig. 4.3. Romp Pomp in action. 25

Fig. 5.0. As the sun sets for the final time at Brainchild, around the Love Shack people dance with their shadows, take to hula-hooping, and celebrate in-time to the low-syncopated bass-lines of Reggae/Dub played by Brotherhood Soundsytem.

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Fig. 5.1. The Hive—or Oran’s ‘frame of the setting sun’—was designed as a hexagonal-structure by Abigail Portus and Roma Swords McDonnnell to raise awareness of declining bee populations. To deterritorialize and paraphrase one of Deleuze and Guattaris’ parables, here we find a becoming-bee of the Hive and a becoming-Hive of the bee (1987: 10). The Hive also contributed to Brainchild’s becoming in offering a meeting-point for idea-sharing and commonality. Photograph courtesy of Abigail Portus and Roma Swords McDonnnell.

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Fig. 5.2. Alon ‘in his element’: Fiddling with strangers’ shoes; chewing on his scarf; beaming at the lens; wearing what little’s left of his fancy-dress wardrobe; while the sun-bleached-grass of Merton Farm cradles him through the night.

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Fig. 5.3. The Brainchildren quickly get to work—drawing graphics, writing quips, anecdotes and scribbling proverbs—at the Brainchild Re-Launch. Photograph by Jackson Caines (2014).

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V

CONTENTS

Front Cover I Acknowledgements II Abstract III List of Figures IV

1. Introduction 1 Methodology: Research, Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Process 3

2. Situating an Anthropological Analysis 6 Bhaktinian Carnival 6 Performativity, Celebration, Ritualized Spectacle and Ecstasy 7 ‘Festival Studies’ 8

3. Meta-Theoretical Discusssions 11 The Affective Turn: Becoming Deleuzian 11 Reconciling Affect and Subjectivity: Technologies of the ‘Self-’ 13

4. Brainchild’s Becoming 16 Moving, Driving, Arriving 16 Ordered Disorder: Overcoming the Impasse of Post-Marxist Pessimism 16 Wave Propagation at a Steez Cafe Jam 20 Line and Strings: Poetry and Puppetry 23 Occupying a Subject Position 26

5. Concluding and Opening: Brainchild Re-Launches 30 Appendix 34 Bibliography 35

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1. INTRODUCTION The insurmountable sense that we are encased in individual bodies combined with the

knowledge that we perceive environments from unique perspectival views (Bergson 1946),

may begin to elucidate why we try endlessly to share our lives with others. Brainchild—a

performing arts festival which took place from the 5th to the 7th of July 2013 in Merton Farm,

Canterbury—was just one of these instances; and I was there, with seven-hundred others,

to make it happen. Indeed, by conducting this field-study I contributed to the generation of

the assemblage referred to as Brainchild 2013. It wasn’t ‘their’ festival, it was ‘our’ festival;

‘as Goethe writes, carnival “is a festival that really is not given to the people, but one the

people give themselves”’ (Ehrenreich 2006: 95).

To re-appropriate Goethe’s sentiment, following the Affective turn I offer a

description of Brainchild which acknowledges that ‘the people that gave this event to

themselves’ are in complex relations not just with other human beings, but also with ideas,

beliefs, technologies, inanimate objects, matter, energies, flows, waves and rhythms,

imperceptible rays and frequencies, all of which ‘compose the multiple milieux’ of Brainchild

(Henriques 2010: 60). This focus on relationality collapses dichotomies to the extent that

entrenched ontological distinctions become nothing less than perfectly compatible

resonating levels; ‘*affect] is their point of emergence, in their actual specificity’ (Massumi

2002: 94).

The analytic of relationality ‘captures’ this process of ‘co-enactment, co-emergence,

and co-evolution’ (Blackman & Venn 2010: 10). We can include in our ethnographic ‘sight’

that which cannot easily be put into words, but which is felt and propelled: the movement

which gives way to an event, the active outcome of encounter. But given this ontological

shift, how can we as anthropologists analyse the autonomy of affect in specific contexts?

With regards to the performing arts festival, how can we transpose such a vivifying

approach to moments of emergence such as Brainchild 2013? Affect theory is largely

unconcerned with meaning-making since affect is pre-subjective, non-human, bodily and

autonomic. How can we ethnographically study movement?

In following Yael Navaro-Yashin (2009) and Henrietta Moores’ (2011) critique of

Affect theory’s side-sweeping of the subject, I avoid paradigm-setting and framing

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contrasting theoretical persuasions in inviolable dichotomies, and rather describe Brainchild

in its own terms. This emphasis on ‘the middle’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987)—which allowed

me to construct the analytic of technologies of the ‘self-’—will be especially helpful in

achieving the necessary reconciliation between affect and subjectivity, in order to propose a

non-paradigmatic anthropology of the performing arts festival. In examining the personal

‘strivings’ (Faubion 2011: 46) of the Brainchildren—as well as that which is beyond

conscious-perception but not necessarily elaboration—I offer a context for understanding

this multiple-milieux and how and why it was conceived and realized.

As an all-encompassing environment Brainchild forced me to reconcile disciplinary

quandaries in order to best describe the lived-reality. This methodological and ethical

imperative has been inscribed in Brainchild’s Manifesto (2013) since Izzi and Marina

founded and organized their first festival in 2012. It proclaims that Brainchild was created

for the purpose of providing ‘an opportunity to explore art and ideas that challenge broken-

paradigms, and share visions for a more sustainable and compassionate society...It is

bringing people together that is truly important’. Through lectures, plays, stand-up comedy,

puppet shows, spoken-word poetry, participatory workshops, yoga classes, jams, open-mic

slots, and performances from some of the most talented contemporary young musicians

circulating around London, the Brainchild co-ordinators lower both imaginary and physical

barriers not only between persons or peoples, but also between academic and artistic

disciplines.

Research invites questions and these questions can only be explored if all scopes of

the imagination remain intact (Navaro-Yashin 2009). Defined as ‘organized sets of acts

performed to commemorate an event, person, deity, or the common identity of the

performers’ (Addo 2009: 218), contemporary performing arts festivals and carnivals are

conspicuously neglected in the anthropological literature (Waterman 1998; SOAS 2011). This

scholarly blind-spot is especially surprising considering the ubiquity of the performing arts

festival1 and the comparative relevance of rich channels of anthropological thought

emanating from the areas of performativity, ritual, celebration, ecstasy, dance and

embodiment. As well as describing Brainchild, this study aims to stimulate more research in

this emerging field.

I argue that existing (although scarce) academic studies of festivals and carnivals are

gravitating towards a ‘Marxist impasse’ which risks alienating researchers from the persons

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that could ‘co-produce’ such explorations. As moments of celebration, transcendence and

ecstasy (Turner 1982; Eliade 1964), communality and re-enchantment (Gardner 2004;

Kaphcan 1995), the task becomes transposing the anthropological insights into such

experiences to the performing arts festival. Since this field is at a critical stage of its

becoming, we need to apply a special sensitivity when exploring this relatively unearthed

and thus unscathed phenomenon to avoid confining the imaginative-scope of forthcoming

researchers.

In order to approach such questions, as well as reconciling affect and subjectivity (or

signification), I embrace Michael Jackson’s (1996: 42) naturalistic mode of analysis which

avoids locking social realities in theoretical ‘strongboxes’. This phenomenological approach

places primary experience and intellectual reflection on the same qualitative footing in

order to set productive dialogues in motion. Its reliance on ‘direct understanding’ and ‘in-

depth description’ methodologically prioritizes the fact that ‘the world is always in the

making, and our thoughts, like our actions, have meaning only in relation to the practical

and social life in which we are engaged’ (ibid.: 2-4). Thus in my descriptions of Brainchild,

informants’ congested life-worlds—their ever-multiplying positions, their slang-oriented,

poetic and even psychedelic vocabulary; their relations with humans and non-humans, the

organic, inorganic and bionic—are brought to the surface rather than a ‘polished-Avatar’

that suitably fits the framework of the intellectual’s essay. In other words, I am activating

the anthropological imperative of experiencing and describing ‘worlds from the ground up’

(ibid: 6).

Methodology: Research, Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Process

This immersive study relies on published works just as much as ethnographic detail to

inform descriptions and analyses of Brainchild in order to capture the concentrated,

vibratory, generative, and over-stimulating sensorium which is the performing arts festival.

Describing such an event space poses a great challenge to any ethnographer, let alone one

who’s still learning to walk. Thus, in order to sincerely describe this moment of emergence

my engagement had to overspill the bounds of the festival itself and tune in to the

associated literature. Moreover, the festival only lasted one weekend, so I had to be

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receptive to its wider becoming, to the ramifications of what has become an ongoing

yearlong arts platform, Brainchild Arts, and which continues to move as I write.

Despite this reliance on secondary-data, my ethnographic material drives my

criticisms of the literature discussed. Given the ubiquity of the performing arts festival there

is a great deal of room to conduct a quantitative study, however I have chosen to rely

largely on qualitative data with the aim of enriching the study’s scope with the countless

perspectival views that generate Brainchild. In this way I was able to draw my conclusions

from lived festival experiences (Wilkinson 2007: 31-32).

In order to acquire this data, I assumed the role of active member, and was thus

both participant and observer. Social boundaries between persons were already diminished

by the fact of being at a festival, so having conversations and conducting open or semi-

structured interviews, recording them and securing informant’s consent to use and publish

their narratives, were easy enough processes to initiate. Despite being eager to sink their

teeth into the festival programme, the Brainchildren were remarkably willing to participate

in the study and offer their thoughts and feelings; some even seemed to relish the

opportunity to take a reflective moment to consider what lay before them. In the months

following Brainchild, after transcribing the thirty or so interviews I conducted at the festival,

I then proceeded to conduct lengthier, more rigorous and idea-focused follow-up interviews

with the festival organisers, as well as sitting in on a full-committee meeting where the

Brainchild Team discussed the structural, ideational and logistical direction of Brainchild

2015, the next festival in the series.

With regards to anonymity, informants were largely ambivalent about their real

identities being used for the study. Some were even eager to be formally aligned to the

event that was taking place. Thus, I have preserved anonymity where I feel sharing

informant’s real identities is ethically precarious, if not explicitly requested already.

My participation in the festival and its counterparts—such as the Re-Launch Party and Steez

events dotted around South London—and thus with the Brainchildren was partially stunted

by the fact that I am not an ‘artistic-performer’. Indeed, Robert Gardner (2004) encountered

a similar hindrance when studying the Rockymountain bluegrass scene. It was not until he

‘established *himself+ as a bluegrass guitar player, or “flatpicker”, that *he+ was able to gain

the respect and camaraderie of the more advanced players as well as local professionals

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who frequented the local scene’ (Gardner 2004: 161). Thus my active-participation in

playing bass-guitar during jam-sessions or rapping over MC-battles was non-existent, and

thus my ability to understand such events is perhaps limited.

Nevertheless, despite this talent-gap, I could always engage as an audience member.

Moreover, by conducting this study I was performing and I could thus overcome the implicit

phenomenological barrier between myself and the artists using the ethnographic process as

a launching-pad. Both performance and ethnography ‘[give] meaning to experience’: like

performance, ethnography is intersubjective; reliant on an audience, a community or a

group through which a ‘living script in which meaning is emergent’ can be co-produced or

performed (Kapchan 1995: 483-84). This aligns with Jackson’s phenomenological approach

to ethnography (1998) which emphasizes how the task of ethnography is not to ‘know the

other’, nor ‘to change the lives of others’; rather its worth lies in its power to ‘describe

intersubjective life’ in the hope of understanding those ‘rare moments...when self and other

are constituted in mutuality and acceptance rather than violence and contempt’ (Jackson

1998: 208). From this perspective, my distance from the so-called ‘other’ (the artist)

becomes insignificant, since we each possess unique perspectival views, and we each

constantly dip into the vast pool of perception to construct our conceptions (Bergson 1965:

133).

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2. SITUATING AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

In order to begin exploring the anthropology of the performing arts festival and Brainchild

2013, it is necessary to first review the vast channels of literature that can be related to this

project and field.

Bhaktinian Carnival

Bhaktin’s (1984) seminal examination of François Rabelais’ rich descriptions of carnival in

the Middle Ages and the Renaissance takes the reader into a world of subversion and

communal renewal. As the ‘cousin’ of the performing arts festival (Johansson & Koziakiewicz

2011: 395), carnival obliterates and mocks hierarchies through humour and play: ‘[in] fact,

carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction

between actors and spectators’ (Bhaktin 1984: 7). A ‘second world’ a ‘second life’ is built

outside of officialdom, in retaliation against the ruling elite. This suspension of civilité (Elias

1994) invites ‘a special type of communication impossible in everyday life’ (Bhaktin 1984:

10). Such communality can be seen in Mckim Marriott’s vivid ethnography (1966) of Holi

play in Kishan Garhi, a rural village in North India. She describes how ‘unilateral love of every

kind flooded over the usual compartmentalization and indifference among separated castes

and families’ (1966: 212).

The wisps of change or even revolution threaten to overthrow the normative order,

to re-centre folk-culture, but ultimately this ‘second life’ remains a fugue state of the

prevailing socio-political order. Carnivals, celebrations, festivals, both religious and secular,

can be seen to ‘transform a deeply felt political urge (the urge for substantive social change,

or revolution) into a recuperative project for capitalism’ (Hickel 2012). Far from disrupting

the prevailing order, such events entrench it. Thus, carnival lends itself to post-Marxist

critique: it is after all ‘a “licensed” affair...a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and

relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art’ (Eagleton 1981: 148). Such analyses

mirror Harvey’s ‘bread and circuses’.2

Thus, Bhaktin intentionally provides a notion of utopia that is not necessarily

revolutionary, that has been approximated in institutions of the past, and ‘that keeps a

viable connection with the requirements of institutionally structured social life’ (LaCapra

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2003: 53-4). From this perspective the revolutionary rhetoric that underlies many instances

of festivity, including Brainchild 2013, appears futile and idealistic. The festivals and

carnivals that we know (and often love) challenge the order, but order is their

presupposition. Bhaktin’s stature as a social theorist is limited since ‘he does not extend his

vision to encompass alternative institutions suitable to modern conditions’ (LaCapra 2003:

53). The performing arts festival provides the keystone to transporting Bhaktin’s

carnivalesque to the present and using it to form a dialogue with the lived-reality.

Performativity, Celebration, Ritualized Spectacle and Ecstasy

The festival’s evasion of anthropological attention is paralleled by spectacle which has

received relatively less attention than other aspects of ritual (Addo 2009: 218). Spectacle is a

useful conceptual-bridge between contemporary religious festivals and secular festivals. As

Ping-Ann Addo notes, in contemporary festivals ‘audiences and performers often coincide in

ritualized spectacle’ (2009: 218) thus invoking Bhaktin’s carnivalesque while dissolving the

religious/secular binary which prevents investigations of ritual attaching to the multiplicity

of the performing arts festival. Without denying the comparative difference between the

phenomena, the two domains can be simultaneously embraced.

The existing literature on ritualized spectacle provides a useful comparison for the

study of performing arts festivals because of their shared cyclical, performative and

symbolic nature. Indeed, ‘the myriad, true meanings and histories of festivities are

accessible mainly by repeatedly participating in them, while maintaining a sense of their

transformative potential for oneself’ (Addo 2009: 231). Religious or sacred festivals which

use performance to convey religious discourse and to stimulate transcendental experiences

have been described by Deborah Kapchan (2008) as ritual revisitings. Their promise of ‘sonic

translation’ and ‘re-enchantment’ subverts Weber’s (1930) damning premonition of the

‘disenchantment of the world’. Anthropological studies of ritualized spectacle have not

sufficiently cross-pollinated such insights with the domain of secular or non-religious—

though not necessarily non-transcendental—festivals.

Nevertheless, there are some timeless anthropological studies conducted on ritual,

festivity and performativity, most notably in Victor Turner’s large body of work. In

Celebration, Turner begins by emphasizing the universal prevalence of festivity and noting

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that ‘*all] cultures commemorate what makes them distinctive and worthy in their own

eyes’ (1982: 7). Alluding to Durkheim’s anomie, Turner argues that with increasing

industrialization, urbanization, and the stress on individualism, ‘the occasions of personal

crisis multiply exceedingly as compared with “tribal” or rurally based societies’ (ibid: 25). To

overcome such tribulations Turner encourages us to be more ‘“liminoid” than “liminal,” that

is, take our crises and transitions into our own hands, ritualize them, make them

meaningful, and pass through and beyond them in a spirit of celebration’ (ibid: 26).

The underlying performativity that characterizes Turner’s approach is found in the

intensified reflexivity that comes with celebration (see Hanna 1988; Kapchan 1995: 479-

80).3 The sensory-overwhelming that comes with festivity envelops the individual

committing each and every person to what Turner called communitas (Kapchan 1995: 479-

80).

This understanding of collective ritualized spectacle links to investigations of

shamanic techniques of ecstasy. Mircea Eliade’s deep and vivifying explorations of shamanic

ritual emphasise the importance of music, dancing and performance in achieving states of

trance. It is by ‘animating the drum’ and dancing that the shaman is able to incarnate the

primordial condition and fly away to the Cosmic Tree (Eliade 1964: 171). This again alludes

to festivals’ ability to ‘re-enchant’ the world and sow up the flaying of the ‘mythical womb'

(Nietzche 1993).

Such observations are highly valuable and perfectly transportable to analyses of the

performing arts festival. As a field of inquiry, the performing arts festival lies as the interface

of some of the most intoxicating anthropological areas; the challenge is simply exploring

and engaging with these multiplicities.

‘Festival Studies’

As Stanley Waterman proclaims, this is no ‘esoteric aesthetic topic’, performing arts festivals

are events of sociological, geographical, and anthropological concern (1998: 55). Due to the

increased demand for spectacle, entertainment and performances, policymakers in the UK

and beyond have learned to capitalise off this stimulus by using festivals as a way to

promote cities. Consequently, since the 1990s, there has been an enthusiastic academic

response from the fields of urban and regional studies and tourism where a new subfield of

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‘Festival Studies’ is rapidly gaining recognition (Waitt 2008; SOAS 2011). From these

approaches scholars are interested in power-relations and how festival coordinators and

urban planners compose the ‘festival gaze’ and thus direct audiences’ bodies and thoughts

to captivating areas of the city in order to boost tourism and improve the city’s stake in a

fiercely competitive market.

When licensed, as most events are today, the festival is bounded to a specific time

and space where spontaneity and bodily encounters are guided by bureaucratic structures

that extinguish the ‘disordering’ and ‘reordering’ potential of the carnivalesque spirit

(Jamieson 2004: 68). Thus, the moments of ecstasy and overspilling that are associated with

festivity are relegated to ‘profitable pseudo-transgressions’ which create the deflating-effect

of ‘ordered disorder’ (ibid). In such circumstances any ‘sense of collective identity can only

be illusory’ (Waitt 2008: 521). Festival-goers are ‘tricked’ into seeing spaces’ ‘colourful

sides’, and those considered to tarnish these rose-tinted vistas—namely the homeless but

also local residents—are ‘rendered invisible by the geographical and social boundaries of

festival spaces’ (ibid: 71). Far from inclusive and subversive, class differences are polarized

by policing and planning (Johansson & Koziatkiewicz 2011).

There is a large body of literature which supports this view of festivals as exclusive, profit-

hungry, fortifying event spaces, where normative communitas prevails within the cage of

the metal fencing which often encases the festival space. Such studies note how festivals

are ‘increasingly accessible to cultural outsiders as commodities or touristic experiences

afforded by contemporary global forces and movements’ (ibid: 231). This approach strays so

far from Bhaktin’s utopia that even as an analytic it begins to appear obsolete.

Yet at the same time, research alludes to the experientially intimate modes of

communication that festivity inspires (Gardner 2004; Bowditch 2010). What we thus find is

(at least) a double-movement. Firstly, one which opens up the potential for commonality,

communality and the subversion of entrenched hierarchies in anticipation of ‘universal

renewal’ through the experience of what Durkheim called effervescence (1915); and,

secondly, one which erects physical and policed cages, passages and fortified cells, that rip

through the social fabric at its most playful and vulnerable and solidify the cleavages that

are practiced, structured and structuring through habitus (Bourdieu 1990). ‘*Both+ structure

and antistructure are present’ (Turner 1982: 24). Therefore, to sincerely describe

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performing arts festivals as assemblages all antipodes of the imagination must remain

active. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes remarks, this involves an acknowledgement that carnival

and festivals are ‘heterogeneous, open, and polysemic, full of ambiguities and

contradictions’ (1992: 482).

The need for such a panoramic awareness is illustrated most poignantly by Robert

Futrell’s analysis of the U.S. White Power Movement’s music scene. Following Durkheim’s

effervescence (1915), through singing, dancing, raving and drinking, it is found that WPM

activists ‘identify with and commit to one another as they collectively participate in music

performances’ (ibid). While camaraderie is bolstered among activists, racialist ideals are

intensified to derogate the racial other beyond the scene’s physical settings. Scheper-

Hughes’ study of carnaval (1992) also proves indicative.4

The contemporary literature on carnivals and festivals calls our attention to the

multivocality and multivalency that underlies such ‘celebratory’ events (Turner 1982: 16).

Neo-Marxist critiques are used to critically challenge preconceptions of these events as

purely inclusive, inspiring a commonality and vitality in all who engage with it. These

scholars highlight the gentrification, fortification and segregation that ethnographers should

be wary of when encountering such multiplicities. However, the agents of this scholarly

movement must be wary of constructing essentialisms and preconceptions of their own.

The binaries of inclusivity/exclusivity, self/other, inside/outside, subject/object are invoked

and there is always the risk of such dichotomies remaining Cartesian in nature rather than

transforming into dialectics which feed into one another and rhizomatically draw our

attention to other understandings of such a field (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). These

understandings, or ‘multiplicities’ (ibid: 8), can be heterogeneous, yet still each can propel

the generation of the other. The anthropological literature on performativity, celebratory-

ecstatic-states and ritualized spectacle can fulfil this purpose. The festival as a fully-

immersive event-space thus requires us to look beyond what an event might look like from

the ‘poles’ of theoretical spectrums and instead to look to the middle, to the ‘plateaus’

which comprise it, where movement becomes a presupposition and theoretical strong boxes

have no place (ibid: 21).

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3. META-THEORETICAL DISCUSSIONS

Affect theory can provide a very useful and neutral approach to describing Brainchild and

performing arts festivals more generally. By treating movement and change rather than

stasis as the presupposition of the universe (Bergson 1946) we can begin to consider the

‘logical consistency, and even ontological status’, of Brainchild rather than understanding it

purely in relation to the ‘fallacy’ of the ‘already-constituted’ (Massumi 2002: 70), i.e. as a

negation or subversion of the norm. Before I utilise this approach it is necessary to first

discuss what affect means and the possibilities it unravels; the theoretical and

methodological problems it poses to ethnographers and how they can be reconciled.

The Affective Turn: Becoming Deleuzian

The affective turn can be seen as a reaction against social constructivism, its assertion that

‘everything, including nature, is constructed in discourse’ and therefore its

anthropocentrism (Massumi 2002: 38; Foucault 1983: XI). Affect theory is a productive

experiment in nomadism—the ultimate aim being to extinguish the drive that causes us ‘to

desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’, power (Foucault 1983: XIII). This is

achieved through displacement; to ‘de-individualize’ (ibid: XIV).

Here the emphasis is on movement rather than essence. What unites affect theorists

according to Henrietta Moore ‘is an affirmative politics that not only situates the human

among the vital forces in the world, but locates it within sets of complex relationalities—

networks, rhizomes—that cannot be figured through linear causal explanations’ (2011:

170). We are becoming with the universe. We are part of a generative flow.

The stirrings of this ontology can be found in the seventeenth-century, in the

meditations of Benedict de Spinoza (1994). His affectus ‘refers to a sensation which may

move through the subject, but it is not known to it’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009: 12). Thus, the

mindbody is penetrable by imperceptible forces, ‘a form of potentiality actualized’ (Moore

2011: 177). As Massumi explains, the mindbody as this implicit form ‘is a bundling of

potential functions, an infolding or contraction of potential interactions,’ the ‘capture’ of

affect (2002: 34). Indeed, ‘[the] limits of the field of emergence are in its actual expression’

(ibid: 35). Therefore, emergence is two-sided: ‘one side in the virtual (the autonomy of

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relation), the other in the actual (functional limitation)....Affect is this two-sidedness as seen

from the side of the actual thing, as couched in its perceptions and cognitions’ (Massumi

2002: 35). Affect is thus only limited by that which embodies it. ‘Actually existing, structured

things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of

affect’ (ibid: 35).

In Deleuze and Guattaris’ (1987) A Thousand Plateaus the rhizome connotes the

autonomy, mobility and synesthetic capacity of affect. As was noted above, affect is the

middle, consisting of plateaus, rhizomes or multiplicities that can be connected to any other

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7), synthesizing and generating new actualities from the virtual

(Massumi 2002: 37). The multisemiosis that Turner attributes to celebration—how ecstasy

emerges not from separate entities, but rather ‘clusters made up of objects, actions,

sounds, states, odours, contacts’ (Turner 1982: 19)—aligns wih the rhizome.

Although Spinoza has had a significant impact on the becoming of Affect theory, it is

really the meta-physicist Henri Bergson that paved the way for this ontological shift. For

Bergson, life is that excess which pushes matter beyond itself. The movement of the present

(the actual) brings the necessity of invention to the accumulation of the past (the virtuality

of memory).

Movement is reality itself, and what we call immobility is a certain state of things analogous to that produced when two trains move at the same speed, in the same direction: each of the two trains is then immovable to the travellers seated in the other (Bergson 1965: 143-44).

Stasis may be the prerequisite for our action, but it is fictitious and thus problematic

when it becomes the presupposition of speculation; it establishes dichotomies that cannot

be reconciled since they have no basis in perception. Take colour: ‘if each shade has any

objective existence at all, it is an infinitely rapid oscillation, it is change’ (Bergson 1946: 146).

Indeed, states are never clearly divisible; ‘[they] interpenetrate without clear distinction’

(Grosz 2011: 31). Static thinking or ‘tree’ thinking (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) renders us

‘unable to see in materiality the same potential for dynamism and unpredictability that [we]

are likewise unable to discern in life’ (Grosz 2011: 31). Life is propelled by constant

invention since even if a state is formally identical to its predecessor, it is itself plus its

predecessor plus the entire virtuality of memory. The immobility of matter, in opposition to

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the mobility of life, is illusory. Matter’s indeterminacy is harnessed by life, and life is

constantly threatening to return to the inorganic from which its body is drawn.

Deleuze clearly extracts orientations from Bergson’s vast pools of thought, but ‘is

less interested in life as lived...than he is in that part of life which cannot be lived by a

subject’ (Grosz 2011: 35). Deleuze is interested in presubjective forces that are more chaotic

or rhizomatic than the actualized bundles of potential that they form. This amounts to a

project that captures moments of emergence, the most vivid example of which is the child

surfing the wave back to shore5, an emergence through which

the subject diverts momentarily into singularity, when the personal gives way to the impersonal and the living connects with and is driven by events beyond it....It is this concept of life that Deleuze himself invents, but invents only through the lineage of intellectual becomings that made his writings possible (Grosz 2011: 38-9).

Reconciling Affect and Subjectivity: Technologies of the ‘Self-’

Navaro-Yashin (2009) argues that the affective turn (away from subjectivity and

signification) is reductive and narrows our scope for describing moments of emergence. As

Turner argues in Celebration, ‘*language+ is, no doubt, only...the dead husk of the living

celebratory fruit, but it remains the most efficient means of expressing and communicating

thoughts and feelings among members of a human community’ (1982: 19). Affect as pre-

subjective movement, as intensities and energies, as autonomic, risks not adequately

acknowledging other peoples’ ontologies of affect (Moore 2011: 203). Indeed, signification

inheres in human relationality with the world. Just as according to affect theory, formed,

qualified, situated perceptions ‘capture’ affect, so too affect theory can be seen to ‘capture’

life-worlds.

However, critics of affect theory must also be wary of ‘capturing’ affect theory for

this ontological shift may still preserve a space for local ontologies of affect. The orientation

of affect theory certainly sides with ‘process’ over ‘signification’ (Massumi 2002); thus I

embrace Navaro-Yashin and Moores’ critique. My argument is simply that within the body

of literature known as affect theory we can find ways to reconcile affect and subjectivity.

One such analytic is Massumi’s (2002) ‘self-’. ‘The hyphen is retained as a reminder

that ‘self’ is not a substantive but rather a ‘relation’ (ibid: 14). This analytic is especially

14

valuable to analyses of performing arts festivals since it acknowledges the perceptible and

imperceptible ways in which persons, rather than just collectives, engage with assemblages;

in this case Brainchild 2013.

Yet what is also required in order to describe Brainchild 2013 as an ‘event’, is an

emphasis on persons’ unique becomings; their intentions and ambitions when entering ‘the

cage’; how they develop thereafter; and the ethics they generate by engaging with other

persons, other practices, vibrations, ideas, smells, sounds, tastes, and the infinite variables

that collided to produce Brainchild. This thirst to learn and develop both throughout the

weekend and with Brainchild’s becoming is a movement which I cannot ignore, and only

paradigm-setting prevents it from entering this analysis.

Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ provides this emphasis on the ethics of the subject.

Techniques or technologies of the self become part of disassembling the self. This is

inextricably linked to the nomadic project underlying affect theory—to ‘de-individualize’.

‘The mode of being to which Foucault was committed is captured in his ambiguous formula

“to release oneself from one self”’ (Rabinow 1994: XXXVIII).

The ‘Middle Foucault’ has most heavily influenced anthropology, propagating a

‘bleakly totalizing vision of societies as systems of power/knowledge, where domination and

resistance are necessary, pervasive, and mutually implicating aspects of all social relations’

(Laidlaw 2002: 322). This vision finds explicit form in Discipline and Punish (1977) where the

panopticon traps the subject of biopolitics in a ‘cruel ingenious cage’ in which ‘the body is

reduced to a political force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force’.

The ‘Late Foucault’ returned to place a greater emphasis on the freedom of the

individual, on the ethics of the self, on the technologies adopted to make oneself a certain

kind of self. Such a shift is not necessarily incongruous with Foucault’s earlier capillarisation

of power, since for Foucault what is meant by power is relations of power and these

relations just as easily cannot exist without being able to exercise freedom (Foucault 1994b:

285). Just as power is everywhere, freedom is everywhere. The conscious practice of

freedom within power-relations is considered the very definition of ethics in antiquity.

Foucault’s analytic enables us to explore the practices which allow a person to ‘make

of themselves a certain kind of person’ (Laidlaw 2002: 327). This can be reconciled with

affect theory when we consider that caring for the self was a true social practice; it can also

15

mean ‘the attention one devotes to the care that others should take of themselves’

(Foucault 1990: 53). Similarly to Massumi, Foucault conceived of the self as a relation rather

than a substantive. In every multiplicity ‘one establishes a different type of relationship to

oneself’ (Foucault 1994b: 290). Thus, to invoke Massumi’s ‘self-’ the analytic of technologies

of the ‘self-’ is produced which symbolically acknowledges that caring for the self is a

relational process. The allusion to affect connotes how the becoming of technologies of the

‘self-’ involves an engagement not just with the self and other human agents, but also all

other implicit forms (the actual) and formless potentialities (the virtual).

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4. BRAINCHILD’S BECOMING

Moving, Driving, Arriving As I drove towards Merton farm I was not alone. I was travelling with one young couple—

one of whom is a budding young artist, and the other an up-and-coming actress—who

planned to co-produce an art installation which sent you into a miniature neon-parallel-

universe covered in dayglo-slime. The other passenger, Alon, was a wild-young-soul from

London who proceeded to shriek out the window with excitement as we approached

Canterbury. The anticipation and vitality that filled that vehicle had been gathering steam

from the moment we became aware of Brainchild and the fact that we would contribute

towards its becoming and it would contribute to our own strivings.

The car was ushered off a country lane by a luminous-orange jacket filled by a

steward who was juggling a makeshift-cardboard-cut-out reading ‘Brainchild This Way’. Our

tickets were casually glossed over, preferably to our faces and bodies, until they granted us

access. I then misguidedly proceeded to drive towards a small herd of cows, a barking dog,

and a barn crammed with a razor-sharp plough. We re-negotiated the terrain and managed

to locate a parking space on the plateau that is Merton farm. I switched off the engine and

my passengers leapt out the vehicle and proceeded to perform shoulder stands, cart-

wheels, and some ecstatic Kung-Fu sequences upon the thick grass of the farm. We ripped

off our shirts to soak in the rays of the burning mid-day sun, and started to heap our things

onto the arms we’d made into forklifts. I looked ahead of me and saw the entire festival

space demarcated by metal fencing. What would become of us, and all the Brainchildren,

that weekend, in that cage, I was yet to learn. It has occurred to me since that this, like

many other instances of festivity, carnival and celebration, was a space of intensified

generativity, movement and stimulation. Here was the perfect place to investigate persons

as ‘complex relata’ rather than ‘atomic units’ (Faubion 2011: 119).

Ordered Disorder: Overcoming the Impasse of Post-Marxist Pessimism

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art (Nietzsche 1993: 18).

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For the founders of Brainchild ‘the unplanned is as important as the programmed’ (Goodwin

2013), and this presupposes that despite the ‘structure’ implemented by the festival co-

ordinators the audience is given free-reign to improvise and participate. Like Bhaktin’s

carnival, the aim is for the lines to be blurred between audience and performer (Bhaktin

1984: 7). On one occasion, when Izzi was in the process of painting my face to make me look

like a blow-fish—constructing the shamanic mask to draw me closer to ecstasy (Eliade

1964)—she ironically mentioned how ‘we don’t just want paintings on walls, we want

people painting’. This blurring of boundaries was spatially achieved by having no back-stage

or VIP area, a ground level stage (or non-stage) in Steez Cafe and The Forum, and a

communal camping area for performers, audience-members and the Brainchild co-

ordinators. Brainchildren floated around Merton farm with no physical boundaries

preventing them from interacting—except, crucially, with the world beyond. Moreover,

through various workshops—such as choral singing, morning yoga, and ‘open-mic’

sessions—the Brainchildren were encouraged to either display their own work, and thus

stimulate their strivings, or participate in Brainchild’s becoming as well as engage with

others, thus forming creative communitas.

But to what extent was the audience/performer dichotomy dissolved? Alon

coincidentally appeared to be one of the most outwardly revelrous persons at Brainchild;

perfectly placed to test the limitations of audience participation. He became Brainchild’s

unofficial mascot, willingly distributing his fancy dress to strangers, often wearing a brightly

coloured, over-sized, top-hat to lift our spirits. He found himself climbing on to a multi-

dimensional art installation that stacked plateaus of geometric patterns made of nylon

strings on top of one another, producing the visual effect of multiple harps revolving around

one another (see Fig. 4.0). He was yelled at and warned to get off the structure. He felt

patronized and misunderstood and remarked on the altercation as a ‘blip’. He ‘wanted to be

a part of the art, or the art itself’. His attempt at participation was understood as too

disordered and an encroachment on the ‘programmed’ and intentional—he was considered

too heterogeneous to attach to this multiplicity.

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[Fig. 4.0 – The plateaus of stringed-multiplicities assembling this art installation, layer, converge and attach to one another, inviting (only the right kinds of) multiplicities to attach

to it]

Another incident is indicative. On the very first night, one male informant decided to

put on a night-dress and smear his face with his sister’s make-up. After a couple of hours of

ecstatic dancing and enthusiastic-drinking, he unfortunately reached his alcohol-saturation

point. He began to vomit into available receptacles. Within minutes a first aider ushered him

to the medical tent. I swiftly followed offering a spare pair of hands and comforting words if

they were needed. After a few reassuring utterances and an assessment of the condition of

the now ‘patient’, the first aider produced a disclaimer and a medical kit; inside the case was

an injection loaded with a sedative. The sharp glint of the injection miraculously sobered the

patient and his body began to accelerate away from the temporary hospital-bed—obliged

by the wide exit of the canvas-medical-tent—dress flowing behind him, in order to continue

dancing for what remained of the evening.

These moments of emergence highlight how for the ‘unplanned’ to be deemed

acceptable it must first be in ‘the planned’. This mirrors Foucault’s critique of the

constraining and dominating function of the disciplines: that before discourse is considered

true ‘it must obey the rules of discursive policing’ (1984: 119). Order prevails in this

supposedly ‘freeing’ Dionysiac realm. Despite the liberating utterances emanating from the

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Brainchild co-ordinators, the spontaneous ‘happenings’ could only occur within a ‘planned’

and ‘intentional’ framework.

A comparison can be made with Rachel Bowditch’s (2010) ethnography of Burning

Man, the infamous, radical, and self-sustaining performing arts festival that takes place in

the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. Understood as contemporary Saturnalias, at both

performing arts festivals people wear outrageous costumes; people scream and shriek

joyfully at will; and people slip incidentally into sexual encounters (Bowditch 2010: 135). Yet

there is a paradox that plagues both festivals in that first rules have to be accepted, and

then ‘there is room for infinite artistic freedom and experiences’ (ibid: 136). Thus, normative

communitas prevails (ibid: 156). If anything gets out of hand the agents of authority

intervene. Indeed, despite its small size, Brainchild had a strong security presence; it had a

caged perimeter out of which you could not leave after ten in the evening; and, as one

informant pointed out, there was a patrol car that surveyed the perimeter regularly. Some

informants felt encroached upon by this constant Panoptical-surveillance.

This description employs the post-Marxist analytic of city festivals and carnivals referred to

above. This ‘capture’ reduces Brainchild 2013 to a mere extension of the prevailing

globalising, but not necessarily universalizing, capitalist order—Harvey’s ‘bread and

circuses’. I don’t doubt that these scholars are using the appropriate analytics for their

respective field sites, I am merely stressing that in order to craft an anthropology of the

performing arts festival there needs to be an explicit acknowledgement between such

authors that what we have here is a phenomenon that takes many guises.

Such paradigm-setting would risk me not learning from Marina that the cage had to

be sealed by ten every evening in order lower door-security costs. Such an approach would

risk me not accepting that if Alon was granted his required amount of freedom one artist’s

work could have been destroyed—as was the case at Brainchild 2012 when graffiti artists

‘tagged’ a meticulously painted mural. Moreover, although the first-aider appeared to be

taking extreme measures, it is certainly less regrettable to err on the side of caution in such

unpredictable circumstances. Finally, such a detachment from the field risked me not

listening to Marcelle, the head of security, when he proudly exclaimed

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We haven’t had a single problem the whole weekend. We simply match your lot’s reaction. I was playing with bubbles last night, I’m even wearing flip-flops. This is the most chilled out, enjoyable festival, with the best nature, that we’ve ever done.

In the case of Brainchild 2013, adopting a Marxian approach would not adequately

‘capture’ Brainchild’s becoming. What else can we, as anthropologists, expect but ordered

disorder from a late-Capitalist multiplicity? Such an approach only leads us to an

unproductive impasse. It certainly reflects a certain side of the movement, but it is

necessary to keep moving.

Wave Propagation at a Steez Cafe Jam

[Interpretations] offered by specialists and laypersons are not enough to give us an adequate understanding of celebratory symbols. We have to view them in action, in movement, in becoming, as essentially involved in process (Turner 1982: 19).

Part of this process involves observing and enmeshing with bodies and vibrations, and

acknowledging how bodies inculcate and transpose affect as they assemble the multiplicity

of an event. Here I’d like to apply Julian Henriques’ ‘wave propagation model’ (2010) to a

jam session that took place in Steez Cafe on the second night of Brainchild.

Henriques proposes that the propagation of vibrations could serve as a better model

for understanding the transmission of affect than the flow of bodies by which it is most

often theorized (2010: 57). Vibrations, and thus affect, are transmitted through various

mediums—be they corporeal, material, or socio cultural (ibid). ‘Vibrations also propagate in

different wavebands through a wide variety of media’ thus aligning with the rhizome’s

ability to connect with heterogeneous multiplicities (ibid: 58-59; Deleuze & Guattari 1987).

I was sitting on a chewed-up sofa admiring the guitarists’ light, bluesy finger-picking

and listening to the tapping of the snare-drum. I sat there for a couple of hours talking to

strangers, or friends of friends; admiring the flow of people that were entering Steez Cafe;

watching them rhythmically pulsate their knees with the beat; slowly being tugged towards

the bar to quench their sun-sapped throats.

The rushing intensity of the flow of people turned up the amplifiers. Sound engineers

began to twiddle their fingers and squint their eyes, acting as puppets to the crowd’s

movements. A harsh squeak produced by feedback-loops between the microphone and

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amplifiers would assault the crowd’s ears, jolting their bodies, twisting the sound-engineers

dials counter-clockwise.

People stared at the ceiling, the floor, their muddy shoes or feet, and eventually

some closed their eyes to feel the vibrations of the music drum through them, losing their

self-consciousness, diverting into singularity. As the temperature and humidity of the tent

began to rise, the sweat emanating from persons’ bodies simultaneously affirmed their

status as entirely corporeal and melted the crowd into a ‘collective’ entity. As Henriques’

observes, what makes the crowd especially interesting is that it is both singular and plural:

‘the one-who-is-many and the many-who-are-one’ (2010: 67). In reference to Radcliffe-

Brown’s The Andaman Islanders (1964), Stanley Tambiah (1985) makes a similar point about

individuals being enveloped by collective ritual through the example of dance. ‘The

peculiarity of the force in question’, Tambiah observes, ‘is that it acts upon the individual

both from without (as a collective performance) and from within (since the impulse to yield

comes from his own organism)’ (1985: 124). In this way ritualized spectacle generates

communitas and effervescence.

[Fig. 4.1 – Those just in front of the band, mirror and feed-off of the vibrations being cast out into Steez Cafe—ploughing them back just as quickly as they come. One dancer maintains a captivated stare at the musicians as they weave through solos, continually brushing sweat

from his forehead to not detract from his concentrated-de-individualizing]

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[Fig. 4.2 – Steez Cafe crammed full of Brainchildren, communing through dance, slipping into singularity, to generate the Steez Cafe Jam]

The musicians were de-centered. The sound-waves’ collision—creating the rhythm, timbre,

tempo, and melody of music—became the subject of play (Massumi 2002: 73). The amassed

heat of the room made the higher frets of the guitar just that much easier to reach with the

loosening of the guitarists’ finger and wrist joints; and the picking of those strings generated

a deeper impression on the crowd, creating more energy and movement. The ‘epidermal

envelope’ is tacitly breached and the image of the ‘individual’ enveloped by a multiplicity is

realized in the movement of the Steez Cafe jam. ‘The crowd’s exertion brings to the fore a

corporeality that literally pulsates with cycles of exertion and rest, sweating and cooling off’

(Henriques 2010: 69). As the music winds down for a brief interval, the beat keeps going in

the background and the crowd knows it is time to recuperate. The bar suddenly emits a

magnetism that some cannot resist. Cold lagers begin to flow; iced-jugs of water are

funnelling down people’s throats, re-hydrating their dilapidated muscles; the die-hard

section of the crowd nearest the speakers keep the movement alive, preparing for the next

emergence of vivifying waves.

Meaning-making and signification also make up this assemblage. The rhymes of the

MC; the small comments between band members that keep the session running smoothly;

the internal monologue each musician has with their instrument; the occasional laughter

23

from sections of the crowd; the intimate conversations taking place on the sides of the

dance-floor; and the verbalized linguistic acknowledgements to musicians that they are

playing an enviable set. Affect allows us to de-centre signification. It reminds us that

‘feelings are effects, at one remove, seen in retrospect after the event, the sloughed skin of

the sentient beast of affect’ (Henriques 2010: 74). From this approach subjects become

open to interaction, receiving vibrations and reciprocating with vibrations; informants

become ‘selves-‘ rather than ‘selves’. However, there also needs to be an acknowledgement

of utterances, discourse and meaning-making: the middle way.

Lines and Strings: Poetry and Puppetry

It was the second day of Brainchild. I stumbled into Steez Cafe mid-afternoon. The snare

drum was still rattling in the far corner from the entrance; the strings of a bass guitar and an

electric guitar reciprocating vibrations. All humans were at eye-level, we danced the same

ground, we channelled the same frequencies. There was little direction in Steez Cafe at this

time; movement became imperceptible, humming in the background, a ‘side-perception’;

the fallacy of stasis stealing, stilling ‘the show’. James Massiah, a vibrant, inspiring, and

highly-celebrated and sought-after young spoken-word poet and dancer from South

London, bounced to the stage in perfect rhythmic timing; light on his feet, wearing all black.

His opening line: ‘it’s the Sabbath so let’s pay our friends downstairs a little visit. This one’s

called The Grim Reaper’s Groove’. The drummer and guitarists moved cautiously waiting for

the resonating levels between multiplicities to intensify: James, his bodily movements, the

stirrings of his unveiled lyricism; the drummer attached to his sticks attached to the drum

kit; the guitarists’ nerve-fibres attached to their plectrums attached to the strings of the

guitars. James kicked into it, jerking his hips, and shoulders. The snare, bass, and electric-

guitar picked-up the tempo. James raps, waves crash and squeeze out an emergence:

The sprites stayed up all night; The minotaurs, the dwarves they dance with all the damned; They dance because they must lest all their souls turn to dust. They dance from dusk till dusk there is no dawn down in the dungeon of the Lord they did not trust.

24

Generativity sparks the small crowd alive. Smirks, tapping trainer-soles, the breeze

streaming through Steez Cafe; eyes wide-open, ears receptive, mindbodies penetrated by

perceptible and imperceptible waves. All the while James’ and The Grim Reaper’s Groove

move:

Angered all the more by their display of undecay He wants to see their edges fray. He wants to hear them scream and shout, Waving their hands in the air He wants to burn this disco out. But we down here do not despair.

Here Bergson’s change as the presupposition of the universe, is engineered

imaginatively into the poem: in the demon dancer’s ‘undecay’, in the continuous ecstasy of

this graphic hellish disco. James is all the while engaging in the ‘demon-DJ’s demonic dance’,

flickering his devilish grin at the crowd as they laugh, gasp, grasp and hang on to the flow.

Now embodying the Grim Reaper, he ‘spits’ (or raps) one lasting, re-generative and

mobilizing image:

One day you’ll die and wish you put your limbs to better use. When crucified your legs decay, you better dance your life away.... So watch your humble human steps each one could be your last. Enjoy each passing moment and take each and every chance, to dance.

An elegant bow and curtsy stimulates wild shrieks and ecstatic clapping from the re-

enchanted-crowd. An after-shock remains. The drummer abruptly stops. Stasis does not

seize the crowd just yet; they await the next perceptible performative movement. James

replaces the drummer—one striving converges with another, one multiplicity attaches to

another.

I detach, at least consciously, from the assemblage of Steez Cafe to return to the plateau of

the farm when I’m quickly lured towards a brightly coloured ground-level tent, lying in front

of one of the four walls of the cage, draped in wall-hangings and bunting. It is occupied by

Romp Pomp Productions, a satirical puppetry troupe just about to set their next

performance in motion. The miniature-mock curtains concealing the window into a puppet-

ruled fantasy world peel open. The puppets are immersed in an enthralling story taking on

identities and pre-histories of their own. It becomes unclear who is possessed by whom

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[Fig. 4.3 – Romp Pomp in action]

between the puppets, Romp Pomp and the audience: ‘Puppet strings as rhizomes or

multiplicities are tied not to the supposed will of the artist or puppeteer but to a multiplicity

of nerve fibres, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first’

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 8). Struggling on their knees, and swamped by the

overwhelming pile of props in their tiny fantasy cubicle, Romp Pomp shift from back-stage,

and integrate with the audience, banishing ‘footlights’. Dreaming up characters based on

children’s stories spliced with macabre and narcotic-influences, Romp Pomp and the

audience are possessed and enthralled by these puppets. Romp Pomp feed their ideas

through the tiny flaps of the puppet’s mouths and they are only convincing, and thus gain a

laugh or a gasp, if the puppets are seen to be the true performers. Romp Pomp wear black

stockings over their heads to transpose their power to signify to the puppets. Relations are

forming between every multiplicity—the bodily gestures of Romp Pomp; the significations

performed by the puppets; the strings that compose the vividly colourful, slap-dash tent

that lured us; the grass beneath us; the cage before us. All these multiplicities resonated to

produce a hilarious and memorable moment of performance.

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Occupying a Subject Position

Months after Brainchild 2013 took place I ‘co-produced’ or mutually-performed (Kapchan

1995) a lengthy and long-overdue interview with Marina. As we eased into the process and

the conversation found its rhythm Marina laid everything out on the table. Initially surprised

by how personal the information and experiences she was discussing were, she re-assured

me that ‘all is open’. Speaking about Brainchild necessitated speaking about her relationship

with an assemblage that is as much an extension of her ‘self-’ as a multiplicity with other

relational attachments.

Izzi can be seen to also align to this perspective. At Brainchild 2013 she repeatedly

inquired about the nature of the festival. She would spring up from nowhere, walkie-talkie

in hand, either wearing black devil-horns spray-painted with gold-sparkly dust, or draped in

Sixties’ denim, stars-and-stripes, materialising as a reincarnation of Hendrix—with a real

afro to support the illusion. She would consistently yearn for an explanation about ‘the

buzz’, the movement, or the momentum carrying us forward, an inquiry often marked by

the dreamy existential question ‘What is this? Does anyone else feel like we’re exploring this

as a separate entity from ourselves?’

Marina links her conception of Brainchild to the ‘comparative-thinking’ or self-

consciousness that plagues so many persons of our generation growing up in London and in

other big cities where technological communication and social networking is so integral to

one’s social existence. She lays the blame for this potentially-destructive approach to

human relationships at the feet of enormous social media networks, namely facebook:

Regardless of whether I liked it or not, what books I read of films I enjoyed, Facebook was a huge part of my psychology growing up and what was rewarded was people looking like they were doing shit….That pressure made me feel like I needed to do something in the real world, and that’s what Brainchild was.

This runs counter to Robert Samuels’ (2009) formulation of Automodern theory

which denounces postmodernism’s conception of ‘individual freedom and mechanized

alienation as opposing social forces’ and argues instead that ‘contemporary individuals turn

to automation in order to express their autonomy’ (3). Here Marina’s autonomy was

partially-appropriated as a consequence of her engagement with a personal computer, a

website and a virtually-represented friendship group. Far from PC being an acronym for

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‘Personalized Culture’ (ibid: 16), here social forces were rubbed in Marina’s face at a critical

time when most people can admit to experiencing degrees of self-doubt and alienation.

Nevertheless, to Samuels’ credit, it is partially through these same technologies that

Marina has asserted her autonomy and is allowing a project of self-discovery, a movement

of ‘releasing oneself from one self’, to unfurl. Automodern theory aside, after investing her

vitality into Brainchild 2012 Marina’s confidence was shattered due to the general stress

that accompanied such a self-sacrifice. She summarises the intensely pressurised juncture

she came to:

So your faced with haemorrhaging costs and your whole family is like “What are you doing? That’s something that you’re not at all sure will work!” In the run-up to the first festival, there were three stages and only ninety tickets sold. It was just a horrible feeling. And 2012 was just pissing with rain for the whole summer. So, I came to terms with the idea that this might just be a complete tragedy; I would have spent a great deal of time and energy on a very poorly populated wet bit of ground where everyone has an awful time.

Her confidence has since re-instated, perhaps largely due to Brainchild’s increasing

notoriety. Marina believes that this will vastly improve her contribution to the festival. She

explains how

Brainchild is a huge extension of me and I hope that the more secure I get, the happier and more confident I become, that I’ll just be able to give to it in a really pragmatic, creative way. It can’t be personal, it has to move away from that for the sake of the festival.

The ethical project that Marina has set for herself involves de-individualizing.

Becoming the co-founder of a festival and organisation which encourages creativity; gives

artists and performers from all disciplines the chance to showcase their work and engage

others in their work, is a ‘self-sacrifice’ and one which involves leaving the personal aside.

According to her utterances, only once Marina ‘diverts momentarily into singularity, when

the personal gives way to the impersonal’ (Grosz 2011: 38-9), does Marina feel that

Brainchild can fully flourish.

This is just one of the many strivings ‘towards the occupancy of a “subject position”’

(Faubion 2011) generating the multiplicity referred to as Brainchild; and, importantly, such

technologies of the ‘self-’ are rhizomatic. Thus, it is crucial that Marina employed the

technology of a confidence-building class to give her the will and self-belief to organize

more Brainchild festivals with such notable success. It is crucial that the relentlessly rainy

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summer of 2012 caved in and welcomed the first Brainchild festival. It is crucial that her

relations with a laptop and a social-networking website were initially her worst enemies—

psychologically obligating her to seek self-validation—and have become the very

technologies through which Brainchild has been launched and Marina can become a certain

kind of person.

Another becoming I witnessed in motion6 was in a workshop titled One Million Lovely

Letters led by Jodi Ann Bickley. As soon as I entered The Forum—a tent where the

workshops, talks, drama, stand-up-comedy, and spoken-word poetry were performed—I

recognised that an especially sensitive and far-reaching event was taking place.

Everybody was curled up on the grass, blankets, scarves and wicker-mats that made

up the floor; leaning or collapsing on others; sharing pens, pencils, paints, felt tips, glitter;

designing and writing letters. But who were they to? What was their purpose?

Jodi had her jet-black dyed-hair tied-up with a turquoise bandana accentuating her

cool, trusting blue eyes. She was sitting down unobtrusively with everyone else and at first I

couldn’t quite determine who was ‘directing’ the workshop: clearly it was a workshop we

were making together. Jodi noticed me and smiled invitingly re-assuring me that The Forum

was just as accepting as the farm. I only managed to speak to her very briefly since her full-

attention was required by her co-writers. She explained how ‘there are a lot of lonely

people in the world, who have problems they feel they cannot easily overcome. They feel

neglected and worthless, and some come close to leaving this world behind. Those are the

extreme cases, but there are enough of them for it not to be peculiar. They contact me

explaining their story and I simply reply with a letter which lets them know that I care for

them and so do many others. Today, through art and writing, we’re just bringing those

others to life’. This event is part of a much bigger project which Jodi launched after suffering

for months with encephalitis which she caught from a tick-bite while performing spoken-

word poetry at Bestival music and arts festival in 2011 (Bickley 2013; Cavendish 2014). She

still suffers from this immobilising disease, but One Million Lovely Letters keeps her from

‘stepping forward from the kerb’ reminding her that it’s just as easy to step backwards

(Bickley 2013).

As I was writing my own letter, I noticed someone sitting to the right of me who was

staring deeply into the moment that was enveloping her. Her name was Mollie, she was an

29

eighteen-year-old from London. She was sitting with her boyfriend close to the right of her,

the warmth of the afternoon sun resonating in the air trapped in The Forum practically

gluing their bodies together. I asked her how she felt, what was going through her head. She

responded with a truly touching sentiment: ‘If you surrounded yourself with people like this

then you’d never be unhappy. Too many people surround themselves with ugliness, often of

their own choosing....I feel like here I can accept the worst news...I feel like here everyone

would feel it for me’.

30

5. CONCLUDING AND OPENING: BRAINCHILD RE-LAUNCHES

My comprehension, recording, inscription, and description of Brainchild 2013 may only

scratch the surface of this assemblage; much of it is imperceptible and incomprehensible.

However Mollie and Jodi’s heart-felt sentiments go a long way to relating what Brainchild

2013 meant for some of the persons there. At Brainchild there was a notable emphasis not

just on ends but means. Technologies of the ‘self-’—such as Marina and Izzi founding

Brainchild; Jodi launching One Million Lovely Letters; James re-enchanting crowds with

rhythmical-lyricism and demonic-prose; Romp Pomp injecting laughter into lives through

hand-puppets; and all the Brainchildren engaging with these multiplicities—reap rewards in

and through their becoming. Such an ontology was succinctly expressed by Joel, a twenty-

five year-old practicing Buddhist from London, who I often conversed with on the farm.

Lying on the grass outside Steez Cafe, he explained how at Brainchild we had a ‘freedom to

interact’. He went on to give Brainchild a tender and captivating thought which seems to

ring of the hopefulness of nirvāṇa or Enlightenment: ‘Perhaps this is the end, if the end is to

find some deep level of interconnectedness’. Oran, a budding young-poet from South

London, made a similar point in a very different way during a long and lucid conversation we

had on yet another chewed-up sofa under a make-shift canopy in the middle of the farm. He

conjured-up a psychedelic image of him reaching-out for company in the darker hours of the

early morning once the Love Shack’s Soundsystem (see Fig. 5.0) had cast its final

indestructible blows at Merton farm: ‘It looked like no one was there and as I drew closer

they climbed out the frame of the setting sun and offered what they had to say that

morning’ (see Fig. 5.1).

Oran and Joels’ depictions of Brainchild, as a place of co-substantiality, commonality

and conviviality, brings us closer to what this event space felt like. Brainchild will remain

part of their strivings, and their strivings will always generate Brainchild (the virtuality of

memory). When we begin to treat ‘movement’ and ‘change’ as the presupposition of the

universe (Bergson 1946) all sorts of intriguing and converging rhizomes come to light.

31

[Fig. 5.0 – As the sun sets for the final time at Brainchild, around the Love Shack people dance with their shadows, take to hula-hooping, and celebrate in-time to the low-

syncopated bass-lines of Reggae/Dub played by Brotherhood Soundsytem]

[Fig. 5.1 – The Hive—or Oran’s ‘frame of the setting sun’—was designed as a hexagonal-structure by Abigail Portus and Roma Swords McDonnnell to raise awareness of declining bee populations. To deterritorialize and paraphrase one of Deleuze and Guattaris’ parables, here we find a becoming-bee of the Hive and a becoming-Hive of the bee (1987: 10). The Hive also

contributed to Brainchild’s becoming in offering a meeting-point for idea-sharing and commonality. Photograph courtesy of Abigail Portus and Roma Swords McDonnnell]

32

While a neo-Marxist approach to Brainchild 2013 took this description far it couldn’t

take us all the way. It allowed me to consider this event in relation to the already-

constituted, i.e. as a negation or extension of the norm, the ‘ordered disorder’. But it didn’t

allow me to appreciate Brainchild in its own terms (Massumi 2002: 70). Equally an attempt

to describe Brainchild using only affect, wouldn’t have allowed me to appreciate the

individual strivings, expressed through signification, that make up this assemblage.

Disciplinary tensions had to be swept aside. This study—a description of Brainchild and the

fleshing-out of an anthropology of the performing arts festival—re-affirms and celebrates

the ongoing non-paradigmatic and nomadic-coloration of the anthropological project.

We returned to my car. The car’s hooting horn drew Alon out of the cage wherein his

scattered beloved-fancy-dress items had sent him on a wild goose-chase. We drove away

and continued our ‘strivings’, and Brainchild’s becoming continued to move rapidly.

[Fig. 5.2 – Alon ‘in his element’: Fiddling with strangers’ shoes; chewing on his scarf; beaming at the lens; wearing what little’s left of his fancy-dress wardrobe; while the sun-bleached-

grass of Merton Farm cradles him through the night]

It re-launched on the 4th January 2014 as a yearlong arts platform—Brainchild Arts

(see Fig. 5.3). Organising the Brainchild festivals is still central to its aims as an organization,

33

but by running events with different artistic communities throughout the year it is now

better situated to ‘encourage creativity in all who engage with [it]’, and to ‘nurture a diverse

community that promotes collaboration and original performance’. An anthropological

study of Brainchild’s becoming, and the becoming of performing arts festivals more broadly,

calls for an ‘alert’ style of engagement where the ethnographer is at the forefront of the

generativity that characterises rhizomes. I was present at the re-launch—a ‘ritual re-

visiting’—pen-and-pad in pocket. I was greeted by familiar faces and just as many new ones.

I had a chance to speak to the videographer of Brainchild 2013 who described the festival

and the Re-Launch as ‘sites of convergence, where projects collaborate, intermingle, and

then launch back with new force into the worlds they came from’.

Underlying this movement, made up of multiplicities that converge, re-converge,

intensify, and then re-launch, is an emphasis on the middle, not the beginning or end. In the

middle ‘strivings’ take place; multiplicities generate and connect with other rhizomes;

technologies of the ‘self-’ are practiced and crafted; and relata relates rather than stagnates.

The middle is as much of interest to the anthropology of the ethical subject and affect as it is

to the anthropology of the performing arts festival.

[Fig. 5.3 – The Brainchildren quickly get to work—drawing graphics, writing quips, anecdotes and scribbling proverbs—at the Brainchild Re-Launch. Photograph by Jackson Caines (2014)]

34

APPENDIX

1. The number of event spaces calling themselves carnivals or festivals has grown rapidly over the past couple of decades and this dynamic movement is taking place across the world. As an indication of the ubiquity of this phenomenon, eFestivals (2012) reports that in the UK alone since 2008 there have been roughly one-thousand music-related festivals of all sizes per year. This can range from the mammoth and iconic Glastonbury, which becomes a city overnight and managed to squeeze in over one-hundred-and-seventy-thousand people in 2013, to the intimate and secluded Brainchild 2013 which comfortably fed, slept, exhausted and enlivened seven-hundred people.

2. By providing a ‘taste of bread’ the populous forget society’s ills and believe in the

benefits of being ruled by the elite (Waitt 2008: 522). 3. The ‘metacommunicative and explanatory function that attempts to make social sense

of schism, ambiguity and division’ and underlies these moments of vivacity, mirrors the higher than usual degree of reflexivity we find in performance (Kapchan 1995: 479-80).

4. Not as celebrated in Rio, which for Turner represents ‘a unifying symbol of Brazilianity’

(Scheper-Hughes 1992: 484), but in the peripheral and predominantly poor town of Bom Jesus de Mata. Here rather than an unstoppable ‘mystical Oneness’ (Nietzsche 1993) launching the town into a state of effervescence, a ‘highly segregated and segmented carnaval’ took place (Scheper-Hughes 1992: 484). People knew their ‘proper’ places and when it came the start of carnaval virtually all the middle-class families had left Bom Jesus preferring to frequent private parties, thus eradicating any opportunity for subverting hierarchical norms.

5. When a child first comes into contact with a wave they might be knocked down. But, in

time, the mindbody of a child may resonate with greater intensity in relation to the wave-flat so that the child anticipates the window of time when it is feasible to either duck under the wave, dive over it, or better still surf the wave back toward the shore. In this moment of emergence, an individual has embodied the symbiotic underpinning of becoming and the complexity of every emergence which relies not just on mind but on multiple resonating levels that move in rhythmic fashion with one another (Grosz 2011: 38-9).

6. Of ‘a subject …“becoming more deeply” itself...but without becoming someone or

something else entirely in the process” (Faubion 2011: 46; quoted by Robins 2012).

35

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