Burningman_thesis_lquaak.pdf

It is often said that trying to explain Burning Man to someone who has never been is like trying to explain color to the blind from birth. This thesis takes up exactly that challenge, showing the remarkable story of Burning Man as it went from the countercultural to the cultural; from reactive to proactive, from growing up to spreading out. It tells the tale of how a spark to an effigy might just ignite a social revolution. Let the burn begin…

RE-PRESENTING THE PRESENT

Back in 1986, on a San Franciscan beach, two friends decide to burn a wooden man-like figure. Now, more than 20 years later, this ritual is the closing act of a weeklong art event held in the Black Rock Desert, where over 35.000 participants are greeted ‘welcome home’ at its dusty gates. The Black Rock Desert has become Black Rock City, and the random burn of a man has become the Burning Man: a festival, community, and social movement.

Re-Presenting the Present THE (R)EVOLUTION OF THE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL

THE (R)EVOLUTION OF THE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL Larissa Quaak | Master Thesis Cultural Anthropology

Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages; May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. - W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939 As found written on the Temple, Burning Man 2005

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

Acknowledgment Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement. - Ludwig Wittgenstein Wittgenstein said many a just thing in his philosopher’s life, and the above quote only underlines his brilliance – and apparent good intellectual influences. As for me, I would not have had the anthropological knowledge as hopefully shown in this thesis without my guiding professor Yolanda van Ede. Throughout the university, both as a mentor and a teacher, she was there to skillfully guide me through. Never making it easy, but always letting the effort be all the more rewarding. In the end, next to intellectual stimulation, she provided me with the much needed willpower and conviction to enter my research process and to stay with it, even when the accompanying frustrations and existential crises made me want to give up more than once. At the University of Amsterdam, I also wish to thank my assessment committee in the form of Thomas Blom-Hansen and Mattijs van de Port, for showing the amount of enthusiasm and constructive criticism they did. In their busy schedule, I am sure having to read through, and comment on, nearly 200 pages of text when 60 should suffice for a thesis was a feat of pure endurance. They kept showing curiosity for all aspects though, and when they gave the legendary feedback “We really, really want to visit Burning Man now”, I knew I had done something right. I also wish to extend my university thanks to a more general level, where it offered me the platform and financial help to spend half a year ‘in the field.’ The University of Amsterdam is the only Dutch university where such freedom and growth has to be experienced in order to graduate, and it has broadened my anthropological ànd personal horizon tremendously. On an anonymous note, I want to thank all those photographers and random people who’s pictures and appearances I so shamelessly stole from the Internet. I try to take comfort in the fact that the shamanic bricoleur also never revealed his mystic sources; gathering and recombining imagery and symbolism to make an often profane point. As in his case, the chosen visual collage not only supports, but is often stronger than words. This will never be published, and therefore the makers and represented will never know how much they made the pages come alive. But I thank them for it – and apologize for any fringe on copy-right and unauthorized nudity it might present and/or privacy it is bound to invade. I have never been much of the prototype academic-to-be; brainstorming, testing theories and having stimulating arguments with fellow students. Yet, Sandra, my dear friend and fellow anthropologistahead-of-me has never ceased to offer me her critical anthropological ear and insights, as well as a much cherished friendship. When all is said and done, she is the reason why I chose to study anthropology – and I have now nearly forgiven her for this path… ;-) Sunny, not a day goes by without me cursing and blessing the adventurous nature of my friends, and wishing we could finally and ordinarily sit on a sun-drenched terrace together again, drinking wine, chatting, laughing or just being silent together. In the flesh, and not just on Skype. Not a day goes by without me missing you and your man. There are many more friends that need mentioning, seeing how they often picked me up and stayed by my side through the whole doctorate process. Together, they gave inspiration or just much needed distraction – processes that often seemed to go hand in hand. They kept me sane. First of all, I want to thank the bunch at San Francisco, who welcomed me warmly and immediately made me feel part of their community: Laura and Max, 1

Evan and Ghreg, John and John, Elena and Krista, and my housemates on Webster Patricia and Justin. In hindsight, even though I didn’t want to let business and pleasure mix on such certain terms, their sociality and allinclusiveness formed a big and visceral part of my theoretical argument on the communal ideology and social impact of Burning Man. The embodied knowledge it brought made the theme ring all the more true. Back at home, in the Amsterdam I love so much, Marijn should be on this page as well, always more than happy to prevent me from becoming an intellectually discouraged hermit. Nuriye who struggled with the same schizophrenic academic and creative split but who always made the combination appear a bonus. Roos and Rebecca who I happily shared my house and many midnight cups of tea with, and Offer, Conan and Bas who I could always cathartically and effervescently dance with. But most of all there is the other significant half of LoLa Productions Incorporated: Loeki, as close and unconditional to a childhood friend I will ever have. Her sharp analytical mind, faith, humor, as well as great cooking and taste in wine offered relief, inspiration and lucidity when needed most. She was always there, and hopefully will be in many more years to come. Thanx babe! Last, but as the cliché has it certainly not least, I am much indebted to my soul mate, my love, Martijn. First he had to let me go to San Francisco, enthusiastically on my own, and endure my long struggle for data – and independence. When I got back, and we were finally sharing the same room again, the problems only just began. Where most people either saw the laughing and bubbly Larissa or nothing at all, he was at home, stuck with the teary eyed, feeble, deeply insecure and frustrated one. He was always the rock my frustrations could bounce off on. My Tefal man. I never once got them rejected and projected back at me. Such patience, such stability, such care. Both on a practical, financial, technical, intellectual, spiritual, physical, and emotional level, this final ‘product’ would truly never have materialized without him. Matiyin, you are my own affirmative flame, and I thank the universe for letting us shine together.

Table of contents Acknowledgment

1

Introduction

4

PART I: SOCIAL BACKGROUND

9

- 1 - Every Now and Then: the Countercultural Package Deal 10 Counterculture in Theory Counterculture in Praxis The Beats The Hippies Guerilla Theatre Situationist Movement The Punks Cacophony Society

10 13 14 15 17 18 20 21

PART II: ESCAPING SOCIETY

23

- 2 - Every One of Them: Baker Beach, a Man, and a Mob

24

Burning a Man A Man with a Vision The Burn that never Burned The Participatory Project The Society of the Spectacle To Participate or Not to Participate The Spectacle of the Man In the End

Theme Camps Performance Art Art against Society The Anaesthetized Society Art in Reverse Community versus Art We Have a Dream: just sign here Borg 2: more Woo Woo for Larry’s Hoo Ha The Core Conflict

68 69 71 72 75 76 76 77 78

- 6 - Every Bit a Gift: Burning Man and its Gift-Economy

80

Why a Gift Economy? Community through the Gift Re-presenting the Present The Gift versus the Commodity Theoretically unwrapping the Gift Mauss’ reciprocal Gift Exchange Hyde’s erotic Life of Property Escaping the Market? The alluring shortness of being

81 81 82 83 84 85 86 88 89

PART IV: SOCIAL IMPACT

91

- 7 - Every Day Burning: Keeping the Flames Alive

92

25 26 27 28 29 30 33 35

Leaving Traces Black Rock City Year Round Going home to Decompress The Regional Network Social Capital A new Kind of Community Ideology & Future Plans Katrina and the Burners without Borders The Black Rock Arts Foundation

93 94 95 97 99 102 103 104 105

- 3 - Everything Goes: the Black Rock Desert as T.A.Z.

36

Conclusion

108

A new-found Location It’s so Empty it’s Full Rituals worth Repeating Where the Wild Things are Pockets of Freedom Dust, Death & Doom

37 38 40 43 44 45

References

110

Appendix A - Glossary

114

Appendix B - Respondents

116

Appendix C – Finance

119

PART III: STRUCTURAL SOCIALITY

49

- 4 - Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man

50

A lesson in Civic Planning Leave no Trace From the Zone to Zoning Binding a heterogeneous Community Who goes to this, and Why? A different kind of Law and Order Organizational Structure Law Enforcement Utopia versus Heterotopia

53 53 54 56 56 58 59 60 62

- 5 - Everyone an Artist: the Communal Art of Black Rock City 64 A City filled with Art Art as Civic Structure

66 66 2

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

3

-1- The Countercultural Package Deal

Introduction Community can’t be rushed or sought directly and self-consciously. Community is neither a goal nor a means. It is, rather, a side effect resulting from continued interaction between human beings. It enriches and facilitates more interaction but it must stem from and be rooted in interaction. Men must have something to do together before they can become a community, and those who pursue community as an end in itself will be as disappointed as those who pursue happiness as an end in itself. (Greeley 1968:78) With few exceptions, the modern discourse of community seems to be dominated by a pervasive sense of loss. From the Enlightenment onward many great thinkers paralleled the passing of an allegedly organic world with the alienation of the individual, the withdrawal into the self, social disintegration, the end of collective ideals or, taken in its widest sense, the public sphere, and, more recently, the decline of social capital in the West. Productivist modernity, with its Nietzschean key figure of Prometheus and subsequently its emphasis on an instrumental rationalizing logic of performativity,1 classically analyzed by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), has allegedly caused an ongoing degree of ‘Entzauberung’ or demagification of the world; placing us into a iron cage of rationalization and turning us into ‘calculable’ beings.2 In Weber’s time, this so called disenchantment process went along with bureaucratization, secularization, materialization, scientization, and mathematization;3 each of which opts for the precise, regular, constant, and reliable over the wild, spectacular, idiosyncratic, and surprising (Dryzek e.a. 2006:214). No matter whether the outcome of these processes is embraced as the fall of superstition and confusion, or lamented as the loss of contact with a meaningful moral universe, the inevitable price for modernity’s ongoing series of transformation always seems to be a deficit of meaning and the eclipse of wonder at the world (Bennett 2001:8). Not only is there a psychic and emotional toll to be paid, but a social one as well, resulting in another form of alienation, namely from each other. In our present supposedly individualized era, the speed of technological and social change, the increase in the pace of living caused by rapid communications and mobilization, the ongoing degree of mass consumption, and the much debated process of globalization have so altered the world landscape that we stand bewildered and unable to recognize existing forms of human associations. But communities do still exist, albeit in different forms than we nostalgically envisioned them to be in the world of tribal villages and pre-capitalist affective networks. Just as the complexity of living has altered physical forms in the West, so its social configurations have changed, taken new shapes, and morphed into seemingly strange and ‘unorthodox’ patterns. These modern social collectivities might not always be immediately visible as physical entities, and are much less totalitarian, fixed and related to blood ties or

I use the term performativity here to refer to a technocratic view of society and knowledge, aimed at efficiency and productivity (Maffesoli 1998). 2 As Weber states, in this disenchanted world “there are no mysterious, incalculable forces that come into play, but rather […] one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” (Weber 1981:139-140) 3 The ‘tion’ form is important, for it emphasizes the extent to which these processes are ongoing and never complete. 1

geographical place than they once were, but they can tell us a great deal about the fundamental theme of man together as opposed to man alone. In fact, recently, especially within the social sciences, there is a tendency to focus more on the other side of the communal coin. This side is not made up by loss, that is, of a growing individualization, but by a rediscovery of community in the modern world of the West. It is a world in which the individualized mass is tribalized again, or, in Maffesoli’s words, a world characterized by ‘le temps des tribus’ (1996:x). These tribes or communities in general do not have the same longevity or fixity as we are traditionally familiar with. Nor do they fully answer to the communal ideal, depicted as this generally is as a group of people living in close proximity with mutual social relations characterized by caring and sharing (Kozinets 2002:3). On the contrary, these so called neo-tribes are in many ways directly related to the allegedly alienating and individuating mechanisms of mass culture, organized as they are around the catchwords, brand-names and sound-bites of consumer culture. Indeed, its members share lifestyle, taste and everyday rituals as ways of belonging, and their choice to participate is voluntary and mostly volatile. Because belonging has become a matter of choice, dependent on the time and place of the day, it is necessarily temporal. In the end, it is less a question of belonging to a certain group than of switching from one group to another. It follows then, that contemporary communities are inherently instable and small scale. They have weaker social ties, no codified rules or enforcement mechanisms, and no neighborly bonds or reciprocal exchange. Lifestyles have become a choice rather than a ‘way of life’ (Bennett 1999:167). Even though there is a strong law of the milieu that is hard to escape, it is based firmly in the present, and future concerns have been overruled by the power of the basic sociality – the being together – of everyday life. Neo-tribes are thus ‘trans-political,’ distinctly disengaged from the political and returning to ‘local ethics’ or an ‘empathetic sociality’ (Maffesoli 1996:11). Summed up, neo-tribalization is a concept that implies superficiality and a lack of commitment to a social group (Greener 2006:398). A couple of years ago, I visited a week-long art festival in the middle of a Nevadan desert, called Burning Man. There, I got a taste of the many things that comprise and flow from what I have come to see as one of the most radical ways to bridge the tension between contemporary individualism and communal ideals: the so called ‘Burners’ community. In the middle of one of the most inhospitable settings to be found in the West, I hit upon a contemporary, temporal, intimate, and intentional community of over 35.000 participants from nearly all North-American states and global continents. Once a year, at the end of summer, this diverse and organic community forms itself around a wooden manlike effigy, only to vanish again after having seen it go up in flames. All participants are expected to leave no trace, and indeed, when the festival is over there is not a sequin, boa feather or cigarette butt to be seen. All that remains are those invisible bonds making up the worldwide network of fellow ‘Burners’; a bond which provides its members with a very concrete sense of social capital, and with a common ethos and internalized way of life that is leaving more and more marks in everyday civic life. In our disenchanted modern times, where individualism would reign and man is apparently alienating from his fellows, Burning Man is literally and physically rising out of these ashes, creating what many participants have called a life changing communal experience, and which can no longer said to be bounded within the spatial and temporal limits of the festival. Mainstream media overwhelmingly depicts the event as ‘the world’s biggest, wildest, wackiest party,’ concentrating nearly solemnly on the most 4

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

obvious elements of hedonism, freakiness, nudity, drugs, sex and raves. However, I have come to believe there are many more things going on above and beyond this thin layer of glittery varnish. Sure, Burning Man definitely provides unparalleled Bacchanalian spectacle and carnivalesque excess, but that does not necessarily contradict the fact that it could have any serious impact on its participants, or, in its latest phase, on society. Precisely because Burning Man ìs such an outrageous party full of frivolous expenditures of hedonistic energy, it stands outside normal society and offers the visitors a week long experiment with alternate forms of being. Here, they can transcend current time/space, connect with others, expand and reveal their hidden Self, and experience a re-enchantment with the world that is made to holds its magic long after the festival is over. Burning Man is very obviously a celebration. It involves fire and fireworks, exuberantly fantastic clothing, patchwork colors, and the multiplication of apparently misplaced masks and costumes. However, under this Mardi-Gras-like and highly Dionysian atmosphere lays an Apollonian inclination for order, and a carefully crafted social experiment. There is art that is made as a gift to the community, and a community that makes art; there is art as a civic structure, and a civic structure that promotes community; there is nothing that you can buy, and the gift that unites all. On Burning Man, talk of community is not merely shorthand for a loosely shared life-style, but a way of living and looking at the world that extends itself beyond the dusty geographical and calendrical borders of its one-week existence. In this thesis I will argue that the physical and social infrastructure of Black Rock City is devised with certain goals in mind, and that an effort is made to create an environment that functions as an incubator of the social process that gives rise to human culture. This, by extension, functions as a critique of society at large that picks up on certain threads already loosely woven within the counterculture, but that, instead of opposing society, is made to affect it and thus create social and political change. It is a utopian agenda that might appear grandiose, but, as I hope to show, very pragmatic methods are actually employed in its creation, resulting in an ethos that grew steadily as the event continued to grow. Every year the blank face of the Black Rock Desert is literally wiped clean, and the world of Burning Man originates anew. With lessons learned and a sociality that is constantly evolving, Burning Man’s own transformation thus far knows no boundaries. I still remember the transformative moment where I decided I really wanted to pursue my interest in the mechanisms behind Burning Man academically. It was in 2004, on the third day of my first year at the festival, and the sun was just setting. I was once again alone, finding myself completely lost in a surreal land. I can still feel the dryness of my skin there and then, coated as it was by about three millimeters of the omnipresent alkaline dust. Basic survival strategies no longer equaled sleep or food, but digesting and embodying this surreal sensorium. I had lost my bike hours ago, or at least, I could not for the life of me envision where I left it when I left it, and I was surrounded by miles and miles of vast, inhospitable desert, somehow inhabited by bizarre humanly creatures never previously before encountered in any other setting. My senses were warped in endless overloads, making everything feel like a crossover between Mad Max and Alice in Wonderland - only then on acid, which would still not make it as chaotic and psychedelic as this moment, this week. I was slowly making my way towards a point I did not even know I wanted to go to; nearly getting run over by a fluorescent chicken on an electric skate board; trotting along my sixty year old neighbor dressed in her homemade sparkling fairy outfit; hearing the thunderous roar of a bunch of fifty or so ‘Satan Clauses’ in full Christmas gear handing out tubes of lubricant in the distance; sidestepping so that the approaching giant 5

lobster of 25 meters plus (obviously on the run for this albeit slightly smaller but much faster moving steel penis on wheels ejaculating fireworks and flames) could get past me; getting my head jerked back with someone shooting shots of god-knows-what-but-boy-this stuff-is fierce straight in my gullet with his super-blast water gun; being overtaken by a bunch of people dressed as carrots fiercely protesting the happening bunny march and thereby interrupting a conversation Darth Vader was having with God over a public phone, when it finally hit me: “this must be the happiest, most amazing, most alive moment of my life, and even though I have no recollection of any theoretical analyses done that could possible explain this phenomenon, I want to devote some of my time at home searching for them.” It seemed that, anthropologically, the ways to connect Burning Man to the world it presumes to escape are as copious as the ways to experience it are. In my defense, contrary to how this might come across with someone unfamiliar with Burning Man and my views on it, I did not choose my subject to have an excuse for an extended party paid for by my university. Neither did I choose my subject because I particularly enjoy dealing with 40 degrees temperatures and fierce dust storms in the middle of one of the most inhospitable environments on this planet. I did not even choose my subject because I was too lame to learn a new language. In fact, I chose to have my life temporarily revolve around Burning Man because upon visiting the festival for the first time, I experienced an overwhelming sense of ritual and belonging and community and numerous things that in general seem to be lacking in contemporary, individualized Western life, and they seemed to work. And when I returned to San Francisco, these things still seemed to work, confirming my belief that Burning Man would be more than just an annual, bizarre party thrown in a godforsaken desert by some rich white kids. For me, and what I now know many others with me, the true story of Burning Man is one that tells the tale of what happens to people - what they do, what it means to them, how it changes them – when they can make a temporary society qualitatively different in so many respects from their everyday one. It is the tale of two friends burning a wooden man on a beach, and twenty years later affecting the lives of thousands and thousands of people, year round. It tells the story of how Burning Man the event became Burning Man the Limited Liability Co., and it offers a fascinating glimpse into how the wildest, least commercial ideas can, almost against their will, become bankable. It speaks about an evolvement that went from the counterculture to the culture; from reactive to pro-active, from growing up to spreading out. It is the tale of Burning Man, and I will try to tell it as unbiased as possible, narrating my explorations with theoretical analyses and through many, many voices. On the Burning Man website it reads: “trying to explain Burning Man to someone who has not been is like trying to explain a color to the blind from birth.” By replacing color with sex, New York City, or LSD, and the blind by a virgin, alien, or teetotaler, different versions are possible, but the inevitable message stays the same: ‘You just had to be there…’. It is an experience that has to be experienced, not put into words, and that Victor Turner therefore calls ‘meta-experience.’ In it, only celebration can adequately understand celebration, “with language as just the tip of the intersubjective iceberg, the dead husk of the living celebratory fruit” (1982:19). However, looking back on Burning Man, this does not mean that nothing can be said about it, or that I have just a priori declared my own thesis to be necessarily inadequate and an unworthy substitute for ‘the real thing.’ I believe that an anthropologist should not just be a participant observant in the field, but also a writer in the field of ethnography. He or she needs to translate culture in such a way as to convey an argument,

-1- The Countercultural Package Deal

observations and experience, and bring it to life. Although often not the most ‘lively’ material, theories are both necessary and beneficial to this process. Theories color data, as well as give grip on the subject under research. Therefore I now want to briefly sketch some theoretical analysis through which’ glasses I have viewed Burning Man - in wide-eyed wonder. Depending on who you talk to, Burning Man can be described as an art festival, Dionysian potlatch, Disneyland in reverse, experiment in social organization, survival test, communal catharsis, social movement, pyrotechnic ritual, Satan’s purgatory, mosh pit, cyber-klatch, and many things more. When it comes to Burning Man, discussions on the true nature of the event are a favorite pastime of many, both before, during and after the event, and the only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is the fact that there is very little that everyone agrees upon. “‘Meaning’ is dog meat in the face of experiment and experience” is how Village Voice writer Erik Davis (1995) sums up festival-goers’ attitudes towards interpretations of Burning Man. No matter how hard it can be to describe or interpret Burning Man though, its significance easily shows itself in the fact that it is most definitely a public event. In perhaps the most comprehensive heuristic treatment of public events, Handelman suggests that all such events are ‘closed phenomenal worlds;’ occasions wherein “people undertake in concert to make more, less, or other of themselves, than they usually do” (1990:16/3). By their very nature, they are symbolic structures; “little worlds that point beyond themselves” and that are “symbolic of something outside of themselves, standing for, evoking or bringing into being something else, something absent” (Ibid.12-13). As such, they would be, for both natives and researchers alike, “privileged points of penetration” into socio-cultural universes (Ibid.9). And indeed, I am certainly not the first anthropologist interested in a public event. Many have gone before me, variously relating it to ritual, ceremony, rite of passage, celebration, feast, carnival, festival, spectacle, etc. Like most public events, Burning Man is a temporary, festive world in which visitors can step out of everyday mundane life and explore the world of heightened celebratory consciousness. According to Ralph Rinzler in his preface for the book Celebration, Studies in Festivity and Ritual, “Wherever the human spirit is free, people celebrate” (in Turner 1982:7). Turner adds to this that to celebrate is to experience ‘high tides,’ peak experiences in social life which mark an occasion or an event with ceremony, ritual, or festivity: “People in all cultures recognize the need to set aside certain times and spaces for celebratory use, in which the possibility of personal and communal creativity may arise” (Ibid.11-12). The word celebration is derived from the Latin celeber, meaning ‘numerous, much frequented,’ and relates to the vivacity generated by a crowd of people with shared purposes and common values. It is through celebration and its vivacity that people reach what the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim called ‘effervescence’: the supreme moment of the solidarity of collective consciousness. By opposing it to structure; society and social organization, Turner sees this heightened state embodied in what he calls anti-structure. The two states are complementary in their opposition, and societal order is constituted by their perpetual oscillation (1995:140). If structure ensures that the organizational requirements for a society are met, then antistructure simultaneously ensures that this structure does not maintain an unbreakable grip, thus becoming sterile and inflexible. Within antistructure, the tyrannies of everyday life – whether imagined or not – are suspended, subverted, and inverted in such a way as to liberate considerable creativity; to release repression; to fulfill some sense of people’s hidden potential; to evoke self-expression; and to unleash the potential for self-transformation. Turner saw this to happen through two of

anti-structure’s main qualities, namely liminality - a transitional moment ‘betwixt and between’ everyday life -, and communitas - an egalitarian state of communion reminiscent of Durkheim’s collective effervescence -, whereby the first would be a necessary mode of access to the latter. As the tangible manifestation of anti-structure, the festival is a classic ‘time out of time,’ an independent critique of the society that brought it into being, and hence a possible font of alternative ideas, values, motivations, and designs for living. In the festival, the oppositions of work versus play, duty versus pleasure, and individual versus group are overcome to produce a third state of what Jean Duvignaud described as ‘unbridled social hysteria,’ in which man transcends himself in a fantastic extension of the social fabric, while suspending the rules and normal forms of communal life. According to Duvignaud, “the sacred delirium is actualized in the festival, and reaches beyond itself: collective consciousness is sublimated, magnified, adoring the dramatic form of its own substance in dance, agitation, confusion, transvestism, etc” (1976:14). Duvignaud argues that especially today, the creation of a separate reality inside a fixed and rationalized world is high needed. Going beyond just being a reaction against apparently stifling conditions, the festival can be seen as a necessarily ephemeral attempt at creating ‘another world’ (Ibid.23). Instead of being another world or separate reality, French sociologist Michel Maffesoli sees ritual and celebration to already be an indissoluble part of today’s sociality, granting an immanent life force that is in direct opposition to alienating, atomizing, rationalized, ‘disenchanted’ and individualized modernity. It is all those forms of ‘being together’ which, for the past few decades, metamorphosed society producing tribalization, a culture of emotion and the social orgiastic. Maffesoli defines the ‘orgiasm’ as a universal form of sociality which, “contrary to a morality of ‘ought to be’ […] refers to an ethical immoralism which consolidates the symbolic link of all society’ (1993:2). It is foundational for being as it offers an essential emotional outlet and passional logic that, while anomic in many aspects, allows for the structuring or regeneration of community. We are warned that: […] a city, a people, or a more or less limited group of individuals who cannot succeed in expressing collectively their wildness, their madness, and their imaginary, rapidly destructure themselves and, as Spinoza noted, these people merit more than any ‘the name of solitude’. (Maffesoli 1993:8) Though Maffesoli reveals little evidence of its presence in everyday life, the ‘orgiasm’ clearly reaches a licentious, contagious and unrestrainable climax in the festal - those moments in which social life is redeemed and transgression becomes the norm. It seems strange that Maffesoli not once accredits Turner, because, to me at least, it seems that strong parallels between the two scholars exist. Echoing Turner’s argument on the prophylactic role of ritual/festive inversion and communitas, Maffesoli asserts that periodic resistance to power and the transgression of norms precludes revolt: to refuse festival is thus “to expose oneself to the return of the repressed, to encourage a brutal and bloody explosion” (Ibid.95). In another way, Maffesoli produces a trademark Turnerian (and thus Nietzschian) denotation of social reality, stating: “confronted with the laborious Prometheus, one must show that the noisy Dionysus is also a necessary figure of sociality” (Maffesoli 1996:21). The opposing social phenomena carry a strong hint of Turner’s ‘structure’ and ‘anti-structure.’ And, like anti-structure, the orgiasm is eventually regenerative - it reinstalls the status quo: In the same way that revolt or revolution permit an energetic new elite to supplant a sleeping, exhausting dictatorship, and through this 6

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

allows for a startling of the political and social, thus the disturbance or festive orgiasm is a sacrificial expiation which allows the proper virtue of the sociality to be restored. (Maffesoli 1993:97) As St. John points out, the ‘proper virtue’ in this quote is only a slight variation of the ‘society’ Durkheim saw recreated and given meaning via the sacred cult (St. John 1999:233). Falassi once again spells it out for us: “the festival has retained its primary importance in all cultures, for the human social animal still does not have a more significant way to feel in tune with his world than to partake in the special reality of the festival, and celebrate life in its ‘time out of time” (Falassi 1987:7). I could not have phrased it any better for Burning Man. The location where it has been held for the last sixteen years, the Black Rock Desert, makes it the ideal liminal space; temporal as well as geographical secluded from everyday life. By turning the ordered world ‘topsy-turvey,’ in all its orgiastic ludism and excess, it offers a cultural interstice in which people can experiment with alternative ways of being – both on an individual as communal level. As Turner already saw happening for ritual and entertainment in industrial society – what he called the liminoid -, play and celebration hereby have paradoxically become a more serious matter: The play frame, where events are scrutinized in the leisure time of the social process, has to some extent inherited the function of the ritual frame. The messages it delivers are often serious beneath the outward trappings of absurdity, fantasy, and ribaldry. (Turner in Falessi 1987:77) Seeing that contemporary play does not have the same ‘sacred’ connotation that tribal ritual and the liminal once had, there can be a freer experimentation with alternative forms, making play potentially subversive as well as merely reversive. Henceforth, the liminoid does not only entail activity without finality, as Johan Huizinga4 would have it, but also offers an image of what life could and should be, different from what it is. Burning Man excels in play; parody, satirical dissent, irony, inversion and subversion. It is the festival’s classic manifestation of overindulgence, transgression, chaos, excess, absurdity, and ‘wastrel prodigality;’ an exhibition of ‘surplus and abundance’ (Schmidt 1995:8). However, what makes it different from most festivals is that it is clearly an alternative event, attractive mostly to those alienated with society; in search of community and meaning in what Cohen calls ‘elective centers’ (Cohen et al. 1987). Existing largely outside the reach of corporate capital and state surveillance, these elective centers or counter-spaces appear at “places on the margin” within the borders of ‘home nations’ since the sixties (Shields 1991). St. John proposes to call the different tribes that flock to them ‘counter-tribes,’ as they are “temporary local ‘drifter communities’ accommodating contemporaneous antinomians and free spirits manifesting a better, more communal and creative world” (1999:11). Attracting bohemians and activists alike, Burning Man has evolved into something more than just an annual, ephemeral escape from society through which social order would eventually be reinforced. Although still a liminoid event in the sense that social life is criticized and alternative possibilities explored, the sense of social critique that lies at the roots of the festival has now turned into an ethos that is as much about regulating anarchy on the playa as it is about influencing social order ‘at home.’ The weeklong sense of communitas has become a year round community of 4 Huizinga wrote the seminal study Homo Ludens. A study on the play element in human culture (1950), in which he argued that some human activities are simply not meant to fulfill a function or pursue an efficient goal. Play, but also the aesthetics of the festival, fall within this category.

7

Burners, where the festival maintains its transformative and perpetuating supremacy, but where its socio-political potential is slowly starting to flow beyond its horizons. As one Burning Man participant phrased it: “After having transformed ourselves, it is now time to transform the world” (Laura, interview July 28th 2005). Apart from the transformation participants go through on Burning Man, and the possible transforming effect it might have on the world, Burning Man as a festival has been through quite some transformations itself. Throughout the years, what started as an event characterized by rulelessness, needed to formulate its own set of rules to protect and maintain the rapidly growing event in the face of official, regulatory state encroachments. As Burning Man has passed over two decades of annual celebration, rebellion has given way to repetition has given way to regularity, apparent in the increasing number and formality of its rules and guidelines. Disorder, chaos and collective spontaneity are now contained and tamed - within a structural form. In her essay on the Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena - which was initiated as an improvised spoof to replace the postponed official Rose Parade in 1978, but has since then rapidly grown into a festive event in its own right -, Denise Lawrence shows that the institutionalization of inherently unstable socio-cultural forms, such as ritual disorder and spontaneity, would be theoretically as well as pragmatically problematic (Lawrence 1987:134). That is because, as we have just seen, the states of order and disorder necessarily contradict and oppose one another. Whether it is believed to be about modeling or mirroring, inversion or parallelization, reversal or intensification, presentation or re-presentation, the festival’s ‘time out of time’ offers a container in which ritual disorder and chaos can be lived out, separated from everyday social order, structure and norms. Between the trinity of the festive, community and society, Burning Man had to find its own niche. It had to regulate play, as well as play with regulation. It had to be liable, but still wild; organized, but still organic; inclusive but still communal; spectacular but still participatory. It had to be an ethos instead of a brand; a model instead of utopia; reaching out instead of selling out. It had to let structure in, or disperse in disorder. Burning Man’s evolvement has been erratic to say the least, and it seems inevitable that the tale and thesis that chronicle it would follow the same pattern. There are many issues that need to be addressed and questions to be answered. In essence, there are two threads running through this thesis, the first being Burning Man that turns the world upside down through subversion and inversion, and the second Burning Man that embodies dedication to changing what the world is. Both threads involve their own specific interplay between the festival, community and society; running from escaping society with a small community of kindred souls to reentering it with a highly heterogeneous network of so called Burners. During this shift, I wonder what happens to the ‘liminoid’ nature of the festival and the ‘communitas’ nature of being together when ideology enters the equation. Next to this evolvement, I am curious to see what it is that drives people to this desert festival in the first place. Is it really just mindless partying that has them travel vast distances into a no man’s land, as the media would like us to believe? Why would they nearly unanimously smile and beam upon being greeted by the words ‘welcome home’ at the gate, when this home is in fact a barren, hostile and inhospitable stretch of dry and dusty land; naturally devoid of water, electricity, plumbing, shade or cell phone access? What ìs it that makes the citizens of Black Rock City flock to ‘their’ city every year again, and talk about it and try to ‘live it’ and often prepare for it during the other 51 weeks a year? What binds them together, both in the creation of those stories as in the reliving of it all; knitting

-1- The Countercultural Package Deal

stronger ties than those on any other festival I’ve ever experienced or know of? And how is this sense of community felt and given shape to when the tangible closeness of geographic space is gone? I love the way Grimes defines a public celebration as “a rope bridge of knotted symbols and performances strung across an abyss. We make our crossings hoping the chasm will echo our festive sounds for a moment, as the bridge begins to sway from the rhythms of our dance” (in Turner 1982:29). I can only hope that my own perilous bridge in the form of this thesis will safely connect Burning Man to the world around it, echoing my own experiential sounds for a moment. My bridge, however, does not just connect the pre-liminal and the post-liminal; A to Z, or even introduction to conclusion, but also Burning Man’s evolvement from 1986 to 2005. And even earlier in time, for when we look at it chronologically, in my view at least, it all started with the countercultural collectives from which Burning Man sprang forth. This is why I want to look at some specific countercultural predecessors and their direct or indirect influence in the first chapter and part; Burning Man’s social background. In the second and third chapter, the part that I have called escaping society, I will then outline Burning Man’s birth and cup years in San Francisco, and the move to the desert that signaled its adolescence. I will show why participation became the first, necessarily, tenet, and how and why anarchy and unstructuredness were not sustainable when the event continued to grow and attract attention. The fourth, fifth and sixth chapter can be read as Burning Man’s college education, in which its evolving sociality is fully given shape. This part forms the core of my thesis: the way Burning Man had become when I was there as a participant observant in 2005. The chapters each describe what I consider the most important elements of Burning Man’s ethos – its civic structure, art and gift-economy – all directed mainly at promoting community and cohesiveness in the ephemeral city, and celebration that is Burning Man. Like the first part, the last part exists of only one chapter, and deals with Burning Man’s re-entry into civic life; its social impact. After more or less having sprung forth from the counterculture, and after having countered culture itself, in this part I will show the ways in which Burning Man is now entering culture, sending off its ethos and offspring into the world. Let the bridge begin to sway…

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

Part I:

Social Background

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-1- The Countercultural Package Deal

-1Every Now and Then: the Countercultural Package Deal Even though the event which, eventually, was turned into the yearly recurring Burning Man festival got initiated in 1986 by Jerry James and Larry Harvey, I do not think that this is where the true story starts. The pinning onto individuals the actions of many has been an American obsession since Paul Revere warned the Middlesex village networks and is thus said to have privately started the American Revolution,5 but it will not be adhered to in this context. For when looking at a certain phenomenon, and trying to make some sense of it, I believe it is necessary to always start by looking at the historical context of the subject under research. Eric Wolf already made the eminent statement that “anthropology needs to discover history” (Wolf 1997:xv), and I hope to follow his lead, although within limits, by starting my argument with a closer look into Burning Man’s rich historic and social background. A background made up by a colorful cast of cultural dissidents and adversaries who inherently reflect a sense of social critique, opposition, non-authoritarianism and zeitgeist. By exposing the festival’s crumbly foundation, I hope to show how it is intimately bound to San Francisco through a rather dense history of (counter-)cultural collectives, their stance towards society and society’s reaction to them. For in a city historically filled with groups and people opposed to the established culture, Larry Harvey took this heritage, gave it several twists and perpetuated its message of alternative ways of being. Not only was Burning Man influenced by its countercultural predecessors, and directly salvaged by one of them in particular, I believe that in many ways it started as a countercultural phenomenon itself. But what is this thing called counterculture in the first place?

Counterculture6 in Theory I have colleagues in the academy who have come within an ace of convincing me that no such things as ‘the Romantic Movement’ or ‘the Beats’ ever existed - not if one gets down to scrutinizing the microscopic phenomena of history. At that level, one tends only to see many different people doing many different things and thinking many different thoughts […] It would surely be convenient if these perversely ectoplasmic Zeitgeists were card-carrying movements, with a head quarters and a file of official manifestoes, but of course they aren’t. One is therefore forced to take hold of them with a certain trepidation, allowing expectations to slip through the sieve of one’s generalizations in great numbers, but hoping always that more that is solid and valuable remains behind than filters away. (Roszak 1969:xii)

5 A myth-like story brilliantly captured by Malcolm Gladwell in his publication The Tipping Point. How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000). 6 As McGregor (1975) points out, the term counterculture is arguable better used in the plural, as there is no such thing as ‘The Counterculture’ but instead a succession of heterogeneous groups.

Cultural phenomena are extremely multiplex entities, and therefore any effort to define and make generalizations about cultural movements will be challenging to say the least - as bemoaned above by Theodore Roszak in the preface to his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture. This is at least as true when talking about those cultural movements through time whose only common divisor is the fact that they are characterized by values and mores that run ‘counter’ to those of the established culture. Merriam-Webster’s digital dictionary, for example, broadly defines counterculture as “a cultural group whose philosophy and mores may be in opposition to those of the mainstream.”7 As such, it can be explained as the cultural equivalent of political opposition, or ‘the principle of expansion’ as applied not to economies or political spheres of influence but to aspects of personal life and creativity.8 Seen in this general sense, Ken Goffman makes the arresting case in his book Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House (2004) to include historic figures such as Prometheus and Socrates, and movements such as Judaism and Taoism. In the foreword to this book, Timothy Leary joins in on the argument by stating that …counterculture [is] a perennial phenomenon, probably as old as civilization, and possible as old as culture. […] [It] blooms wherever and whenever a few members of a society choose lifestyles, artistic expressions, and ways of thinking that wholeheartedly embrace the ancient axiom that the true constant is change itself. (Leary in Goffman 2004:ix-x) When talking about counterculture as being a somewhat neat category, this is in fact hard to maintain. The biggest problem here lies in the fact that its constituents are not united under a single ideology or cause. To speak of a united front of opposition or a comfortably amalgamated de-centrism is too simplify things, as counterculture’s de-centralizing elements often show no consensus around that which would constitute ‘the center’ or mainstream culture. Different rejections of the ills as seemingly belonging to this center activate an abundance of alternative ways of being, as vividly illustrated by the ‘free love’ attitude of the hippies as contrasted by the punk’s slightly less corporeal intended ‘fuck the queen.’ In general, I think we can more or less divide countercultures into two groupings, namely those that seek to avoid defusing and those that enact cultural diffusion. The first hereby is more inclined to remain underground, on the edge, or in the gaps, whereas the second is trying harder to disseminate their values, ideas and practices. A detectable ambivalence, therefore, exists within counterculture’s adherents; a tension between the desire to remain undiscovered and immediate, and the pro-active desire for exposure and reform; between maintaining boundaries and breaking them down; between de-centring and re-centring. It is a tension that, as I hope to From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary version 2.5 (digital). Downloaded on April 22nd, 2006. 8 On: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture, accessed September 4th 2006. 7

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

show, is far from resolved within Burning Man and has played an important part throughout its existence. Still, my argument states that Burning Man started off more countercultural than it is now. Before we can even begin tracing its history in order to prove such statement, we need to narrow the concept of the counterculture down. When defining it as simply any lifestyle that differs from the prevailing culture, it should really include traditionalist groups like fundamentalist Christians or orthodox Jews; opposed as these might be towards pluralism, abortion, sexual freedom, science, materialistic selfindulgence, free speech and many other aspects that are more or less mainstream in the Western world. Yet, such groups do not exactly have resonance within Burning Man, and, personally speaking at least, rarely spring to mind when considering exemplars of the counterculture.9 In order to more aptly distinguish countercultures from mainstream society, as well as from subcultures, religious and ethnic minorities, and non-countercultural dissident groups, Goffman argues for a threefold of root principles, or meta-values (Goffman 2005:30-31). First, he sees countercultures to assign primacy to individuality at the expense of social conventions and governmental constraints. Second, they would challenge authoritarianism in both obvious and subtle forms. And third, countercultures would embrace individual and social change. Furthermore, Goffman views his diverse array of counterculturalists to be joined by their ‘anti-seriousness’ as it were: the fact that they tend to be jokers, bohemians and libertines. He stresses that while these qualities might subvert serious analyses, their importance should not be diminished, as for many people, and in many ways, the resulting antic behavior and easy sensuality are precisely what makes them attractive (Ibid.37). Countercultural playfulness here represents the non-authoritarian refusal to take oneself, any ideology, or any code of righteousness too seriously - but that does not mean that the countercultural message and critique should not be taken serious. In the public imagination, the counterculture as a visible, tangible cultural phenomenon is often linked with those deviant Western youth cultures arising in the turbulent age of the sixties and seventies.

In fact, even though very few people will have an exact, handy definition for what counterculture is, most of these people are pretty convinced that they know it when they see it. And indeed, in the time when the term counterculture became popular through Theodore Roszak’s publication The Making of a Counterculture in 1969, one could literally see the people who were to fit into his conception. Any male with long hair and possible a beard, wearing raggedly-assed jeans, a bandanna, and maybe even a tie-dyed T-shirt, was almost certainly a counterculturist. Any woman with even longer hair, wearing a similar outfit or alternatively a peasant dress, fitted neatly into the same category. In other words, almost every young American attending college at that time could be considered as belonging to the counterculture. In Roszak’s view, apart from these more obvious aesthetics, the common ground between these youngsters was their mutual rejection of the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominated industrial society, or, in short, what he labeled ‘technocracy.’ Because I think that the social critique already inherent in the term counterculture is very significant, and also because I think that Burning Man still resonates with some of the more specifically formulated critiques by the counterculture of the sixties, I want to have a closer look into this technocratic society as described by Roszak.10 Roszak starts by describing how, through time and as American society progressed, more and more technology got incorporated into its citizen’s culture and everyday lives. In the fifties, the American technological industry gave way to a progress that promised security and affluence (Roszak 1969:205). It offered an image which was much looked-for after the insecurities that came with the Cold War period, the nuclear horrors of Hiroshima, and the upcoming threat of U.S.’ military intervention in Vietnam. However, with all these new technologies, society was advancing but at the same time it became so vast and complex that the general public started the deferring on all matters to those who were ‘experts.’ As Roszak phrases it: In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the non-technical man. Instead, the scale and intricacy of all human activities - political, economic, cultural - transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts. (Roszak 1969:7) Accordingly, the mentality of the fifties is best described as the idea that in order to be successful and reside on the more affluent or acceptable side of society, one had to follow the rules and regulations of these experts. In turn, technological advancements that were supposed to literally lead to the ‘advancement’ of society, turned into a controlling technocracy. As a response to technocracy’s alienating and submissive model, there developed two different types of realms in society. There was a generation and societal gap between those who believed in order and the more authoritative technocratic ways of life, and the opposing many that wanted to counter this restrictive sense of societal status quo and started to revolt. To have such revolt or protest towards the affluent dominant society is not new, but what was different in the sixties was the fact that it was the young affluent generation itself who felt oppressed and wanted to be heard; those who “had enjoyed the richest, most pampered adolescence in the history of the world [and] had now decided that it was crap” (Stevens 1998:292). For these countercultural youth it was truly about ‘break and rupture’, as Roszak specifies: “What makes the youthful disaffiliation of our time a cultural phenomenon, rather than merely a political movement, is the fact

9 Saying that, searching for ‘counterculture’ in Google these days shows a vast array of links in the direction of the ‘Christian Counterculture’, apparently based on Romans 12:2 “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world…”, and which mostly goes against the ‘pollution of syncretism’ or ‘the sin of liberal Christianity’. (e.g. www.counterculture.ca; www.worship.ca; www.desertstreambible.org, accessed November1st, 2006)

11

Roszak is not the only one attacking the technocratic society, or more in general what he calls ‘technoculture’ or the ‘Promethean legend.’ In fact, his attack makes him part of a cabal of countercultural critics that also includes Jerry Mander with his Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), and Neil Postman with Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985).

10

-1- The Countercultural Package Deal

that it strikes beyond ideology to the level of consciousness, seeking to transform our deepest sense of the self, the other, the environment” (1969:42/49). The counterculture so characteristic of the sixties was therefore the development of not only questioning authority - traditionally inherent in any counterculture - but also of questioning the whole mainstream mindset. It hereby included the search for more concepts of freedom in one’s society - and one’s mind. Furthermore, it questioned the traditional definition of social change as a belief in progress, achievement and betterment, and ended up altering the concept of social change itself.

Anton Zijderveld, writing in 1970, perceives a similar rationalization of modernist society, and argues how the counterculture would stem from a protest against the abstract and alienating structures of its institutions: I obviously mean to say that modern society has become abstract in the experience and consciousness of man! Modern man, that is, does not ‘live society’; he faces it as an often strange phenomenon. This society has lost more and more of its reality and meaning and seems to be hardly able to function as the holder of human freedom. As a result, many modern men are turning away from the institutions of society and searching for meaning, reality and freedom elsewhere. These three co-ordinates of human existence have become the scarce values of a continuous existential demand. (Zijderveld 1970:54) For Zijderveld, the search for ‘meaning, reality and freedom’ was not exclusively the right of youth, or, more in general, to be limited to a specific age or life phase. Instead, he saw it inherent to human nature to both conform and resist the complex psychological, sociological, cultural, political and economic structures of modernity. He calls this human paradox the ‘homo duplex theorem’11 (Zijderveld 1970:3), and sees the spirit of protest so characteristic of the sixties to be part of this complex and multiple phenomenon. Whether we view the sixties counterculture as part and parcel of the technocratic society or as one side of the homo duplex theorem, fact is that its (youthful) resistance turned out to be very ‘mediagenic.’ Mass media was quick to pick up on the message of rebellion posed by these dynamic youths, and recuperate, appropriate and assimilate it into popular culture. Historian Thomas Frank even argues that the way we picture the counterculture today is only its co-opted capitalistic version, full of stereotypical psychedelic/hippie imagery. Frank hereby acknowledges that 11 Durkheim already mentioned his concept of the ‘homo duplex’ to refer to the two centers of gravity that the human being unites in him or herself: a ‘lower pole’ that pertains to the embodied individual, and a ‘higher pole’ that pertains to mind and society. For Durkheim there was a similar sense of tension between the two poles of human beings. Durkheim saw the ‘lower pole’ of this dualistic unity - the embodied individual – to be the stronger and primordial one. However, this would not be without a certain sense of tension, much like Zijderveld sees in his homo duplex.

the counterculture might have its roots in bohemian and romantic antecedents, but shows that this originally adversarial culture (as was still the case with the beatniks) became ‘hegemonic’ during the sixties. In his book The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, he illustrates how American capitalist marketers in the sixties discovered the allpowerful new potential of youth;12 replacing the ‘old’ conformist mass products with the appeal to rebellious individualist products and consumers. Advertising played a pivotal role in the cultural transformation of this era as it harnessed people’s skepticism of mass consumerism and mass conformity, to consumerism itself. The new ads enabled people to reject those mass values while at the same time they enticed them to buy, in great masses, the products which would distinguish them from the masses.13 By thus incorporating the critique of mass society in their ads, corporate capitalists were able to co-opt14 that individualistic critique. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter go even further in The Rebel Sell: How Counter Culture became Consumer Culture (2005) by suggesting that there has never even been any tension between the counterculture and capitalism, and that the mutual interests have always been compatible. In their view, the story of capitalism since the sixties is the story of business absorbing so much from the so-called counterculture of that decade and after, and vice versa, that the two effectively merged. Like Frank, they see the counterculture’s governing ideas of rebelliousness and ‘cool’ to have become the central ideology of consumerism. Ultimately, the question whether the sixties and seventies were a matter of the ‘conquest of cool’ by corporate capitalists or whether the counterculture in that time was their ‘creation of cool’ begs to differ. I think that there was definitely a high degree of co-optation going on, and I also think that Frank and Heath & Potter make a good point when they perceive mass media’s appropriation of rebelliousness to subvert this rebellion, to make it safe as it were. However, I do not believe in denying, as Frank seems to do and Heath & Potter certainly do, that there was a real counterculture that existed before and after The Beatles and the Beetles, just as I do not share their opinion that all counter cultural values got coopted during this particular pivotal time.

In the words of Ulf Zimmerman when discussing the new marketing techniques used in the sixties: “luckily you just had to think young to take part, so that no one was excluded” On: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi? path=17028900969687, accessed October 18th 2006. 13 The Volkswagen is a good example of this: first used (by the Nazi’s even) as a uniform ‘people’s car’ and then turned into an icon of American democratic dissent, linked to hippies, free love and unlimited freedom. To perpetuate this association, the VW’s ads showed an unbridled capacity to live outside capitalistic society - but of course you first had to buy a VW to have such option. 14 ‘Co-optation’ was the word New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse first used to describe the ‘cultural repression’ he saw around him. Roszak acknowledged it as the process in which the cultural experimentation of the young was subject to ‘commercial verminization’ and so of having the voice of its dissent dissipated. 12

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

Burning Man did not originate in San Francisco for nothing, just as it does not continue to leave its strongest mark on this liberal city for nothing. Even though nowadays the festival takes place on a desert plain in Nevada, it is still a great deal more entwined with ‘S.F.’ - as its locals lovingly call her - than with any other place. San Francisco is not just the birthplace of Burning Man, but also “its headquarters, its philosophical home, its conscience, and its main conduit to the outside world” (Jones 2006:16). It is the city where the office and its year round staff reside and it is the city where the greater part of all Burning Man related events take place. But above all it is the city whose past resonates most strong in the event and whose future holds most promise to incorporate its ideals. As Harvey puts Burning Man’s connection to the city:

However, I do believe, in relation to my argument, that Larry Harvey took the perceived co-optation, commoditization, assimilation and appropriation of countercultural values and aesthetics as an important lesson, and that this aspect of the sixties counterculture shaped the way Burning Man came to be as well. As I hope to show in the next part, the Burning Man organization – and implicitly its participants – took, and continue to take, unequivocal steps to avoid turning into a mass marketed and mass mediated brand or commodity. What’s even more, on Burning Man the way mass media is said to appropriate all things (counter)cultural is turned into yet another critique towards the parasitic and mediated nature of Western society. In turn, what seemed to be a very conscious decision was made to try and infiltrate this society in order to change it - not to counter it. These premature conclusions have to part of a future discussion, though. I first want to have a look at some of the countercultures that came to influence Burning Man when they were still alive and kicking at society.

San Francisco has always been a place apart, and a center of eccentric and independent thinkers. And what we started here, I don't think could have grown up anywhere else. […] You can create a social context in which culture can be created, but you can't directly create the culture. (Harvey in Jones 2006:16) The creation of San Francisco’s specific social context goes back a long way.15 As the last stop in America’s voracious westward expansion, the settlement and later city has always attracted artists, dreamers, and outsiders. On top of this, or maybe even because of this, the city has always been anti-authoritarian, making its more contemporary role as a catalyst for social change, the avant-garde and a whole range of countercultures seem a likely outcome. In John Mickletwaith’s book on conservative power in America, he states that San Francisco “is as edgy as America gets – a peculiar mix of blue bloods and gays, dotcom millionaires and aging hippies” (2004: 375). This edginess gets translated into bizarreness by author Jan Friedman in his book Eccentric America, with the first lines: I never thought of myself as eccentric despite being from California, the most eccentric state in the union, and San Francisco which I like to think is the most bizarre city in the country. I grew up thinking a nightly hot tub was a necessity, that everyone needs a hug, and that protest marches were as much a civic duty as voting. With a background like that I came to believe that all Americans are ‘free to express their individuality’. (Friedman 2004:ix)

Counterculture in Praxis Many core aspects of the Burning Man experience stand out when viewed against the historical context of some countercultural experiments […]. Of course, tracing such roots and influence is a curious game when you are dealing with an event that wants to scramble historical traces and turn all traditions upside down. In successfully constructing a pocket universe where radically different rules temporarily apply, the festival disguises its connections – historical, economic, and cultural – to the ‘real’ world. This allows for enormous joy, especially as the real world takes on the lineaments of a cruddy Sci-fi dystopia, but it is nonetheless crucial to remember the ancestors as well. (Davis in Gilmore 2005:17) After having done some theoretical explorations into the subject of the counterculture, I think it is high time to have a more pragmatic and descriptive glance. Obviously, this thesis is not about ‘the history and evolvement of countercultures,’ and I certainly have no ambitions to discuss all things countercultural. My goal in this first part is to consider Burning Man’s social background, and to answer the two interrelated historic questions of ‘why there’ and ‘why then.’ It is therefore that I now want to follow up on the above quote where Erik Davis urges us to ‘remember the ancestors,’ and try to unravel the indeed sometimes hard to distinguish threads that bind Burning Man to a history filled with countercultural collectives and their critique towards society. 13

Founded in 1776 by Spanish Jesuits as ‘Yerba Buena,’ the name changed into ‘San Francisco’ when control of the town passed to the United States in 1946. In 1848 gold was discovered, making the city’s population ion rise from 800 to 25.000 within two years time. 15

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Needless to say that according to this same book, California holds the highest density on the national ‘eccentricity map’ of the U.S. (as measured by the amount of ‘weird, wacky, and outrageously fun things to see and do’), and the entry on Burning Man starts with the sentence: “If any event in America defines ‘bizarre’, it would have to be Burning Man” (Ibid.247). And yes, by many standards this aspect probably holds true, and yes, individual expression definitely reigns at Burning Man, but I think that to define the festival just on its ranging in the ‘scale of quirkiness’ is to miss a point; a point that relates directly to Burning Man’s communal and subversive ideas. And I believe that this reflects back on a more recent history in San Francisco, namely the advent of the ‘Beat Generation’ and the way its adherents would question traditional values and eventually break with the mainstream culture.

The Beats

On October the 13th, 1955, a crowd of young poets and poets loving youth packed the Six Gallery in San Francisco. A small, neurotic Jewish homosexual walked to the front of the room and, with all the solemn drama he could muster, intoned the words: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterically naked. What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and

imagination?”16 Apparently, by the time Allen Ginsberg was finished reading his epic poem Howl, he was crying, the audience was chanting, his fellow poets were announcing the arrival of an epic bard, and, according to Goffman in his book on countercultures, ‘the revolution had begun’ (Goffman 2005:228). Without necessarily agreeing with his bold deduction, fact is that this moment is often singled out as the moment when an already extant subculture of hipsters and beats finally blew up big. And indeed, mass media popularization of that seemingly nihilist culture of visionary rapture and apocalyptic alienation from America’s repressed society followed directly on its heels. In his work on the subterranean traditions of American youth, David Matza saw the beats to be “a modern manifestation of the Bohemian17 tradition, committed to romanticism, expressive authenticity, and nonauthoritarianism” (Matza 1961:102). In the fifties, there was little room for these values in the States. It was a time characterized by exhaustion after the Depression and World War II - a war that had ended practically overnight with the hydrogen bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 -, and white conformist Americans were mostly pushing their nuclear anxieties away by buying into the new consumer market. As Dostoevsky had already prophesied when he talked about the realization of the socialist dream of universal prosperity, as it was for many middle-class Americans in this time, “men would suddenly realize that they have no life any more, no freedom of spirit, no freedom of will and personality, that somebody has stolen all that from them. People will become depressed and bored” (Dostoevsky 1998 [1918]:27). And this was exactly what the American youth felt: depression, boredom and disenchantment. It was time to break loose. Clellon Holmes had already introduced the term ‘beat’ to the world in a 1952 New York Times article by the much telling title This is the Beat Generation, in which he argued that despite its excesses, the post war generation was actually moved by a desperate craving for affirmative beliefs. The beat, having nothing to lose, could at least be honest, and live in the moment. And although their intense ‘Now’ was grounded in despair, with a gloomy general mien, it still carried a sense of unconstrained aliveness that was missing in the carefully planned office bureaucracies and suburbs. In Understanding the beats, Edward Foster describes the trap that this last category of ‘squares’ found themselves in: Men were expected to be logical, 16 Howl was first published and distributed across America in 1957, and along with Kerouac’s book On the Road – published in the same year – it earned the beats mass recognition and popularization. 17 The term ‘Bohemianism’ emerged in 19th century France to describe outsiders living apart from conventional society; untroubled by its disapproval. The 1862 Westminster Review states: “The term ‘bohemia’ has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gypsy, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits. A bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art” (Noted at the Online Etymology Dictionary).

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

efficient, and coolheaded. […] There was no place for the excitable, intense and independent personality exemplified by frontier America. That was identified as adolescent, a stage responsible men were supposed to outgrow (Foster 1992:13).

inhabited it adhered to a set of laws and rhythms completely different from the nine-to-five routine that governed straight society. More than anything else the Haight was a unique state of mind, an arena of exploration and celebration. The new hipsters cast aside the syndrome of alienation and despair that saddled many of their Beat forebears. The accent shifted from solitude to communion, from the individual to the interpersonal. (Lee 1985:72)

The beats refused to conform to this unnatural state of being, as exemplified by beat writer Jack Kerouac’s famous lines: “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn” (Kerouac 1957:1). The beats became pioneers in the sense that they were the first semiotic counterculture, exiling themselves from mainstream culture not through physical isolation but through art, perception, argot and mode of dress. But they also became pioneers through the way this shared aesthetic got appropriated for mass audiences. Especially the new up- and coming medium of television turned their original dissident aesthetic into entertainment, putting style above content and hereby bereaving it of most of its meaning. The romanticized image of the beat would draw dissident youth from all over the country and in great flocks to the original beat center in San Francisco’s ‘Little Italy’ North Beach, where rents were traditionally low and cheap wine plentiful. It was not long before touring busses started rolling in, rents rocketed sky-high, and the beats moved on to greener pastures; leaving only echoes behind. Nonetheless, these echoes run throughout all the forms of alternative/counter culture that have existed since, and the beats left a definite mark on the city, making the San Francisco Examiner in more recent times state that “[…] the Beat attitude is integral to the Bay Area’s identity” (Peters 1997:17). I think it is the beats’ attitude of nonconformism, freedom and possibility that would also influence Larry Harvey and the way Burning Man came to be. However, in turn, Burning Man would not be Burning Man if this connection would not be ridiculed under a thick layer of irony by its participants. In the year that I did my research at the playa, my eye fell on a listing for the Post Beatnik Syndrome camp: Oh, we've got it bad. That syndrome. Everytime we see a set of Bongos, the poetry just spills out. This unconscious sense of disrespect for authority rises, and we have an urge to have a cup of coffee, sit on a pillow, play and listen to music, and space out. It's so hard to get anything done, but, what the hell, we don't care anymore, just want to enjoy the remaining daze ahead. Come join us, and watch the sun come up, waltz across the sky, and set into the western desert. (2005 theme camp guide)

The Hippies

The beats left a legacy that became fertile ground for the new generation of cultural dissidents. In the hands of these so-called hippies, the beats’ overall rather sullen anti-authoritarian and anti-materialist tendencies started to evolve into a more playful, absurdist style. To the hippies in these days, it seemed as though bureaucratic regulations, the rules of ownership and the presumed necessity to sell one’s time for wages were simply tiresome roadblocks to be ignored, danced around, or finally be overthrown. The young people picking up on this message were speaking a language of peace, love, community and ecstasy. Instead of North Beach, they gathered in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, popularly called ‘Hashbury’, where large ramshackle Victorian houses could once again be rented cheaply. In his book Acid Dreams, Martin Lee observed: By 1965, Haight-Ashbury was a vibrant neobohemian enclave. […] A small psychedelic city-state was taking place, and those who 15

The hippies made non-conformism and the personal search for identity a mass movement, and really put the word counterculture on the map as it were; in many ways summoning forth new forms of conformity, group identities and communal ideals. As Theologian Dr. Martin Marty put it, “they reveal the exhaustion of a tradition: Western, production-directed, problem-solving, goal-oriented and compulsive in its way of thinking.”18 The hippies instead sought individual liberation through means as various as drug use, total withdrawal from the economy, and cathartic gettogethers.

Quote from Marty in Time Magazine article The Hippies July 7 1967 (from the archive: author unknown)

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-1- The Countercultural Package Deal

These get-togethers were often large gatherings, characterized by its visitors’ ubiquitous absence of physical, mental, emotional and even, or sometimes especially, biological restraints. In my opinion, this meeting of the political and pleasure as it were; the ‘party’ and protest, or - for those fond of Greek mythology and/or Nietzschian philosophy - Apollo and Dionysian, and the drive for an intense sense of togetherness and collectivity in doing so, that is similarly exemplary of Burning Man. It is what Musgrove called ‘the dialectics of utopia:’ “a dynamic tension of political activism (resistance) and personal growth (aesthetics and play) which characterized the counterculture” (Musgrove 1974:16). This definitely shows in the culmination of the hippie era: Woodstock. Although the three days of the ‘Woodstock Music and Art fair’ took place not in San Francisco but in upstate New York, Bethel, and there are at least as many differences as there are similarities with Burning Man, I find it important to mention the hippie fest here. This is not just because contemporary media often makes the oversimplified analogue in many articles on Burning Man, but because Woodstock as a festival shook America through the sheer size of the hippie youth and the potential power of the spirit of community, and it did so in a very non-confrontational manner. It even made Time magazine state that Woodstock […] may well rank as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age. The revolution it preaches, implicitly or explicitly, is essentially moral; it is the proclamation of a new set of values. […] With a surprising ease and a cool sense of authority, the children of plenty have voiced an intention to live by a different ethical standard than their parents accepted. The pleasure principle has been elevated over the Puritan ethic of work. To do one’s own thing is a greater duty than to be a useful citizen. Personal freedom in the midst of squalor is more liberating than social conformity with the trappings of wealth. Now that youth takes abundance for granted, it can afford to reject materialism.19

I think that this last point is rather significant, and, as argued before, in a way goes for all things countercultural in the prosperous times after the fifties; it is simply much easier to reject money and materialism in times of bounty. In the case of the hippies, surplus goods were more easily available during the economic boom of the sixties, which followed a long period of post-war prosperity. Nowadays it seems that the economic privileges that brought these hippies and beats the leisure to dream such wild dreams have struck up against – among other things - corporate consolidation, a pervading model of capitalism, and the commoditization of countercultural values and aesthetics themselves. In a way it is precisely those things Burning Man opposes in its ethos. But maybe most Burners hereby fall exactly in the same category of post-scarcity ‘safe’ nonconformists. Maybe, though, we have to look at it from another angle, and argue that Burning Man might not be about rejecting money or material per se, but about rising above the estranging effects it is thought to have and instead using it to enter the communal sphere again. But again: these are speculations for later. For now, suffice to say that what I think resonates most with Burning Man is the hippies’ emphasis on community rather than wealth, free expression rather than conformity, a shared playful aesthetic rather than a Puritan ethic, and the possibility to do one’s own thing as a group thing. However, as said, Burning Man is definitely not Woodstock ‘the sequel.’ Larry Harvey vitiates this in an interview by referring to the fact that Burning Man is a far cry from a youth movement, and that “it should be remembered that this is the 21st century, and most ‘hippies’ are concerned about their kids, have passed 50 years of age, and, if they come to Burning Man, are more likely to do so in a rented RV with a shower than a painted school bus.” Additionally, Burning Man does not give its participants a ready made musical program; people are expected to take their survival en thriving in their own hands; technology is much more integrated and hailed into the event; and, most of all, I dare to say that it is more radical in its notion of community. This is definitely partly due to the fact that everyone is expected to participate at the festival. The hippies’ co-optation into culture and fall into structure has also left its mark, and has made the Burning Man organization conscious about how to re-enter culture. According to Turner, they should not have bothered, for the hippie movement, and similar types of ‘communitas,’ will always be phases and not permanent conditions (Turner 1969:112-113, 138-139). Following the communitas scheme, the hippie development can be outlined as having started with the spontaneous communitas which occurred for example in Woodstock, but also in the many other get-togethers and gatherings. Around these happenings a union of followers was normatively organized, with their own places and times where communitas could be experienced on the margins of society at large. Eventually, throughout the years, complete ideologies were developed to promote, ideally for all members of the society, the type of utopic communitas the hippies experienced. In the end, however, Turner sees the fate of any type of communitas to inevitably be a “decline and fall into structure and law,” as was the case with the hippie movement (Ibid.132). Just like anti-structure and structure only exist through their juxtaposition, so too does the “maximization of communitas provokes maximization of structure, which in turn produces revolutionary strivings for renewed communitas” (Ibid.129). In the case of the hippies, it produced something that might have taken off during the hippie days, but that evolved into a whole new separate counterculturally inflected subculture. This particular communitas and participatory collective started with a theatre group, and ended in guerilla. It is to them that I now want to turn.

Taken from Time Magazine article ‘The message of history’s biggest happening’ August 29, 1969 (from Time Magazine’s online archive: author unknown)

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Amaaaarican way of life or it can look to changing that society ... and that's POLITICAL. (Doyle 2002:75)

Guerilla Theatre

Already in 1959, and thus some time before the hippies even got òn their busses in order to ‘drop out’ at the Haight area, the city saw the birth of another collective that would leave its mark, albeit in more moderate form. This particular collective went by the name of ‘The San Francisco Mime Troupe,’ and it emerged as a rather unique blend of the contemporary avant garde (mostly beats or early ex-beats) and the radical left (mostly activists from the civil rights movement). Members of the Mime Troup, with the idea of ‘making public what is private,’ took their performances outdoors, outside the private spaces of traditional theater and into public spaces like the city parks. They were all about delivering high quality, absurdist and improvised entertainment for free, or at least for no more than a simple passing of the hat, whilst staying true to their message of moral and civic responsibility.

Guerrilla Theater was not intended to be a call to arms, but to verb a cultural revolt aimed at replacing discredited American values and norms. What this should be replaced with is vexingly vague, but that the artist should be at the vanguard of the cultural revolution was certain. In order to give form to this, in 1966 the Artist Liberation Front (ALF) was born, which went against a mentality they themselves dubbed as ‘ArtOfficial’ or the ‘Edifice Complex:’ the official trend of constructing large municipal centers of art instead of the small neighborhood centers the guerilla artists had in mind to bring art to the people with. The ALF became a vehicle for working artists outside the official arts establishment to band together for mutual support. Together they organized underground arts festivals and so called Free Fairs, which were all about communal celebration and participation. The artists would set up kiosks with large rolls of paper and painting supplies, kids (of all ages) could make their own art, and bands came to play. When looking back on these happenings, ALF member Barbara Wohl reminisces: I didn't articulate it to myself at the time, but what the point of the fairs was, was not to have artists displaying their works, finished products, but to have the supplies there so people could make their own art. [...] That was the basic idea of the fairs. It is not someone coming to observe his picture, but where whoever happened to walk up and see the paints could become the artist and do his thing, make his own art, be a participant. This was meant to be, and is, a very political thing. It was the beginning of this burgeoning toward not passively allowing the government to go on with the war. [...] This erasing of the difference between the performer and the performed upon was the real nitty gritty of that, the politics of the whole thing.20 A few months after the ALF initiative and the first set of Fairs, a number of Mime Troupe members broke away to found a free-wheeling anarchist collective they called the Diggers. They took their name from the English Diggers (1649-1650), who had promulgated a vision of society free from private property and all forms of buying and selling.

In 1965, their vision of a theatre with a revolutionary political agenda resulted in their first official manifesto under the name ‘Guerrilla Theatre.’ Underground theatres all over the country instantly adopted the phrase to describe their work. In the manifesto, the fundamental mission of a guerrilla theatre is described: The motives, aspirations, and practice of U.S. theatre must be readapted in order to: teach, direct toward change, be an example of change. It is necessary to direct toward change because ‘the system’ is debilitating, repressive, and non-aesthetic. The guerrilla company must exemplify change as a group. The group formation - its cooperative relationships and corporate identity - must have a morality at its core. The corporate entity ordinarily has no morality. This must be the difference in a sea of savagery. […] For those who like their theatre pure of social issues, I must say—FUCK YOU! buddy, theatre IS a social entity. It can dull the minds of the citizens, it can wipe out guilt, it can teach all to accept the Great Society and the 20

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On: www.diggers.org

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The ‘new’ Diggers were still in essence an art collective, but they represented a natural evolution in the course of the Troupe’s history, as they took the action off the constructed platform in the parks and jumped right into the most happening stage yet - the streets of the Haight-Ashbury, where I already described the new hippie youth culture was starting to manifest itself in those days. To blur lines between performers and audience was also no longer satisfactory enough for the Diggers; they strove for the even more ambitious amalgation of art and life. The Diggers liked to see themselves as ‘life actors;’ a caste of free beings, and in this capacity they propagated the idea of the ‘free city.’ As they believed that exemplary actions were the key to realizing their ambitious goals, they provided the area with daily free food, a free clinic and even a free store. And with subversive street theatre events: For the Diggers’ part all theater involved the willful suspension of disbelief by those who participated in it. Their play on guerrilla theater attempted to extend that suspension of disbelief, act out alternatives to bourgeois ‘consensus reality’ in its liminal space, demonstrate that these alternatives were possible, and thereby convince others to join them in enacting the Free City into existence. (Doyle 2002:80) I believe this quote shows well how alive some of the Digger ideals are within the Burning Man ethos. I do not think Burning Man as such is about enacting very concrete ‘free cities’ into existence, but - apart from being a (nearly) free city itself - the idea of becoming a catalyst for social change by showing alternatives to and examples of being in the world, has definite overlaps with the Burners community.

Even though the Diggers were relatively short-lived, they left a mark on the city that would be felt for many more years. Not only did Guerilla theatre, the ALF, Free Fairs and the Diggers become a big influence on further – better known – events such as the Human Be-in in San Francisco and Woodstock in New York, Burning Man is obviously strongly resonating with the participatory ideas behind these artistic movements as well. On Burning Man it is not just theatre that is intended to be participatory though, the concept is extended to include art in all its manifestations and productions. Instead of consuming art as happens in everyday life, on Burning Man everyone can be an artist, and most artistic expressions are

highly democratic and interactive, thus blurring the line between artist and audience, life and art - as shown in this section. To really put this participatory and artistic endeavor in a cultural context, it is time for a little excursion out of San Francisco and into Europe, where the ‘Situationists International’ were situated. I realize that the detour might seem redundant in our itinerary, both geographically as countercultural, but I do think it might shed some light on our subject. Situationists’ ideas have continued to echo profoundly through many aspects of culture and politics in Europe and the U.S.A., and most certainly resonate in Burning Man. Even in their own time, with limited translations of their dense theoretical texts,21 combined with their very successful selfmythologization, the term ‘situationist’ was often used to refer to any rebel or outsider (Bonnett 2006:25), rather than to a body of nearly philosophical, surrealist-inspired Marxist critical theory. But in order to more properly trace their influences within Burning Man, I nevertheless want to have a closer look into some aspect of their controversial theory.

Situationist Movement

The Situationists are best described as being a small group of Dadainfluenced, left-anarchist intellectual and artistic extremists, who targeted the culture of ‘spectacular consumption’ that was said to turn leisure into boredom, art into commodity and life into representation. The movement formed in the late fifties and mostly centered itself in Paris, where it greatly influenced the French revolt of 1968. The first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste defined situationist as “having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International.” The same journal defined situationism as “a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists.”22

21 Not just were there little translations, also in its original language the Situationists could be hard to follow. Critics of the Situationists frequently assert that their ideas are not at all complex and difficult to understand, but are at best simple ideas expressed in deliberately difficult language, and at worst actually nonsensical. Anarchist Chaz Bufe even asserts that “obscure situationist jargon” is a major problem in the anarchist scene (On: http://www.seesharppress.com/listen.html, accessed December 15, 2006). 22 Internationale Situationniste #1 (June 1958) On: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html, accessed January 17, 2006.

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

In 1967, the most prominent member – and the only one to stay with the group throughout its existence – Guy Debord would have Situationist critiques reach mass audiences through the publication of his anti-capitalist rant The Society of the Spectacle.23 In it, he identified the primary control system of capitalist society as, indeed, the society of the spectacle, in which mediation would result in an alienation with the average person from his own subjective experience. I think that Greil Marcus, in his book on punk and Situationism, explained Debord’s view most compact and clear: A never-ending accumulation of spectacles made a modern world, a world in which all communication flowed in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. The spectacle naturally produced not actors but spectators: modern men and women, the citizens of the most advanced society on earth, who were thrilled to watch whatever it was they were given to watch. […] Having satisfied the needs of the body, capitalism as spectacle turned to the desires of the soul. It turned upon individual men and women, seized their subjective emotions and experiences, changed those once evanescent phenomena into objective, replicable commodities, placed them on the market, set their prices, and sold them back to those who had, once, brought emotions and experiences out of themselves – to people who, as prisoners of the spectacle, could now find such things only on the market. All desires had to be reduced to those that could be put on the market. (Greil 1989:52) Once, when capital had been primarily focused on providing basic necessities and when the world was not completely mediated and interpenetrated, human beings had private lives; their leisure time was not yet colonized. Whereas classical capitalism taught people that ‘wasted time’ would be synonymous for time nòt spent at work, modern capitalism reversed that view, declaring through advertising and other ‘spectacular’ means that it is the time spent at work that is wasted, and justifiable only because it provides the money to consume. It was this transition that made capital turn away from the selling of necessities, and into the new market built around the selling of fulfillment and experiences. In the spectacular society, everything that had once been directly lived had now transmuted into a representation. As Larry Law sums it up: “Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience” (2001:3). However, for the Situationists, it is not the spectacle as such that forms the domination of the world by images or any other form of mind-control; the real domination lies in the social interaction that is mediated by all these omnipresent images. Seeing that a spectacle requires general nonparticipation and encourages lack of communication between people, it causes alienation, numbness and meaninglessness. This situation is rather hopeless, since when people consume the commodities or image-objects of the spectacle, they become part of the spectacle, and as such rebellion against it becomes hard or flat impossible. Even the most radical gesture gets recuperated into the spectacle and turned into a commodity, negating its subversive meaning. This process, by which the spectacle takes a radical or revolutionary idea and repackages it as a saleable commodity, is what the Situationists called ‘recuperation’. To counteract the alienating spectacles, and to annihilate the possibility of recuperation, the Situationists argued for the ‘construction of situations’ in everyday life: 23 Then still in the original French, under the title La société du spectacle. The first English translation was published by Black & Red in 1970, and got strongly revised in 1977.

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The construction of situations begins on the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see the extent to which the very principle of the spectacle - non-intervention - is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectator's psychological identification with the hero so as to draw him into activity. […] The situation is thus made to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing public must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, a new sense of the term, 'livers,' must constantly increase. (Dubord in Knabb:43) For the Situationists, direct action through performance within everyday life was put forth as a remedy to the usurpation of reality through its totalitarian representation. Performance thus became a vehicle of taking back one’s life from spectacular social control: “To the Situationist, you are – everyone is – a creator of situations, a performance artist, and the performance, of course, is your life, lived in your own way” (Lasn 1999:101). So like with Guerilla Theatre, the emphasis on praxis and participation was a similar point of gravity for the Situationists. And like with Guerilla Theater, Situationist members saw themselves to deal with a new, revolutionary art - away from traditional modes of artistic expression, and into the cityscape. For the Situationists, the need for creating situations was intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space (Chtcheglov 1958). Therefore the phrase ‘unitary urbanism’ was coined to describe experiments with creating ‘the next city’; designed specifically to open up new possibilities for social interaction. In line with this, Situationists members practiced their version of the ‘Dérive’: a practice of wandering aimlessly in groups through the cityscape, with the purpose of “bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world” (Plant 1992:58-59). Next to this re-signification of urban space, the Situationists would also set off what they dubbed ‘Détournement’, which literally means ‘turning around’ and involved “[...] rerouting spectacular images, environments, ambiences and events to reverse or subvert their meaning, thus reclaiming them” (Lasn 1999: 103). For the Situationists, the ‘detourning’ of signs and texts formed the opposite side of the coin to ‘recuperation’. This meant that instead of radical ideas and images becoming safe and commodified, images produced by the spectacle were subjected to alteration and subversion. Through irony and parody, ownerships over public space could once again be claimed, and the cycle of the spectacle broken or at least temporary made questionable.

-1- The Countercultural Package Deal

The Situationists as a movement dissolved in 1972, but its influence, and societal critique, is still felt. Urban guerilla and anti-consumption tactics such as the dérive and the détournement, for example, continue to inspire creative resistance and offer inspiration for alternate horizons on a ‘taking back the street’ level.24 Moreover, the Situationists’ sense of recouping politics and its creation of everyday experiences and situations exerted a strong influence on the anarchist and punk movement that started to gain force in the seventies. Some of these punk ideas and practices, in turn, would heavily influence the way Burning Man came to be. How and why this was so, is what I want to unravel next.

The Punks

Although there were definitely elements happening in the New York underground scene that can be labeled punk ‘avant la lettre’, the official punk movement began in the UK, roughly in the mid seventies. There, it was associated with a lot of class resentments; people in dead-end lives at the bottom of the social pyramid revolting. When the punk movement crossed into the United States – according to which’ Declaration of Independence all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - it began to turn into a movement that espoused two main basic ideas, namely ‘never sell out’ and ‘do it yourself.’ With regards to the first idea: ‘never sell out,’ Burning Man organizer Larry Harvey talks about why this motto would be especially paramount to American youth in those days: You're talking about a generation that had seen everything it ever loved taken away from it. You're talking about a generation that, as it sat around the great American table, wanted to spit up. Throughout their lives they'd endured the same recurring experience. Something would be invented in the context of community, and culture would be generated spontaneously out of the interactions of individuals who felt that they belonged to a thing, and that it belonged to them, and out of that ethos they would begin creating things that embodied their identity in the world, and as soon as that happened, someone would come along, a market scout, and it would be appropriated, marketed as a lifestyle, and turned into an image. It would be completely denatured of any meaning that it ever had for anyone. (Harvey 2000)

direct action politics, new musical sounds and experiences” (McKay 1998:2; see also Purdue et al. 1997). Thus, within the punk movement, social criticism got combined with cultural creativity in what is “both a utopian gesture and a practical display of resistance” (Ibid.27). It would come to spawn a whole underground network that operated completely outside the system; mostly in squads and warehouses, where its autonomy was fiercely protected. The DIY movement counted collectives likes the Survival Research Laboratories, who advertised with posters on concrete pylons under the freeway for the few who knew where to look for them, and who had performance shows where dead rats were thrown at their San Franciscan audience. Their intentions were clear: the shows were held for no one but themselves, and if you did not like it then you could go and create your own show. Or take Circus Redickuless, another infamous punk inspired collective, where the whole point was that it required no specific talent to join, which made one newspaper critic review that they exhibited ‘Olympian ineptitude.’25 Exemplary, the circus had acts like the ‘man-eating chicken’, which involved a close friend of Larry Harvey, Chicken John, sitting on stage eating… chicken.

So the punks, responding, perhaps, a little crude at times, made it their first tenet that they would never compromise their integrity, morality and principles: they would never sell out. Directly linked to this is the punks’ second tenet: the idea to make your own show, or the ‘do it yourself’ (DIY) code. According to McKay, DIY culture is “a kind of 1980s counterculture: A youth-centered and -directed cluster of interests and practices around anarchic radicalism, As exemplified, for instance, by the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) whose members have been waging a “guerrilla war on the boredom and banality engendered by the corporate annexation of public space” in San Francisco for over 22 years. BLF quote from its own site http://www.billboardliberation.com/. For an excellent discussion on BLF and others, see Vivoni 2006, on: http://www.soc.uiuc.edu/about/Transnational/francisco% 20vivoni.pdf. Both sites accessed November 2nd 2006. 24

Taken from the Austin Chronicle 30-03-1998, in a review of the documentary directed by Phillip Glau about the tour Circus Ridickuless did in 1995 under the unofficial name ‘Cirque du So-Lame: a real tour de farce’. On: http://www.filmvault.com/filmvault/austin/c/circusredickuless1.html, accessed November 9th 2006.

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

In 1977, another in this abbreviated list of absurdist San Franciscan theatre/performance/ DIY/never-sell-out collectives saw the light, and it was dubbed the Suicide Club, based on a Robert Stevenson story where several men agree to commit suicide after living one last day free of social restraints. The name belied the gentle albeit zany nature of its members, who had a predilection towards light-hearted practical jokes, and who Doherty described as “a gang of ‘twixt-hippie-and-punk intellectuals and edge-seekers – not the cool kids but the weird ones” (Doherty 2004:35).

Even though the Suicide Club chose to remain highly implicit about their philosophy or purpose, they do state what it had nòt been: “So far, there has been no President, no voting, no meetings, no collectives, committees or consensus, no rules agreed on by everyone, no dares, no mandatory experiences.”26 The Suicide Club became a sort of secret club: a clearinghouse for urban adventures idea, street theatre, and the drive to experience life as if every day were the last. However, in 1982 this actual last day came after all, and the club just sort of sputtered out. It would not even have been of any particular interest to mention here, were it not for fact that several of the remaining members launched the so called Cacophony Society, which took the basic punk ideas of ‘never sell out’ and ‘DIY’ to a whole new level.

Cacophony Society

Daniel Pinchbeck described the Cacophony Society as “a Bay Area network of ‘culture jammers’ and pranksters, leftovers from the posthippie, prepunk bohemia of the ‘70s, though with a touch of both” (Pinchbeck 2003). According to the boilerplate on its newsletters, the Cacophony Society is: A randomly gathered network of free spirits united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society. We are that fringe element which is always near the edge of reason. Our members include a wide variety of individuals marching to the beat of a different din. We are the merry pranksters of a new decade. We are nonpolitical, nonprophet and often nonsensical. You may already be a member.27 Each month, many of the Cacophony members would get together for various participatory experiences, “covering a wide range of activities and events generally designed to push the limits which contemporary society

has placed on fun, humor, entertainment and excitement.”28 I cannot resist the temptation to mention a couple of the more illustrative stunts they pulled. Take the fully staged public protests against the Disney movie Fantasia, where they represented an absurd conclave of interest groups such as the Sensitive Parents Against Scary Movies (SPASM), upset with how frightening the movie was to small children; the Bay Area Drought Relief Assistance Program (BAD RAP), outraged at Mickey Mouse’s water wastage during his sorcerer’s apprentice scene; and ‘Calorically Challenged’ activists, peeved with the mocking of dancing hippos. It earned them an article in Time29 magazine, and then later in the Wall Street Journal about how they fooled Time into taking them serious. Another infamous random Cacophonic act consisted of the members setting themselves up in clown uniforms with briefcases at bus stops down an entire route, hereby slowly filling the bus with seemingly unrelated clowns. And in yet another collective outing they traipsed through Haight Street giving away pennies to bewildered passersby. Unlike the highly secretive Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society assumed that it was possible by cross-fertilizing with other groups, tendencies and events in the area and even the nation, to all create their own interesting good times – together. One of the central organizers, Michael Michael (who is still with the Burning Man organization till this day), even led the attempt to franchise Cacophony, creating mini gangs of mischievous gremlins in any American city where he could find someone to lead them. When I asked him the same question I asked Larry Harvey – “why it began in San Francisco” -, he answered that while the careerminded artists had always gravitated to New York or Los Angeles, San Francisco remained a haven for the more quixotic creative types, among which he classified himself, whose only place in the world was going to be the one they and their friends created through their own will, joy and free thinking. If any principle united Michael to these people and these people to one another, it was simply that they wanted to make their own fun and experience things together. Michael: “We were not just sitting in a room with a bunch of people glued to a TV and not talking. Cacophony was about direct experience” (Michael, interview September 20th 2005). On: http://www.cacophony.org/, accessed May 15 2005 Ironically enough, Time Magazine cited the protest in an essay about America becoming a nation of whiners and complainers; calling the protesters a ‘fringe pressure group’. On: http://diswww.mit.edu/tla/humor/4, accessed October 12 2006.

28 29 26 27

www.suicideclub.com On: http://www.zpub.com/caco/caco1.html, accessed May 15 2005

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-1- The Countercultural Package Deal

In 1988, when Michael stumbled onto the seemingly pointless little ritual of burning a wooden Man on a public beach, he was immediately charmed by the directness of the experience. So much so, that he wanted the Cacophony society to get involved. As Doherty phrases the attraction: “Burning a giant statue on Baker Beach for no stated reason was just the Cacophonists’ kind of absurd fun” (Doherty 2004:44). At that point in time, Burning Man had already been going on for three years, and a small and illdefined community had started to grow around the making and the burning of the Man. Michael, in his drift of cross-fertilizing, wrote about the Burning Man experience in the Cacophony newsletter so that the next year, the communities could get together and have fun together. Michael states how important this ‘shared togetherness’ was for the Cacophonic Society: it gave its collection of curiosities a sense of community, and it did so to people who had generally been made to feel, or chose to feel, separated from most of the people and culture around them.

I think that this last point - bringing a sense of community to people who did not feel, or chose not to feel, part of the established culture - is very significant. In a way I think it is what unites all things discussed in reference to Burning Man’s social background, and maybe even in general all things countercultural. As I hope to show in the next chapter, when Burning Man continued to grow it continued to attract an ever more diverse bunch of visitors, and became more of what Graham St. John (1999) would call an ‘alternative cultural gathering’: a heterogenic meeting point of countercultural collectives, ‘disorganizations’ and subcultures. As such the people visiting Burning Man were no longer united by a shared sense of critique towards society, but more by a shared sense of making an experimental and temporal community work, and to take this lesson in community back home again. All this would not have been set in motion though, were it not for the fact that the Cacophony Society indeed got involved with Burning Man when it was needed most, and helped to take its evolvement to the next level. And into the next chapter.

22

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

Part II:

Escaping Society

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-2- Every One of Them: Baker Beach, a Man, and a Mob

-2Every One of Them: Baker Beach, a Man, and a Mob

Apocalypse Now during that feverish night of my first burn, only without the story board and without any glimpse of a director – or direction. Later, when I start to delve into the phenomenon that is Burning Man deeper, I find out that apparently seventy percent of all people will literally get lost that night, and I will be more surprised about the thirty percent that find their way than the seventy percent that does not, but back then there is no such known consolation. For there and then, with the Man coming to an end, I cannot help but wonder how it all started and transformed, and how the Man has become such a primary icon to the widespread community of so called ‘Burners’ - for this one week and far beyond.

The year is 2005. At about ten ‘o clock on a Saturday night near the end of summer, a throng of over thirty-five thousand revelers, including yours truly, will enthusiastically shout “Burn it!” in a remote corner of a Nevadan desert. “It” is a towering effigy made of intricately latticed wood and glowing neon. For a week this giant Man has been a point of reference, common symbol and beacon for the visitors of the Burning Man festival. It has represented a myriad of dreams, future plans, artistic inspiration and communal ideals. An ephemeral city has been build around it; hundreds of people have kissed and held hands at its feet; it has led those lost home, while simultaneously making the concept of home debatable. This year again, there will be people who witness it and who will tattoo the abstract figure in their flesh upon returning home, literally using it as a signature for a new found Burner identity. And like all other years, even though the towering figure is laden with many allusions inviting an incalculable number of associations, it will be devoid of overt dogmatic significance for the group that will hail its existence – and, tonight, its annihilation. As the evening wears on, the scene all but resembles that of an ancient totemtoting tribe, were it not for the fact that this particular totem is stuffed with state of the art pyrotechnics, and membership to the tangible tribe around it voluntary, optional and in this specific manifestation necessarily temporal. The tension in the air can almost be physically felt, like waves of electricity; its tactile effects alternating between goose bumps and heat flashes; clenched damp fists raised mid air. Strangely enough, it is eerily still though, like the earth itself is holding her breath. When the figure’s arms slowly start to move upwards, setting its immanent doom in motion, the serenity is officially done with. Now, there is a giddy bloodlust in the air that is in direct contradiction to the gathering’s overall tone of joyous celebration. As both of its arms complete their overhead journey, the Man forms a crisp X shape, set against the darkening night in a gesture at once submissive and triumphant. When the first sparks coming from the feet will finally light the evening sky, what started as a careful and disorganized chanting minutes before now becomes a definite, cathartic cheer. With elaborately orchestrated fireworks shooting from the Man’s shoulders, elbows, heart and eventually head, people that were solemnly standing side by side half an hour ago now hug each other with a certain, often teary eyed, franticness. The Man itself, unable to sustain its own weight in the engulfing conflagration, soon collapses into a pile of sparks and a pillar of smoke, transforming the desert and its inhabitants into a chthonic dreamscape and frenzied purgatory where most of the socially ordained rules of so-called normalcy will be suspended until dawn. As the first people rush forward to cross the field of glowing ambers that is now the desert floor, a substantial part of the hundreds of art works scattered around the festival area will also be incinerated, obscuring everything and everyone from sight through billows of impenetrable choking smoke - while laser beams project otherworldly rays and figures overhead and ‘fire dancers’ pirouette, torches in hand, beneath the stellar umbrella of the night sky. I will never forget the sensation of feeling like a supernumerary on the set of

In 1986, the Man is brought to life for the first time in a tiny basement by two friends: Larry Harvey and Jerry James. On the night of the summer solstice - the 21st of June – they take the eight-foot wooden effigy to San Francisco’s Baker Beach and set it to flames. Even though nowadays there are many myth-like stories circulating as to the why of this initial event, the initiators themselves categorically state that it was for no apparent reason or motive. As Harvey describes it, seeking the source of things solely in this much discussed ‘First Time’ and affixing great significance to this earliest act “is like looking for the tiniest trickle of a tributary that eventually flows down into the Mississippi and confusing that for the mighty Mississippi. In fact, it’s the sum of a thousand tributary waters” (Harvey in Doherty 2004:25). 24

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

We have already traced some of the tributary waters eventually leading to the ‘mighty Man,’ in the form of countercultural ethics, critiques and collectives. They are important as they show that the seed of Burning Man sprang forth from such fertile ground and timing - something that Harvey never ceases to emphasize. What is not that important for Harvey is whether there was some deep unconscious Freudian drive that caused him and his friend to burn their wooden man on a public beach for the first time. Instead, what turned out to be crucial is what happened when it dìd burn, and especially what happened as it burned again, and again, and again. For there was a didactic path to follow, and for the first years of its destruction, the Man would have an important lesson to discover about the construction of community. It is a lesson of participation, non-spectatorship, and of people needing to have to do things together for community to appear. It is a lesson that I want to explore in this chapter.

Burning a Man When looking back at the first burn, what turned out to be most important was that we happened to choose to do it in a public space. It was done impetuously as a pure gesture. That was part of the San Franciscan culture I had absorbed, the culture of the self-expressive gesture, this countercultural notion that you could manifest your spirit by acting on creative impulse and have the courage to do it in a public way. (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005)

When I started my research in San Francisco, I could not wait to go to Baker Beach and see with my own eyes where it had all began. I probably had this romanticized image in my head of me on a blanket in the sand, interviewing Burners, whilst a setting sun would color the city’s proud symbol, the Golden Gate Bridge, pink in the distance. Fact is, though, that Baker Beach is just a narrow strip of not-so-golden sand, with little but a few brave nudists conquering the immanent dampness of San Francisco. It was Mark Twain who uttered the legendary quote that the coldest winter he had ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, and after living in that city for six months I can only agree with him. The biggest problem is the fog, or, more specifically, a scorching hot inland which draws mists of icy cold seawater over the city, thus creating fog. If anything, my first visit to Baker Beach made me understand why people would want to make big fires there – you need to if you want to keep warm and dry, especially at night.

25

Larry Harvey and Jesse James did not just want to stay warm through any means though, they wanted to do so by burning the Man they had just spent a day building. When they took this Man to the beach for the first time, it looked nothing like the grand, authoritarian point of reference I saw going up in flames, even though an ancestral relationship is conceivable. Looking at old pictures, the biggest aesthetic difference is obviously sheer size; the first Man was only about one head bigger than its creators and thus less than four sizes smaller than it is today. The ribs looked kind of similar, if not as plentiful and even, and the head was spiked with wild hair, instead of shaved like today, although it already carried the familiar inverted pyramid-style. The legs were the same orthopedic device-looking sheaths, though much less sleek and slick, and they were standing firmly on the beach and not on another two-storey house pedestal like it has for the past few years. And whereas today the Man is a streamlined high-tech wooden en neon skeleton stuffed with combustibles and fireworks, back in those days it still had flesh and viscera made of burlap to make it burn better.30 Seeing that the first Man was drenched in gasoline (so volatile and fastburning that it was decided to switch to kerosene in later years), it burned incredible fierce, and must have formed quite a sight on that narrow strip of beach. “It was just a crude thing stuck in the sand,” Harvey says, “but poised against the broad Pacific, flames licking, it was theatrical in a whole new sense” (Harvey 1997 speech). Like moths to the flames, strangers suddenly came rushing in from the beach. According to Harvey, it was then that the magic happened: people would begin to interact and contribute to the experience. As the wind blew the flames to one side, a girl tried to touch the Man’s hand. A hippie with a guitar sang a song about fire and some would sing along. Others started dancing, passed their bottle of wine, or threw in more driftwood to be burned. According to both Harvey and James, it was these acts of impulsive merger, participatory performance and collective union that made the initial burn so special. Furthermore, in hindsight, it was there and then that Harvey realized that this ritualized experience might have universal meaning and appeal, as it made people see that they are part of something beyond themselves. “That first man was just 8ft tall, and it was enough. […] Something bigger than they are, that’s all people need. It’s at least enough to inspire a leap of faith” (Harvey in Stein 2000:3). 30 To prove my point of the Man being slightly more advanced these days, some numbers concerning its needs in 2005: 450 board feet of wood, 15 pounds of screws, 500 feet of cable for lightning at night, 30 yards of white silk for the face, and 170 pieces of neon tubing for the intestines (information from co-construction manager Ben Stoelting).

-2- Every One of Them: Baker Beach, a Man, and a Mob

A Man with a Vision

It is obvious from the beginning that Harvey is the philosopher, the scholar, the analyzer, the ‘man with a message’ as it were. It is Harvey who speaks about countercultural influence, who reads and quotes theories from Hyde, Debord, and Putnam in public address, and who stirs ‘his’ festival in the direction of global manifestation. When I talk with his initial partner James about those first years, Harvey’s inclination is again confirmed: Larry started to ponder what it meant and why we were doing it, what the available metaphors or implications might be. He was thinking about it and writing about it. Why did he do that? It seems to be his nature, I suppose. To me it was just a big adventure, just an exciting, curious thing to do. I wasn’t as puzzled or intrigued as Larry as to why we were doing it. (James, interview September 13th, 2005) Hardly surprising then, it was Harvey who was in favor of making the burn of the Man not just a continuing ritual, but an ever-growing one, both in terms of the size of the Man and the number of people involved. In hindsight, Harvey recalls an argument with James and another friend over why the Man had to be taller than his original eight feet: “I remember feeling very much put-upon, feeling so disappointed and kind of lonely that they couldn’t see that it had to be. It just had to be” (Harvey in Doherty 2004:44). Hence spoke a man with a vision, and a Man to burn. So the second year, instead of the twenty people that joined the previous burn, there were now over eighty people on the beach. Afterwards, when Harvey looked at some grainy footage made of the burn, he heard a voice shouting ‘Wicker Man’31 over and over again. “I thought, if you’re gonna call it something, call it Lumber Man, for Christ’s sake, or Wood Man,” says Harvey. “I figured we needed a name if people were going to call it that crap” (Ibid.:32). For Harvey, son of a Freemason and carpenter, the use of wood in building the man had symbolic significance and was a critical part of the ritual. Hence wise, after considering the options, he settled for Burning Man: “a great multivalent name because it’s an action and an object and a shared experience all at once” (Ibid.:32). And thus, under the name of Burning Man, by 1988 both James and Harvey were committing to it fully: making posters and flyers to attract an audience beyond their immediate friends and building a Man topping around thirty feet, or twelve meter. The summer solstice that third year was a foggy, blistery night. As the effigy was torched, the kerosene soaked burlap and newspaper that stuffed its body blew away in ashes, but the Man, though charred, was still standing. Still, the flames had been impressive enough to exceed the sight of the usual bonfire, and the Man was to have his first encounter with the Law Wicker Man is a classic 1973 cult film starring Edward Woodward as an earnest Methodist who is sent to investigate the mysterious death of a woman on an island. There, he gets involved in an ancient Celtic cult that culminates in the burn of a giant human effigy made of wicker and stuffed with chickens, goats and, of course, the hapless Methodist. Harvey stresses that he had not seen the film when he first burned his Man, and on the Burning Man website it states that “Any connection of Burning Man to ‘Wicker Man’ in fact or fiction -or, for that matter, to Guy Fawkes, giant figures burned in India, or any other folk source- is purely fortuitous.”

31

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

in the form of a local policeman on shift. After some negotiation, an agreement was made to knock the statue down and finish burning it in less over hovering shape. In hindsight, I think it was here that the relationship between authority and Burning Man was defined for the very first time, and a hint towards structure first felt. Later on, the resulting cooperation on the side of Burning Man would be tried and tested to a much higher degree, and with more at stake, but not just yet. For despite the inauspicious end of the Man and the ominous signs that Harvey and James’ spontaneous expression was bothering the authorities in San Francisco, 1988 was a pivotal year in the life of Burning Man for yet another reason. It was the year that the earlier mentioned anarchistic Cacophony Society discovered the Man, and liked what it saw.

friends, a small army of volunteers was created. In the Cacophony mailing list that year, interested people were invited to meet in a parking lot in downtown San Francisco to help assemble the wooden sculpture. Michael Michael showed me the June 1990 issue of the Cacophony newsletter, a page of apple-green paper listing such events as a group read-in of Finnegans Wake and a series of lounge acts in the subway. The Burning Man entry reads: “The erection and destruction of a monumental human figure at the Summer Solstice is meant to dramatize the passage of time. […] The final event will be held on June 30th. Burning Man is a non-prophet organization.” Harvey is nowhere mentioned. When the Man got taken to the beach that year, an immense crowd of people was there already, eagerly awaiting its arrival. In anticipation of yet another police visit, Cacophonists with radios patrolled the paths down to the beach as pieces of the Man were hauled down. It did not prevent the Golden Gate Park Police (GGNRA) - represented by a lone officer on a motorbike - from showing up. Park regulations in force at that time limited beach burns to three by three-foot campfires. On Baker Beach, the Man, now grown to his present-day stature, loomed four-stories high, and this embarrassing discrepancy did not go unnoticed. Harvey again managed to negotiate a compromise, this time to assemble and erect the Man and then not burn it. Once more, it confirmed the valuable lesson that “it is often easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission;” an adage, Michael Michael states, that was already known by the Suicide Club and the Cacophony Society.32 It would be the beginning of one of the event’s most storied legends: the Burn that never burned.

The Burn that never Burned

It all started rather well that fateful year of 1990. The crowd had gotten so huge that it hardly fitted on the beach anymore, instead spilling out in all directions. As a line of about forty people slowly pulled the man upward, all those present cheered its erection. When the Man’s arms were pulled upright and over its head, the collective piercing shout was said to reach all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. And then a profound silence ensued. As the organizers gaped at the surrounding crowd, and the crowd stared back, a second, harder lesson was at hand. For the by then about eight hundred boisterous revelers were not about to just turn around without seeing the blazing spectacle for which they had come. A riot began, whereby even Harvey himself was assaulted and nearly strangled by an aggressive stranger. He told me how this horrified him not so much because of any physical pain, but because he had previously thought a community existed around the burn. It became obvious that what had begun as a small spontaneous group of ‘participants’ had now grown into an anonymous throng of onlookers. The people dedicated to creating Burning Man numbered in the dozens, and their well-wishers and friends amounted to several dozen more, but the many hundreds who now surrounded the Man on that night of June 21, 1990, had invested absolutely nothing in the process. In the words of Harvey: In fact, the Cacophony Society, impersonated that night in the figure of Michael Michael, liked it enough to tell friends and associates about it and cover it enthusiastically in the Cacophony newsletter - read and seen by hundreds in and around San Francisco. In 1989, their networking and promotional efforts would have the number of people attending the burn soar to over three hundred. The Cacophonists’ obvious enthusiasm inspired Harvey to make the Man even bigger the next year, an effort for which he received help from the Society of Carpenters. As friends told friends and they, in turn, told other 27

[…] we weren't used to crowds. And so we got the Man up, and then we turned around and we were surrounded by this big crowd, it was the first big crowd that we'd ever encountered. And it dawned on us that we didn't have a P.A. system. And we had no way of addressing them, or communicating with them, and then we were appalled to find out that a great part of the party that had come down had nothing invested in what we'd done. They'd come for a spectacle. 32 At: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1986_1996/, accessed July 1st, 2005.

-2- Every One of Them: Baker Beach, a Man, and a Mob

They'd just heard in town that there was this big man, they're gonna burn it. They hadn't worked with us. We hadn't been conscious of ourselves as a community, we were just doing it. And now it became a mob. It became a mob of disassociated individuals. 33 What had started as a playful event in which people interacted with each other and hence formed community, had turned into a tense mob; a majority of individual spectators who were there solely to consume the event, adding nothing to it and consequently ignoring the prevailing rule of participation. Analytically, what I believe happened was that its liminality; its communitas and collectiveness, was arrested by people who did not follow the rules of the game. These onlookers did not participate or added anything to the interactiveness of the ritual and thus broke the spell. As Huizinga elucidates, rules are a very important factor in the concept of play, and the person that trespasses against the rules or simply ignores them is a ‘spoil-sport:’ he robs the magical world of play of its illusion34 and must therefore be cast out as he threatens the existence of the play-community. After four years of burning the Man on Baker’s Beach, the circle of friends had grown into a crowd, and indeed the very existence of the ritual and thus the community was threatened.

The Participatory Project A core principle we know and love is Participation: our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. All of us here 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. (Harley Dubois: Member of the Burning Man Board, interview July 26th 2005) I have shown how after four years of obliviously burning the Man, rules ended up being broken. But if rules were broken, does that mean that rules were actually made? I think that during those first years on the beach, as clearly indicated by the 1990 mob incident, the ‘rules of the game’ were more implicitly present; in less conscious and more experiential form. I furthermore believe that before the formulation of rules and guiding principles –the Burning Man ethos-, what is overarching all ideology attached to Burning Man is the fact that it really is an experiment in community. As we have seen, according to Larry Harvey the event would not even have been repeated after that first time if he had not seen it to create community. It was an immediate act, an immediate experience, and it immediately brought seemingly strangers together. Now Burning Man has come a long way since this first act, but it is still the core around which the event revolves. And I think that this core is constituted by a form of social critique that is nearly countercultural in nature, and that goes against individualizing, alienating and disenchanting mechanisms as seen by Harvey in the anonymous and passive culture that forms American society today. In a lecture he held for the Cooper Union in New York City on April 25, 2002, he phrases the general unease as follows: America is now wealthier than at any other time in its history, yet all around us and within us a feeling of lurking anomie persists. Like that scratchy sensation at the back of your throat, that shudder down your spine when feel the flu coming on, and symptoms of this deep unease pervade our society. The spread of materialistic values has contributed to a moral coarsening and a growing cynicism in our country. Within a manipulative world all motives seem venal, all efforts illusory. But at a deeper level, it is the commodifying of imagination itself, the moral passivity, the social isolation, the angst that is generated by living in a solipsistic world of fraudulent satisfactions that is producing the greatest evil. (Harvey 2002)

33 Taken from a speech Larry Harvey did on August 30th1997, at Hualapai Playa, Nevada. On: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1997/97_speech_1.html, accessed July 1st 2005. 34 As Huizinga explains, illusion itself is a pregnant word which means literally ‘in-play’ (from inlusio, illudere or inludere) 1955:11.

According to Harvey, Burning Man hereby poses some deep and drastic therapy to break this spell; to reestablish contact with one’s self, to reinvent a public world; to connect again to the natural world of vital need; and to really feel part of a community. And it is no longer contained to the dusty limits of the festival area but seeping out into everyday life and society at large. Nowadays, there is talk about being Rome to the colonies, but we have to remember that, like Rome, Burning Man’s ‘export model’ was not built in one day. Before becoming a culture within the common structure, or a structure within the common culture if you like, I think that Burning Man was more oriented towards escaping society, or at least towards countering perceived ills in this society. A society that is said to be culturally exhausted, and for which Burning Man poses an antidote in the form of immediate experience and radical self-expression – of participation instead of passive consumption. Through the mob incident, an essential and valuable lesson was learnt: people need to have something to do together in order for them to form a community. This kind of shared action, or participation, was exactly what 28

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

was lacking in contemporary American society, at least according to Harvey. At another lecture Harvey delivered, in the year 2000 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, he blamed this perceived deficiency in great part on the omnipresence of television in the American social landscape, and the numbness, isolation and alienation it would bring. In turn, I extend this to include ideas about Guy Debord and the society of the spectacle. For me, they both view today’s society to be deficient because of a similar axis of evil, namely the commodification of culture.

them for palpable things and real experience. Gnawed by an incessant appetite, a boundless hunger for spectacle and its ambiguous promise of satisfaction, they endure this vicarious state from day to day, from year to year, now throughout entire lifetimes, in a state of isolation from the sunlit world and from one another. For Harvey, television offers spectacle but no participation, images but no real experience; a pseudo life that holds no true connection to actual life, and which can never truly satisfy the craving it creates. And as the degree to which people exchange television watching for real experiences in their lives increases, so too does the level of alienation from this life. Seeing that Harvey mostly sees television watching to be a solitary act, he additionally concludes that people are alienating from each other. Harvey’s argument rings with existing theoretical analyses on how industrial society, with the separation of leisure from work, and subsequently the passive spectacles and hollow entertainment in the first sphere, would somehow be less real and experiential than pre-industrial society. As I have already shown in the previous chapter when discussing the Situationist Movement, the theorist that would truly fuel this discussion was Guy Debord, mostly through his widely read anti-capitalist rant The Society of the Spectacle (1967), which in turn was heavily based on ideas from Henri Lefebvre on the alienation of work and commodity fetishism,36 and Jean Baudrillard on the concept of hyperreality. In my opinion, what Debord – and Harvey - perceive to happen around them can be described, in general terms, as a process of ‘cultural exhaustion.’ With the risk of labeling things in un-nuanced black and white, and in highly attested criteria, I think this view of contemporary life as being culturally exhausted is an element that - to a certain extent characterizes so called ‘postmodern’ thought, and as such is viewed as an outcome of modernism’s mass culture and individualism. It is a view based on the dearth of access to cultural production in a social context, and it is typified by a passive spectatorship instead of a constructive participation in this culture. The result of this can be seen as two folded. On the one hand it implies that the commoditization of culture, with its constant flashy images and sensory stimulation, exhausts the meaning and usefulness of cultural production the moment it emerges, a kind of marketplace of symbols for sale, and as such results in feelings of anomie, in-authenticity, and meaninglessness.

The Society of the Spectacle

Larry Harvey, born in 1948, grew up in a time in which television would begin to take an ever greater place in the life of Americans. Much has been said about how this new up- and coming medium altered relations, perception, and ultimately society itself,35 and Harvey (2000) has certainly expressed his share: Like those famous prisoner’s in Plato’s cave, these [television watching] internees are given only spectral shadows to experience. They stare steadily at entertaining images and by degrees mistake The long, long list of such theorists would surely include McLuhan (1964), Debord (1967), Williams (1974), Mander (1978), Baudrillard (1984), Fiske (1987), Morley (1992), Smith (1998), and Bourdieu (1998). 35

29

Commodity Fetishism is a combination of terms first used by Marx. The best explanation of it that I have found up to date, is made by Leah Hager Cohen: “This tendency to regard objects as though their essence and their monetary worth were one and the same is sometimes called commodity fetishism. A commodity is a thing with a price. A fetish is a thing with a spirit. Commodity fetishism is the habit of perceiving an object’s price as something intrinsic to and fixed within that object, something emanating directly and vitally from that object’s core, rather than as the end result of a history of people and their labor” (Cohen 1996:11).

36

-2- Every One of Them: Baker Beach, a Man, and a Mob

On the other hand, it implies a certain degree of physical and emotional exhaustion, an ailment of ‘pseudo’-cultural fatigue, that is, too much simulation of culture. It basically says that when culture is merely consumed rather than created, there is nothing there of sustenance, no construction, no renewal, no replenishment, and no wonder at the world. Much like the alienation of ‘labor’ from ‘product’ that Marx talked about, cultural exhaustion implies an alienation of ‘life’ from ‘culture’, and leaves man feeling alienated from himself, others and existence.

consuming the spectacle, that person takes his or her own vision and projects it onto the world with the notion that he or she can change it. On Burning Man, people are actually creating ‘spectacles,’ together, instead of merely consuming them. Connectivity is often the outcome Culture and meaning should be something we create through our interactions with one another as we take part in the shared life of a community. But modern society discourages active participation and encourages us to be passive consumers. Instead of a community, we’ve become a mass. As a mass, we don't participate in culture, we consume it. We live together in isolated stalls. The context of community, the vital interplay of human beings, has been forgotten. What we consume has no inherent meaning or transcendent value to us. It is no surprise we thirst for thrills. Consumption doesn’t lead to satisfaction, only more consumption. If we’re to break this cycle, we must somehow reclaim community and create culture out of that experience.37 Culture is created through the experience of community, and community in turn is experienced through participation. Both as incentive and result, the self-maintaining spell of the society of the spectacle is – temporarily at least - broken or reversed.

To Participate or Not to Participate Because culture is all around us; because it feels so familiar and pervasive, locating what Carol Ehrlich calls ‘the tormentor’ becomes increasingly hard: Within life as spectacle, the stage is set, the action unfolds; people applaud when they think they are happy, yawn when they think they are bored, but they cannot leave the show, because there is no world outside the theater for them to go to. (Ehrlich 1979:275)

Burning Man does offer a place outside the theater for people to go; it proposes an antidote in the form of, among others, non-spectatorship; a spectacular ‘non-spectacle.’ I think that this is why the punk tenets of ‘make your own show’ and ‘Do It Yourself’ became so important for Harvey and his early initiators. It was Doyle who stated that the spectacle’s “hegemonic forces keep consumer-spectators enthralled and politically inert” (Doyle 1997:149), but if one is making one’s own show, then, instead of passively

To counter the society of the spectacle, or more in general the society of spectating, the first key value on Burning Man started to take shape as the injunction to participate in some way, with the corollary that there should be no spectators. Simply put, this meant that everyone in attendance was and is - accountable for making some kind of positive contribution to the collective experience. It is a form of participation that is blatantly egalitarian: anyone can do it. As Burning Man’s official newspaper the ‘Black Rock Gazette’ advises first timers: “Do something. Do anything. Your participation makes the event. Be spontaneous, silly, anarchic, igneous or rehearsed. As long as you harm no others, nor the playa, your creative actions enhance the happenings.” 38 In Burning Man’s early years; those beach years around which this chapter evolves, it was rather easy and clear cut how to participate. Friends told friends who told friends that there was a wooden Man that needed to be made, transported, assembled, erected, and set aflame. There were flyers that had to be printed and distributed, maybe some authorities that needed to be appeased, and a beach that needed post-burn cleaning. Nowadays though, as we shall find out in the next part of this thesis, Burning Man truly became a city ‘that never sleeps.’ Even though ‘no-spectators’ was the first tenet learned, and it was learned through the first years on Baker’s Beach, it would only really come to serve its purpose when Burning Man moved out of town, into a hash desert where it would become a several day event. At the moment, for its one-week existence in that desert, there are so overwhelmingly many things to see and do that if you wanted to experience them all, a whole year would probably not even be long enough. And, for the really mind-boggling part, everything is there because participants put it there and make it happen. Try to imagine what a festival would look like when there is no organization to provide the show. Then imagine that this festival is also a city, with a highly heterogeneous crowd and preferences. Then imagine that this event is actually taking place in one of the world’s most inhospitable settings, and that there will be nothing for sale, except coffee and ice. If you In the 1993 newsletter of the Burning Man Project on: http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1995/21/wray.html, accessed June 14th 2005. 38 From the 2005’s Black Rock Gazette’s Gate Issue. 37

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

have imagined all this, then imagine how I felt when I received a thirtyseven page booklet upon entering this strange place, stating all the activities and services and sights throughout the week – alphabetically; day by day; hour by hour, with a list that went on and on and on.

If you can imagine this, then you can imagine how extremely radical the concept of participation is at Burning Man. It is an alienating concept when compared to ‘normal,’ regular well-known Dutch festivals, such as Lowlands, Oerol or Pinkpop. Such festivals would be unthinkable without paid or professional or booked performers entertaining those who have come to see them. Burning Man, on the other hand, features neither rock stars nor any other kind of marketable celebrity. On the contrary, the stars are the participants. They do not pay to watch a show; they pay to be the show. Non-spectatorship is not only thinkable; it is actively taking place year after year. As Burning Man participant Max phrased it: I use to play sometimes you know, before an audience, but so often people just stare at you. Here, the ‘no spectators’ rule works brilliant, clearly borne of a generation who’ve finally realized that rock concerts are only as fun as the audience. In Black Rock City, what you’ve got is all the fixings of a weeklong rock festival - light shows, music, intoxicants and crowds - with only the infrequent appearance of an actual band. The audience has to entertain itself, and guess what? It blows your average stadium gig out of the water. Pink Floyd only wishes they could tour a show like this. (Max, interview September 22nd 2005) Nowadays, the injunction to participate is stretched to include all facets of participation normal in any city. In concrete form, this includes, though is certainly not limited to, pizza deliverers, masseurs, rangers, hairdressers, newspaper editors, seamstresses, bartenders, lamp lighters, musicians, beauty pageant contestants, cooks, clowns, and even the occasional anthropologist-to-be. The city would literally not exist without its volunteerism and participation. For while a citizen of Black Rock City, you are also the work in process. As T.S. Eliot would have it, you are “the music while the music lasts”39 or, in Rilke’s more emphatic formulation, “a resonant glass that shatters while it is ringing.”40 You are what makes the bridge sway, but also what keeps it together. In: The Dry Salvages (1945), the third part of Elliot’s poem Four Quartets. The full sentence would be: “Among the fleeting, in the realm of declination, be a resonant glass that shatters while it is ringing”. From Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke (1975).

Logically, from a few people gathering on a beach to an ephemeral municipality in a desert: as Black Rock City continued to grow, the rule of non-spectatorship became ever more urgent. I have already shown how those watching the burn of the Man turned into a dissociated mob; the exact opposite of community, but when Burning Man became a several day event characterized by a high level of ‘free expression’ and tantamount naked or else what bizarre looking people, not to participate became even more of a discrepancy towards the community. For although the specific means or manner of participation is theoretically limitless, entirely up to the individual and has changed through time, nòt to participate is very much frowned upon and actively discouraged by the rest of the community as it disrupts that which makes the community whole. As the San Francisco Chronicle puts it: “At Burning Man, the annual art carnival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, strange behaviors are not just tolerated, they’re encouraged. Voyeurism, however, is not one of them.”41

39 40

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Slow Burn at Burning Man -- Too Many Gawkers by James Sullivan, Thursday, August 31, 2000.

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-2- Every One of Them: Baker Beach, a Man, and a Mob

Of course, everyone who has ever been to Burning Man has once been a newbie, a ‘firsttimer’ and thus most likely to have experienced feeling entirely overwhelmed: trying hard to process everything happening around you makes participating in any constructive sense the last thing on your mind. According to Rico Gagliano, as you first enter Burning Man, you will inevitable be a tourist: In any case, in the midst of that first stroll through Black Rock, is when the typical novice hits the most difficult level of enculturation the shocking realization that he or she is a tourist. Indeed, the festival’s slogan is ‘no spectators,’ but after about an hour of gawking at the sights, there’s no denying that a spectator is exactly what you are. Which places you almost at the bottom of the unofficial Burning Man pecking order, ranking just slightly above journalists, who are identified with numbered eyeball stickers and only barely tolerated.42

for the weekend of the burn has become impossible. Marian Goodell, Burning Man’s ‘mistress of communication’ says that the decision to abolish walkup tickets for the last four days “was because we wanted to discourage people making last-minute, on the whim, decision making. We implemented the policy to try and reduce the ‘looky-loo’ factor” (conversation at the office, July 8th 2005). Additionally, Burners are forever encouraged to educate those not following the rules or guide-lines laid out. It being Burning Man, the way towards such education is often interpreted in funny ways. Like by the ‘Yahoo Education Project,’ who make the self-proclaimed “number one ‘zine in Black Rock City” called How to get laid at Burning Man. It is our mission, in the tradition of great satirists like Jonathan Swift who coined the name ‘Yahoo’, to use humor and satire to inform and influence some of the more vapid and insensitive Yahoos who attend Burning Man. They are usually first timers, fresh from the burbs and the malls who have never encountered the concept of radical participation, free expression or anything truly alternative.43

To Rico, the feeling of humility that thus arises is needed to adjust to a new frame of mind, in which your ‘freaky’ nature alone will not let you stand out, but where participation will. It will show you that if you really want to be part of the community, you have to do so on the community’s terms: by participating and actively contributing to the experience. If you decide not to participate, or maybe not even decide but simply do not see the need, according to the Burning Man argot you are engaged in the passive act of voyeurism, lurking, gawking, spectating, or on-looking. You yourself will irrevocably be someone who ‘doesn’t get it.’ My interview notes are full with references to such characters, for instance by Justin, who categorized them in yahoos and tourists: Yahoos, you know, the frat boys, are those thick wankers who come to the event thinking it will be a cross between a tailgate party and a Girls Gone Wild video. They just want to drink beer, see some naked chicks and make fun of all the weird people. They typically only attend the final weekend of the event. Tourists, on the other hand, are those lame asses who make little effort to interact with anything going on at the event or contribute anything. You see them spending most of their time in an RV, with occasional trips to the ‘big’ pieces of art located between center camp and the man. They dress the same as they would staying at a roadside campground anywhere else in the country. They look at the weird stuff, take pictures, then go back to the safe air-conditioned environment of their RV. They are considered to be slightly less evil than the Yahoos, but are still not exactly appreciated. (Justin, interview July 28th 2005) Burners have often told me how important they thought it was to keep the levels of those not-participating low, or else run the risk of ‘being run over’ and thus loose the event as it is now. To minimize the risk of people coming on a whim and not putting any effort into their stay and level of participation, the organization now sells tickets more and more expensive as the event draws to a close. Also, gates close on Thursday, so entering just Digital version of the magazine on: http://www.yahoopamphlet.com/, accessed January 23rd 2006. 43 42

On: http://home.pacbell.net/one-11/BurningEssay98.html, accessed January 3rd 2006.

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

Obviously, in reality there is no possibility of checking one’s level of spectating versus one’s level of participating, and there is always the warning ‘not to be a participation snob:’ when someone does not run around in a sexy self-made elf suit interpreting erotic tarot cards for you, that does not mean that that person has not just helped building half the city, for instance. From the 2005 ‘guidelines to the event’ print: Ours is a society of activists. When we see a job that needs to be done, we are inclined to roll up our sleeves and pitch in. Keep this in mind: there is no ‘they’, only ‘us’. Burning Man is a 100% participant funded and staffed event. Sadly, there are always a few people who just don't get it. These folks believe that the mystical ‘they’ will appear to provide for their needs and clean up their mess. Help us instruct them. If you see someone acting irresponsibly, introduce yourself and speak up. Also, don't be a ‘participation snob’. Just because someone isn't costumed or visibly participating doesn't mean they aren't contributing. Participation provides the community with a necessary tool for in- and exclusion, and helps to define its boundaries. Through participation, members become the authorities of their own community, something that Muniz and O’Guinn, writing on contemporary communities, describe as ‘legitimating:’ “the process whereby members of the community differentiate between true members of the community and those who are not, or who occupy a more marginal space” (Muniz and O’guinn 2001:9). It is an important process as it conveys outsider status to those who are deemed unworthy – spectators and the kind who have not created anything for the community. Additionally, in an event where everyone is asked to create, and recreate themselves, and where social divisions from the outside world are suspended or overthrown, participation becomes the currency through which recognition can be earned, and which thus creates some sort of hierarchy in the intended egalitarian community of Burners. Unlike Durkheim saw in effervescence, Turner in communitas and Maffesoli in the orgiastic, members of the Burning Man community are neither homogeneous nor, in practice, completely egalitarian. From their comments to me, people indicated that they were constantly judging others in terms of the degree of their participation in the event, and I sometimes even found myself guilty of just such behavior, probing others in conversation about their levels of ‘participation.’ It might be a more constructive way to classify community members than one based on bank account or class, but it does show that classification and ranking are still in order, both within the community as towards the ‘outsiders.’ As Falassi states on hierarchy between the allegedly equal and undifferentiated festival crowd: “By singling out its most outstanding members, the group implicitly affirms some of its most important values” (Falassi 1987:5). As such, I think participation became the first essential part of Burning Man’s sociality, created precisely because it would generate, and delineate, the Burners community, and literally make the event work. 33

The Spectacle of the Man

Of course, the clever irony is that the greatest communal act on Burning Man; the actual burn of the Man, is a spectacle par excellence. It always has been, already on the beach, but especially in the desert it became sensational, with hundreds of fire dancers swirling and fireworks exploding, and everyone watching in awe. If ever there was a spectacle that deserves the adjective ‘spectacular’, this must be it. So why would this particular spectacle not separate its viewers from one another and the material world, as we have seen Debord predict? In the old days, making and erecting the Man was all done by friends and friends of friends and they had invested something in the spectacle that was to ensue. Back then, the whole community cooperated in making their common symbol. The mob incident shows that the ratio of those participating was subordinated by those who had done nothing, and thus invested nothing. When Burning Man moved into the hash desert environment, participation in the small group of attendees was not only encouraged; in some basic sense it became inescapable and purely a matter of survival. And these days, with Burning Man grown into the fully functional ephemeral city it is, there is a greater call for participation than ever - but the concrete burn of the Man does not necessarily require that same growing demand. These days, instead of being in the hands of the whole community, the responsibilities have been transferred to a team of experts and representatives, pretty much what Roszak (1969) saw happening for all matters of the technocratic society. Practically, it means that the by now 50-foot tall Man is not lifted into place anymore by a long rope and lots of human effort, but by immense cranes and trucks. Today, it stands atop a pedestal where no one can even touch it, let alone torch it by either using a lighter or by being alight one’s self and then touching it, as happened in the old days. Admittedly, there is still a whole crew of carpenters busy for months with its creation, supplemented on the playa by a small army of pyrotechnics for the placement of fireworks inside, and the combustion is initiated by an impressive assembly of carefully choreographed fire performances at its base, but that still means there will be over 30.000 people just ‘watching the show.’ There will be a crowd made up of gawkers, spectators, voyeurs, on-lookers: all those curse words that are normally not considered acceptable Burning Man behavior.

First, in defense of the Man, I think that it very much serves a purpose in showing those assembled to watch it burn a common symbol and act, which might even be more powerfully experienced because of its spectacular nature. On the Sunday after the burn, I talk to Joy about how he she experienced it. This is what she said:

-2- Every One of Them: Baker Beach, a Man, and a Mob

I'm sure it's annoying to hear all this talk of community and shared experience, but last night everyone was rooting for the same thing. ‘Have a good burn,’ people would say. As simple as that: have a good burn. Maybe it's not much different than saying ‘Happy New Year,’ but the fact that you had made it through this hellish week, and the fact that you were miles and miles from the comforts of this world, and the fact that so many thousands of other people were willing to do the same crazy thing, well, it made you feel like you belonged. So to Joy, precisely because the whole event has already implied participation, nearly unavoidable because of the location, this final act only confirmed the feelings of belonging she had build up during the week. The night of the burn becomes the sum of everyone’s individual experience. In this sense, like Joy also expressed, it does not stand on its own: the context is made by the weeklong event that Burning Man eventually became. In that setting, the participation I watched all around me was no longer contained to ‘just’ making the art of the common symbol; it got extended to include the making of the whole city, for, as I will argue further on, the whole city became a form of art. On the final night, when the Man meets its immanent doom, its burn might not be all that participatory, but everything around it certainly has. In this sense, the spectacle of the burn has just been the proverbial icing on the communal cake of Burning Man; the final ritual of what has become a community through participation. As Cosmo puts it:

Burning Man as a whole is a veritable tar-baby of interpretation. Representing nothing, the Man becomes tabula rasa:45 any meaning may be projected onto him. It is a viewpoint that seems to be one of the few that nearly all Burning Man attendees can actually agree upon. On an allegoric level, I think that the burn of the Man shows the community not to cling on to any symbol or art project or icon, but to let go. Through the annihilation of the material there is a chance for renewal, so the final act of destruction also becomes catharsis: an act of transformation. As Snohomish puts it in an interview: After all my years at Burning Man, still now, as the procession starts, the circle forms, and the man ignites, I experience something personal, something new to myself, something I’ve never felt before. It’s an epiphany, it’s primal, it’s newborn. It’s completely individual and it gives me great faith in the future and what I can become. By destroying the ego, I become a better man. I liken it to the making of wine, where grapes have to be crushed in order to be fermented. (Snohomish, interview April 4th, 2004) When the Man is set alight on the Saturday night, all in all I think that it is a spectacle that is more likely to remind those watching that they need to let go of the material world in order to gain reality, than to gain material by letting go of the real world.

It’s the climax of a thing that’s impressed you all week - OK, this has been so incredibly awesome and now we’re going to burn it together. But it’s a small part of the event. For people who have gone for a while - this year will be my 7th - the burning of the man is a footnote to the event. It’s really all the stuff that happens before and after that makes the event worthwhile. (Cosmo, interview July 19th 2005) In my personal view, another thing that would go against the Man-asspectacle imputation is the fact that this particular spectacle is kept without any commentary or assigned meaning - except that which participants bring to it. Even though Burning Man is obviously Harvey’s vision and lifemission, much to his credit he has always rejected the mantle of cult leader, or personality cultist; instead emphasizing at every turn the Do It Yourself/ collaborative nature of the Burning Man community. True, as I will show later on, in the course of Burning Man’s existence rules did get formulated, but within this structure there is still no common creed, no coercive demands or unified projection. The sheer hybrid strangeness and polyglot weirdness of the participants and performances contradict and challenge one another, and for one week this particular stretch of desert becomes a contest of meanings. Seen like this, the only definitive meaning of the Man is that there is no definitive meaning to the Man.44 In fact, Harvey is quite proud of the fact that the Man as a central symbol would be enigmatic: We never say what the Man means. He's just there to provide a unified focus for the community. It could become a wonderfully coercive tool politically - like, ‘The Man doesn't like that, the Man says...’ We could make the Man The Man, right? But he stands beyond the social circle, something that unifies everyone. (in Doherty 2000) In an interview Larry Harvey stated that because ‘we’ (being him and Jerry James) would not give the media an initial sound bite as to the why of the event, “the postmodern nihilist sector of the community developed the notion that since we refused to explain ourselves, by extension we refused meaning. The refusal of meaning, the postmodern attitude, is something that I hate. We didn’t ever say that. What we still say is that you have to achieve it. You have to participate.” (on: http://www. catalystmagazine.net/issues/story.cfm?story= accessed October 21, 2006) I personally do not think that saying that there would not be one single meaning to the event means that there would be no meaning at all to the event… 44

‘Tabula rasa’ meaning a smoothed tablet; hence, figuratively, the mind in its earliest state, before receiving impressions from without; - a term used by Hobbes, Locke, and others, in maintaining a theory opposed to the doctrine of innate ideas. From: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Tabula, accessed March 2nd 2007.

45

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

In the End

In this chapter, we have seen how a few friends built and burned a wooden effigy on a public beach, and how a community formed around it through interaction and participation. During Burning Man’s first toddler years, this community was mostly based on the simple and above all practical acts of building, transporting, assembling and raising the Man by ropes. These acts required people to act together; to perform a cooperative action, and that action defined their being-together. As the crowd continued to grow, not everybody would, and could, participate in these communal acts anymore. So even if the Man held any meaning to its constructors and destructors because they had either worked with it or aided his imminent end - it became mere hollow entertainment, a spectacle to consume, to the other on-lookers. The group that now formed around the Man was neither linked through its shared sociality nor its common sensibility. As Maffesoli would have it, there was no group aesthetic, no common ethic, and no underlying custom. There was no sociality, no loyalty, and thus no community (Maffesoli 1996:18-20). The year 1990 made it all too clear that Burning Man in its current form had to change if it was to survive. As the Man was taken to storage, I do not think anyone could have anticipated the fact that, sixteen years later, nearly 40.000 people would be eagerly anticipating its burn again. This time, in my opinion at least, there would be a very strong-shared sensibility binding the group, which in a process of feedback came out of the social body of the Man and determined it in return. The no-spectator rule was the first, crucial part of Burning Man’s sociality, and it would not be the last. For as Burning Man continued to grow, tools to define the boundaries of the community would become increasingly important, and additional rules would be formulated to the same effect. With friends it is one thing to join hands in one grand participatory project – it is a different thing altogether to do so with a highly heterogeneous bunch of strangers who quite literally live in a city. All in all, the fact that people who did not necessarily knew each other responded to that first burn by participating, and through that participation connected, was essential to the repetition of the ritual. The fact that hundreds of people who had not in the least bit participated in the existence of the fourth Man turned into a disassociated mob was even more significant, as it would signal another phase of Burning Man’s still rather countercultural early beginnings. For in 1990, after the Man was taken safely to storage, the Cacophony Society was there to make sure that it would burn after all. This time, it would not burn in San Francisco though. This time around, it would burn in The Zone.

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-3- Everything Goes: the Black Rock Desert as T.A.Z.

-3Everything Goes: the Black Rock Desert as T.A.Z. From Paul Segal’s memoirs: 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.

“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. “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 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, eighty-nine people joined hands, and as one, stepped across the line and into The Zone.46

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, gathered a group of 40 people together to read Proust. This time, our joint adventure had a purpose. In the back of the 30-foot 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. We warned everyone to bring at least four gallons of water, 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 pitch in the park, the last trips to the all-night Walgreen’s had been made. John and I conferred as the unexpectedly large group climbed into their questionably road-worthy vehicles.

A Zone Trip is the Cacophony’s term for out-of-town group excursions, and already for some time they had wanted to put this enormous flat plane in Nevada to its use: the Black Rock Desert. Cacophonist John Law – who had argued with Larry Harvey in favor of burning the Man that faithful last time on Baker Beach – had been on the desert plane before to attend a rather unorthodox croquet game, involving a giant ball and huge hoops with On: http://laughingsquid.com/bad-day-at-black-rock-cacophony-society-zone-trip-4/, accessed May 22nd, 2006.

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trucks used as mallets. He thought it would be the perfect desolate location for a Zone Trip, and everyone immediately agreed. How could they not? By its very nature the Black Rock Desert forms a place that seems dedicated solely to the participatory project, with no outside interference or even context to distract. Practically, it was a place where the man could burn without presenting a fire hazard. On Baker’s Beach, the Man had traditionally burned during the summer solstice. But the adventures lying ahead in the desert were beckoning, and to wait for a whole year suddenly seemed incongruent with the Cacophonic spirit of doing. So instead, the excited bunch settled on the Labor Day weekend, that year from the first till the third of September. Thus it was that Rough Draft No. 48, the September 1990 edition of the ‘Official Organ of the SF Cacophony Society,’ contained the following listing:

Over the next few years, this particular Cacophonic Zone would evolve into an enclave of desert dwellers; cultural outlaws, rebels, adventurers, anarchists, and artists. Those first years in the desert, it was as much about creating a mini kind of civilization isolated from the ‘default’ world as it was about the unbridled freedom to do whatever-the-hell you wanted in a magically unsupervised land. In this sense, many have likened the Zone to what Hakim Bey calls a TAZ or temporary autonomous zone: a temporarily liberated area free from the forces of societal control and repression. In this chapter, I will outline Bey’s argument and see if indeed Burning Man might fit his anarchic description. I will also discuss why, and how, Burning Man’s specific kind of anarchy, or adolescence, eventually ended, and why Burning Man had to grow up. But first, I want to have a look at the exact location, because Burning Man would definitely not be the Burning Man I stumbled upon if it was not for this start expanse of nothingness.

Bad Day at Black Rock (Zone Trip #4) An established Cacophony tradition, the Zone Trip is an extended event that takes us outside of our local area of time and place. On this particular expedition, we shall travel to a vast, desolate, white expanse stretching onward to the horizon in all directions. A place where you could gain nothing or lose everything and no one would ever know. A place well-beyond that which you think you understand. We will be accompanied by the Burning Man, a 40 ft tall wooden icon which will travel with us into the Zone and there meet with destiny. This excursion is an opportunity to leave your old self and be reborn through the cleansing fires of the trackless, pure desert.

A new-found Location Welcome to hell. It’s wedged into a forgotten corner of the Great Basin, not far from oozing nuclear waste dumps and military target ranges. A stark and unforgiving site, the Black Rock Desert affords a unique sensation of unbounded space, not to mention punishing heat, harsh winds, occasional blizzards of thick whitish dust, unnerving thunderstorms, and brief, torrential rains. It's here that Black Rock City flits across a parched expanse of cracked alkali. (Ferranto 2000) The year 1990 equaled both a beginning and an end for Burning Man. Obviously it was the end of its flaming existence on Baker Beach; the end of ‘easy for all entertainment,’ and certainly the end to it possibly being ‘just a spectacle.’ When the event crossed into the desert, its surroundings became so harsh that no one could merely just relax and watch the show, not even if one wanted to. The move to Nevada ushered in a new era, and a necessarily new outlook on everything this wooden Man would represent. In a way maybe it was the move into the desert that manifested the blueprint of Burning Man’s true countercultural foundation. For those willing to cross into the Zone did so often because of the need to create alternative spaces; alternative ways of being felt lacking in convenient mainstream American society. If ever there was a space in which societal structure could be escaped and a new kind of anarchic society enacted, the Black Rock Desert was it.

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-3- Everything Goes: the Black Rock Desert as T.A.Z.

take the Twelve-mile. Another short drive will take you further into the nothingness that is everywhere around you. And there, congratulations, you will have reached your destiny. You have made it to Burning Man’s earthly void. You are now in the Black Rock Desert, a.k.a. the playa.

It’s so Empty it’s Full

It is interesting for me to think about the first group of Cacophonists who made the journey from San Francisco to Burning Man, fifteen years before I would travel that same way. From experience, I know it is a maddening, long, never-ending, crazy-gorgeous drive out to the Black Rock Desert, where, except for the heat waved asphalt and occasional road sign, from Reno onwards the barren environment must have looked roughly the same to the first settlers heading West centuries ago. Not so for Reno itself though, this crazy run-down version of Las Vegas where no road will take you around – only through, in anticipation of an instant attraction to one of its many casino’s. From Reno, you can either take the 1-80 freeway or the 445 surface road, each of which will deposit you on the narrow 447 surface road: at least seventy miles of two-lane highway stretching toward Gerlach – the tiny town closest to Burning Man. All along the way are hills and mountains, in various colors but mostly wearing a faded brown and a dusty, dry, withered yellow, dotted with small clumps of grey scrub. They do not loom, these bumps of the earth, do not overwhelm, give no dizzying titanic perspective, they just cradle, infinite and indefinite. Once the 447 reaches the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation road, it rolls ninety degrees to the right in a roller-coaster rise. The valley that once held ancient Lake Lahontan then spreads out around you, and at this point you would not in the slightest bit be surprised to hear the lonesome croak of a Pterosaur gliding overhead. Absurdly and arbitrarily, a sign from the state of Nevada tells you that the scenic route ends just at the beginning of one of the most picturesque stretches: the pale and mysterious valley of the Great Basin. The drive is long and there are few clues as to how far you have gone or if you will ever end up anywhere but gliding on through the endless valley. Hardly anyone will pass you in the other direction, and those few that do will wave at you, and you ought to wave back. After dozens of gentle upand-down sweeps up the road, when you have reached the point where most radio signals will not work anymore, you will see Gerlach with its first (and last) store for many dozens of miles. As you slow down while driving through Gerlach’s main road, you take a right turn after the town is over and drive on until you reach one of the playa’s navigable entrances, named after the approximate number of miles it is past Gerlach. I do not know for sure which one the Cacophonists took, but nowadays it is recommended to

I think the Black Rock Desert, as a new, unique location to the visiting urbanites, proved crucial to the way the event came to be.47 In this strange no man’s land, everything imaginable suddenly turned possible: To prove this point: last year, for a course the anthropology of the senses, I decided to use Burning Man scholarly for the first time as the subject for my final essay. In order to answer the question of whether sensual relations equaled social relations at Burning Man, one of my methods was a questionnaire on the Internet. From the 100+ people that responded, nearly 40% rated the specific place - the playa – as the number one factor for making Burning Man most unique – next to the raves (2%); art (7%), and community (52%).

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

The Black Rock Desert, the site of Burning Man, may be regarded as an earthly void – a place so perfectly annihilating in its emptiness, that, properly speaking, it is no place at all. The 400 square miles that comprise this high desert playa forms a tabula rasa, a vacant tract of perspectiveless space. (Pendell 2006:7) The sublime emptiness of the desert raises the possibility of not just staging a spectacle, but creating a visionary reality. If ever there was an archetypical playground secluded in time and space, “a temporary world within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (Huizinga 1955:19), this must be the school example. By its very nature the playa provides an altered state of existence that contrasts starkly with ordinary life. Having the festival there is conducive to powerful experiences because it is imagined as a blank canvas, a frontier of possibilities and unrealized potential - “the vacant heart of the Wild West” as Burning Man’s first entrance sign reads. Larry Harvey instructs festival-goers to “Imagine the land and the looming lakebed of the playa as a vast blank screen, a limitless ground of being.”48 And Piss Clear, Black Rock City’s other newspaper, reminds festival-goers: “all that lays before us is the wide open playa floor. It is our palette and canvas, to create the world we can’t enjoy at home.”49 The Black Rock Desert comprises the second largest flat plane in North America,50 and is also one of the highest at an altitude of 3.848 feet (about 1100 meters). It stretches on for about 110 km, and its width ranges from a mere 8 km to just over 30. It measures well in excess of a half million acres, roughly nine times the size of the entire city of San Francisco. The Black Rock Desert Recreation Area Web Site reads: “Spectacular scenic opportunities abound in one of the largest and flattest alkaline playas in the United States. The Playa is a now-dry remnant of ancient Lake Lahontan. Opportunities for solitude are considerable.”51 Other than the nearby desert town of Gerlach with its 250 inhabitants (“five bars and no churches”) and the endlessly stretching two-way asphalt lane that passes through, there is nothing human for as far as the eye can see. Here you will not find water, plumbing, shade, nothing that lives, just packed down alkali dust cracking of to every horizon; framed by nothing but the curvature of the earth.52 Perhaps more than any other place in the world, it invokes an idea of an eternal and immutable timelessness, seeming to simultaneously exist at the moment before time began as well as after the point that it ended. 48 On: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1997/97n_letter_sum_2.html, accessed March 27th 2006. 49 In: Utopia-on-a-stick. By: Stewart McKenzie. Piss Clear 1998. 50 Only outdone by the Bonneville Salt Flats. 51 On: www.recreation.gov, accessed March 16th, 2005 52 Geologists and biologists would disagree with me here, and say that there are tons of life forms on or above the playa, such as insects, reptiles, and birds - all getting their salts. I, however, have never seen anything alive except for that species called human. On E-playa (one of the biggest and most active mailing lists related to Burning Man), one of the messages was about ‘birdwatching at the playa’, and it was initiated by a participant who had apparently spotted a bird on the playa: “It seemed perfectly happy yet had a staggering type walk, it tripped a couple of times. Seemed not afraid of us at all.” He was now wondering if anyone else saw this bird as well or whether he had simply just hallucinated the whole thing. A girl upon reading this posted a reply saying: “I never saw any birds at BM, but that sounds like a LOT of humans I saw!” (http://eplaya.burningman.com/)

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The Black Rock Desert is a hostile place for human beings. The biggest problem lies in its soil, which is made of acidic alkaline minerals. In the summer, when all the water has long been evaporated from the ground, as soon as people step or move on the playa it liberates the alkaline and sends it upward in big white clouds. Within seconds on the playa the dust makes you appear as a creature no longer simply human, but more of a playa-human chimera; laced with a new skin of pale chalky white settling and attaching and growing over you, whilst eating away your skin. It does not just take over your surface; your every breath takes in an endless refilled air-andplaya dust cocktail that invades your lungs and nasal passages. The finely powdered dust seeps into everything and everyone; creating so called ‘dust devils’ and ‘wipe-outs’ where it becomes impossible to see or even breathe. But is not just the omnipresence of the finely powdered alkaline that makes living on the playa hard. For as the playa bestows you with dust, it takes water away. On a typical day, the sun is like a thumb pressing down on your eyes with an insistent reminder that the heat and dryness are wicking water out of you almost as fast as you can drink it. And when the evening comes and dusk settles in, temperatures can – and will - plunge about forty degrees Celsius in less than half an hour, to reach near-freezing point for the continuation of the long, long night. Torrential rainfall and intense storms can ravage the playa within seconds, transforming it into a huge muddy centrifuge where everything that is not staked down with long rebar will be swept up as self-proclaimed offerings to the almighty weather gods. This is not the Garden of Eden where everything is lush and welcoming, this is survival taken to its limits, and no S.A.S guide will give you an apt description on how to conquer it.

-3- Everything Goes: the Black Rock Desert as T.A.Z.

Yet, for most participants I spoke with, the playa is no Valley of Death, but a place where ‘welcome home’ signs line the entrance, and indeed reflect common sentiment - at least for this one week a year. Today, this so called home represents a fully functional city; a constantly raging party, a marvelous fecund arts festival and a gift-giving community all in one. Today, it is filled with nearly forty thousand friendly strangers and hundreds of things to do and see and experience twenty-four seven. In its early years though, such was not the case. One can argue that there were definitely seeds present, but if this was so, they were still deeply buried under the acidic alkaline, with little incentive to sprout. During the first year, the limited circle of Cacophonists out there would mostly talk and read, and, if the heat or cold allowed it, sleep. They built shade structures – which would often get blown away -, enjoyed the silence and stars that were hardly ever more intense than in the desert, soaked in the nearby hot springs,53 hosted one rather surreal tuxedo party, pulled a few ropes to raise the Man, watched it burn, and that was mostly it.

Rituals worth Repeating

When talking to some of the people who were there during Burning Man’s first couple of years at the Black Rock Desert, when hearing their fond memories and enthusiasm, I find that the strangest thing is how… how uncompelling it all sounds to me. I mean, a camping trip to this otherworldly site of beautiful nothingness – beautiful but also brutal and punishing - was probably worth doing and remembering, but why on earth go back? Why keep going back, and telling everyone about it and persuading them to come as well? Why preparing for it months ahead and spending an enormous amount of time, energy, resources, and money doing so? Really, what is it that makes this specific ritual a continuing one? And more in general: at what point does any happening stop being ‘simple’ entertainment and starts to transform, bind, and give meaning; becomes ritual? Ritual and community appear to be inherently interconnected. We can trace the balance between the two concepts throughout Burning Man’s existence: the shared experience of ritual bringing forth community, and a strong sense of community creating shared meaningful rituals. It is a balance that is not lost on Harvey, and that, in my opinion at least, he has

continuously and deliberately directed. This was not always so, for, as shown in the previous chapter, Burning Man started as a spontaneous expression, a rather personal act that happened to take place on a public beach. After that, almost in a naïve way, for the next four years the act gets successively repeated, but any kind of balance or connection between the ritual and the bigger part of the people got lost. Subsequently, during these years, many of those who had come to watch the Man burn saw nothing but a spectacle in it. To those onlookers, the ritual did not hold much meaning; it was not transformational; there was no transcendental reference, and, as they were not so much bounded to each other and to the common symbol, it did not do much in the sense of creating a community of equals. The Man was mere entertainment and when it did not deliver the promised spectacle, the crowd turned into a mob of disassociated individuals: the exact opposite of community. In that sense, I think that it was more of an individual, liminoid experience to those spectating. As Turner phrases it, whereas “the solitary artist creates the liminoid phenomena, the collectivity experiences collective liminal symbols (Turner 1982:52). And this is exactly what happened when Burning Man moved to the desert, where the Cacophonic sense of ‘experiencing’ became a necessity as well as an incentive. Within this Zone of experience - the ‘realm of pure possibility’ (Turner 1967a:97), it became possible to strip the familiar of its certitude, transcend conventional economics and politics, and/or explore social alternatives. With it, the people around it could achieve an ineffable affinity, and a community, or even communitas, started to take shape and form itself around the Man, both literally and metaphorically. Although the ritual of the burn, unlike most collective liminal symbols, is intentionally kept meaningless, I think it does show the community a common, if enigmatic, point of reference, and has thus became a solid part of Burning Man’s evolvement. Throughout its existence, through the burn and numerous other rituals that together make Burning Man, individual differences are overcome and the unity of the community both stressed and defined. According to Maffesoli, rites and rituals are necessary in our current time of the tribes because it would remind the community that it is a whole: “At the same time as the aspiration, the future and the ideal no longer serve as a glue to hold society together, the ritual, by reinforcing the feeling of belonging, can play this role and thus allow groups to exist” (Maffesoli 1996:140). Much like Durkheim, Maffesoli sees ritual to surpass the individual monad and strengthen the collective feeling, and to serve as an anamnesis of solidarity.

The hot springs, which are an easy drive or long walk away from the Burning Man site, are no longer accessible during the event due to the big ecological pressure this would put on their fragile ecosystem. 53

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In Doherty’s book This is Burning Man (2004), John Law answers the for me mysterious question as to why the group felt dedicated to doing Burning Man again and again. In his memory, it was because of that which he fondly remembers as the group ‘wow’: There was this group awe of what we’d done. The synergy of the place, the statue, and our isolation taken as a whole made us realize we were doing something new. There was no imposed ritual or meaning. We had backed into a new version of an induction ritual. By having this shared experience, in this amazing place, it created a unity among us that nothing else possibly could. We had this continuous group ‘wow’. The words we used to describe it were all monosyllabic – wow; cool; yeh. (Law in Doherty 2004:43) Theoretically, it is this wow that Durkheim (1915) might have called ‘effervescence’; Turner (1967) ‘communitas’; Mauss (1903) the ‘dynamic totality’; and Maffesoli (1993) the ‘orgiastic’: the supreme moment of the solidarity of collective consciousness, manifested through the tangible proximity and exaltation of the group. As Mauss so aptly describes, it is “that one moment when the whole social body vibrates to the same chord” (in Duvignaud 1976:14). In this momentum of intense participation, individuals melt away: “They become, so to speak, the spokes of a single wheel whose magical gyrations, dancing and singing, would appear to constitute a perfect image” (Ibid.15). The experience of such a community of equals and its creative effervescence binds people together as it allows an individual to transcend him or herself and motive him or her into collective action. Turner sees the liminal as a threshold; a moment betwixt and between two stages in life. A ritual hereby is more than a mere moment in which participants get carried away emotionally, only to be returned to their original condition afterward. When effective rituals are enacted, they carry the participants from here to there in such a way that they are unable to return to square one. To enact any kind of rite is to perform, but to enact ritual liminality is also to transform.

Indeed, many people I spoke with confided in me that the burn of the Man exalted and transformed them, and quite plainly took them beyond themselves. Laura, for example, opposed her what she referred to as 41

Burning Man’s ‘rite of passage experience’ to something so clearly lacking in her everyday life: In ancient times, we used to celebrate the holy cycles of life: harvest time, our initiation into womanhood, the communion of loved ones. Now, people just party every weekend. And this makes it insignificant and trite and hollow. But Burning Man sort of gives the celebratory feeling back. To me at least, it always feels like a rite of passage, as close to a sacred marking as I can get. […] There, in the desert, I shed my old skin. (Laura, interview July 28th 2005) As an analytical tool, the Turnerian comparison of liminal ritual with a rite of passage, and, in turn, Burning Man with a rite of passage as, for example, done in the above quote by Laura can offer us valuable insights into the impact of the event. Let me explain by quoting from an online blog posting I stumbled upon after the 2005 event, in which a certain Cybele Knowles reminisced how Burning Man had changed her life that year. Like Laura, she associated Burning Man with a rite of passage, but not before first explaining her vision on what would constitute such rite of passage - in probably way too simplified terms for me to use personally in this writing: Here's how a rite of passage works. It's the same the world over, Ndembu, Trobriand and Kwakiutl. They take you away from your ordinary life - your online banking, your myspace.com, your commute. They bring you to a place set apart. They give you a new name and they don't let you bathe. As the dirt rubs into your skin, you return to the earth in a symbolic death. And in the words of Mircea Eliade, a scholar with a poet's name, then comes ‘a time of marvels’. Masked figures and sculptures, dancers. Grotesque or beautiful beings that teach you the things you need to know. When you leave, you are ready to be the next version of you.54 However, what would constitute that ‘next version of you’ forms a crucial difference between traditional rites of passage and Burning Man’s festival time. In the first you learn how to be a proper man or woman, husband or wife, healer or shaman; you are emptied so that you may receive a new set of social rules. This is why liminality tends to be ultimately eufunctional even when seemingly ‘inversive’ for the working of the social structure (Turner 1982:54). But at Burning Man, the transformation one undergoes is often linked with a sense of social critique: a rejection of mainstream values and one’s position in it. It is therefore more personal, and its results and rules less defined. According to Robert Kozinets, an ethnographer at Northwestern University, “You don’t need to go to a rite of passage every year. Once you go through it, it’s over. And really that model says you shouldn’t be selling tickets to the same person twice” (Kozinets 2002:23). Although I understand his point, I do not agree entirely. For it seems to me that repeat practice can also mean perfection. In a way this difference with liminal ritual harkens back to the same individualistic nature that prevented the presence of any overarching sense of meaning or doctrine on Burning Man. It dictates that if you do not like what the event was that year, you yourself can make it better the next. In fact, you have to make it better if you found something wanting or stopping it from being perfect, because Burning Man is only that what people make of it. Auspiciously, there are few stages as vast or canvases as large on which to impress one’s vision as the Black Rock Desert, and every year the slate is, quite literally, wiped clean. In this sense, I think that the temporary nature of Burning Man, as a ritual and as community, is an essential part of its success - that being temporary, being On: http://www.burningman.com/blackrockcity_yearround/tales/CybeleKnowles.html, accessed March 27th 2006.

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built from the playa each year and taken right back down to the playa, freezes it in its formative moment. Burning Man is thus perpetually in the act of creation.

website: “The desert had enlarged the scope of human struggle and intensified involvement. It had restored the spirit of Burning Man and the community that had grown around it.”56 In this new, hash environment, figuring out how to exactly survive without any of the amenities usually taken for granted by urbanites became of extreme importance. One of the first priorities therefore revolved around getting to know, trust and in some ways depend on your neighbor – whether relatively far or relatively close on the playa. According to Brian Doherty, conversations would begin spontaneously, based on this bare need to connect and survive, and lacking the usual inhibitions of the outside world. It would be the first sign of the community that forms around the Man as I know it still does today: Stranded by themselves beyond civilization, the citizens of what would soon be known as Black Rock City began to re-create some of civilization’s earliest gestures of comity: wandering around the campsite, offering small gifts to one another, and granting decadent hospitality to those that stopped by. (Doherty 2004:53) Through want, need, and plenty of hard work a community rises. It is a community already united in a felt social criticism towards society; a miniature Cacophonist Society keen on escaping American society with its omnipresence of mediation, and its entire passive and ultimately hollow spectacles. Now, in this desert, they find each other, and together, they are given the change to build a new kind of utopian civilization, in every which way they want. Through this effort the community that already sprang forth from the Cacophony Society was beginning to become its own desert community; sharing this glorified ‘we are the only ones doing something as crazy and unthinkable as this’ feeling. I guess in that sense it was also a rather elite and selective community. As Harvey remembers: […] there was the Cacophony spirit, the Zone Trip spirit, which delighted in doing what seemed inexplicable, what no one else would do, venturing where no one else would go. This was literally true in the case of erecting this giant Man out there. Who would do this? We could let our imagination run wild – who had ever done this in the history of mankind? It felt like glory. That sense of special election we all shared.57

The move to the hostile setting of the Black Rock Desert, along with Burning Man becoming a several day event, heavily pushed along the transformation into the ritualized community building event it still is today. As Chris phrases it: It’s a frontier situation – you get into the middle of a desert, and you start to believe in bullshit that you normally wouldn’t believe in. It’s very important that the event is held out in Black Rock. The isolation is important. So people go out there and lose track, both willfully and unconsciously, of other responsibilities, and they are willing to have a great time of excessive play and excessive work, and this works miraculously well. (Chris, interview August 6th 2005) In a very real sense, in the desert everyone is forced to be a participant, for survival camping in such hash surroundings will always stay a challenge. On top of that, a pilgrimage-like journey is now required to reach the home of Burning Man, helping along its appearance of a consecrated space, a place apart and separate from the ordinary world.55 On the Burning Man On: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1986_1996/index.html, accessed July 1st 2005. 57 Taken from the dvd Burning Man: Beyond Black Rock (2004). 56

For more background information on the idea of Burning Man as a pilgrimage site, see Gilmore’s Fires of the heart: Ritual, Pilgrimage, and Transformation at Burning Man (2005).

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

As time went on, a great fraction of participants started to attach more and more meaning to their sense of special selection, and moreover would have this depend on the exclusion of others. “The dark side of it became that as more people showed up,” Harvey says, “there was more resentment of those people” (in Doherty 2004:55). Inclusiveness became harder, but the atmosphere also became harder; wilder as it were. As the numbers of those attending doubled with every new edition, Burning Man as an isolated free haven became more and more anarchic: more punk and less hippie. The Zone of the Unknown became a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Where the Wild Things are Whenever I could afford it, we would get a really good rental car, and make sure it was fully insured. That was the most important part. […] I consider this the ultimate metaphor for the nature of the early days of Burning Man: We’d go to the middle of the playa after we knew no one was out there and just drive. As fast as we could. Flying on mushrooms. Drinking wine out of a bottle. With the lights out, only the moon and the Milky Way lightning the way. Vanessa and I would be fucking and shooting guns out the window at the same time, Jane’s Addiction blasting from the stereo. I consider that my peak American experience. (Law in Doherty 2004:86)

freedom – and space – to drive, access to all the area hot springs all day and night, and guns, guns, guns. Burning Man then truly was an anarchistic event, even, in the words of US News, “the anarchist’s holiday of choice.”59 It most certainly was an anything-goes party of pyrotechnics and drive-by shooting ranges done off the grid, with no official approval sought and none granted. When Michael reflects back on those days, he urges me to remember that it very much captured the spirit of Nevada. Much in the same way that the countercultural notion of free expression was very much San Francisco in nature, the wild, wild west years of Burning Man were very much part of Nevada. It might have a different set of connotations all together in Western Europe, but in America, traditionally, fire arms do not necessarily have to be scary or violent, and certainly do not per definition stand between socially acceptable behaviors and having a good time. Quite on the contrary, if we are to believe Michael, they are an extension of the American frontier spirit, and helped a long way towards getting Burning Man more or less accepted by the locals: There's a very strong connection with firearms and survival, which grew out of the American West. And when we first came out and built this big wooden man and burnt it, the locals thought we were a bunch of simps. And then they found out that we had guns and we could use them. And then we were OK. It was a little silly to them but we were unusual independent characters and that is respected out in the West. (Michael, interview September 20th 2005) I must say, all in all it does not sound too appealing to me, but, as said before, within the Burning Man community I have heard quite a few people lament the loss of these wild outlaw years in present days. I think I can understand that emotion as well, for there are not that many places in the West where you can still do outlaw stuff, whether this is prohibited out of safety reasons, impracticability or sheer illegalness.

Here is a question for you. If you would be put on a desert plain with nothing in sight, and no rules to follow whatsoever, and you would camp there for five days, how would you bide your time? Oh, and yes, you would be attracted to this whole idea of being in an unwelcoming desert environment for five consecutive days, so you probably never felt very that comfortable living in the comforts of Western suburban life to begin with. Additionally, you would be American, so chances are you had a natural distrust towards authority in your genes and development, and would maybe even like the image of you facing a frontier situation.58 Then, just for good measure, some guns would be thrown in, followed by a dose of drunks, mixed with absurdly destructive machinery. It would be topped up with fast cars and fire, a pinch of dust would be added, et voilá: your cocktail recipe for limitless tomfoolery and mayhem would be complete. For me, the end result is hard to imagine, but apparently it is exactly how the first years in the desert looked like: no rules, no cops, unbridled Yes, I know generalizations like this are dangerous and probably out of order in an anthropological thesis, but I just ask you to contemplate the possibility – not take it as a given.

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59 Taken from: Burning Man Meets Capitalism. How a strange cultural event became a viable commercial enterprise. By John Marks. Us News 20th of July 1997.

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Not only does the Black Rock Desert offer the perfect backdrop because of its seclusion from societal sight; at times it can seem to actively encourage doing weird, wild stuff. You see, all things you do out there come across as spectacularly grand and even minor gestures become magnified and transfixing. In a place with nothing, anything seems like everything. It is tempting to do strange, wacko things out there, and it is tempting to stretch the safety line further and further. Out there, away from societal control, above all I can imagine how natural the anarchic thought of not needing structure or order might occur. In a society where it seems that the institutions of control are omnipresent, the Black Rock Desert poised the ideal site in which the State could be escaped. Burning Man hereby held a very concrete promise as to being what theoretician Hakim Bey calls a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

‘old Consensus,’ Bey himself has been labeled a ‘postmodern anarchist’ (Zerzan 1997:79) - or in Bookchin’s (1995) denunciation, a proponent of ‘lifestyle anarchism.’62 However, even though many of Bey’s concepts share an affinity with the doctrines of anarchism, he pointedly – and for most anarchists controversially - departs from the usual rhetoric about overthrowing the government through revolution. Instead, he prefers the temporal and festal nature of what he calls Temporary Autonomous Zones, or TAZ’s.63 According to Bey, the only way you can subvert the system, the all encroaching juggernaut created by a centralized system of mass production, is to seize ground like guerrilla soldiers in a jungle. The TAZ hereby implies that you can commandeer some part of the public environment and make your own show, create your own rules, and then, before the authorities showed up, melt away back into the jungle:

Pockets of Freedom

In order to get a better theoretical understanding of Burning Man during these first years in the desert, I believe Hakim Bey’s ideas regarding immediate events, or what he calls temporary autonomous zones, can offer some insights. Bey might be an unusual choice of theoretic; he is not directly related to the social sciences and has yet to be mentioned in any reference from any anthropological publication I have read to date. However, his work and ideas are often linked to punk-inspired anarchic underground collectives such as those discussed in the section on Burning Man’s social background, e.g. Survival Research Laboratories, Circus Ridickuless, the Suicide Club and the Cacophony Society. In an interview I had with Michael Michael, he told me how the Cacophony Society for instance took great pride in constructing Bey’s so called temporary ‘pockets of freedom’ within the city of San Francisco. And when several Cacophony members arrived in the Black Rock Desert to cross into their Zone, I think that this Zone can very well be considered a Temporary Autonomous Zone, and held specific promise as such. Let me explain. Hakim Bey, pseudonym for Peter Lamborn Wilson, is an American libertariananarchist philosopher, subversive poet, and proponent of ‘edge Islam.’ Described as ‘the goofy Sufi,’ or ‘the Marco Polo of the marginals milieu’ (Black 1994:105), he is the author of a number of provocative essays and communiqués, among which his most famous publication to date, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism (1991),60 which in turn has been reviewed as ‘the countercultural Bible of the 90s’ and ‘inspiration for a generation of troublemakers and idealists.’61 In advocating ‘creative destruction’ of the The TAZ, - along with most of Bey’s other writings - is freely available on the web. For instance on www.hermetic.com/bey or www.gyw.com/hakimbey/ 61 In the Whole Earth Review (1994:61) and on http://www.amazon.com/T-Z-TemporaryAutonomous-Autonomedia/ accessed January 3rd 2007. 60

The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can ‘occupy’ these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. (Bey 1991:99) Accordingly, temporary autonomous zones are mobile or transient locations free of economic and social interference by the State; autonomous within their own sense of space and time. They exist not only beyond control “but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State’s ability to see” (Ibid.132). Therefore, their greatest strength is their invisibility. The TAZ remains invulnerable so long as it remains invisible, in Bey’s view “a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies (Ibid.101).

I use the verb ‘denunciation’ here because Bookchin considered such ‘episodic rebellions’ as the TAZ to be a ‘mere safety valve for discontent,’ from which the bourgeoisie would have nothing to fear. He described the TAZ as ‘irrational, narcissistic, decadent and a bourgeois deception.’ A few years after his rant, Watson showed shortcomings and contradictions in Bookchin’s polemic between classical anarchism and Bey’s anarchism. 63 Although Bey puts the ‘T.A.Z.’ as an acronym in the title of his book, in the text itself he looses the marks of abbreviation and writes it as ‘TAZ’. I will follow him in the latter. 62

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Because TAZ’s are necessarily ephemeral, Bey equals them with ‘uprisings,’ which he believes provide “moments of intensity [that] give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life” (1991:100). These pockets of freedom enable the individual to elude the schematic grids of Big Government and ‘too-Late Capital,’ and to occasionally live within realms where he or she can briefly experience total freedom. If such a temporal uprising instead were to be a revolution, this would only imply that for it to conquer structure, it in turn would have to become structure, making true liberation through revolution an oxymoron, and good governance an impossibility:64 Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a head-on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation. Its guns are all pointed at us, while our meager weaponry finds nothing to aim at but a hysteresis, a rigid vacuity, […] a society of capitulation ruled by the image of the Cop and the absorbent eye of the TV screen. (Bey 1994)

that it was kept that way. Spreading the word went from mouth to mouth, unmediated and as such already implying a selection of those attending. And this selection was quite often made up by those countercultural, liberal, often rowdy and raucous characters, conscious or subconscious in search of a TAZ; a place to escape societal structure. Like with most anarchic thought, it was believed that a natural sort of order would occur, without authority; between equals. Indeed, as John Law explains to me, he very much hoped to […] make a fantasy place in the middle of nowhere, to make it so you could not orient it to anything, displaced, floating in a void. To me that was integral. It made it a different place. It’s why people didn’t behave like dicks. It helps people realize that just themselves, just their community, was all they really had, and should be treasured. (Law in Doherty 2004:92) The Black Rock Desert hereby facilitated the notion of Burning Man as a TAZ, literally hidden and secluded from the omnipresent State.

For Bey, liberation can only be achieved via the realization of ‘the new autonomy,’ which lies within the TAZ - nòt via the attainment of phantom needs manufactured under capitalism. This new autonomy, in turn, can only be achieved in the direct presence of the Other; an immediate community; a free associations of individuals – non-mediated, nonauthoritarian, and non-hierarchical. In ancient times there used to be certain, festive events that lay outside the scope of ‘profane time,’ thus literally occupying gaps in the calendar. For Bey, empirical science conspired to close these calendrical gaps where the people’s freedom had accumulated, resulting in “a coup d’etat, a mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the organic cosmos into a clockwork universe” (Bey 1991:103). The scientific calendar reform would mean the death of the festival, and no matter how “the media nowadays invites us to ‘come celebrate the moments of your life’ with the spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation” - it is certainly not the way to its insurrection. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled for instance by the Situationists) and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers of our leisure. ‘Fight for the right to party’ is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle but a new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which offers TVs and telephones as ways to ‘reach out and touch’ other human beings, ways to ‘Be There!’ (Bey 1991:103, original emphasis) For Bey, festal culture flowers in the corporeal, non-regulated, noncommoditized festival, in which there is no mediation, and in which all spectators must also be performers. This is certainly the core of the TAZ, and, for me at least, it is undoubtedly the core of Burning Man - especially the way Burning Man was during its first years in the desert. For in those first desert years, Burning Man was highly anarchic; a little island in which societal structure could be temporarily escaped and unstructuredness ruled. The new-found no man’s land of the Black Rock Desert made sure that the event took place literally beyond the gaze of the State and/or the media. It was not so much that this was caused by intentional secrecy, more that reporters and/or government officials had not gotten hold of it - yet, and Hence the ‘ontological anarchism’ from his title, which states that chaos is life, and the State (as order) death. Seen like this, no state can ‘exist’ in chaos, so for anarchy to replace the state is ontological impossible.

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Not only does the comparison of Burning Man with a TAZ helps explain the anarchic and countercultural outline of its initial phase, it also helps explain why Burning Man eventually moved on to the next phase. For the way I see it, Bey’s ideas often seem to have a rather paranoia edge to them. It appears that they are permeated with the fundamental assumption that in the end it is all rather hopeless; that all that you can do is fight these little guerrilla battles because there is no way anyone could confront the big, bad organized army that is the State. But as it turned out, Larry Harvey had bigger plans than to fight a little guerilla battle contained within the spatiotemporally limits of the Black Rock Desert. After a few years of being a semi-secret and highly unstructured temporary autonomous zone beyond the state’s reach and out of the media’s way, he realized that if he wanted his festival to keep on growing, things had to change. And then came 1996, and with it Burning Man’s adolescence and cup years would be forever gone.

Dust, Death & Doom

Finding first hand information on Burning Man’s first desert years has proven difficult. Fortunately, though, there is a collection of audiotape diaries Steve Mobia made back then, in which he mentions every year the amazement he and others felt for the intensity of it all. He seemed mostly amazed that, despite all the heroically fearless recklessness and exploding

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mortars and destructive robotic devices and raging fires, no one ever got seriously injured or killed.

our numbers had to double every next year, it was a one way ticket to trouble. (Law in Doherty 2004: 91)

Even though Furey’s death set a tone before the event had even begun, there were more indicators that the old model of Burning Man was reaching its breaking point. The numbers of those attending had grown exponentially every year, and had now reached well above 8.000 people. Their increasing influx began to strain the infrastructure, and even though the event was as loosely organized as possible, the logistics and responsibilities that come with having that much people attend were growing too, and were getting harder and harder to sustain. Ultimately, too many people with too little supervision resulted in disaster.

After 1996, he stopped saying that. For the tempestuous turning-point year of 1996 made it all too clear that the transgressions, even though they were never intended to hurt anyone, were definitely getting out of control and could not be let loose for much longer. Looking back on it, Harvey described 1996 as the year that the playa was turned into the worst aspects of Los Angeles: “We had brought the ills of civilization with us,” he noted sadly.65 I do not know L.A. that well, and I am inclined to think that it might have been more about pushing boundaries of derailed behavior normally impossible to act out in any ‘civilized’ city, but sure thing is that 1996 saw Burning Man’s first fatality. It was that year that San Francisco neon artist Michael Furey, age 37, motorcycled into camp with his headlamp dark after a night of drinking in nearby Gerlach and nearly had his head sliced off by the mirror of John Law’s truck. It was a stupid, drunken and obnoxious stunt pulled by Furey, in a pitch-black and extremely dusty environment, and by all accounts Law was not to blame, but that did not do much to change the outcome: Burning Man would never be the same again. What really caused a breach between the new path Burning Man was soon to follow and the old ways, was that when Larry Harvey arrived at the death scene, just outside the perimeters of the festival, it is commonly remembered that he announced “there is no blood on our hands” to the grieving assembled – possibly three times in a row. According to Harvey himself, it was just a statement to ventilate his relief over the fact that there was nothing that they could have done to prevent this accident from happening, but two of the other key organizers took it as an indication that he was concerned more about insurance and legal consequences than about the actual death of someone they all knew well. Discussion reined so high that, after that year, both of these people left the organization. They no longer shared Harvey’s vision of an ever growing, and therefore necessarily ever more regulated Burning Man. As co-organizer John Law explained the difference in vision: I never wanted to encourage growth. By 1992, we were big enough. Three hundred people could have a great time and stay underneath the radar of authorities, no problem. I truly never understood why

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On: http://www.spiralgirl.com/dsblack/index.html, accessed September 5th 2005.

For some years, careful attempts at many of today’s amenities were made, but it was still all done in a very slap-dash way. ‘Port-a-potties’ (public toilets) were provided for, but they were too little and often too dirty. There was a matchbox ticket boot somewhere along the entrance road, but the desert around it was vast and there was no fence. Most people did stop by the boot to pay, but this did not prevent Burning Man from being sent into debt through money management problems. The event had a tripartite ownership, formed in a hot spring one night, but even between these people there was no consensus as to where the event was heading, let alone if anything could be ‘owned.’ There was an insurance policy, but it was purchased through the neon company that two of the three owners had previously started, so it was not even officially covering Burning Man itself. The police had recently begun to be a presence, but they were still not many and mostly wandered around bewildered without making any arrests. There certainly was an abundance of art on the playa, and this element was becoming more and more ambitious, but it was still mostly about destruction and, well, randomness. To try and make a more coherent whole of all the individual art pieces, in 1996 Harvey initiated what still plays a part in Burning Man today: the annual ‘art theme.’ For the first year, the theme was to be Inferno, or, more popularly, Helco, and the organization would have been hard pressed to find a more suitable theme for 1996. The pressures of the event’s growth, the growing tension among the organizers, and the increasing rowdiness of the citizens were such that “I knew we were in for hell,” Harvey says now. “At some point we just decided, well, let’s do it! Let’s sublimate some and not deny it” (in Doherty 2004:102).66 The story that was created around Inferno had Satan out to buy Burning Man through his ravenous mega corporation Helco. It does not take an expert to see the countercultural symbolism apparent in this metaconcept. Most people involved in Burning Man then consciously operated on an underground and countercultural impulse that opposed ‘successful’ mainstream culture. They were passionately devoted to lose coordination, no bureaucracy; no official outside interference, the whole TAZ model. That all changed irreversible with the growing population and growing attention from the media, the police, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The Helco theme was sure to tap into anxieties that were very real indeed for those who made Burning Man happen – both in the organization and in the crowd. It apprehended the corruption and selling out of their experience, their community, and their Funnily enough, that year a devout Christian journalist infiltrated Burning Man, and reported on evangelist Pat Robertson’s 700 Club a few weeks later that the gathering was a form of devil worship, and that no true Christian should ever be present. At exactly the same time, Wired Magazine put Burning Man on its cover and dubbed it ‘the New American Holiday’. It makes me wonder what the greater part of America’s ‘Christian Right’ thought about that statement.

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reality to large, sinister forces, and it resonated with the lessons learned from the appropriation, commoditization, co-optation, assimilation and recuperation of many of the countercultural predecessors, so close at hand in San Francisco.

Nowadays, next to everything Burning Man might represent to some, when you arrive at night you can most certainly think you have just entered a week-long rave fest. Nowadays, there is music pumping out of big sound systems and dj’s are spinning 24/7, but back then that was not the case. In 1996, loud music in the form of specific rave camps was not allowed within Burning Man for the possible nuisance this might pose to the rest of the happy campers. To avoid the rule, though, a dance collective decided to set up camp a short drive away from the main settlement. It was to be the first rave camp. That fateful late Sunday night, a seemingly drugged-out man recklessly cruised away from the rave camp and drove over a tent – with two people sleeping in it. As if this was not bad enough, he then crashed the car into another vehicle, spilling scalding radiator fluid all over a young woman in another tent. Apparently, needless to say, it truly was hell at that point. The wounded were taken away by a chopper - all three of them lived, although one with permanent damage - and the driver was arrested, but for the authorities it was an ominous sign that things had reached their apocalyptic end: “I think there's a general consensus … that the Burning Man Festival has outgrown itself”, says Ron Skinner, the weary sheriff of Pershing County, vowing to stop Burning Man 1997 from taking place without radical changes. “My whole, entire staff is just totally burned out from the last five days. We're a small department that serves 4,700 to 5,000 people, and we're just not equipped to handle 10,000 partygoers. The rebellion and indulgence is really getting too much.”68 To me, it seems that in reality, 1996 means a clash between what in essence is the Cacophonist, punk way, as opposed to Harvey’s essentially populist way. It is a vision of an exclusive, secretive, under the radar, very wild party as opposed to an open, expanding, more accommodating and inclusive community. In this sense, Harvey calls 1996 ‘a Manichean year’, and adds: I fought a great battle with the Punks. There was a T-shirt that said WOODSTOCK OR ALTAMONT? YOU BE THE JUDGE69. The Punk

Given the demographics – it still took a fair amount of nerve and insider knowledge to actually visit Burning Man – mockery, derision and fear of corporate forces were both obvious and effective on the playa. That year’s pageant, a grand tour de destructive force on plaza Helco, showed it all: [T]hat night, a marching band led a torch-carrying parade out into the desert where an entire mini-mall had been erected, complete with name-brand franchise outlets (Starfuck's Coffee, Caca Bell, and a dozen others). Suddenly a flamethrower tank rolled into the plaza and billowed out 50' long gouts of flame, while giant killer robots rolled into the plaza and began demolishing every building in sight. The plaza was soon reduced to a pile of flaming rubble. Meanwhile, a man dressed as Jesus in a cowboy hat climbed up the side of a 60' high office building with a glowing neon HELCO sign on top. Once at the top, he lit a roadflare, tossed it into one of the windows, and then jumped onto a cable and slid for his life as the tower exploded into a ball of white hot flame and collapsed, roaring and bellowing, to the ground. The audience cheered, coughed, wept, ran for their lives.67 In Doherty’s memoirs of that year, until dawn it was all mad release and sudden love and destroying and reinventing human civilization from scratch with nothing but scrap and fire. “Hell was burning all around. Satan was told to fuck off with radical bravado” (Doherty 2004:104). But things turned genuinely, not just playfully, horrific on early Monday morning that year.

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On: http://www.tcp.com/~prime8/New/index.html, accessed November 16th 2006.

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contingent believed - and hoped, really - that it would be the last Burning Man. They said we don’t want uncool people coming. I asked them to draw up a list of uncool people. When I added them all together it seemed everybody hated everybody. My position was that anybody could come. Period. (Harvey in Haden-Guest 2006) The symbol to represent the split that year was, of all things, a smiley icon. Opinions vary. Larry Harvey told me it was done out of provocation. John Law insisted he did it to diffuse some of the dark energy of that year’s theme. Chicken John called it “a defacing of the icon” and “a challenge to the control that Harvey has always exercised over an event he conceived” (John, intoxicated monologue September 10th 2005). Whatever the incentive, a couple of Cacophonist pranksters that year secretly placed a smiley face on the Man, for which they used a timer to make it flash occasionally for just seconds at a time.

Where the Wild Things Are, by Mack Reed. L.A. Times, Wednesday, September 4, 1996. Some say that whereas Woodstock came to denote the flowering of the hippie era, San Francisco’s Altamont festival meant the end of it. According to the website echoes.com, Altamont “was the product of diabolical egotism, hype, ineptitude, money manipulation, and, at base, a fundamental lack of concern for humanity”. It resulted in ‘one of the most violent days in rock history,’ with four people death and several injured.

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The action was understandably lost in all that year’s turmoil, but that does not take away its symbolism. I think it was a pretty clear Cacophonists statement: in their opinion Burning Man as an event had begun as Zone trip # 4, and Larry Harvey had to lighten up with his seriousness about reaching out, community, continuity, and the great untouchable symbol of the Man. Harvey, in turn, had ended up among Cacophony but was never quite of it. In Doherty’s words, he appreciated their identification with the Dadaist and Surrealists, and made friends among their ranks, but after all, “they came to his ritual, not he to them” (Doherty 2004:98). To Harvey, replacing autonomy for rules “[…] is the price you pay for living in a civil setting versus being a hunter-gatherer.”70 In the end, 1996 showed that the Burning Man could never be a true TAZ. In a way, I think that the matter of Burning Man not being a TAZ was already settled in 1988, when a deal was made with the police to knock the Man down and burn it in less over hovering shape. It again got confirmed in 1990, when another deal was made with the authorities to not burn the Man at all. When the event moved to the desert, even though it felt and looked like an archetypal TAZ to most people, it was a TAZ that proved, appropriately enough, to indeed have been temporary in nature. For a TAZ can only contain so much people and still stay under the radar; and Burning Man had yet been above such modest numbers for some time. Even Piss Clear, ‘Black Rock City’s Favorite Alternative Newspaper,’ writes the year after: Granted, last year DID get a little out of hand, what with all the Medevacs flying in and the YAHOOS screaming ‘show us yer tits!’ from the backs of pick-up trucks, and all the assholes driving their cars around fucking EVERYWHERE. I mean, hell, two people DIED last year, giving credence to CNN’s ridiculous description of Burning Man as ‘the world’s most DANGEROUS art festival.’71 Burning Man had grown too big, and it was now up to Harvey and a few coconspirers to make sure it would grow up. A long road was still ahead, but an important lesson was once again learned: if there were any aspirations of ever having an influence in daily civic life, this would not be gained through an anarchic escapism and the TAZ model. Instead, it had to be changed by making an event with an ethos, an all-inclusive community and eventually an exemplar municipality. Burning Man had to go civic, and embrace civic ethics. By letting go of its overall countercultural social critique and by embracing communal ideology, it was hereby ready for its next phase. Black Rock City was officially born.

In: State of the art. By Steven T. Jones, San Francisco BayGuardian Online, http://www.sfbg.com/39/10/news_burningman.html, accessed November 15th 2006. 71 In: Anti-anti-Burning Man. By: Adrian Roberts. Piss Clear 28th of August 1997, Issue 5. 70

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Part III:

Structural Sociality

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-4- Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man

-4Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man For our first year on the playa, my friend and I posted a message on the digital Burning Man bulletin board: “Two girls from Amsterdam need a ride, preferable from San Francisco or vicinity. Willing to share petrol costs.” We got anywhere in between ten and fifteen responses – a day, for over two months. In the end, we decided on Lee: an amiable surfer normally conquering waves and a midlife crisis in Santa Cruz. He picked us up in San Francisco, in a huge SUV with trailer, both rickety and stuffed to the brim. There were bikes a tent, 5 by 5 meter shade structure, 90 gallons a water, airbeds, a homemade portable solar shower, folding chairs, eski’s filled with ice, sleeping bags, pillows, a couple of rugs - the works. He even brought bikes for us to ride, and had two comfortable sofas strapped to the roof of his car. Bless him. This year, though, with my task of conducting fieldwork ahead, I am arriving in my own style, with my own newly purchased, 31-years old, bright orange Volkswagen camper. Finding a place to camp is not as easy as it might appear at first. It has to be a tactical spot; the main quarters to my research. Some people of the organization have extended their invitation for me to stay and participate in their San Franciscan office to the playa, but I want to be in a more neutral place this week. I end up deciding on VW Camp, where I am hailed and eventually surrounded by thirty or so other Volkswagen vans and their owners, both in various forms, age and plumage. It is a very neutral camp, without loud generators or sound systems or planned communal activity. It is central enough, but not as frantic as other central camps, and it offers a tranquil, undisturbed haven from which to explore and gather data. And that is exactly what I want us to do while you are here: explore. I know our time is limited, so you will have to tell me what you want to do first. Obviously, there are endless things to see and do in this city, and three days are not nearly enough to do so, but we have to start somewhere, don’t we? If I can make a suggestion, I’d say that I show you around the populated part of this city today, so that we can use tomorrow to visit some of the more remote art works ‘out there,’ and spend our last day volunteering. Of course, we can also do it the other way around, if you prefer, but I know when I got here for the first time, conquering the so called urban environment, if you can call it that, was all I wanted to do, and it was only later that I became awe-struck over the works of art. It seemed that the more I submerged myself in the hectic craziness of the city and its inhabitants, the more I appreciated the vast quietness of the desert and otherworldly surrealism of the art. And the more I appreciated both the civic structure and the art, the more I wanted to give something back by volunteering. You have probably never been in this strange city before, so let us first allow a little peek from above, just so you might somewhat get your bearings. When you are far, far away in the sky you might mistake the sight of Black Rock City for the schematic imprint of a crop circle, or perhaps a Tibetan sand mandala etched like a gargantuan tattoo on some vast extraterrestrial plain.72 When you get a bit closer though, you can see the city’s typical ground plan, which consists of nine well-marked curvilinear rings arcing from what would be 2

o’clock through 10 o’clock on a clock face, with subdivisions at each half hour in-between. When we picture the circle complete, at the axis of it all stands the Man itself; the heart of the city, surrounded at great distance by the bigger sculptures and art projects: tomorrow’s destination. Prime real estate can be found on the first street facing the Man: the Esplanade, where the biggest and most elaborate theme camps are. In the middle of this Esplanade, at six o’clock, are the lungs of Burning Man, provided for by the organization, in the form of the Center Camp Café and a number of other public services. After the Esplanade, the concentric avenues ranging backward reflect this year’s theme Psyche: they are ‘Amnesia’, ‘Bipolar’, ‘Catharsis’, ‘Delirium’, ‘Ego’, ‘Fetish’, ‘Gestalt’, and ‘Hysteria.’ Luckily we are camping at 7.30 and Ego, and not Amnesia, because I want you to remember our address carefully. Orientation can be a true nightmare on the playa, especially in the year when the Man rotates. Saying that, it might help that you are from Amsterdam, and thus familiar with a similar lay-out of semi-concentric circles in the form of our canals.73 However, no matter how liberal of a city Amsterdam might be, you try getting a public ‘kittytrim’ done by the ‘bushwacker who is a PhD’ (Pelvic Hair Designer) there, or attend an intermediate workshop on Japanese rope bondage with a bunch of people who, like yourself, have not washed in over five days. And even though Amsterdam might be bike friendly, I have personally never witnessed the sight of more than 3.000 topless women cycling through town in an endless succession, such as is happening on one of Burning Man’s yearly highlights: the ‘Critical Tits Parade.’ Maybe the only thing the two cities really have in common is that people who have never been seem to associate it mostly with drugs and sex, while every citizen knows there is so much more to the place.

Some people think of Burning Man as some kind of theme park for grown-ups, but if such would be the case, than this specific one is a highly surreal and very uncomfortable version of it, as exemplified by the risk and rules stated at the back of your entrance ticket: You voluntarily assume the risk of serious injury or death by attending this event. You must bring enough food, water, shelter, and first aid to survive one week in a harsh desert environment. […] A In such comparison, Central Station would roughly equal the position of the Man and Dam square that of the Center Camp café. Our camp would probably be located somewhere in the Jordaan.

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And like an original Tibetan sand mandala, Black Rock City gets wiped clean and leaves no trace.

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

Survival Guide will be made available thirty days prior to the event, which you must read before attending. You agree to abide by all rules in the Survival Guide. This is not a consumer event. Leave nothing behind when you leave the site. Participants only. No spectators. In this theme park, when you sit in Santa’s lap, chances are he will be trying to shove tubes of lube down your panties. And the rather exact replica of Disneyland’s It’s A Small World After All - called the Small After All World to avoid persecution - will hold speakers attached to it which blare the tune in every version ever recorded, loudly, taped together, again and again until Chairman Mouse releases everyone by blowing the whole thing up.

green and yellow feathers and chaps; underwent a sex change, and exchanged my best friend for a temporary one at the Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet. Things can get pretty strange out there…. At its most basic level though, Burning Man truly is a city, and like most cities, the only way to get a feeling for the place is just to wander. Wander and wonder. Endlessly and maybe aimlessly, but always willing to be immersed into this strange cityscape. As Tolkien already stated, “Not all those who wander are lost,”74 and at Burning Man it certainly appears that those who wander often find more than they thought they were looking for. Within the city, they find community, and within this community, they might just find themselves. Now let us see what we can find.

I don’t know about comparing Burning Man to anything really. It truly is a world on its own - and a very crazy world for all that. From my notes, during one random walk around the blocks of Black Rock City, I saw an angry milkman in a white boiler suite trolling for milkmaids who could lactate at will; a tether ball on fire, twirling round its pole and then kicking itself back into action; a car dragging behind it a man on a flaming toilet reading the paper; a flyer on a porta-pottie that warned me about an escaped gorilla, only to open that porta-pottie and have a kid in a gorilla suit leap at me, squealing with laughter; two bluely painted cowboys on a fifty meter see-saw constantly alternating either rising high above everything or being dipped in refreshingly muddy water; one huge white rabbit running in circles as a persistent Black Rock City’s Animal Control officer chased him (her?) with a carrot dangling from a stick; a Burning Man virgin being whipped at the Temple of Atonement for not having attended the event earlier, and a bunch of fluorescent zombies playing chess with their bodies on a block-wide board. That outing, I hitched a ride on a flying carpet and a bus-sized white whale; laughed at a man sitting in a cubicle dressed in a business suit working frantically on a cardboard computer, with his water bottle - also wearing a carefully crafted bottle-sized suit and tie - beside him; stopped for a quick intellectual chat at the free bookmobile; had raw tuna sushi served to me on silver platters at Camp Tuna; joined a group of strangers all flossing off with one thread dangling from someone’s chicken suit; watched stunningly complex laser shows at dusk while in the distance people were playing golf with burning toilet paper rolls; marveled at the beautiful templar girls at Venus; mutilated Barbie dolls while enjoying a twelve year old Merlot at the Barbie Death Camp and Wine Bistro; talked to God in the thereto designated phone booth; stumbled upon a marriage ceremony held by a voodoo priest in

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74 At length: “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.” (Tolkien 1997:305)

-4- Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man

We have extensively covered Burning Man’s auspicious year of 1996, so both for us now - and for Harvey then - it is obvious that going into 1997, the anarchistic ‘just come out here and do what thou wilt’ model had to change if the event were to survive. Unbridled liberty, chaos and the Shooting Range were no longer going to be the main selling points. Whilst in essence keeping true to the anarchistic basis of ‘no ruler’ and cooperation over coercion, there was a growing insight that rules needed to be formulated for the event to survive. Burning Man had to grow up; it had to be prearranged, formalized, managed and accounted for. It needed to be fenced, zoned, condensed and made car-free. It needed civic planning, an infrastructure, guiding principles and a legal form. In the end, it had to become a municipality; a city, which, like all cities, needed structure: We should not conclude from this that Burning Man has at all lost its sacred spark. As the vampiric tendrils of consumer media and the surveillance society wrap themselves ever more tightly around the heart of human experience, the festival continues to successfully ride the paradox of regulating a temporary autonomous zone. (Davis 2003:38)

threads and relegate them in separate chapters seems to go against the very nature of that which makes Burning Man’s social fabric: the interconnectedness that forms its novelty and its power and its story. Burning Man is a crazed Dionysian event where the city is made of art and art should be a gift; where the community makes the art and the city enhances community; and where the whole event becomes a gift to the community that creates it and thus flows from it. Such is the interconnectedness of things at Burning Man. However, before discussing all that, we first have to see Burning Man as the highly heterogeneous city it truly became. Being a city is definitely different from being a TAZ. It means that staying under the radar is no longer an option, which in turn means letting the outside in. The outside in the form of a more diverse selection of participants, but also of law and order, money and commercialism, interests and liability. Of regulations, permits, officials, and planning. Of rules and restrictions, an ethos and ethics. As Burning Man became Black Rock City, it truly had to go civic, and find a way to balance utopia with heterotopia. In this chapter, on this first day of our tour, I want you to follow me so that we can explore this city in all its inexplicableness.

Even though I personally think that regulating a temporary autonomous zone would be oxymoronic, I do agree with Davis when he talks about a paradox of autonomy and regulation that Burning Man would successfully ride.

This chapter is all about that paradox. It deals with having structure and going wild; regulating and letting loose; communal harmony and conflicting interests. It explores the true city that Burning Man has become, and the highly heterogeneous community that inhabits it. Likewise, it is an introductory chapter to the section of my thesis that will explore Burning Man’s current state; focusing on being rather than evolving, showing glimpses of this festival that I stumbled upon. Even though Burning Man is above all an experience – the embodiment of the “you just had to be there” mantra, in the next three chapters I hope to convey just why it would be such a powerful experience and experiment; city, arts festival, and gifteconomy all in one. A little caution is in order here, for to unravel these 52

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

subversion of what a city should be like. Much of this derives from the wellthought out levels of civic planning and crystallized architectonics of the event: the invariant city lay-out, the ‘going out’ areas, the street signs; the Big Brotherly Man watching it all. If any collection of people can have the inspiration, get the resources, keep authority at bay, and build a city in the ultimate void that the Black Rock Desert is, then it seems that human imagination can truly manifest utopia. For Burning Man is a city all right, more extravagant than Las Vegas, New York, and San Francisco all combined. And after a week, the whole city disappears.

A lesson in Civic Planning We believed it was a community. We knew people were feeling it to be such. But there wasn’t a social framework to fully shape Burning Man around that idea. We decided to build a vessel to contain a community. We realized we had to create a real city. If you look at our newsletter in ’97, it’s one big propaganda sheet for community. That’s when the litany began – community, community, community. People grabbed onto it. (Harvey in Doherty 2004:121) Black Rock City is what D.S Black calls an ephemeropolis; an evanescent city.75 During its one-week existence, it qualifies as Nevada’s fifth-largest city. Nowadays, it is a densely connected grid of streets, plazas, and public landmarks covering more than a square mile of desert terrain. Its thoroughfares are thronged with a cosmopolitan population drawn from around the world, and it is served by an array of public institutions. There is a fire department, a post office, two daily newspaper, about 15 separate broadcast radio stations, a temporary airport for small planes (92 landings in 2005), a recycling center, 400 portapotties (cleaned and restocked twice a day), several bike repair shops, a bus service into town, an infirmary and emergency medical service, a ‘Department of Public Works,’ a volunteer safety and security organization known as the ‘Black Rock Rangers,’ and a pizza delivery. The London Observer described it as a “beautifully zoned tentopolis, designed with a precision of which the Renaissance city-state idealists or Haussmann would approve.”76 The disorder and chaos, emotional and perceptual as much as physical and infrastructural, of Burning Man’s early desert years now seems to be kept at arm’s length. Sure, the city still has an ultimately chaotic feel to it, but I think that today’s chaos is often more contained, and possibly more semiotic than corporeal in nature; a perversion, inversion and eventually In: Burning Man as Ephemeropolis and the Refusal of Meaning, Presented February 20, 1998 for the North American Interdisciplinary Conference on Environment & Community University of Nevada, Reno. 76 At: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1999/99n_letter_sum_0.html, accessed May 28th 2005. 75

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Leave no Trace

Burning Man is committed to a Leave No Trace effort,77 meaning that after the event is over, the blank slate of the desert is quite literally wiped clean again. Not a sequin, boa feather, cigarette butt or pistachio nutshell will eventually disgrace its surface. This would be amazing enough, and it does take a crew of about twenty people, most of which volunteers, a whole month to comb the playa inch by inch after the event is over, but it is even more amazing considering the fact that you cannot find one trashcan in the entire city. Seen like this, Burning Man’s disappearing act becomes nothing less than miraculous. People are actually told they have to pack in everything they pack out; to take all their smelly, nasty garbage, put it in the car and drive back home with it. And they do it, making Burning Man the largest Leave No Trace event in the world.78 In a way, the leave no trace ethos is practical, because if the festival were to have a significant negative impact on the site, the Bureau of Land Management would not allow it to be continued. Every year after the event The Leave No Trace (LNT) philosophy was first articulated in the 1970s as the human impact on the planet was becoming too obvious to ignore. Since then, the concept of enjoying a landscape and leaving it unchanged has become official policy on many federal lands. 78 The Boy Scouts also practice Leave No Trace, and though they are a bigger organization, they have no single event as large as Burning Man 77

-4- Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man

is over, the a team from the BLM scrutinizes every inch of the four-squaremile playa, and if they still find any trash, no matter how small, it can mean the end of Burning Man’s yearly permit. Next to pragmatics, though, there are also ideological causes for the leave no trace effort. On the website: If Burning Man is to validly function as an alternative to the commodified mainstream of American culture, its participants must be willing to consider the material consequence of the choices they make as consumers. If what we bring to our desert experience is to truly define what we are, we need to look carefully at what remains as we depart.79 On top of that, leave no trace links back to Burning Man’s ethos of nonspectatorship. Because Burning Man claims to be a participatory event instead of an anonymous public spectacle, it is only logical that, as a participant, everyone should become a member of the cleanup crew. It is as much about immediate experience as it is about immediate responsibility; civic freedom as about civic conscientiousness. But most of all, it is about civic planning, and about its purpose of optimizing community. Because the city does not just disappear – it also arises; planned, regulated and even zoned. And as it does, it binds people together.

From the Zone to Zoning

As we have seen, Burning Man was not always the ‘beautifully designed tentopolis’ the London Observer stumbled upon in 1999. Before 1996, Burning Man was a disorderly scattering of camps, spread out to the degree that virtually everything had to be done by car. After that, any form of civic planning was not just needed for possible aesthetics reasons, but most of all out of safety measurements. According to Harvey, it was high time: “In ’96 we had let the city expand like a cancer. It wasn’t safe, and we knew it” (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005). Without a city grid, Washoe County officials insisted, how can emergency vehicles reach people, or know where to find them? Directions such as ‘look for the green tent near the shark car twenty meters north of the giant Helco Tower’ were simply not good enough. So, like that of developments in many cities, the urban planning of Black Rock City came as a response to tragedy. In order to prevent such tragedy from escalating again, an official city grid was implemented. But how does a tribe of cultural outlaws and nonconformists sit down and design a city? As one might imagine, the process drew from disparate sources and methods - ancient and modern, idealistic and pragmatic. The basis was clear: the Man had to be at the center, so that he could be visible from anywhere; functioning both as navigation system and focal point of the community. Instead of building the city in a full circle around the Man, the decision is made to keep the circle open. As we can read on the Burning Man website: Instead of completely circling the Man, we invite the natural world to intrude. Rather than looking across our claimed tract to see only more settlement on the other side, our vision is spilled outward into the vastness of the greater Black Rock Desert. With this reminder of the infinite we hoped to evoke a connection between the small world we created and the fathomless universe we live in.80 The semi-circular rings, or avenues, ranging backwards have blocks spanning from 2 o’clock to 10 o’clock. Every fifteen degrees is equivalent to half an hour, and finds itself as an intersection with the streets ranging backward. As the sun passes, the Man’s arms quite literally act as a sundial: giving participants a way to instantly determine their whereabouts. The

79 On: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/2000/00n_letter_sum_2.html, accessed May 28th 2005.

At: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/brc_growth. html, accessed April 3rd 2007. 80

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

resulting city-grid is relatively easily comprehended and negotiated without disorientation, as well as being scalable for future expansion. For instance, in the year of my research, 2005, the five circumferential streets created in 1997 had already grown to nine, and the arc of the city, originally less than half, now extended over two thirds of a circle around the Man. A city designed to accommodate 9.000 participants in 1998 had developed a capacity of well over 35.000 in seven years. No matter how much of a utopian project Black Rock City might be, there are still very pragmatic concerns and demands at its core. Because any city needs infrastructure, departments, city services, subdivided blocks and, yes, even that apogee of municipal control: zoning. On Burning Man, zoning space was initiated because of the need to locate theme camps in some coherent way. It means, for instance, that families with children are told they might be better off camping in the area known as Kidsville, and that all camps that look as if they might have sexually explicit themes are situates away from this familyfriendly zone. It also means that there is a large sector in which collectives determined not to use generators or loud music can safely gather, and that the real big rave camps get placed more towards the edges of town. It is amusing to see how Black Rock City can sometimes be just like the real city its inhabitants are so anxious to get away from, with the outer rings more ore less resembling suburbia: people take up a lot more space so that they can put down lawns, golf courses and swimming pools, and the inner city equaling prime estate: so dense and popular that people are literally arguing over inches. Black Rock City’s civic planning offers a rare look at the lifeblood of all urban civilizations. What is it that makes a city work? What is essential, and what is it possible to do without? On the playa, you start to think: do I need a lot of comfort and convenience? Maybe not as much as you thought you did. But do you need street signs - oh, yes. And if you have signs and roads, do you need cars to traverse them? Not really, but you had better live up to your proclamation of being the ‘most bicycle friendly city in the States.’ Just as well, if you want a city based on interaction, putting people is close living space is certainly a good start. Also, open fires might be nice and community generating, but if your city is jam packed with synthetic tents and shade structures, all nearly touching each other: providing fire pits might be the better option. All in all, as Harvey sums up the civic lessons learned: “safety requires control; giant groups demand intelligent design; and culture thrives in smaller tribes. Form must bend to function, but function is elevated by beauty.”81 I cannot stress enough that Burning Man’s civic beauty is manifested at the terrible inhospitable wasteland of the Black Rock Desert. As such, it is frequently beset by unpredictable and brutal windstorms, where everything that is not blown away will at least get covered in dust. At: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/06/15/ carollloyd.DTL&type=printable, accessed November 13, 2006. 81

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Black Rock City is only a minor imprint on this vast terrain, and ironically enough things get pretty crowded within the city blocks. Brian Doherty once made the remark that during Burning Man so many people will be crammed into such a relative small space, that “the desolation beyond the encampment will seem a cruel tease as the inhabitants live for a week in an impromptu tent city that screams ‘refugee camp’ more than it does ‘vacation’” (2004:2). I do not know about the comparison with a refugee camp, but I must admit that I had my frustrations when first looking at the immense space around Black Rock City in the distance, and then at my neighbors’ colossal speakers, which were practically touching my tent. Of course, such population density is no masochistic design on behalf of Burning Man’s urban planners, but rather another tool in the creation of social interactions and communal belonging. As Harvey explains it: We got people to live in approximately the same density as you’d find at a kibbutz. Americans don’t typically do this. Everyone is supposed to be a king and, in these latter days, a queen, and so we’re all kings and queens and we all have our domain and our little estates that we control. Here, they’re living chockablock. That means they simply encounter one another more often. (Interview October 15th 2005) Such forced proxemics seem to allude not just to social spacing, but also to a spatial affiliation: location becomes connection becomes communion - both as a consequence of, and a preconditioning for, community.

-4- Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man

The fact that it has grown to its current size seems to be because of the amazing pull it has on people. This pull is not from Harvey himself, but from the idea and experience of Burning Man. As Doherty phrases it: “The essence of Burning Man, that thing that makes it work, is a joint, decentralized creation of thirty thousand people, not of Larry Harvey, John Law, any single artist of gargantuan absurdities, the DPW who ‘built this city!’ or any other single claimant” (Doherty 2004:262).

Binding a heterogeneous Community […] the city is organized and structured to assist participants in acting as a sharing, caring community. Consequently, 25.000 strangers unite and come to see one another as a community. They live in close proximity; act with affection toward one another; share food, drink and extraordinary experiences; strive together against the elements, express themselves as openly and as radically as they dare; and help one another. In a week, it is all over. (Kozinets 2002:25) As Kozinets already makes clear in his enumeration, there is more than proxemics to the experience of community at Burning Man. I personally have always been amazed at how harmonious a city Black Rock was, how much trust and openness and empathy and, well, love, there was among those that inhabited it. I say amazing because it is not that this is a group of people so homogeneous and egalitarian that they would normally form community. Quite on the contrary, throughout the years, Black Rock City would be inhabited by an ever larger, but also increasingly heterogeneous, collection of citizens, no longer united under any Cacophonists, pirate or otherwise rebellious flag. Through augmented attention from the media and the rapid evolvement of the Internet in the mid nineties, Burning Man became known to many people who had previously not known it existed. Consequently, exactly as Harvey liked to see, it moved away from being a little secret to the Cool Kids Club; a selective anarchic TAZ, to an all-inclusive city: From the beginning I hated the hipster attitude of keeping out the uncool people. My obsession was inclusion. That was, for me, a redemption: to make a society that everyone could come into. It was an antidote to the alienation I grew up with. (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005) As a child, Harvey was adopted into a strongly independent family of dustbowlers, who raised chickens on a farm in Oregon. When Harvey was young he was sent to a suburban high school and embraced their values in a lot of ways, but, according to him, he and his family always remained outsiders. Maybe, therefore, this drive to make Burning Man all-inclusive answers to a lot of frustrations retraceable to Harvey’s youth. Maybe, though, like with Burning Man’s beginnings, it does not really matter what deep unconscious drive motivates Harvey’s words, inclinations and actions, just its effects. For Burning Man is not, and probably has never been, Harvey’s one man show.

Who goes to this, and Why?

In 2005, Burning Man was the creation of nearly 36.000 people, of all ages, ethnicities and economic backgrounds. They all had their share in the community that I eventually considered the most essential part of my Burning Man experience. There were old people and young, grandmothers and children, hippies and punks, the cool kids and the freaks, the enlightened and the geeks. Matt Wray’s list: There are all sorts here, a living, breathing encyclopedia of subcultures: Desert survivalists, urban primitives, artists, anarchists,, Deadheads, queers, pyromaniacs, cybernauts, musicians, ranters, ecofreaks, acidheads, breeders, punks, gun lovers, dancers, S/M and bondage enthusiasts, nudists, refugees from the men’s movement, hippies, ravers, transgenders, and New Age spiritualists. (Wray 1995) With some exceptions, these diverse groups become happily cohabiting groups. As Laura phrases it: I spoke with many people out there about how it is easy to have a ‘perfect time’ with 20-30 of your closest friends. The amazing thing about BM is that same togetherness can be felt among a diverse and previously unacquainted crowd of 35.000 people and more. That is real community! (Laura, interview July 28th 2005) Sure, at times there is conflict, and the relationship between self and community can be a charged one at Burning Man. Observers of the relationship between self and community in the contemporary United States have argued that Americans tend to emphasize the needs of the self over those of the community. In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues point out that when Americans describe their spirituality they talk most about personal empowerment and self-expression rather than the requirements of community (Bellah 1985). In contrast, Burning Man emphasizes both the needs and wants of the self, and the creation of community. Self-expression is encouraged but must be constantly tempered 56

Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

by consideration for one’s neighbors. Conflict therefore is often more over decibels than ideology. However, such pragmatic contest is usually quickly settled by an appeal to the rules and to the communal ethos of the event. Seen like this, peer pressure remains one of the most effective ways for people to abide to communal ethics.

In the same Wired article, the author interviews Daniel Steinbock, a doctoral student at Stanford and three-time Burning Man veteran, and asks him about the demographics of the event. Steinbock has a theory on the overall whiteness of the participants: What I’ve heard said about BM before is it’s the way that rich white people find community, because people who have undergone any cultural strife automatically develop community out of survival. But here you have a group that’s never experienced marginalization, so the only way they can develop community is to spend a bunch of money on this crazy art out in the desert. (Ibid.12) Harvey indeed acknowledges why Burning Man would be especially attractive to white people who lack tight-knit cultural and familial communities. In response to Burning Man’s ‘alternative newspaper’ Piss Clear’s question about the seemingly under representation of America’s minority groups on the playa, his straightforward reply is: Burning Man caters to white folks for one primary reason, and that’s because they’re the most privileged and richest members of this society. They’re also the most disconnected from one another, because of their consumer clout - because they can live without any relation to anyone else. Now if you’re poor and a member of what we call an ethnic minority, it also means that you network. It means that you’re connected to family in a way that white folks aren’t,.

In all their heterogeneity, the citizens of Black Rock City are amazingly similar of color. I mean, sure a fair percentage of them will be painted gold, purple, yellow, striped or dotted, but underneath all that color and design the majority is Caucasian. Responding to the question “Who goes to this thing?” Sarah Pike (2001) wrote in one of her essays: “There seems to be twenty-something ravers, fifty-something hippies, and thirty-something computer whizzes. Many, but by no means all, are white (and) middle class” (Pike 2001:456). Indeed, even though no statistical studies have been done, on the playa it seems that those with the means and desire to attend are often white and relatively wealthy. Enough so to make Wired magazine state that Burning Man “can take on the appearance of elitist indulgence” (Axline 2005:12). The absence of ‘people of color’ in an event touted as ‘radically inclusive’ is a popular topic of discussion among Burners. The fact that the organization never really advertises the event, and that the subsequent word-of-mouth awareness contributes to cultural homogeneity might begin to explain, but surely there is more.

Piss Clear: Not to completely generalize, but do you think that white people come out to Black Rock City to create a community that they wouldn't otherwise normally have? Harvey: You bet! To find roots, and to find a sense of relation to other people. If you’re in the ‘hood’, and the uncles and aunts and cousins are all around, you’re in this network, this community. But a lot of white folks are sitting at home with their catalog furniture and wondering what it’s all about. And so [Burning Man] has a more immediate appeal. Spiritually speaking, the white folks are needier, even though materially, they’re much advantaged.82 Seen like this, Harvey concedes that what he provides, for lack of a better word, is maybe more of a service than a city: “We’re offering people something they can’t get anywhere else, and that’s community […]There isn’t a corporation in this land that could recreate it. You can’t buy it. You can’t buy community. It’s like love” (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005).

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In: The Man, The Myth, The Legend: Larry Harvey. By Adrian Roberts. Piss Clear 2000.

-4- Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man

And this is where some people might disagree with Harvey, for criticism will forever be that maybe one cannot buy community – but that he is certainly selling it, and for a steep price as well. Such critics see that with Burning Man’s ongoing structuredness and monetary gain, it no longer differs that much from any which commercial entertainment place where people gather and where one proprietor is receiving a huge amount of money in entrance fees. Jensen, for instance, fiercely attacks the tantamount ‘theme park nature’ of Burning Man and heavily criticized what he calls the ‘hypocritical nature’ of its organization: They’re taking a totally standard, normal, corporate line toward their theme park, but that idea embarrasses them, since they don't like to think of it as a theme park. So they cloak it in bullshit and hope that everyone will buy the lie that it’s actually some spontaneous group-hug, and not a theme park. (Jensen, interview September 12h 2005) Even though there are not that many people as fierce as Mike, he is not alone in his criticism. Specifically on those cold playa nights, talk about ‘the good old days’ is never far removed from those fire pits. While granting that things have changed, Harvey himself is weary of talk of such glorious Burning Man - that the event has now gotten too big; that it is no fun anymore because of all the rules; that it was better when it was more exclusive and everyone could do anything they wanted. “The exercise of liberty in Black Rock is remarkable, but we don’t accept anti-social activity and we never have,” he says, and continues to explain: I do agree with the basic anarchist idea that culture is self-regulating and spontaneously would provide society with useful customs to regulate the relationship of the individual to the collective. But I don't like nouveau anarchists who are basically selfish hooligans whose creed is, `I do whatever I want, whenever I want, and I don't care, and I hang out with cool people who do anything they want to, and there are only a few of us, and fuck you. How charming. 83 Burning Man took the other road, and went civic. They were probably the first counterculture to have gone civic, at least to my knowledge, and this evolvement has been vital for where the event is heading now. However, ‘going civic’ goes beyond the city grid, infrastructure and zoning, and into the realm of law, order and organization. Because no matter how much of a utopian city Burning Man might be – it is still a city build and dismantled on public land, and thus has to deal with official, regulatory instances.

A different kind of Law and Order Black Rock City is a municipality in all respects – it has a post office, Department of Public Works, fire stations, medical services, police, and everything else, except a traditional government structure. Imagine a political anthropologist coming to study government at Burning Man. On Day 1, the anthropologist says, “Wow, a city without government.” After careful scrutiny, the last day’s report reads, “Oh there’s government here alright, they just do it differently than in other cities. And, they do it quite well.”84 The people I have spoken with, those who know Burning Man out of experience, seem to fall into three categories. Well, they fall into a lot more categories, but regarding the issue of rules on the playa, I identify three: the lamenters, the imposers, and the followers. One does not necessarily exclude the other, for it is possible to lament the fact that the old heydays of anarchy and lawlessness are gone, and still follow the rules as they are laid out these days, just as it is possible to be the Washoe County Sheriff, imposing rules whilst really lamenting the fact that they got formulated because it is that which got you in to this godforsaken position in the first place. All in all, the numerous rules that now pervade the event have not always been there, and some regret this change and some do not. Obviously, rules are only symptomatic, not the disease itself. I think the disease itself is freedom, or, to be more precise, a misunderstood sense of freedom both by those who overestimate it and those who underestimate it. Some old-timers, or people just seduced by the myth of the old days, may still harbor old deep-playa-fueled fantasies of an exploding TAZ where the blue of authority never mars the desert’s profound blankness. And some cranky old cynics might still think that just because there are cops around, any implied promise of liberatory experience at Burning Man is a vicious lie, undoubtedly told to put one more gold bar in Harvey’s hidden vault, somewhere far, far away from his dingy apartment. From the 2005 afterburn report. At: http://afterburn.burningman.com/05/admin/government.html, accessed May 1st 2006.

84 83

At: http://www.reason.com/news/show/27598.html, accessed September 27th 2005.

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

I have come to think of Burning Man’s freedom as being more about social freedom: freedom from the negative judgments of those around you, from possible rejection, from non- belonging. You can be everything you had ever wanted to be, whether that means a sexy alien, princess warrior, nude, transgendered, performer or artist, and find such eccentricities cheered and encouraged – not mocked and derided like they would quite possibly be in everyday life. What makes Burning Man so special to me is the freedom everyone has to fully express themselves, not so much an alleged freedom from societal control. Saying that, Burning Man’s freedom might be social, but it is definitely not legal. In fact, nowadays the Burning Man organization has formed a Limited Liability Company, and must deal with as many as a dozen authorities at all levels before it can open its gates. Every year, a huge amount of resources is devoted to placating government agencies. Permits are only given in exchange for the presence of law enforcement inside, and do not exactly come cheap. Still, with all the regulations and enforcement, the Burning Man organization does a pretty good job at keeping the playa the libratory place it is. How it does so is something I want to look at next.

Organizational Structure

One of the first things that needed to be structured was the Burning Man organization itself. After 1996 it became apparent that Burning Man had to create some kind of legal entity to do business with the world. As Black Rock City continued to grow, no single organizer could be expected to personally assume the legal and economic risks that were created by an event on this scale. Responsibilities and relationships implicit in Burning Man’s former mode of operation now needed to be formalized. So it was in 1997 that Harvey founded Burning Man’s Limited Liability Company (LLC) and the first version of a senior staff. On the Burning Man website: “The time had come, in other words, for Burning Man’s organizers to kick themselves upstairs.”85 It was from this seed that the present organization, with its several tiers of decision-making and its many levels of consensus formation, has grown. 85

At: http://afterburn.burningman.com/05/org/index.html, accessed October 3rd, 2006.

59

The tale of how Burning Man the event became Burning Man the Limited Liability Co. offers a fascinating glimpse into how even the wildest, least commercial ideas can, almost against their will, become bankable and regulatory. A press release by the Burning Man organization in 2004 states: Based on corporate accounting and participant survey data, the organization estimates that it contributes $10 million annually to Washoe County, including property taxes, vehicle and equipment rental, and the money that its participants spend on groceries, supplies and lodging on the way in and out of the event. 86 Furthermore, revenue from recycled cans is donated to local schools, and the Bureau of Land Management receives four dollar per person per day for the use of the federally owned land, now roughly yielding another 700.000 dollar annually. With ticket prices soaring to as much as 300 dollar at the gate, Burning Man certainly takes home its share of the money. No matter how ideologically driven, its organizational structure is still a LLC - not a nonprofit. However, as Harvey summarizes the finances: “If anything, we joke, we are more aptly termed a ‘no-profit.’87 And this might be true, for Burning At: http://www.burningman.com/pdf/press_releases/press_release_06062003.pdf, accessed October 4th 2006. When I spook with a salesclerk working for a huge supermarket in Reno, he confided that during the days before Burning Man, his store’s turnover had grown to be higher than it ever had been during Thanksgiving and Christmas – traditionally the most profitable days of the year for retail. And his store was not the only one – according to him Reno’s entire combined revenue followed the same pattern. 87 At: http://afterburn.burningman.com/01/financial_intro.html, accessed June 28th 2005. 86

-4- Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man

Man has never had investors; does not accept commercial sponsorships; has turned down several promotional deals; endorses no products, and has disallowed vending except for the sale of coffee and ice at the event. All of these activities would be typical sources of income and funding for a normal business that exists to create a profit. On the Burning Man website, every year after the event the so-called Afterburn Report is made public. In it, we can find extensive documentation on all the wrongs and rights of that year’s event, as well as a highly transparent financial summary, including a chart documenting cash expenditures, asset acquisition and income. Apparently, in 2005, it cost approximately 222 dollar per person to produce Burning Man. This pays for the presence of a professional medical service and fire department, art funding, the Man, porta-potties, county fees, insurance, and the office.88 With tickets starting at 165 dollar in January, and rising with about 20 dollar every few months, it means that every ticket sold over 222 dollars subsidizes every ticket sold for less. This is why people are forever encouraged to buy their ticket at the highest affordable price “so as to help other community members to do the same.” Like any other company, Burning Man’s LLC generates money, has an office, people on the payroll, weekly meetings, structure and hierarchy. However, what struck me most from my working days in the office, was something that John (the HR manager and thus in control of, well, basically, me) had said. At that time, John had not been working there that long himself. Coming from a corporate background, he told me about the difference between his new and old job, which he saw summarized in the fact that when he came in for his first day at the Burning Man office, his future colleagues there all gave him hugs instead of handshakes. It reminded me of something I had once read, that the handshake’s original purpose was to make sure that the person you were meeting would not have a weapon in his hand. The hug, on the other hand, showed John that they really cared about him. Instead of feeling a little bit uncomfortable like I had before, I now started to like the fact that he had given me a hug when I walked in there first.

Law Enforcement

Its management structure is not the only thing that makes Burning Man different from ‘normal’ organizational structures; the enforcement of law or ‘community standards,’ as the organizers would have it - is at least as different from what you are likely to find elsewhere in the country. Still, even though Harvey always insists that Burning Man is ‘the place on earth where the First Amendment is most fully exercised,’ that does not mean that everything goes. For, as said, despite the party atmosphere and the stated ethos of radical self-expression, Burning Man does not - or I should so no longer – equals anarchy. There are now several official instances that need to be placated before, during and after the event; placing Burning Man squarely within the realm of politics: Black Rock City has all the characteristics of other municipalities of similar size, including a need to maintain diplomatic relations with numerous government agencies. And government is sure to bring politics. The paradoxical result is that the apolitical art event known as Burning Man is highly engaged in politics from the local area all the way to the national level.89 Managing such government relations successfully has meant letting in law enforcement. But even though real cops, mostly from Washoe County, patrol the playa, they do so alongside the Rangers and hardly ever act without consulting this by Burners generated ‘peace corps.’ In full, ‘The Black Rock Rangers’ are basically ‘non-confrontational community mediators’ who help to resolve disputes within the community, and to bridge the gap between the ethos and the culture of Burning Man’s citizens and the needs and responsibilities of law enforcement. Michael Michael, who more or less initiated the Rangers and is still known by his playa pseudonym of ‘Danger Ranger,’ explains their essence: We are giving people an opportunity to play the role of hero, not the role of policeman. […] I want them to think whether there’s a real reason for telling a person to stop doing something, not just something programmed from outside society. Like if you see someone burning a car...is it their car? Well, you can’t burn someone else’s car without their permission. But if it is [the person’s own car], you need to remind them that they will be responsible for cleaning up the mess. But sure, they can burn their car.90 During the required training for the all-volunteer force (160-strong in 2005), the trainees must yell en masse “We are not cops!” And mostly, they do not act like them. They patrol, they help people who ask for help, they talk to each other on radios, and only sometimes do they administer frontier justice. For instance, and I love this example, when Michael found someone driving illegally, he emptied the car’s tires of air, leaving the immobilized vehicle sitting in the middle of nowhere. Michael added a sign to strike fear into others who might think of violating community mores: “Air pressure is a privilege, not a right – signed, Danger Ranger.” From the 2004 Afterburn report. At: http://afterburn.burningman.com/04/admin/government.html, accessed Sept. 21st 2005. 90 At: http://www.reason.com/news/show/27598.html, accessed September 27th 2005. 89

88

For the full overview, see Appendix D

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On the playa, it is not just the Rangers acting in ways often not expected from those keeping order and control. For example, consider this one incident I saw happening in 2004, where a young topless woman rushed from her camp to challenge two Washoe County cops with a pump-action water rifle. She fired, but failed to get a good shot off. I remember feeling a little shocked and worried how they might take this obvious assault, but was amazed to see how one of the cops gently showed the woman how to pump the water gun properly so it might work the next time. Having their authority mocked, with what pretty much looked like a real weapon aimed at them, both cops then cruised on, leaving me, and the girl, behind in laughter. In many towns actions such as this one, and many others that I have witnessed on the playa, would surely get you arrested, but in Black Rock City the cops appear to stay relatively tolerant and stoical under it all. In all Burning Man’s history, I know of only two cases in which either a bunch of people or one particular object was ejected from the playa. The first one involved an entire group of revelers calling themselves Capitalist Pig Camp, who were doing what they insisted was an art project, but which basically only entailed the shouting of racial slurs willy-nilly, sexual comeons and in general very obnoxious remarks to anyone passing by. By Wednesday morning, they were politely yet insistently told to go home. Self-expression apparently has its limit, and it is still not to interfere with communal feelings I guess. The second incident revolved around the Jiffy Lube Camp – a camp catering to gay men. It was pretty hard to miss their gigantic mechanical billboard of two muscular men, about 12 feet tall, cut out of plywood. The brightly painted art was hinged with pins to allow movement more specifically, to portray anal intercourse. The work was placed under a spotlight on a platform that raised it high above the tents. The statement was too much for the police, and they demanded for it to be taken down. Harvey agreed, emphasizing especially the presence of children on the playa. However, I can imagine that in reality it was mostly about keeping the peace and not disturbing the tender relationship with authority. After the 2005 event was over, I heard that there had only been seven arrests on the playa that year. One was for trespassing (a truculent wouldbe gate crasher), one for assault, one for weapons possession, and the rest for drug sales. Especially the last might seem incongruent with Burning Man’s emphasis on ‘radical self-expression’, but the Burning Man organization was quick to point out that they still stood by these drug arrests. As Harvey explicates, this is so because they would have violated Burning Man’s ‘no vending’ rule. I guess that is one way of looking at things, or at least one balance to keep. Still, a pretty good score, especially when compared with other festivals, carnivals, celebrations and sometimes even cities in similar size. In general, to me, such little arrests show that a policy of looking the other way - or, as Michael Michael puts it, of ‘respecting Black Rock’s community mores’ – seems in effect regarding drugs, lewdness, and indecent exposure. I guess that such policy will not sound too good to either the media or concerned constituents in the counties, so it is pretty much left unsaid. When I began asking a county sheriff about the possibility of an 61

official ‘see no evil’ policy, he cut me off before the heresy was even fully out of my lips. All laws of the county are enforced to the fullest, he insisted. Off the record, I insist that to inculcate such relaxed policing in a place where such transgressive behaviors are taking place, is an accomplishment on the organization’s negotiation skills, and, probably also not totally unimportant, the financial gain the event offers. From the number of arrests to the laid back attitude of police at the playa, Black Rock City might appear to be a uniquely peaceful and crimefree place. Still, whilst browsing on digital bulletin boards I found quite a few messages dealing with issues of rape, sexual assault, theft and crime in general on the playa. It leaves me to think that the fact that so little crime gets reported would not necessarily be a good indication of the number of crimes actually taking place. Most crimes committed at Burning Man will go unpunished – at least by official law enforcement, but that does not necessarily imply that no crimes would take place among its thirty fivethousand-plus participants. However, to me it seems that the very fact that most Burners believe in their city’s idyllic nature already makes it a fare more pleasant place than it would be if they would chose to focus on really figuring out exactly how crime-free or safe it is, and which of their neighbors might be a potential thief or attacker and should thus be approached as such.

In the end, I also think that crime is often linked to anonymity. The playa literally has so many eyes on the street and in that sense social control from the ‘bottom up’ that crimes are already less likely to happen. There is simply much more chance that someone will step up and say ‘we don’t do that’, or ‘stop doing that’ or whatever other line that would prevent violent acts, sexual assault or theft from escalating or even taking place altogether. This is also part of Burning Man’s ethics: of being a participant and thus also responsible for the safety and well-being of your city and community. Black Rock City is a city in which people in general have invested themselves to such degree that committing a crime would be a crime against their own efforts. More pragmatic, I can only imagine that making the long drive to the Black Rock Desert, paying a rather large amount of money to get in, and then being submitted to all nature’s whims and fancies might be a few too many obstacles for the average villain. Having said all that about Burning Man’s overall relaxed relation with authorities, it is a truce that is far from stabile or infinite. In 2006, just after I had left San Francisco, there was a lot of discussion going on at the Burning Man office because of proposed ‘draconian stipulations’ that would allow the Bureau of Land Management (the BLM) to charge Burning Man more money for the use of its public land and especially its law enforcement costs, and also to give this law enforcement the unfettered discretion to evict participants based on a broadly generalized ‘good cause’ instead of the law. The Burning Man organization noted that between 1998 and 2004, the cost of law enforcement rose 616 percent, while the increase in the Black Rock City population was only modest and the number of crimes in some years actually decreased.

-4- Everywhere You Go: the City that is Burning Man

Utopia versus Heterotopia

Black Rock City is literally a manifestation of the human imagination, and its barren location only serves to underscore the impressiveness of this feature. It seems to exist in the magical space between eu-topia (good place) and ou-topia (no-place). Sir Thomas More merged these two Greek words to form the term Utopia, meaning “’a good place’ which was ‘nowhere,’ except in the imagination” (Hetherington 1997:ix). Utopian theorist Rosabeth Kanter argues that Utopia is the imaginary society in which humankind’s deepest yearnings, noblest dreams, and highest aspirations come to fulfillment, where all physical, social and spiritual forces work together in harmony, to permit the attainment of everything people find necessary and desirable. (Kanter 1972:1)

For the first time in seven years, it was decided to digitally ask the community for help. The plea went like this: If you support Burning Man, if you want ticket prices not to increase because of the BLM's mismanagement, if you care about how your public funds are being spent, if you care about the future of the Black Rock Desert NCA [National Conservation Area], if you believe government agencies should be held to the letter of the law, if you value your First Amendment right to express yourself and assemble on public land, if you value your civil rights, and if you want your voice to be heard then here's what we would like you to do:91 The recommended course of action was to send an email or letter to the BLM. Apparently, 2,221 emails and 298 letters were sent. Personally, I don’t think this is all that much, but if you consider that people had less than five days to do so, and I for instance only saw the mail after the date when the public comment period turned overdue, it is not all bad as well. All in all, after many conversations with Washoe County officials and the BLM, Burning Man managed to avoid their growing grip on the festival, but one wonders if this present avoidance is not just a future postponement. Whichever way, it illustrates how hard it can be to ‘successfully ride the paradox of regulating a temporary autonomous zone,’ as Davis phrased it. There will always be an inherent tension between growth and regulation; chaos and civilization; surprise and routinization; forces from the inand from the outside. So far, Burning Man, although a far cry from the free, anarchic haven it once was, has been relatively free and autonomous within the system it no longer could pretend to escape. It went civic, yes, but it is a civility that, even though held on public land, exists more or less on its own utopic grounds. 91

Essential to utopia is thus that it is an ideal world, which is by definition impossible to achieve. Burning Man, however, is definitely achieved, if only temporarily. It not only exists in the human imagination, but is that imagination given flesh, or, more appropriately, canvas, rebar and street signs. As I hope to have shown, the city that has thus arisen is as much part of the human imagination as it is of the human society that surrounds it at distance: rehearsing and staging an alternative model of how the world ‘should’ be within the limitations of how the world actually ‘is.’ For authority, permits, regulation and law are as much part of Black Rock City’s infrastructure as the rave camps, lampposts and ubiquitous neon lightning. In Patterns of Order and Utopia (1979), Frank Manuel’s approach is to study utopias as psychological documents that tell us about the sensibility of the societies in which they are produced, and can be interpreted as “decisive social bombs of revolutionary changes.” Morris (2006) adds to this that utopias can be seen as ‘signs’ or ‘signals’ of evolutionary developments in society, providing a liminal stage where new forms of economic and political possibilities can be enacted and rehearsed. According to Parrington, the United States have always been linked to utopic thought. In American Dreams: A Study of American Utopias, he reveals that “from the very beginning, Americans have dreamt of a different, and usually of a better world. America is a Utopia […]. America was built on promises. From the first voyage and the first ship there were promises” (1964:xi). More specifically, Robert V. Hine (1983) has recognized that since the fifteenth century when the term ‘California’ was coined, it has called up visions of utopia; utopian colonies and settlements which attempt to establish new social patterns that experiment with new cooperative forms of living and being. Although having moved to Nevada, Burning Man is still a quintessential part of this Californian utopian trend. As I will argue later on, California and more specifically San Francisco is not just the site where Burning Mans countercultural predecessors are most loudly heard, it also the site where its utopian imagination can be most tangibly felt.

On: http://www.burningman.com/news/blm_news_06.html, accessed May 1st 2007.

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Foucault argued that, by contrast to ‘utopias’, “sites with no real place” which “present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down,” there exist ‘heterotopia:’ specifically unsettling, ambiguous and non-ordinary social spaces. These ‘counter-sites’ are: …a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. (Foucault 1986:24) Such ‘spaces of otherness’ always possess an aura of mystery or danger, and always contain multiple meanings for participants (Ibid.13). They can be event-spaces of transgression, such as Burning Man, or spaces for the perfection of social control and order, such as prisons and asylums. Hetherington adds that, “Almost like laboratories, they can be taken as sites in which new ways of experimenting with ordering society are tried out (1997:12-13). Black Rock City certainly has utopic and heterotrophic threads running through. On one hand, it is a ‘no-place,’ a construction and performance of new social ideals situated in a vast, open expanse of desert; the human imagination given form. Yet at the same time it is a ‘someplace,’ a juxtaposition of multiple spaces, life-styles, social groups, official instances and patterns from the ‘real world’ taken into one place. Above all, it is an experimentation with alternative ways of being; both with civic and organizational structure as with community. Erik Davis reminds us that William Blake identified Eden with the realized human imagination, and that the poet saw this paradise not as a peaceful garden, but as a fiery city (Davis 2005:38). Not a rainbow gathering, in other words, but a Black Rock town, going wild. It is a manmade city and a city made for men; life-affirming through its raw power, Dionysiac excess, state of the art technology and celebratory art. It is to this omnipresence of art that I want to turn next.

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-5- Everyone an Artist: the Communal Art of Black Rock City

-5Everyone an Artist: the Communal Art of Black Rock City I hope you enjoyed my little city tour yesterday. I know it can be a bit overwhelming at first, so we are going to take it rather slow today. Well, maybe slow is not the right word, but at least we will venture out of the tent camps and into the uninhabited part of Black Rock City. For today, as promised, the art tour is on offer. We will take the bicycle, because we want to cover a big part of the playa and by foot such excursion would be next to impossible. In my normal routine, I would cycle to center camp first, have a coffee or two, read the daily newspaper, talk with people, make notes; start the day. But today I have decided to skip that part and take you straight to the furthest ‘left-end’ side of the city. And I know; many people are convinced that nighttime would be the optimal viewing time for the Man, the city, and its art. They say that the blinding daytime light would be too inhospitable for such a physically demanding task. I do not agree. For me, I prefer the morning hours, when the sun is not too hot and bright and there is a very gentle feel to the playa. As said, today we will be after art. Art, however, is hard to pinpoint on the playa, both conceptual and geographical. It is marked by its own sense of aesthetics, appreciation, and purpose. Remember, for instance, that bus-sized white whale we just passed, with the fully articulate moving tail and the bubbles shooting out of its blowhole, you know, before those people meditating on top of that flying carpet overtook us? Here they are called Art Cars, and in order to drive any of those fantastical conveyances you have to apply for a permit by the Department of Mutant Vehicles.92 Art cars are the only form of motorized transport allowed on the playa, and their form can take on anything ranging from a golf cart wrapped in pink fur to the elaborate and insanely detailed reproduction of a sixteenth-century Spanish galleon built around a truck - which I think I mentioned before but which never ceases to impress me. Not your average art gallery material, but art nonetheless. To further test your acceptance of what would constitute art, let us cycle way out into the playa. What is it you say? Oh, no, no need to get discouraged by that sight. I know seeing a house-size vagina complete with pubic hear and people entering with little condom like reservoirs on their head might make you afraid of venturing further, but bear with me. In Black Rock City, it is not so much a matter of art being tasteful or ‘good’, but more of art… well… being. Some of the art is downright stunning though, like the gigantic chandelier right there. Does it not look like it has just crashed from some Olympian sky; a banquet of the Gods; a cleavage in space? And if you look to your left, how about those giant metal lotus flowers spewing flames? Or out there in the distance, more towards your right, those mud swimmers that seem to briefly surface from the desert floor to gasp for breath? Surely you are not hallucinating, I see them as well.

Having just bought my VW, I know that the Department of Mutant Vehicle is a parody on the actual governmental Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), from which all matters concerning vehicles are arranged.

Now, can you make out that narrow, elegant ladder reaching out to touch the clouds, all the way there in the distance? That is the general direction where we are heading. I know, I know, we might have taken a bit of a detour, but you’ll have to excuse me for that. Like most others here, I have only been a citizen of this city for a mere five days, and my orientation is still far from perfect, especially outside the actual city-grid and onto the vast expanse of the playa. And no, do not worry, we will not accidentally leave Black Rock City and never find our way back again. Before that happens, we would inevitable be stopped by the trash fence, which is erected all along the perimeters to prevent objects taken by the wind from leaving the site. And although one can find art objects all the way to the fence, and sometimes even incorporating the fence, a visit to the Man, and not the fence, is next on the agenda. When we get to the Man, we can visit the Funhouse of the Mind, beneath its base. I have never quite counted them, but have been told that it consists of exactly thirty insidiously linked rooms, all filled with art. Together, they form quite a maze, and as the playa’s official newspaper warns: “If you suffer from claustrophobia, agoraphobia, or are taking any psychotropic prescription drugs whose names end with the syllables -in, -ine, -an, -trin, -ac or -ex, you should consider not entering this structure.”93 I sure hope this warning does not apply to you. Once in the maze, if and when we can find one of the two stairways that lead upward, apparently, with a little effort, we will even be able to rotate the Man 180 degrees. So far I have not found either one of the stairways, but I sure have been disoriented a few times by the Man’s altered position. The other advantage from being way up here in the maze is the fact that it will give us a good vantage point from which we can oversee the playa. There, now you can see with your own eyes how many art objects lie scattered out there. Some big, like those five gigantic thirteen-thousand-pound chunks of granite suspended by tensile steel cords, where we saw that pretty couple tempting faith by using it as a merry go round; some small like the tiny plastic ant colony we nearly drove over on the intersection Esplanade and 9.30. We could stop by an infinite amount more, and in doing so I would probably discover dozens and dozens of surprising art works I had not yet found, or found out about, myself, but in our current tour, time is too limited for that. The sun is already getting really hot, and there are still a few specific art works I want to show you.

92

93

From the Black Rock Gazette, Volume 1, issue 1, 2005.

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message that states “5-6-88/11-5-94, I love you baby - Mommy”; some contain photographs, like the one with that young, pensive man, and the message “You left us by your own hand. We love you and forgive you”. I wanted you to see and feel the contemplative solemnity of this space; because I think that it forms a very real part of Burning Man as well. And on the final night, when the Temple with all its offerings and messages is burned, the catharsis it holds might even surpass that of the Man’s conflagration the night before.

So let’s cycle on. On the promenade behind the Man you have to have a look at the giant blue human head rising from the desert floor at cheek height. It is called The Dreamer and it is executed by longtime Burning Man artist Pepe Ozan. Arguably, this is a particular work of art that might be better viewed in the dark. For at sunset each day, the Dreamer’s eyes will open and a fire will be lit inside its cranium. Around it, fire performances, including dancing and interactive sculptures, will begin to ignite, lasting way into the night. Now, though, the head just slumbers. If we wanted to, we could participate in dream workshops that are given inside, but if you do not mind, I would rather move on to the far end of the Promenade and keep my dreams to myself. The playa is enough of a dreamscape, and sometimes I have the sneaking suspicion that even my most fantastical dream would be no match for life and art in Black Rock City.

It is hard to see from here, but if you look beyond that string of driving cupcakes, behind that cloud of dust even, then surely you will see it looming. The magnificent wooden laced structure starting to take shape before our eyes is what is called the Temple of Tears, or the Mausoleum, and I wanted you to see it last. You have to understand, when the Man is this city’s heart, and the Center Camp area its longs, this imposing edifice must surely be its soul, or whichever other part of the body one uses for commemoration, mourning, and remembrance. I have walked in here many times this week, and whenever I did, I was moved by the small rituals taking place: people scribbling personal messages on the pieces of filigreed plywood that comprise its structure and reading those left by others, playing music, praying, crying and hugging. The Temple is the private made public. Some messages are made like a shrine, like the one over there with the teddy bear and the 65

From its early associations with the bohemian lifestyle of its San-Francisco based founders, to its later association with the Cacophony Society’s attention-inspiring performance art-based events, Burning Man has long been constructed and described as an arts festival. However, art at Burning Man crosses genres, defies classification, and does not fit comfortably in the standard art academic and gallery worlds that dominate the art scene in America. It is democratic, inclusive, experiential, site specific, temporary, community based, interactive, and able to withstand extremes of weather. The works of art done in the desert are furthermore not done to impress any art critic, to get a dealer, show or exhibition, or to make a sale. More often than not is done simply to realize a vision mostly unrealizable anywhere else, and to give that vision to an appreciative audience who may interact with it - and with each other through it. Again, the otherwise stark environment of the Black Rock Desert is important, because it makes everything stand out. “The context of no context makes anything leap to the eye, as if its identity shines out of it. In a primal way, it also makes people shine out of themselves” (Harvey 2003:1). It is the shared surrounding emptiness that summons the community to decorate their world and themselves.

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In this chapter I will explore the processes used by organizers and participants to relate art to a form of self-expression and non-spectating that is more communal and genuine in nature than those practices that occur within the ‘official’ art world. Additionally, I will look at the important effects that this artistic association has on creating a shared sense of community.

Like most defining characteristics of Burning Man, art as well is intended to go against perceived ills in American society. For out in the less dusty world, it is argued by the organization, art is often alienated from the event’s sense of intimacy and interactivity, and instead subjected to the laws of commerce and the marketplace, hereby loosing its vital function of community building. On Burning Man, though, art and aesthetics are brought back together, and mutually act against a state of numbness that Susanne Buck-Morss sees critiqued in Benjamin’s influential Artwork essay. Her argument connects aesthetics to the synaesthetic system, and opposes this with Benjamin’s perceived numb, suppressed society: or in her words the aneasthetized society. I will explain this theoretical stance in further detail next, but not without first properly tracing the history of art and aesthetics on the playa.

A City filled with Art The construction and planning of the city - the originary gesture that establishes the container for the gathering - is itself considered a work of art by its organizers. Throughout the city and dotting the playa are sculptures and installations, some easy to find, some several miles away in unmarked territory, left for the intrepid to stumble upon. (Pinchbeck 2003) On Burning Man, free expression, creativity and play form a vital trinity. Put these three together, and the addition sum is shown in an abundance of art on the playa. These works of art are not about commercial value, and most of the time not even about being ‘good.’ In Black Rock City, ‘bad taste’ is not denigrated - even apparent failures can be recycled into future winners. From Hello Kitty to Aztec temples; from giant melting ice balls to swinging monoliths on a string; from a 60 meters high vagina you have to exit for rebirth to a pirate ship on wheels holding a gaudy bar inside: Burning Man suggests a stance beyond qualitative and artistic judgment. In a community where the art is not intended to be sold or reviewed, but to generate community and interactivity, its aesthetic merit seems somewhat beside the point. When viewed in such context, artworks become experiential tools, not final statements or museum pieces. It is a new genre of art that might not be new at all, but remind us of a time in which there was similarly little separation between art and life. At Burning Man, the do-it-yourself ethic is the community standard, and aesthetics are enthusiastically explored by everyone, not just artists. When the work has been experienced, the object that catalyzed the experience can be liberated through its destruction. As long time attendee and artist Justin told me in an interview: “I totally love burning my art. Only then can I know for a fact that no one will own it. It belongs to the community.[…] It belongs to the field of experience, not material.” (Justin, interview July 17th 2005). In the end, it does not matter how much time, energy, and skill has been lavished on the artistic object. The point of art on Burning Man is not to cling to that shell, that structure, but to evolve from it, and to be transformed by the experience.

Art as Civic Structure

One of the ways to describe Burning Man is to put it in a context of ‘arts festival,’ which at times has earned the event the title ‘the world largest outdoor art gallery.’ In the year of my research, 2005, there were over three hundred art installations scattered across the city: on the open playa, in the camping area, at center camp café, along the trash fence which marks the boundaries of the city, in the small participant-run airport, along the entrance road, and within the pavilion on which the Man stood. Art it is part 66

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and parcel of everyday life for the citizens of Black Rock City, nearly all of whom produce objects for use and display during the event, from costumes and small items given out as gifts to large-scale art installations. It seemed that the whole city I stumbled upon was made to facilitate art, so that it could be populated by interactive theme camps, wildly costumed creatures, surreal art cars, omnipresent and often spontaneous performances, ambitious arty installations and prankster iconography. Today, art truly is everywhere, and everything appears to be art.

Art has always been important to the event, but when Burning Man went civic, Larry Harvey decided that art was going to be the official means through which the event was to survive; the foundation and trademark of its up and coming civic structure; the element binding the increasingly heterogeneous citizens of Black Rock City together. Burning Man would start to not only host, but also fund art. The first, officially funded, art project was to be the lampposts of the city to be: pragmatic through their nature and demand: I felt very strongly that what we needed was some kind of architectural symbol that would demarcate public space. And if you did it in a way that signaled transcendency people would respect it. I decided on lampposts. And they instantly respected that space. (Harvey in Haden-Guest 2006) Such seemingly insignificant object as a lamppost had great impact. Not only did it define the city grid, it also made respect this new ‘civilized’ space. As Haden-Guest sums up the effects: “what at first seems riotous post-apocalyptic anarchy soon comes to seem as organically structured as a nautilus shell” (Haden-Guest 2006). To this day, every evening just before dusk, the lamps are lit, with some solemnity, by a small procession of lamplighters with kerosene torches. Their ceremonial lightning honors a different kind of flame than that of the Man’s primal abandon on burn night: the steady, ongoing fire of civilization. Nowadays, with the city laid out officially as it does, the lamplighters march out north, south, east and west from Center Camp to the temple and to the Man; connecting a myriad of artistic expressions that define the city and its grid much in the same manner as the lampposts.

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The lampposts clearly show that it is literally, as well as metaphorically, art around which the civic structure gets build. But art is more. Since 1996, socalled Art Cars are the only permitted form of motorized transport during the event. An Art Car isn’t just a car with stuff painted on, but a car that has undergone some degree of structural transformation, as well as having been accepted by and registered with Burning Man’s Department of Mutant Vehicles (DMV). If the DMV approves, they issue you a license with the disclaimer: “By entering this mutant vehicle you agree that under any circumstances whatsoever the operators and company owner are not responsible for any physical or mental damage done to you. This includes death ... Enjoy the ride....” In 2005, 455 mobile artworks were registered, including 297 daytime vehicles, 33 nighttime-only vehicles, and 125 that roved the playa both day and night: bringing forth a hallucinatory amount of power-driven couches, whales, boats, penises, rockets, living rooms, fish, insects, cats, lobsters, giant heads, flying saucers, octopuses, and anything anyone might dare design and still get moving.

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In addition to painted, decorated, and altered cars, the ranks of art vehicles on the playa have grown to include fire trucks, buses, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, golf carts, and all manner of wheeled, mobile objects which might serve as transport of some kind. The perfectly flat and empty playa serves as a superb setting for the art cars, and to many the occasional art car parade is one of the event’s highlights. Art cars also represent a convenient way of getting around, as you can always hitch a ride, hop on and hop off, and might just suddenly find yourself pole dancing and shooting cocktails in a steel, fire breathing dragon’s belly whilst getting smoothly, though slightly tipsy, from A to B.

Theme Camps

The amalgamation of art with community has furthermore contributed to what is known as a Theme Camp. Theme camps are devoted to creating – often with fanatical dedication – sustained and planned environments to entertain, enchant and interact with the other citizens of Black Rock City. The concept is simple: twenty people contributing to an organized plan stand a greater chance of achieving something more expressive and impressive in less time and often more functional ways than each could do individually. Seen like this, theme camps are the middle tier of the selfreliance needed to survive in a desert. Perhaps they can be viewed as the “safety in numbers” family-sized version of radical self-reliance, where you can survive with the help of others. As an organizational structure, theme camps can range from chaotic slacker towns to carefully planned environments; they create public areas, chill spaces, fully stocked bars, workshop areas, valet parking restaurants, rave floors, playful installations and in general an endless amount of ‘things to do.’ Composed of ravers or Microsoft code writers or underground artists or certified healers or voyeuristic perverts, each theme camp presents a unique vision, reflecting a particular community’s musical and aesthetic ideal and possible subcultural affiliations. In a large, collaborative act of self-expression, these visions are projected outward to be shared by all. Throughout the years, many camps have become elaborate enterprises with several hundred members and equipment stored in warehouses in nearby towns. In general, their level of artistry and attention to detail can be prodigious, especially when projected on a blank and hash desert environment.

Apparently, the first unofficial theme camp was born in 1992 when a woman named Vivian Perry set up her camp with fresh flowers and champagne buckets; eating oysters and caviars off china and silver. As the days advanced, more and more people were puzzled as to how she managed to stay as pristine and spotless as she did, whilst everyone else was covered with dust and grungy after minutes of arrival. It turned out that she had multiple pieces of the same outfit, and continuously cleaned

herself with a damp rag, but she was still the talk of the day. As Steve put it: “they hadn’t seen anybody do anything so conceptually obsessive out there yet” (audiotape Steve). Hers was not so much a theme camp in the sense that she would hold open house for anyone stopping by, but she still acted out and presented a unified, created experience. And she would inspire Peter Doty to stage his Christmas Camp the year after, which would go into history as the first official theme camp. In this camp, properly festooned with Christmas decorations including a freshly chopped pine tree in the middle, Peter would dress as Santa, blast tapes of Christmas carols 24/7, and supply everyone with thick, boozy eggnog in the desert heat – but not until they had eaten a slab of fruitcake. As heard on Steve’s audiotape: I even staged a dysfunctional family freak-out because, after all, that’s what Christmas is really all about. I started screaming, “Why can’t we for once just go out to the desert and have a perfect Christmas? Is that really asking too much? I hate all of you; I wish you were dead!” He would then run sobbing into his tent, change into his Santa outfit, come back out and pose for pictures with a loaded shotgun in one hand, a bottle of bourbon in the other and a topless girl in his lap. “That became my Christmas card that year.”

These days, theme camps in all shapes and sizes adorn – or sometimes blemish – Black Rock City. It is estimated that over half of Black Rock City’s citizens live in and are actively involved in a theme camp of their choice, often even throughout the year; more and more intense as the event approaches. In 2005, theme camp registration at Burning Man’s office processed 508 applications, from which 485 theme camps eventually made it to Black Rock City. These registered camps are placed in the two innermost blocks of the city’s great circles. Beyond them, in the outer circles, are hundreds of other ‘unregistered’ theme camps. Theme camps are literally seen as a gift to the community, a point I will elaborate on in the next chapter. They are often costly projects; a reason why the bigger camps hold fundraisers (or ‘fun raisers’ in Burning Man jargon) on forehand to be able to finance all their expenses. From roughly May to August, San Francisco is buzzing with such parties and gatherings, and most of my weekends there I could choose from at least three different ones to attend. When Burning Man is over, some of the bigger theme camps will hold reunion parties to again relive those wonderful playa moments, 68

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and share them with all – and probably, less noble, to try and make it out of debt. Such happenings really define San Francisco’s social agenda, and although in general each of them carries a distinct ‘Burning Man style:’ participatory, crazy, and very open and welcoming, they all more or less had their own distinctive aesthetics and crowd. To me, in the city as in the desert, the extremely diverse range of theme camps reflects the heterogeneous nature of Burning Man. This is no longer a countercultural TAZ populated by countercultural rebels escaping society, but a true city in the sense that it contains a diverse range of people, all with their own interests, aesthetics and sense of meaning. Even though Burning Man might resemble its own utopian microcosmos when viewed against the macrocosmos of society, it in turn holds a plural of microcosms within, each reflecting their own unique vision. What springs to mind when thinking about these microcosms, is that they might more aptly be described as subcultures.94 That way, I could have the brilliant argument that Burning Man went from the countercultural to the cultural via the subcultural, but, alas, I do not think it is as clear cut as that. For most subcultures, it seems that the circle of their collectiveness is pretty much closed as it were, and often used to separate the ‘self’ from the large group of ‘others.’ Sarah Thornton, after Pierre Bourdieu (1986), described subcultural capital as the cultural knowledge and commodities acquired by members of a subculture, raising their status and helping differentiate themselves from members of other groups (Thornton 1995:11). Style hereby is a very important distinction, described by Dick Hebdige as subculture’s “fashions, mannerisms, activities, music, interests, and argot”95 (Hebdidge 1979:16). On Burning Man, however, subcultural capital and style are not so much used to define a tight little world and thereby exclude people; on the contrary, in most cases it seems that they are used as a bridge to commune some inner vision to the outer world, and to credit this world with the same kind of reality seen in those inside the bonded circle. When reality is projected outward as such, culture is no longer a given, but something that can be created. Instead of isolation, social interaction is the result.

It is as if theme camps are not just defined as an amalgamation of community with art, but also as the incorporation of communal life into civic life. Like subcultures, communal interactions occur on an intimate scale, and have a tendency, over time, to seek a kind of closure that repels outsiders. Civility, on the other hand, is practiced with strangers and relates to a greater realm beyond the boundaries of a particular group. With the As early as 1950, David Riesman distinguished between a majority, “which passively accepted commercially provided styles and meanings”, and a “‘subculture’ which actively sought a minority style and interpreted it in accordance with subversive values” (in: Middleton 2002:155). 95 Originally used as a code language for thieves and criminals, Bruce Sterling defines ‘argot’ as “the deliberately hermetic language of a small knowledge clique [...]. a super-specialized geek cult language that has no traction in the real world.” On: http://www.viridiandesign. org/2006/03/viridian-note-00459-emerging.html, accessed May 15th 2006. 94

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open nature of theme camps, they solve the distance normally experienced between communality and civility in a city. From the Burning Man website: We feel like particles within a mass, and so are tempted to seek narcissistic refuge in small circles - to associate only with people who immediately mirror our personal tastes or lifestyle. However, we have learned that striving toward transcendent goals can inculcate a deeper sense of fellowship and pride within a group than is attainable through any clique or crowd. A public world expands our sense of who we are.96 Transported at large, the open nature and circle of theme camps basically take the same form as Black Rock City; with the Man at the geographic center and the streets in an open arch. When I asked Harvey if, with the number of those attending constantly on the rise, he would ever close the circle, he answered “Good God no. We’d all go psychotic. Do not ever close the circle. We have to keep feeling that the world outside has the same reality, the same sense of inner reality that we find in ourselves” (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005). It seems that with this remark, like theme camps projecting a vision and reaching out to fellow participants, Burning Man itself is just as much a vision with full potential to reach out to society.

Performance Art

Besides theme camps and art cars, so typical of Burning Man, there is an abundance of performance art - in the broadest sense of the term - on the playa. And like theme camps and art cars might stretch the definition of art, so too does this particular manifestation. Richard Schechner (2002) defines performance as behavior that is heightened, if ever so slightly, and publicly displayed. He describes it as ‘twice-behaved behavior:’ performed actions that people have rehearsed or prepared for, and performing as ‘showing doing;’ as pointing to, underlining, and displaying doing. Performances, of art, rituals, or everyday life, are omnipresent. Schechner quotes Erving 96 On: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1999/99n_letter_sum_0.html, accessed March 27th 2007.

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Goffman, from his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: “A ‘performance’ may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants (Schechner 2002:15-16). On Burning Man, such a broad definition of performance seems suitable enough; as broad as the 35.000 random manifestations of ‘self-expression.’ You can find performances that would fit a theatre, such as Pepe’s opera, involving a trained choir of in the hundreds, or the El Circo camp, where beautiful aerial and trapeze artists carry out their carefully orchestrated shows. However, there is also a large category which might not immediately ring ‘performance art,’ such as that drag queen with five day stubble who I watched doing a dramatic rendering of the “I’m a Barbie Girl” song in deep baritone voice; or the protest march I witnessed where people from the Carrot Liberation Front, unsurprisingly in carrot garb, staged a fierce attack on the food patterns and ‘furry oppressors’ of nearby Bunny Camp, whose inhabitants in turn showed up in their pink bunny suits to verbally abuse, and nibble on, the carrots. Whether bizarre or surreal; rehearsed or spontaneous; high-brow or camp – performances reign the playa. Again, it is vital to remember that this is a festival where all entertainment is done by its participants. If they do not do anything, then there will be nothing to do. As Goethe suggested when commenting on the Rome carnival: “[It] is not really a festival given for the people but one the people give themselves” (In: Duvignaud 1976:3). The Burning Man organization will not book MTV’s hottest rock bands, or the best performers, or today’s most enlightened gurus. All that it intends to do is to challenge you to become that hot rocker, performer, guru, dj, or dancer yourself. This is what is called radical self-expression: “the feeling that your inmost vital self is real and that you can project a vision of this sense of being onto the surrounding world.”97

No judgments. No fear of rejection. Of course I realize that some people will pass judgment on me no matter what, and who might find my whole new sparkly me dumb or not cool enough, but they are outnumbered to such degree that I never feel drawn back because of them. At best, I feel sorry for them. I would not want to have missed out on this wonderful, liberating opportunity of recreating my identity. Where else could I embody such benign and playful God? (Laura, interview July 28th 2005) In a way, Burning Man’s emphasis on (performance) art, radical selfexpression and non-spectatorship all entail the same thing: the challenge to give the best of yourself and to create your own reality; individualism in order to benefit community. Performance art, however, plays an interesting and sometimes awkward role at Black Rock City. Because a performance implies an audience and an audience implies passive, rather than active participation in the event, Burning Man’s emphasis on performance art and its ethic of non-spectatorship might feel incongruent. However, I think that the element binding the two is, indeed, self-expression, for at any alternating moment you can be either audience or performer - even both. The Burning Man organization actively encourages all visitors to become aware of their own unique potential for creativity, and to contribute this part of themselves to the community. Self- expression hereby both binds participants together and resonates with the community’s core values. The manifestation or performance (in the form of art and costume) becomes the conversation piece at the proverbial dinner table. The outrageous costumes worn by some (or complete lack thereof) become the open doors to conversation; they become individual welcome mats to everyone’s person inside. Performances are, proverbially, taken off stage, and distinctions between real life and performance become blurred. Once more, a form of art is taken out of its normal context in the ‘official’ art world, and brought into Burning Man to enhance community.

Performance art on the playa is really the concept of radical self-expression taken to its utmost extremes. It is about taking what is most private and uniquely personal and then contributing it to a public environment. And even though its effects might sometimes look rather silly or even plain ridiculous, it brings about an environment that many participants have told me feels extremely non-judgmental and therefore highly liberating: On Burning Man, I can be the best me, just like everyone around me is their best them. There is no history holding us back. No expectations. 97

On the website: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/lectures/ viva2.html

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Art against Society Burning Man is a revival of art's culture-bearing and connective function. It is art that is designed to be touched, handled, played with, and moved through in a public arena. It solicits a collaborative response from its audience, even as it encourages collaboration between artists. It deliberately blurs the distinction between audience and art form, professional and amateur, spectator and participant. Burning Man is art that's generated by a way of life, and it seeks, in its broadest aims, to reclaim the realms of politics, nature, history, ritual and myth for the practice of art. This is art with a utopian agenda. (Rhey a.k.a. Harvey1999) In 1992 - Burning Man’s second year in the Black Rock Desert -, it received the official name ‘The Black Rock Arts Festival.’ Back then, it is not inconceivable that Harvey intended art to optimize community, and, basically, life as much as he does now, but I am not sure if his utopian agenda was shared by everyone. Already in the more anarchic and unstructured days before 1996, art was definitely and positively important, and people were having a lot of fun creating and destroying it, but it was not so much functional, at least, not in a structural sense. As Chicken John adequately frames it, “it was more about making mind-blowing things and blowing them up, then about creating community around such gestures” (John, conversation September 10th, 2005). From 1996 onwards, starting with the lampposts, the Burning Man organization has used (partial) proceedings from the festival to finance art projects that especially fit its idea of art as a community building tool. As such, next to looking at more obvious and pragmatic factors such as viability and originality, art fund proposals are mostly screened on their interactive qualities; art as a means in which participants can interact and thus solidify their community. It goes against what Larry Harvey sees as the commoditization and ‘corperatization’ of art, or what he describes as “the work of art in the age of the market economy” (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005). Under his pseudonym Daryl Van Rhey: Art in America now originates within a system that is wholly institutionalized. The dead hand of bureaucracy is everywhere apparent, represented by a system of production which links art schools to an art industry that, in turn, controls the marketing apparatus that selects and distributes these privileged goods. Caught between the aridity of academia and the banality of this marketplace, it scarcely seems surprising that our art has lost vitality. It does nothing to disturb the course of material interest, much less lead to any form of spiritual awakening. (Rhey 1999) In a lecture Harvey delivered in 2002, he delves deep into the history of underground art. The scene is set with an examination of the National Endowment of the Arts’ (NEA) budget over the last fifty years. The NEA, founded in the late sixties, is the government’s support package for art. Around 1978, it experienced a peak budget at just under 350 million dollar. In 2006 this number is slashed to less than 130 million dollar; “making its [NEA] programs seriously and fundamentally underfunded.”98 Additionally, in the late seventies, the Carter administration slowly began the great move to privatize government functions, and following this Harvey (2002) recalls that at roughly that time “the first big corporate [art] show occurred in San Francisco. It was sponsored by Philip Morris.” Since then, more and more corporations have become art collectors and investors of museums and biennials, making the private sector responsible for the substantially bigger part of art funding in North-America (Borgonovi 2004:22). 98

Figure and quote from www.americanartsalliance.org

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With this economic situation, finding funding puts artists in a binary position. On one hand they are forced to theoretically advance the progression of art by steering from anything remotely derivative for art critics, and on the other hand they have to blend their art into the juggernaut of ‘approved’ society for corporate sponsors. Some groups, however, refuse to go either route. The Cacophony Society was one of these groups, and it brought its sense and essence of experiential art to Burning Man. Theirs was a rough form of art; with a fundamental ‘outsiders’ nature that is still felt today. It dictates that art is about immediate experience; about creating things and enjoying such creativity more than having it abide to criteria such as beauty, timelessness, corporate interests, or commercial value.

Harvey has taken the Cacophonic sense of underground, immediate art to Burning Man, and with this insists on offering an escape route from the marketplace of commoditized and corporate art. Once again, art is to become a medium of social regeneration and connection; qualities that would have been long lost in the conventional art world. Burning Man’s art curator ‘LadyBee,’99 when asked about the difference between her job and that of a curator working inside the art establishment, explains it as follows: Those people earn their bread and butter working for institutions whose purpose is to validate art. […] People gather around institutions and accept the professional advice of people whose job it is to institutionally validate the art product. Burning Man, on the other hand, is devoted to immediacy. We view art outside the frame that the contemporary art world puts around it. We tend to look at it as an instrument by which to create social relationships. It’s basically the connecting glue that holds this little experiment together and that’s a much larger agenda. (LadyBee, interview August 10th 2005) In Art Magazine Leonardo,100 the abstract of the article ‘The Outsider Art of Burning Man’ reads that “the goal of the event [Burning Man] is to remove the artist from the world of commerce and competition, emphasizing instead collaboration, cooperation and shared experience” (Kristen 2003:343). Most of the time, though, artists are not so much removed from the world of commerce and competition, but turned artists in the temporary 99 Who herself is a former sculptor educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After ten years on the ‘art world treadmill’ in New York she found Burning Man, moved to San Francisco and ‘never looked back’. 100 A renowned publication from MIT Press, founded in 1968 by kinetic artist & astronautical pioneer Frank Malina, focusing on art that uses science and technology in innovative ways.

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world of Black Rock City where normal ‘artistic standards’ are contravened, inverted, subverted, and twisted ‘topsy-turvy’. Whenever art falls outside the established system as it does on Burning Man, it often gets labeled as ‘outsider art.’101 In practice, outsider art is an extremely broad concept, including work produced within the unselfconscious vernacular traditions of folk art, ‘naïve’ work created by amateur or untrained artists, and contemporary popular productions such as custom car decoration or graffiti art (Rexer 2005). On Burning Man, the term is used rather loosely, as some of the artists do have degrees from art schools, exhibition histories and art careers. However, having such professional background is certainly no incentive: one does not even need any art-making experience at all to build an installation, to perform, or to express one’s self artistically in any which way. LadyBee: “We don’t fund vanity art projects, where one artist makes it and puts it out there. Our real goal is to show people that really anyone can make art” (conversation August 10th 2005).

On the playa, art and community are both an incentive for and a result of social life. For whereas art is creating community; in turn the community is creating art. Both practically and ideologically, most art pieces on the playa are made so that they require an action on the part of participants to achieve completion. They are often premised on fantasies and participatory scenarios which seduce the erstwhile audience for art into assuming an active and interpretive role that often places them in a relationship with fellow participants. In Black Rock City, distinctions between audience and art, professional and amateur, spectator and participant are blurred or vanish altogether. The sharing of art results in a shared aesthetics, which in turn equals a shared sense of communal sociality. This communal sociality is then exported outside the playa, into everyday life. Larnie Fox, who has been bringing art pieces to the playa for some years, thinks that as an export model, Burning Man stands at the center of a wider art movement: There is a yet unnamed art movement that may prove to be of some significance, and Burning Man is close to its center. It often manifests itself as circus, ritual and spectacle. It is a movement away from a dialogue between an individual artist and a sophisticated audience, and towards collaboration amongst a big, wild, free and diverse community. It is a movement away from galleries, school, and other institutions and towards an art produced in and for casual groups of participants, more akin to clans and tribes, based on aesthetic affinities and bonds of friendship. It is a movement away from static gallery art and formal theater towards site-specific, time-specific installation and performance. It is a rejection of spoon-fed corporate culture and an affirmation of the homemade, the idiosyncratic, the 101 Nowadays, Burning Man’s ‘outsider art’ has actually received some serious coverage in the art press, as shown by the article in Leonardo, and today’s general trend seems to be about re-erecting the art in public spaces – not about burning it. However, it is still fair to say that most art on the playa gets executed by people with no particular credentials from or love for the gallery or academic scene, thus still adhering to the term ‘outsider art’.

personal. It is profoundly democratic. It is radically inclusive, it is a different challenge, and it is beckoning.102 It is a view on art that seems to be diametrically opposed to the common view on, and position of, art in contemporary American society. And intentionally so, for the Burning Man organization is very conscious about the (re)positioning of art on the playa and its effects. There is an insolence in Burning Man’s heart that goes against both the art world and the ‘normal’ world, and proposes to radically alter the outlook on both. By bringing art closer to the people in order to bring people closer to each other, the organization seems to grant art a role that is nearly politicized, or at least used as a tool to benefit an agenda that, to a certain extent, is political in nature. Tortuous, the ethics of such agenda can be seen as a reaction on American society, where the position of art would be part and parcel of the current state of alienation, commoditization and disenchantment. It is a society that Susanne Buck-Morss, after Walter Benjamin, views as anaesthetized and ‘un-aesthetic’; desensitized and insensitive. To counter such numb society, art is to undo the current alienation of our corporeal sensorium, and kick us back into collective life. Let us see how such analyses might clarify our view on art at the playa.

The Anaesthetized Society

Harvey has never made the inspiration he received by ideas as put forward by critical thinkers such as Debord and Bey a secret. I have already talked about the kind of society these scholars were theoretically opposing; what solutions they offered and how this would eventually reflect back on Burning Man, but there is one more scholar I would like to add to the list, namely Walter Benjamin. Even though Harvey has never made any direct reference to him - at least not to my knowledge –, I believe that the way Benjamin thinks about art, and especially the urgent task he sees lying ahead of art, very much equals Harvey’s approach to art on the playa. There are many things I wish I had done slightly different during my first period of anthropological fieldwork, and discussing Benjamin with Harvey is certainly one of them. The chance to do so will not easily appear again; something I regret because within Benjamin’s renowned statement of art having lost its aura, there is a more hidden argument in which art is to undo the alienation of our modern anaesthetized society. This second, less obvious layer of Benjamin’s Artwork essay is what I find most interesting, and what I think might explain best what Harvey’s intentions are by assigning art such primary position on Burning Man. However, before unraveling those threads, let us first briefly consider what Benjamin Larnie Fox, sculptor, on http://www.infoflow.com/larnie/statement.html. accessed March 17, 2005, emphasis mine. Even though nothing on the website states that Larnie’s would be familiar with Maffesoli’s work, his ‘casual groups of participants’ seem to hold great similarity to Maffesoli’s neo-tribes.

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had in mind with the ‘aura of art’ and what exactly has changed with this aura in our current age of mechanical reproduction.

Walter Benjamin became well-known through his analyses of the effects of capitalism on art, and mostly through his conclusion that mechanical reproduction would destroy the uniqueness, authenticity and sacredness – that which he labeled the ‘aura’ - of the work of art. By putting copies of an original work in places where the original can or will not go, mechanical reproduction might ‘depreciate’ the quality of the work, but, by doing so it also liberates it: “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (Benjamin 1969:224).103 If art is mechanical reproducible, the criterion of authenticity is no longer traced back to its basis in ritual, either magical or religious, and the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - that of cognition and thus politics. In Benjamin’s time, the aestheticization of politics is ‘managed’ (betreibt) by a Fascist cult, and as a Marxist he proposes that communism should counter this by politicizing art. So far, Harvey would probably not be too much drawn to the argument, but when we trace Susanne Buck-Morss analyses, what Benjamin is really demanding of art here is a much more universal task, namely to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, through which humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it is capable of viewing its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure. And this is where Harvey and Benjamin are very much on the same line, for they both seem to use the concept of aesthetics not so much within the usual current philosophical trinity of ‘art, beauty and truth,’ but more in its original etymological meaning. The ancient Greek used the word ‘aisthitikos’ for that which is ‘perceptive by feeling,’ and ‘aisthisis’ as the sensory experience of perception. Seen like this, the original field of aesthetics was above all corporeal in nature; referring to reality rather than art, and sensory experience rather than cultural forms. Because the senses encountered the world prior to logic or meaning, Buck-Morss argues that I think that we should not forget here that Benjamin was greatly inspired by Marxism, and that it is definitely this inclination that makes him appear so hostile against ritualistic art, mystique and sacredness. After all, it was Marx himself who stated “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” (Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique.html) 103

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they “maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance to cultural domestication” (Buck-Morss 1990:6). Precisely because their immediate purpose is to serve instinctual needs, they are indispensable for the self-preservation of both the individual and the social group. Modern man, living in the age of mechanical reproduction and subsequently with the daily image-phantasmagoria of mass culture, experiences a simultaneity of overstimulation and numbness, or what Benjamin saw as shock, and what I have earlier summarized under the term ‘cultural exhaustion.’ Under the conditions of these ongoing modern shocks, response to stimuli without thinking, without sense-consciousness, becomes necessary for survival. This causes aesthetics to no longer refer to a cognitive mode of being in touch with reality, but to a way of blocking out reality. The synaesthetic system, wherein “external sense-perceptions come together with bodily sensations and the internal images of memory and anticipation,” (Buck-Morss 1992:16) becomes anaesthetic: a deadening of the senses for the sake of self-preservation. It is this anaesthetic state of humanity in modern times that makes it possible to view its own destruction with enjoyment, as seen by Benjamin in Fascism. His proposed answer in the form of a politicization of art can therefore be interpreted to mean that art’s task is to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses; to undo corporeal alienation and sensory impoverishment, and to connect again with one’s own body and one’s own world - for the sake of humanity’s self-preservation.

-5- Everyone an Artist: the Communal Art of Black Rock City

For me, this interpretation of modernity and the crisis in cognition summons up a great deal of the social critique that Burning Man poses. It also explains the high regards counter themes such as ‘realness’, ‘experience’ and ‘immediacy’ receive on the festival. It is striking that it was Benito Mussolini himself who stated “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power” (in: Goffman 2005:365104). Seen like this, fascism as feared by Walter Benjamin in the context of an aestheticization of politics, and thus feeding an ongoing anaesthetization of society, can be directly extended to what Larry Harvey fears and opposes: corporatism. As mentioned before, corporatism in relation to art can be said to have started in the sixties and seventies, and from then on played an important role in determining an artist’s perceived value, by both critical and commercial measures. It hereby offered artists exposure and revenue, but often killed true creativity or deviance in art. As art curator Baker describes it: “Corporate mingling in the arts hammered shut the coffin of the avantgarde” (Baker 2006:11). As a result, Harvey reminds us, contemporary art often seems more of a ‘high society’ aesthetic than social glue or primal connection (Rhey 1999). Not so in Black Rock City though. For there, we find art “that is designed to be touched, handled, played with, and moved through in a public arena” (Rhey 1999). It is art that is made corporeal, that anyone can make and interact with, that is part of daily life. On Burning Man, shared aesthetics once again refer to a cognitive mode that is very much open and in touch with reality; intended to shake the individual to life by offering an escape route out of the marketplace of art, where both art and the individual are said to have become cultural domesticated and where reality is constantly blocked out; mediation offering a mere simulation of reality and culture. It is a critique on society paired with a solution in the form of art that seems to clearly unite Benjamin’s ideas with those of Harvey.

Obviously, in a way one could argue that Burning Man mirrors the Urexample of modern shock as being stimuli or excessive energies from outside, but I believe that on the playa this does not mean that the senses are numbed or that sense-perception would entail an isolation of the internal from the external world. On the contrary, precisely because the synaesthetic system is open and free from normal restraints, its triptych of physical sensation, motor reaction and psychical meaning is twisted so as to create a direct sense of aliveness. It is an experience that is highly individualized, but because it takes place in a shared sensorium so radically different than normal, it becomes a communal experience.105 If we are to believe both Harvey and Benjamin, such experience is needed, if not ultimately for humanity’s self-preservation, then at least for its direct sense of awakening and thriving. But art and aesthetics go further than the artistic objects as such, for emphasis is once again put on the sensual process that causes one to admire collective things; making aesthetics refer to those groups of social situations in which collective emotions are lived out; social life in its entirety. As Chris Carlsson phrased it in an article:

I have searched extensively to find the original source of this quote, which is generally attributed to an article written by Mussolini in the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana. However in the English translation (The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore 1935) I could not I find this specific statement. A Google search, which brought over 5.000 hits, did link me to an article which doubted the validity of the quote in the first place. It rather explained it to be a summarization of things Mussolini had said in general.

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Art is alienated from everyday life by being commodified and separated, but Burning Man places art at the center of human activity. BM slips an exciting notion into the back of its participants’ minds: our greatest collective art project is living together. Every activity can be engaged artistically. One can find in anything a sense of aesthetic pleasure, communicative depth, and resonance with something true and passionate.106 On the playa, as aesthetics are linked back to life, reality, and vitality, they once again function as ethics, for, as Maffesoli states “experiencing in common gives rise to values and is conducive to creation” (1990:91). Burning Man very much has its own unique interplay between art, aesthetics and ethics, and it is a model that is made to be imported back into society. For Burning Man’s art is indeed art with a utopian agenda; art that is politicized.

To read more about how sensual relations, and thus a shared sensorium, would mean social relations, I recommend Howes’ publication Sensual Relations. Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (2004). 106 Burning Man. A Working-Class, Do-It-Yourself World’s Fair. Processed World 2.005. Winter 2005. by Chris Carlsson. On: http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue2005/ burningman.html, accessed March 6th 2007.

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Art in Reverse

Burning Man being Burning Man, art on the playa might have a serious alleged cause and hopeful effects, but its specific form and shape are often far from serious. Instead, what really struck me on my endless tours through Black Rock City was the obvious ironic, appropriated and juxtaposed nature of its art. As Turner already stated, “in liminality people ‘play’ with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them” (Turner 1982a:27). On Burning Man, this is definitely accurate, and, I think, a process with ideological intentions. It is not new to think of contemporary life as being pseudo-lived in a ‘society of the [fake/commoditized/empty] spectacle’. We have already discussed Guy Debord and the Situationists and how they feel about the lack of ‘real-ity’ in everyday life; how it seemed that things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy, and how, as a commodity, “the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience” (Law 2001:8). We heard Hakim Bey arguing for his Immediatist project because to him, “that which is seen through the mediation of the media becomes somehow unreal and loses its power” (Bey 1994:15). And just now, we analyzed how Benjamin saw the omnipresence of the reproducible image to mean a deadening of the senses; a way of blocking out reality instead of receiving it. When we talked about the Punk movement in the beginning of this thesis, Larry Harvey explained that the punk generation “was a generation that had seen everything it ever loved taken away from it,” because as soon as they would create things that embodied their identity in the world, they would see market scouts who would turn their style into marketable images through appropriation, and subsequently “denature it of any meaning that it ever had for anyone” (Harvey 2000). So now, and I might even dear say in response to this, on Burning Man a diversity of such marketed images, symbols if you will, are taken from popular culture and made familiar again through their defamiliarization. They are mocked, satirized, lampooned, taken out of their context, given new twists and juxtaposed with other forms so as to signify new, personal meaning. In the worlds of playa artist ‘Crash’: “[we] appropriate the appropriators.”107 Whereas popular culture would not be ‘real’ in the Baudrillian sense of the word; would cause shock and numbness of the senses as Benjamin sees it; would parasitize what was once directly lived culture and transform grassroot art into commodities as Debord saw to happen – on the playa this process is reversed. For there, a new kind of aesthetic pleasure is offered and shared, and this shared sense of ironic and absurd aesthetics is made to sustain community. Although it is far beyond the scope of this thesis to explain why Burning Man would take place in America and not somewhere else, this view of art as a reaction against mass culture and its ‘fake’ imagery might be significant nonetheless. For America is a nation with an omnipresence of marketed symbols. From that fact, it is not hard to imagine how turning this daily phantasmagoric display upside down, ‘topsy-turvy’ as Turner would say, would be a process with a certain degree of escapism and empowerment. An appropriate remark coming from the man partly responsible for the ‘Barbie Death Camp & Wine Bistro: The Friendliest Concentration Camp On The Playa’ […] where not only the Barbie is put into barbeque, but award-winning cabernet sauvignon is served up to any citizen of Black Rock City.” For the past seven years the camp has offered hilarious sightings of grown-ups (‘Barbiebarians’) cathartically massacring Barbie dolls… However, it is a remark that can be extended to include many artists, camps and intentions on the playa. 107

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It seems to be typical of festivals that many symbols and performances possess what Barbara Babcock has called “an excess of floating signifiers” (Babcock 1978a:292). On Burning Man, the apparent eccentricity of its art ‘to the point of indeterminate nonsense’ suspends customary meanings. Babcock follows Jacques Derrida in arguing that “a surplus of signifiers [vehicles] creates a self-transgressive discourse which mocks and subverts the monological arrogance of ‘official’ systems of signification (Ibid.296). On the same page, she continues that …the bantering anti-signified of carnivalesque discourse is an insult both to the complimentary of ordinary speech and to the multisignified of serious ritual communication. It is also a statement in praise and a demonstration of the creative potential of human signification as opposed to its instrumental and representational use. On Burning Man images that are taken out of their original context do not only look ragingly surreal in the empty, barren landscape, they subsequently loose part of their meanings and signification. Instead, they are mastered and made transparent as it were, breaking the cake of custom and liberating reflexive speculation. As Turner states, “when elements are withdrawn from their usual settings and recombined in totally unique, ironic configurations, those exposed to them are startled into thinking anew themselves and society” (1982b:205). Previous habits of thoughts, feeling, and action are disrupted.

-5- Everyone an Artist: the Communal Art of Black Rock City

What is first said to have caused disenchantment and dissatisfaction with culture as solely being ‘on display,’ is now used to cause a new found wonder, enchantment and feeling together in the world. I think that it is the nature of its communal, topsy-turvey art that makes Burning Man stand out, and makes it a true liminal realm. In the musings of Turner himself: “To my mind it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free or ‘ludic’ recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is of the essence of liminality, liminality par excellence” (Turner 1982:28 original emphasis). And: […] artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, ‘edgemen,’ who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination. In their productions we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized and fixed in structure. (Turner 1969:128)

I have said this before, and I will probably say it again: the people visiting Burning Man are an extremely heterogeneous group of people; not united under any symbolic flag, creed or liking. A relatively big part of them though certainly not all - will have outspoken ideas about art, life, individual rights, acceptable speaker volume, good taste, sexual inclination, beer preference and in general anything anyone might have an opinion about. This can give reason for strife - and often does. In the light of Burning Man’s evolvement as shown so far in this thesis, one of the most interesting battles to date is the mock created by a group of artists that eventually united before the 2005 event under the name of Borg 2, and the fame of the ‘We Have a Dream Competition.’

In Black Rock City, people once again play with elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them. The art that is thus created is often rid of the ‘ought’ and instead shows that which ‘could.’ Hereby, it manifests possible new ways of being and signification that are made to last.

We Have a Dream: just sign here

When I was there I did not exactly have a lot to compare it with, but apparently my first year of attending Burning Man was the year when the level of art, at least as far as grand and impressive goes, was at an all time low. As the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online phrased things after the 2004 event: The problems came to a head this year because so many people said the art sucked. There wasn’t enough of it, and only a few pieces really wowed people. At the very least, between artist no-shows and static art-funding levels, it’s certainly true that the art isn’t keeping pace with the population growth.109

Community versus Art In case you haven’t noticed, a picturesque brouhaha, very typical of San Francisco, has recently erupted here in our hometown. It is a wooly tale, complete with manifestos, petitions, speeches, rending jeremiads, as well as some coverage in the local press. A lot of heat, so far, and naturally, a colorful cast of characters. It’s the art-versus-community question that is at its core.108

Rebellious artists from Burning Man’s first hour Chicken John and Jim Mason perceived the, in their eyes, long-time declining importance of art on the playa and, instead of just ‘whining and moaning about it,’ they decided to act upon it. Together with John Law, the fellow friends had already been behind the Smiley incident in 1996, which I mentioned before was especially symbolic of the split between those serious about creating a new kind of community open to all, such as Harvey, and those who were wary of such high-minded State of the art. As Burning Man approaches its 20th year, Bay Area artists are staging a revolt that goes to the soul of the mega-event. By Steven T. Jones. On: http://www.sfbg.com/39/10/news_burningman.html, accessed 9-7-2005. 109

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On: www.tribe.net (unfortunately, tribe does not come wit URL’s)

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goals and just want to make art, the kind of mind-blowing, fire-spewing art you can only display in the Black Rock Desert, such as Law, Chicken and Mason. Back then, in all the other turmoil, Smiley pretty much went unnoticed, but such would not be the case when Chicken and Mason paired up to rekindle their mutinous flame after the 2004 event. In November that year, Mason and Chicken wrote an online petition outlining what they believed would be positive changes for the organizers of the event. They called it the ‘We Have a Dream’, and – in much abbreviated form – it went a little like this: We are the artists. We feel that this event which we made great has gotten away from us and we would like it back. We want the art to be spectacular again and we are willing to step forward to do the work to make it so. […]

informed decision, which is now the task of Burning Man’s art curators, Harvey expresses fear as to how a radically democratic voting system would promote popularity contests and factionalism that would hurt the Burning Man experiment: “I would much rather deal with consensus than the results of the ballot box.”113 Rather than boycotting the event, the upstarts decide to start an ‘art duel’ with Burning Man’s organizers - a competition over who can bring more and better art to Black Rock City. Ideas from the We Have a Dream petition are used to conduct an experiment that is called Borg 2 – a play on ‘Borg,’ a slang term for the Burning Man Organization.114 The fat lady is not quite done singing yet.

The fix must address many issues, but the CORE ISSUE for the fix is THE ART. Art, Art, Art: that is what this is all about. Fix the art and make the process for doing it fair and fun again, and the rest will likely fall into place. Our solution towards this end is simple: radically democratize the curation and funding of the art. So Borg, how about a deal? We, the mass of Burning Man creative agents, agree to reapply ourselves with focus to the creation of mindblowing, I-can't-believe-someone-actually-made-that, KNOCK YOU ON YOUR ASS ART, and you agree to LET US DO IT. Simple. You GET OUT OF THE WAY. No more benevolent ART-ocracy of black box funding, crushing bureaucracy and resistance to creativity in the name of ‘theme compliance’ or ‘mandatory interactivity’. Release the power back to the participants.110 The demands were spread in a letter, an online petition, and a full-page ad in the Bay Guardian, and those who agreed with the sentiments could register their support online. Eventually, the petition got signed by about a thousand Bay Area artists, including some of the most storied figures in the history of Burning Man. Their threat to basically leave Burning Man unless there was reform and rejuvenation in the process of selecting and funding its art was then delivered at the Burning Man office. The organization rejected the idea. In hindsight, Harvey told me he was at first bemused by the petition, then perplexed. “It was not only bad policy but unworkable,” he explained. So he wrote a response that began: I've read the We Have a Dream petition with interest. I think it will spur discussion and provoke some new ideas. I think real good can come of this. In writing this response, however, I feel called on to examine the very specific proposals that the petition advocates.111

Borg 2: more Woo Woo for Larry’s Hoo Ha

In order to bring about the ‘art renaissance’ at Burning Man 2005 that Borg 2 had in mind, Chicken asked for ‘some good real estate’ at the event, access to the list of event attendees to ask them for donations towards a goal of raising 250.000 dollar, and the autonomy to implement Borg 2’s vision without unnecessary interference from the ‘official’ Borg. In order to intensify the art duel, he then fired off an e-mail by the title “more woo woo for Larry’s hoo ha,” and laid down a bet. The best explanation of the actual bet as it stood is contained in the following excerpt from Larry’s letter of acceptance below: To enter more fully into the sporting spirit of this contest, please let me rehearse the terms of the wager. You pledge to create a ‘massively collaborative’ art installation achieved through ‘radically democratic means’ in an allotted district of Black Rock City, and you will accomplish this feat entirely with your own funding. The art that you produce will then be matched against our own poor efforts at supporting and creating art. Should your woo woo trump our hoo ha on the playa, I pledge to reconsider my opposition to your radically democratic curatorial methods. Should our hoo ha make your woo woo look ho hum, you commit to sit all day in a dunking booth at next year’s Decompression. Let Chaos Provide!

Then, he went on to tear apart the idea of funneling ten percent of ticket sales to fund the new approach, and the accusation that the decline in the quality and quantity of art this year would signal an institutional shortcoming rather than just an off year. Especially, he radically eradicated the petition’s concept and logistics of democratizing the art selection process: “I see no evidence that the authors of this manifesto have imagined any of these problems. This is because they’re accustomed to receiving grants from Burning Man, not giving them.”112 Among Burning Man’s Board of Directors and its staff, the consensus process is much preferred, at least, to cruder, more corruptible instrument of democracy that would also involve the larger group. Instead of expecting people to read through hundreds of lengthy art proposals and then make an

In: Larry Harvey is god – or maybe not. San Francisco Bay Guardian. By Steven T. Jones. March 17, 2005. 114 The official Borg numbers six equal partners who own the Burning Man logo and various other key concepts. If any of the six chooses to walk away, their payout will be 20.000 dollar. 113

Petition at: tinyurl.com/6151h, accessed 9-7-2005. 111 At: http://www.burningman.com/art_of_burningman/petition_response.html, 9-7-2005 112 Especially Mason received some of Burning Man’s biggest grants in the past. 110

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Some heavy stakes indeed. And this coming from Borg 2: an experiment that appeared to be filled with an abundance of conflicts and paradoxes: anarchist artists engaged in representative democracy; questions on how to participate in an event whose framework was being rejected; art which needed to simultaneously be selected by elected guest curators and a popular vote; serious organizational and fundraising issues facing people who were only serious about art. I guess it was doomed to fall short on its own highly aimed ‘woo woo.’ I was at San Francisco’s Decompression party in September 2005, and fetched a beer for Chicken whilst he was keeping to his end of the bargain by sitting, indeed, in a dunk tank. In the end, although Borg 2 did get to elect an art council and held fund-raisers to pay for art projects, they never met their estimated funding goal of 250.000 dollar, instead getting stuck at 25.000 dollar. And while they effectively started a democracy, the elected council was quick to realize how tough it is to get people organized and to make decisions. “We had three meetings before we could decide some of the simple fundamental stuff,” said Zachary Coffin, an artist and council member. “There was a perception in the community that we were being tight- lipped and elitist, but it was just murderously slow working with a group.”115 In the end, Borg 2 ended up replicating a lot of the same decision-making processes that Burning Man does, pretty much as Harvey predicted. Even though this outcome might not exactly be surprising enough to justify the many words I devoted to the entire conflict, I entered it into length because I think that the more hidden attitude behind it is very interesting to unravel. It is an attitude that seems to reflect back on Burning Man’s entire evolvement and pretty much everything that has been said in this thesis so far. It is based on a fear of losing the event because it would be ‘taken over’ by people who would make it ‘inauthentic’, commercial and lost from those who started forever.

The Core Conflict

As I have discussed in this thesis, Burning Man and the Bay Area’s underground art community essentially grew up together during the eighties and nineties, feeding off one another. According to Harvey, and after having lived in the place for six months, I must agree with him: “San Francisco is unique in that it has all these little ‘subtribes’ that you can often trace back to projects or camps of people at Burning Man” (Harvey in Jones: 2005). And these subtribes keep coming back to the playa because, as Chicken adds in the same article, “That is the vehicle we’ve found that has the highest-percentage chance of blowing people’s minds.” It is a symbiotic relationship that, understandably, led many artists to feel that their contributions created the event and that their departures could kill it, hence the petition’s first line “We are the artists. We feel that this event which we made great has gotten away from us and we would like it back.” But in the end, the petition only showed that it might be a bit too late for that now. The contributions – artistic, cultural, metaphysical, or just social and entertaining – have simply become too diverse. 115 In: Burning Man at 20. Artistic sparks: Creative ‘revolt’ falls short, but group gets own spot at festival. By Leslie Fulbright, SFGate Monday, July 18, 2005.

And I think that it is this precisely this evolvement that has been nagging Chicken, Mason and their followers, and that has ultimately motivated the Borg 2 rebellion: a longing for an idealized Burning Man past. It is a past in which the event was still much less structured and more chaotic; where there were explosions and gunfire and utter madness in the air, and where the whole experience made you a little scared, and maybe even left you scarred, figuratively or literally. It is the emphasizing of art over the competing foci of the party or community. It is the specters of pre1996 Burning Man, and all its artistic transgressive anarchy, at odds with the contemporary spirit of civic harmony, cooperation, and safety. In the end, I think a great deal of it is fear as well: the countercultural fear of getting rolled up in the inertia of the collective.

Those Burning Man participants no longer form a community made up entirely by countercultural rebels and underground artists such as Mason and Chicken themselves. As Harvey phrases it, “They thought they were the core community, but really, it’s been a long time since there was a core community.”116 Mason admitted that since the conflict began, his eyes have been opened up to a world of Burners who see the event as more than an art festival. Some see it as simply a great party, others as a quasi-spiritual endeavor, and others as an amalgam that is uniquely Burning Man. Above all, it seems that many people actually like the ‘c-word’, and do not feel like there is an art-versus-community conflict that has to be resolved. In Harvey’s words: “Jim and Chicken stumbled on this whole continent of activity that I don’t think they knew was out there. Suddenly they encountered people who thought it was about community. And the art? That’s OK too” (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005).

116

On: http://www.sfbg.com/39/10/news_burningman.html, accessed June 1st 2005.

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In the end, Borg 2 has not been a complete failure. The petition and art duel has fueled discussion, both among the organization and the participants, and got many artists enthusiastic again. Practically, in 2005, the art grant program’s resource pool nearly doubled: 425.000 dollar instead of 2004’s 250.000 dollar. The grant review team was expanded to include an expert in the field of modern art, and grant proposals were opened to art installations outside the annual art theme. And for the first time ever, the call for proposals received emphasis on the Burning Man website and in the Jack Rabbit Speaks newsletter. This resulted in the largest amount of grant proposals ever (160), leading to awards of a record 52 honoraria to artists. Harvey and LadyBee, Burning Man’s art curator, do not see these changes as forced upon by Borg 2, and note that they were already in the works before the revolt began in November. However, whatever the actual reason, they both agree that “it has been universally agreed that the 2005 event featured the most, the best, and the most groundbreaking art ever seen at Burning Man.”117 And Borg 2? Well, they got their spot on the playa, and, although nowhere near as impressive as the “volume and quality of creative work that Harvey [would] envy and wish he was responsible for himself” promised by Chicken, it was a nice place to visit. In the end, though, it appears that chaos provided more valuable discussion and insights into Burning Man’s evolvement than fine art. Today, on Burning Man, it is still officially recognized that the art is there because the community creates it, and vice versa. In the words of Harvey aka Van Rhey: The art of Burning Man, produced by amateur and professional alike, is created within and for a community, and, within this community, it is intended to be given away. This is work that's generated by a way of life. It is an art, above all other things, that is devoted to social connection. (Van Rhey 1999) How and why the ‘giving away’ of art, among other things, would additionally be a powerful promoter of community, is something I want to look at next.

117 In the 2005 Afterburn report. At: http://afterburn.burningman.com/05/art/index.html, accessed June 1st 2005.

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-6- Every Bit a Gift: Burning Man and its Gift-Economy

-6Every Bit a Gift: Burning Man and its GiftEconomy Do you still have enough energy for today’s tour? I know the last days have been chockfull with sights and impressions, and you might be starting to feel a bit weary and overwhelmed by it all. I apologize, but this is Burning Man; there is simply no other way to do it. For the same reason I fear that today again will not be the most relaxing day, as it will be filled with a concept and consequently labor that makes great demands on your ability to re-adjust your mindset. Because today, we will focus on giving something back to the city we have toured for the past two days. Today, we will contribute, volunteer and gift. Now, within your normal frame of reference, you might envision the act of ‘giving back’ or even ‘gifting’ in the smallest possible way, like maybe we will polish Harvey’s shoes for five minutes, hand out a few trinkets and be done with it. Such, however, is not how it is done at Burning Man. Here, the act of contributing is stretched to include nearly all aspects of life and activity normal of any city - and then arguable some more. And in Black Rock City, it is all done for free. You see, nothing is for sale in this city, yet everything is there for you to eat, drink, attend, experience; ask. It is an alienating concept to most people who have not been there, and in order to come to terms with it, images of a constant bartering usually spring to mind. Yet, again, this is not how it is done at Burning Man, where gifting really means giving. Let me illustrate what a gift economy might, quite literally, ‘re-present’ in Black Rock City. The case in point starts with me sitting at the Quixote’s Cabaret Club & Bar, a rather modest camp not far removed from my own. Seeing that Quixote is put there by Europeans – English mostly –I am drinking gin tonic with a slice of lemon and eating scones with freshly whipped cream. Oh, and smoked salmon on toast, with some sort of herb I personally cannot really identify – fresh dill perhaps. On the house. Someone wonders aloud if there’s any cheese - why not? Why shouldn’t there be cheese? Of course, one of the guys serving the gin dissembles a moment and disappears to see if he can’t scare up some brie. In the meantime a show commences, costumed people doing theatre, while a naked woman, painted in the colors of the English flag, pedals past, simultaneously balancing on a unicycle and playing a tuba. Quixote’s is a nice place to hang out with total strangers, but it is not the most popular attraction by far, even not as far as the bars and lounges go. The most popular, for years, has probably been Pinky’s; a full-scale nightclub all done up in pink leather and boa feathers, which you can only enter if you are either painted pink or wearing pink. At night it is basically a strip club, with pole dancers, body shots, and lots of pink clothes coming off. Even though I enjoyed spending time here, I would rather take you to a more obscure place, not listed and way out near the trash fence. If we were to go there now, in the day, the place will just be a giant pair of fuzzy dice, looking, at most, like yet another of Burning Man’s surreal art projects. But at night, hidden doors open to reveal the fully equipped, smoky and swanky jazz club inside; complete with piano and carefully orchestrated mafia skits. Just hold up the cup you brought, and ask the bartender for ‘the usual.’ I am sure he will be delighted

to serve such regular customers his premium, single malt whiskey - on the rocks, remember. Obviously, where there are drinks, there is food. We are supposed to be selfreliant, and I do think I have some dust-covered pouches of Tasty Bites still buried in the van, but why not get something better? Like the splendid strawberries ’n cream they serve at FoodLab, or the French fries at the 50’s style Grill and Chill Black Rock Diner. Maybe we can stop by Tuna Camp and have some of their fish, which they grill, sauté, cook, or make the best sushi with. I think I mentioned their camp before but it never ceases to impress me, out there in this hash, extremely hostile desert environment; with no cooling, water, or electricity provided. The people behind Camp Tuna are all professional fishermen, one of which told me they import and store over four thousand pounds of tuna and salmon every year to feed to anyone who drops by on the playa. Even if you would not particularly want to go to any camp, chances are food and/or drinks will cross your path naturally. Or, such as with that Belgium guy who stopped by yesterday morning with his solar-powered waffle maker and fruit shaker to make us breakfast - it will actively come to you. However, the often-uttered sentence ‘the playa will provide’ entails more than just consumables. For instance, and this is only a minor thing but it represents a lot to me, when I arrived at Burning Man I found out that I had apparently forgotten my gas cap at a petrol station somewhere along the way. I was bummed because I knew that in the States, finding a replacement cap for a 33-year old German car would not be too easy. Then, on the second day, a man got off his bicycle, screwed a sparkling new and fitting gas cap on the van, made a ‘thumps up’ gesture at me, and drove on again. I never saw him again, and probably would not even recognize him, but I think it was through him and his random act of kindness that the extent of Burning Man’s gift economy really sank in. Because the gift economy is even more all-enhancing than all the consumables or even material objects you might gift or get. Gift-giving at Burning Man also brings forth a 24/7 abundance of things to do or see or experience, and all those people making that happen do it for free as well. There are workshops, lectures, live bands, classes, book readings, rave parties, healing rituals, pottering, spiritual explorations, circus acts, parades, costumed balls, beauty queen pageants, salon discussions, story telling, massage sessions and anything else someone might come up with. Upon entering Black Rock City, you have probably received your forty-page booklet listing all the week’s special events. I do not know if you already had a look at it, but I do know that just browsing through the little book already brought me an entertaining and often hilarious couple of hours - let alone actually experiencing the things listed. We could go to 12-step meetings at Anonymous Camp. Attend workshops from turban wrapping to foot care; fire dancing and pole dancing; yoga and tantric sex; African drumming and Israeli chanting; massages and hypnosis, ‘used eyeglass recycling’ and tooth flossing, joke telling and eye gazing. We could visit ‘Pandora’s Matchbox Cocktail Lounge & Space Station’s Ass-Less Chaps Social Hour & Fashion Show,’ as well as the ‘Pink Tantric Puja,’ the ‘Naked Psychedelic Ritual Dance,’ and ‘Brainwave Scans’ at Automatic Unconscious. The ‘Republic of China Town’ is here, straight from Taipei, offering, among other things, ‘betelnut beauties and philanthropic gangsterism.’ There is the ‘French Maid Brigade Parade,’ hosted by Le Consulat General de France, and the ‘Black Rock City Int’l Kite Festival’ hosted by the Department of Tethered Aviation. We could even participate in a ‘Carpet-Munching Workshop’ (‘single carpets will be accommodated’), or have our daily dose of Chrakra Breath Meditation & Kundalini Yoga at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers Camp. 80

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Except for the coffee, tea and ice on sale in Center Camp Cafe, everything that makes Black Rock City the city it is, is there as a gift to the community and thus enhances community. All the entertainment, all the services, all the drinks and all the food; as soon as you enter through Black Rock City’s gates, everything is on the house. The selling of things is about the only thing expressly not allowed within the perimeters of the city, and it is taken very seriously. If you need or want something, you can generally ask for it, and often enough find what you need. This is not just some hippie group-grope fantasy. It happens. The whole city works this way, for a week anyway, and I still find it one of the most amazing aspects of Burning Man.

So far, we have discussed several elements of the Burning Man ethos; how and why they evolved and to what effect. We have talked about the rule of participation and non-spectatorship; the need for self-reliance and the emphasis on self-expression. We have seen how Burning Man went from an anarchic TAZ to the all-inclusive, heterogeneous city it is today. We have discussed the growing need for civic planning, and how art and aesthetics united all. However, there is one essential part yet to be revealed, and it is exactly this part that I see to act as the strongest catalyst for the conjoinment of individual and group at Burning Man. It deals with the giving of gifts, and its profound effect as community builder. While much of the world is seeking to build an American-style market economy, Black Rock City provides a temporary refuge for those who have already become weary of its many psychic and social intrusion. This chapter will outline the incentive, appearance and effects of Burning Man’s gift economy, and see how it might fit within theoretical analyses done on gift exchange, mostly by looking at Mauss’ classic work Essai sur le Don, and Lewis Hyde’s more contemporary work The Gift. It will focus on the so called market place of culture which Burning Man seeks to escape, as well as raising questions on the viability of such project. Before getting into all of that though, I first want to start by exposing the foundations of Burning Man’s gift economy, and see how community is build upon.

Why a Gift Economy? So we founded a city, and one of the rules that we observe in Black Rock City is absolutely stunning. You can’t buy or sell anything. Now that’s simple, but let the consequences sink in for a moment. Have you ever been in a city of thousands of people where you couldn’t buy or sell anything? I mean it seems so strange that it’s hard for most people to imagine because our world is so permeated with commodity transactions. (Harvey 2000) Black Rock City is intentionally designed to foster a so-called ‘gift economy;’ an intentional culture of contribution, where no vending, no advertising, no buying or selling of anything is allowed. The display of commercial logos or banners, or distribution of commercial promotional items, is prohibited. Sales of handmade items and food items ‘in order to cover costs of the trip’ are not allowed, and bartering is discouraged because even that would be a 81

commodity transaction. Instead, Burning Man has an ethos and economic system that is devoted to the giving of gift – both material and non-material. If we are to follow Harvey, it is an intentional and radical departure from the marketplace of culture that is Western, and specifically American, culture. In this marketplace, a consumerist revolution has taken place that leaves consumption, as suggested by Colin Campbell, “especially important if not actually central” to the lives of the majority of people, “the very purpose of existence” (Campbell 1987:11). In Consuming Life (2007), Zygmunt Bauman argues that our current consumerist society, in which everything is judged according to its market value and discarded if found wanting, applies, with terrible consequences, to our most intimate relationships as well. Why commit to a relationship if you can always bin it and try another one? Because of this principle, Bauman concludes that we are losing our ability to “establish firm, solid, reliable and satisfactionbringing relationships with other people” (Bauman 2007:7). Burning Man’s gift economy, however, is founded on principles that are diametrically different from those that dominate such consumer’s market. By replacing commerce with a gift society, Burning Man brings back the communal aspects of gift exchange.

Community through the Gift

Following the literature, the idea of a gift-giving community grew more or less organically out of the original settlement from which Black Rock City grew. Back then, this communal gathering was mainly composed of people who knew one another and who were simply sharing their recourses and art. Within so intimate a circle it would seem inappropriate for anyone to be selling goods for commercial gain. Throughout the years, as the city population increased, the organization retained that ethic as a prohibition, and made the conscious decision to suspend commerce. What was already more or less happening organically, now became implemented as a rule and an important part of Burning Man’s ethos. With the ongoing emphasis on community, the gift economy became the perfect tool to build strong bonds of loyalty within an otherwise heterogeneous assembly of strangers. Today, the entire city is constructed and maintained through an economic system of civic volunteerism; the giving of time, creativity, talent, skills, and resources. It seems to me that the creation of this ‘environment of abundance’ relies on two primary principles, both of which I have touched upon before, namely radical self-reliance and radical selfexpression. The first downplays the need to ‘get’ something; the second offers a meaningful opportunity to give. And whereas the gift economy

-6- Every Bit a Gift: Burning Man and its Gift-Economy

relies on these principles, they in turn are affected by it. Because being selfreliant in a sometimes harsh and always unpredictable desert environment, where nothing is for sale, entails a demand on inner resources and existential communion that goes way beyond the normal convenience of American consumer culture.

Implicitly, gift-giving thus acts as the proverbial bridge between art, theme camps, participation, and civic life in its entirety. Combining selfreliance and self-expression, it is all about the individual, but individuality then becomes a gift to the community. In his 2002 speech Vive Las Xmas, Harvey extensively states the differences between such individualism and that within consumer culture. In the case of the latter, individuality would always be stipulated by the purchase of some product or the other: I mean all these ads say be all that you can be, buy this car and you’ll be free, but they’re just substitutes. You are not going to be unless you can project a spiritual reality out onto the world. But most people just don’t have the confidence anymore because they’re too isolated; they’re too passive. (Harvey 2002, emphasis in original) Later, when I have my interview with Harvey, in my most anthropological voice and with Marcel Mauss in the back of my head, I ask him if he considers Burning Man to hark back on some ‘primitive,’ pre-capitalistic mode with its gift economy, and how its emphasis on individualism might seem rather incongruent with such previous age of human culture. Of course you can never silence Harvey for more than a few minutes, and for this remark he also seemed to have his reply ready. In essence, he brought it back to a succession of feeling states that were different then and now. What he said intrigued me to the extent that I will allow myself a little detour into its details, supplemented with some of my own speculations.

Re-presenting the present

Likewise, whereas the desert provides the individual with the space to express her or himself, not directly by consumer’s goods and brands but by inner self, the individual’s journey of personal creative discovery in that space becomes his or her gift back to the city - and to the community that is formed. Self-expression in Burning Man’s gift-economy thus becomes both an ethic and an aesthetic. In that sense, everyone is expected to participate in creating the city by contributing some unique part of themselves to the shared experience. This might take the form of public service, as with the Black Rock Rangers, Greeters, Lamplighters or many other forms of volunteerism. It might mean hosting a theme camp, installing an artwork, convening a game or performance, or distributing tokens and gifts to neighbors. At a minimum, it means decorating the personal campsite or creating and wearing a costume.

Harvey’s answer to my question seems to combine both spiritual and pragmatic elements. He explained to me how the way he saw it, in ancient times, the ‘state of being’ used to start with gods and myths of supernatural origin, then progressed in long-sustained traditions among people who struggled to survive in a challenging world, to eventually end somewhat tenuously with the experience of the individual. In short, he called this the ‘It is,’ ‘We are,’ ‘I am’ continuum, and explained how its order would be reversed at Burning Man. 118 This order can be reversed because according to Harvey, Burning Man is all about showing people that they can define the world by the vision they carry inside of them - by their own context instead of by the context that surrounds them. They can then share that vision with other people and attach some I found out later that Harvey had also talked about this continuum in a speech he delivered at the Cooper Union in New York City on April 25th 2002: http://www. burningman.com/whatisburningman/lectures/viva.html. Accessed May 9th 2007. 118

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transcendental principle to it. As Harvey already summarized things in the above quote: “you are not going to be unless you can project a spiritual reality out onto the world.” The order of being thus starts with ‘I am:’ the feeling that one’s inmost vital self is real and that it is possible to project a vision of this sense of being onto the surrounding world. Then it proceeds, as in a theme camp, to a feeling that one is united with others; linked in a bonded circle in which parallel experiences can be shared through an act of giving: ‘We are.’ Finally, there is the feeling that some-where outside the circle there exists some greater gift everyone is joined together by as they give to it: the ‘It is.’ In Harvey’s concluding words: And I have come to believe that whenever these feeling states can be strung together like pearls on a string, as if they were part of one spontaneous gesture, you will then generate an ethos, a culture, that would be impossible to create through the commodity. (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005)

I have thought about the continuum of ‘I am,’ ‘We are,’ and ‘It is’ a lot - like I have thought about most things Harvey said long and hard - and I think I figured something out that he himself did not mention. Because the continuum as he sees in Burning Man would not necessarily be that much different when projected upon American consumer society. There, it also starts with ‘I am,’ whether this is a pseudo or real, conditioned or authentic individualism. And as an individual, consumption patterns can link you to a wider group; that what Muniz (2001) calls a brand community, and Cova (1997), building on Maffesoli but extending more into consumption realms, a neo-tribe. However, in American society, it seems that things get corrupted with the final stage of ‘It is.’ Because, as widely read books such as Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2002) and Kalle Lasne’s Culture Jam (2000) painstakingly demonstrate: there is no ‘It is.’ At the end of the corporate and consumptive tunnel, its walls plastered with ubiquitous and intrusive ads, it turns out that the proverbial light at the end has been blinding the eye all along. There is no transcendence, no enchantment, and no gratification. Instead, we find, in Harvey’s words, the ‘sin of simony’: “an unhallowed trafficking in sacred things.”119 In the end, the result is not culture as Harvey sees happening on Burning Man, but a marketplace of culture: empty; mere spectacle; un-reality - the simulation of being through the commodity. Interesting enough, Maffesoli would probably turn all this around. Again, I am just thinking out loud here, but it seems that he puts the ‘We 119

www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/lectures/viva.html, accessed May 9th 2007.

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are,’ “the being together of everyday life,” first. This is exactly how he motivates his choice of the metaphor of the (neo-)tribe, because it would allow us to account for the process of dis-individuation that he sees at work: “Perhaps we ought to show […] that the individual is no longer as central as the great philosophers since the age of the Enlightenment have maintained” (Maffesoli 1996:9-10). Instead of the individual, his neo-tribes are based on ‘fellow-feeling:’ “Indeed, whereas the individualist logic is founded on a separate and self-contained identity, the person (persona) can only find fulfillment in his relations with others” (Ibid.10). Even more interesting in this light is Maffesoli’s interpretation of the ‘It is,’ which, by appropriating Durkheim’s social divine, he more or less seems to place within the feeling state of ‘We are.’ Maffesoli defines this as ‘religiosity:’ a genuine holy dimension to social relationships, but he gracefully allows the use of the word religion as well “if it is used to describe that which unites us as a community; […] a foundation of the ‘being together’” (Ibid.38). In this light, Maffesoli points out - and abides to the etymological tie between religion (religare) and reliance (from the verb relier: to connect, link or bind together). Even though Maffesoli acknowledges that the essential characteristic of religion remains its transcendence, within his neo-tribes he finds this to be an ‘immanent transcendence;’ “not situated in a great beyond, but in the group transcending individuals” (Ibid.40). Precisely because Maffesoli locates his version of the ‘It is’ within the ‘We are,’ it by nature empowers the individual – the ‘I am’ – through a growing autonomy with respect to the overarching powers. In Maffesoli’s words: “Thus, even if one feels alienated from the distant economic-political order, one can assert sovereignty over one’s near existence. This is the goal of the social divine” (Ibid.44, emphasis in original). So for Maffesoli, the image of contemporary society’s empty ‘It is’ as I have painted would be an outdated model. Seeing that his neo-tribes are already the ‘remainders of mass consumption society,’ its members again have evolved in the feeling state continuum: using lifestyle and taste not as mere ‘image,’ but as liberatory and transcendental features of their shared sense of ‘We are.’

The Gift versus the Commodity

We have seen how certain elements of Burning Man came into being so as to counter perceived ills in American society, and the gift economy is probably one of the strongest tools in this antidotal package. Specifically, the gift-economy is meant to counter America’s market economy, in which boundaries between people would be solidified through the almost entirely impersonal act of purchasing, with alienation and passivity as the outcome. For in America, like in most if not all parts of the West, going beyond your immediate circle of friends and family means entering a public world primarily governed by the freedom, but also rootlessness of commodity transactions. Within this world of modern convenience culture, it becomes both possible and wanted to satisfy all appetites and desires without reference to others. The result, as Harvey summarizes, is that “consumption has replaced communion in our modern age” (Harvey 2002).

-6- Every Bit a Gift: Burning Man and its Gift-Economy

Theoretically unwrapping the Gift Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. […] When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges. (Hyde 1983:xiv)

Let me illustrate. If I would want to buy, say, a newspaper, the great convenience of it is that there does not have to be a connection between me and the pimply adolescent selling it at the counter. Most of the time purchasing does not even take direct communication anymore: a cash register will simply display the conditions of the transaction on both sides, and money can be exchanged without as much as a glance. After paying, I simply walk out of the store and may never see the cashier again. In fact, chances are that if he would have insisted on chatting to me about my family or thesis progress, I would be so bothered by the unwanted intrusion that I would definitely never visit that store again. After all, I just wanted the newspaper, not a life story, nor any connection. However, interactions that are based on gifting tend to operate quite different, for a gift creates involvement with the life of the person gifting. If I were to give you a gift, this represents a very personal gesture. There is an element of bonding involved in the gesture, both on an emotional and a moral level. In the giving of gifts, goods are transformed from mass commodities to singular items. They move from the selfish, individualcentered realm to that of aesthetics and community. This is why gifts are very good conductors of solidarity and feelings of group belonging - a quality certainly not missed within the social sciences. Without getting into the whole theoretical discussion based on gift exchange, which is way beyond the scope of this thesis, I do want to trace some of its more interesting outlines, and see how Burning Man might fit within.

Like Hyde, nearly all anthropologists who have addressed themselves to questions of gift exchange in the last half century have taken Mauss’ classic work Essai sur le don, published in France in 1924 and later translated in English under the title The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, as their point of departure.120 Their theories unanimously recognize and celebrate the centrality and importance of gift-exchange to anthropology. As Karen Sykes phrases it: “Developments in the anthropological analysis of gift-exchange provide a pedagogical pathway through a history of the school’s research and orientation. We could say that the logic of gift exchange lies at the centre of the discipline” (Sykes 2005:11). She furthermore concludes: “The clear message from anthropology, regarding decades of study of the gift, can be put: Mauss’ insights help contemporary anthropologists to raise a warning against assuming that economic reason, especially utilitarian value, dominates human life” (Ibid.2). The beauty of the gift is exactly that it combines legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological, political and domestic dimensions, and shows that we cannot neatly separate such categories. Indeed, it is an insight gained in great part through Mauss, who viewed gift exchange as a ‘total social phenomena;’ governed by particular norms and obligations which would intersect almost every aspect of social and cultural life. Through understanding the social and cultural significance implicit in patterns of gift exchange and reciprocity, he argued, a unique understanding of a community could be gained. In turn, I think that by analyzing some of the patterns of Mauss’ argument, a unique understanding of gift exchange can be gained that can clarify certain aspects of Burning Man’s gift-economy, and I therefore briefly want to look at him next. The list is long, but would surely include Raymond Firth, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Peter Blau, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bordieu, Marc Osteen, Annette Weiner, Maurice Godelier, and ‘our own’ Aafke Komter. 120

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Mauss’ reciprocal Gift Exchange

In a nutshell, at the center of Mauss’ argument lies his observation that gifts can never be ‘free.’ 121 Rather, he sees human history to be full of examples that gifts give rise to obligatory reciprocal exchange. In his opinion, the principle of do ut des (‘I give so that you may give’) is not restricted to nonwestern culture, but also characterizes gift exchange in our own society. The famous question that drove Mauss’ inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” (Mauss 1990:3). His answer follows two steps. First and more pragmatic, he emphasized that the sanction for not reciprocating would be hostility; ‘private or open warfare.’122 Second, and most famous, he saw gifts to be labeled by the gift giver’s personality or spirit and imbued with ‘spiritual mechanisms’ engaging both giver and receiver. A gift exchanged or shared would transcend the divisions between the spiritual and the material in a way that, according to Mauss, would be almost ‘magical’. The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: “to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself” (Ibid.12). In essence, Mauss’ essay is one of the first syntheses of true ethnography, following the established tradition of seeking the roots of the modern in the archaic (Hyde 1983:91). Henceforth, what Mauss has really done is to write a prehistory of our modern kind of legal and economic contract: a narrative of decline and fall from a world where prestation dominates, to one where market and gift have become radically divorced. He concludes that the vestiges of the archaic principles remain in modern gift practices, but it is exactly such mirroring that has been most fiercely debated. For some social scientists find both the West and archaic societies lost in Mauss’ game of reflections, or what Carrier calls his ‘wonderland’ of anthropological models (Carrier 1997:201). They find that Mauss’ model of reciprocity, of going to (re) and fro (pro) between people, like a reciprocating machine, leaves too little room for the voluntary, altruistic and desired act of gift-giving in modern times. In our modern day market society, property entails both the commodity and the gift, and human interaction is very much influenced by their sharp division, as well as by that between transaction versus exchange, and thing versus person. In order to understand the gift in such new light, Alain Caillé urges us to remove it from the shadow that haunts all accounts of the gift: economism (in Godbout 1998:130). Additionally, Mark Osteen advises us to “redirect our gaze from reciprocity toward other principles and motives” (1986:7), and Lee Ann Fennel proposes: What we need is a new vocabulary for understanding gift giving as it is practiced in modern Western societies. Instead of attempting to conflate gift giving and market exchange, such a vocabulary would focus on the characteristics of gifts that set them apart from ordinary commodities. (Fennell 1986:85) A theorist who indeed offers us such new vocabulary on the gift in modern day society, and who is especially insightful when analyzing Burning Man’s gift economy, is Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983).

Deducting from this, we can say, as both Testart and Derrida point out, that if we would define the gift as something given without the need for reciprocation, Mauss never discussed the gift at all. To him, if such a thing as a gift would have been given freely and altruistically, it would not have been a gift, for it would not create a social bond. 122 A pupil of Durkheim, to Mauss it was equally most important to understand social order, not the conflicts that may disturb it. War, therefore, did not receive that much attention within his spectrum of social significance. 121

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-6- Every Bit a Gift: Burning Man and its Gift-Economy

Both Hyde and Mauss thus see the gift to create solidarity and build social ties. However, the incentive is quite different; Hyde seems to view gift-giving as a more altruistic and positive social phenomenon, which is why he values the emotion of desire above Mauss’ explicating rationale of fear and self-interest. In extension of this, I guess the perceptive reader has already distilled another important point, namely that whereas Mauss places the gift in a system of ‘exchange’, Hyde refers to ‘gift-giving’. Linguistically, the difference might be subtle, but epistemologically it changes everything. Hyde argues, fairly against Mauss, that, regarding gift exchange in a market economy, there is a very real difference between a ‘true’ gift given out of gratitude and a ‘false’ gift given only out of obligation. In Hyde’s view, the ‘true’ gift binds us in a way beyond any commodity transaction, whereas “we cannot really become bound to those who give us false gifts” (Hyde 1983:70). There is a condition here though; the ‘true’ gift has to move on; to be passed along - or it will constrain us still. Accumulation, then, provides another stark contrast between gift and commodity economies. Whereas in a market economy, one can hoard one’s goods without losing wealth, or even increase wealth through ‘saving’, in a gift economy wealth is decreased by hoarding. This is because gifts cannot be accumulated like profits; they must be plowed back into the cycle of gift giving. As Cosmo phrases it:

Hyde’s erotic Life of Property

Hyde calls himself “a poet, translator, and sort of ‘scholar without institution’” (Hyde 1979:32). Without doubting the accuracy of his description, The Gift is officially listed a ‘work of literary anthropology.’ And justified so, for even though Hyde fashions meaning from an atypical combination of sources, he very much elaborates on the gift’s theme of solidarity already extensively analyzed within anthropology. According to Hyde, it is precisely the gift’s quality of solidarity that makes it distinct from commerce. Because of the gift’s bonding ‘bottom up’ qualities, Hyde sees them best described as ‘anarchist property:’ “The connections, the ‘contracts,’ established by their circulation differ in kind from the ties that bind in groups organized through centralized power and top-down authority” (Hyde 1983:84). The same quality of establishing interconnected relationship between those involved in gift exchange leads Hyde to speak of it as an ‘erotic’ commerce, hereby opposing eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular). Needless to say, to Hyde the market economy is an emanation of logos.

Nothing I had ever experienced had brought home to me as forcibly as Burning Man that fundamental truth which is so easy to know, yet so hard to live by: giving is getting. […] No one ever became poor through giving. At Black Rock City, everyone becomes rich by giving. (Cosmo, interview July 19th 2005) Sahlins, in his Stone Age Economics (1972), already argued that it is the distinction between saving and hoarding that ironically makes the gift economy based on affluence because of the giving away of possessions, and the market economy on scarcity because of the hoarding in order to increase possessions. With the strict dichotomy of the gift versus the market economy, Sahlin, Hyde, and Harvey seem to share the same view, which associates commodities with freedom, rootlessness, alienation and scarcity, and gifts with connection, community and abundance. Arjun Appadurai is wary of such “exaggeration and reification of the contrast between gift and commodity,” and points out how “the tendency to see these two modalities of exchange as fundamentally opposed remains a marked feature of anthropological discourse”(Appadurai 1986:11). Osteen adds that “this Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy subtends a number of other dualities in social theory,” among which, for instance, he mentions the domestic vs. the public spheres; ‘society’ vs. ‘economy’; and the oikos vs. the agora (the home vs. the marketplace). I would like to add to this Tönnies famous distinction between Gesellschaft (market) and Gemeinschaft (community).123 The latter category has traditionally achieved far greater attention within anthropology, and, as Hyde argues, certainly poses the greater modality in which gift exchange might occur: The primary work on gift exchange has been done in anthropology not, it seems to me, because gifts are a primitive or aboriginal form of property – they aren’t – but because gift exchange tends to be an economy of small groups, of extended families, small villages, close knit communities, brotherhoods and, of course, of tribes. (Hyde 1983:xvi) As Tönnies defines it: “All intimate, private and exclusive living together is understood as life in Gemeinschaft (community). Gesellschaft (society) is public life - it is the world itself. (Tönnies 1955:37) 123

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Through his observation, Hyde directly states a limitation “that has been implicit for some time”, that is, “that gift exchange is an economy of small groups” (Ibid.89). To him, when we speak of communities developed and maintained through an emotional commerce like that of gifts, we are therefore speaking of something limited in size, which for Hyde roughly equals an “upper limit of about one thousand people” (Ibid.89).

‘part of the self’ he takes it beyond just material objects, and into the realm of inner gifts; immaterial talent and inspiration: I have hoped […] to speak of the inner gift that we accept as the object of our labor, and the outer gift that has become a vehicle of culture. I am not concerned with gifts given in spite or fear, nor those gifts we accept out of servility or obligation; my concern is the gift we long for, the gift that, when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul and irresistibly moves us. (Hyde 1983:xvii) It is the assumption of Hyde’s book that a work of art is a gift,124 not a commodity, and that it in turn appeals to a part of our being which revives the soul and can wake our own creative spirit. As Joseph Conrad so eloquently phrases the function of art: [it] appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring. […] It speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity. (Conrad 1979:preface, emphasis mine)

So how do we fit the by now over 35.000 people strong community that is Burning Man within this limitation? Conveniently, Hyde offers us a footnote in which he nuances the quoted size limit. He states that an exception to the rule would be possible in the form of those communities or groups that do not pretend to support the wider life of its members. Such communities can be connected through gift exchange and still be quite large. Although he never mentions it, Hyde’s later mitigation make it sound like gift exchange can be taken out of the Gemeinschaft sphere, and into what Herman Schmalenbach, in his 1992’s critique of Tönnies dual categories, added as a third general modal category, namely the Bund (‘communion’). Coincidentally, it are exactly these ‘Bunde’, or ‘elective affinity groups’, that Rob Shields, in his foreword to Maffesoli (1996), finds similar to neo-tribes – a connection which Maffesoli does not seem to make himself. Without getting into too much detail, both Schmalenbach’s Bund and Maffesoli’s neo-tribe seem to share the same certain voluntary and transversal structure; a life affirming sociality and inherent force that I find fascinating when thinking about Hyde’s concept of the gift as anarchist property. Because it seems that there are many connections between theories on the Bund or neo-tribe on one hand, and anarchist theory and traditions of gift exchange as an economy on the other: all seem to emphasize emotional expression, feeling and experience; to shun centralized power; to be best fitted to rather loose associations; and to call into question the institutions of power - what Maffesoli calls pouvoir - that traditionally state that passion will undo social life and that coercion will preserve it. Quite on the contrary, they seem to share the underlying assumption that through passion, emotion, sharing and giving community will appear – the erotic life of property. Extending from this, Hyde makes another important point on gift exchange, which I think also links back to anarchist theory, namely that it is not “when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when part of the self is given away,” that true connections can be made (Hyde 1983:92). Mauss already saw the gift to be indissolubly tied to the giver because it would always contain some of his spirit, making person and object more or less inseparable. Hyde, however, goes further, for when he views the gift as 87

Maybe this is precisely what Benjamin saw lost in art: that magical ‘aura’ or fetishistic quality once contained within art’s sacredness, uniqueness and irreproducibility. It could be argued that art as a gift, as viewed by Hyde and Conrad, would retain this aura because of the art’s uniqueness, and because it is made to be a gift again. Larry Harvey seems to be echoing this sentiment by saying: People need to understand what gifts really mean in our community. They need to shift their focus away from objects as commodities, and towards art as a gift. […] I explicitly say work of art here, because the verb already implies that for art to be a gift it needs to be active; keep moving. 124

-6- Every Bit a Gift: Burning Man and its Gift-Economy

A gift is a considered thing that is imbued with spirit. It should somehow speak of intimate intention even as it conveys a respect for the person you are giving it to.125 So for Harvey, a gift does not necessarily have to be a tangible object, it can also be a simple act of kindness, or a contribution to life in the city. It can take on the form of a performance, body paint, a massage, or public service. It is as Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his nineteenth-century essay Gifts wrote, “Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me” (Emerson 1876:161).

I have talked about rules defining the community before, but I think that awards might be as important. When looking at Burning Man and the extent of fanaticism people display towards it – preparing for months and investing huge amounts of money, resources and time -, I doubt if these Burners would go through such trouble if there was nothing to be gained; when not even recognition could be expected in return. Call me deterministic, functionalistic or even materialistic in a nonmaterial sense, but I think that a sense of award in the form of social status, attention, and prestige through gift-giving contributes to Burning Man’s social dynamic as much as the gift itself.

Ironically enough, the giving of immaterial gifts, as well as taking money and commodities out of the picture through a process of decommoditization and replacing them with gifts might recognize, establish and maintain community, but the result does not necessarily imply an egalitarian community where everything exchanged – including the ‘Self’ – would be of equal value. It seems that sooner or later, every group, tribe or community will find some form of hierarchy, and the Burners community is certainly no different. It is Hyde who states “In communities drawn together by gift exchange, ‘status,’ ‘prestige,’ or ‘esteem’ take the place of cash renumeration” (1983:78). Without getting into a philosophical debate based on whether or not this would go against Hyde’s own argument on the very existence of the free gift, I do think that he makes a valid point. Indeed, in Burning Man’s one week of cultural inversion and subversion, normal rules of hierarchy might no longer apply, but the gift-economy provides a rather efficient means to fill such lack of social discern. Participation and self-expression as a gift become adequate ways of earning social esteem, and on the playa it seems that the social ladder is easier climbed with a sequined utility belt than with the usual overflowing money belt.

Escaping the Market? The people attending Burning Man are highly critical of the present state of this society and they are expressing their dissatisfaction in a very radical way. They are going out and showing the consumer society that they don't need the consumer society. (Laura, interview July 28th 2005) Burning Man poses to offer some kind of escape from consumer society. In Black Rock City, the mediating and socially distancing forces of the markets are constantly on display. In signs, rules, and discourse, consumptive America is constantly and consistently parodied, resisted, and, at least temporarily, shut out and suspended. There is a constant differentiation between the inside-Burning Man-utopic-community based on gift-giving, and the outside-real world-dystopic-capitalist society based on monetary exchange. This is why Burning Man is not Disneyland, but ‘Disneyland in reverse.’ From Burning Man’s ‘2002 summer newsletter’. At: http://www.burningman.com/ whatisburningman/2002/02_news_sum_2.html, accessed July 2nd 2005, emphasis mine. 125

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structures that Harvey so despises, such as Walmart, Target and Costco, and from what I have heard from others I was not alone in my spending routine. As Ramie states in a critical essay on Burning Man: Only the imagination of late capitalism could create a culture that deludes its participants into believing they are operating under a ‘gift economy’ while ignoring the intense consumerism and commodity fetishism that accounts for its existence.126 Burning Man’s gift economy might be an economy of abundance, but it also an economy that is a direct product of the surplus created by super-efficient American capitalism. Indeed, despite its no vending rule, Burning Man survives off the cornucopian excess of its participants’ daily lives. Only because people earn money within the capitalist system can they choose to reject it for this one week. It costs money to be able to temporarily go without money.

Burning Man clearly manifests itself as ‘the other choice in a consumer world’ in offering an escape from the omnipresence of markets. To downplay the difference between Burning Man and consumer society, products have to be purified, and for this reason acts of de-commodification are rehearsed, such as customizing or burning products, masking or transforming brand names, and, especially, turning commoditized products into gifts. However, it begs to differ if consumer society can ever really be ‘notneeded,’ left out, or escaped. Most participants seem to acknowledge the unfeasibility of such striving, for instance Michael, who I interviewed on the playa: I’m walking around with no cash. I love that! It’s great! It would certainly be idealistic if everything worked on a gifting or even barter system - that would be beautiful. Of course, the real world doesn’t operate like that but then again this isn’t the real world. This is like an experiment, creating some semblance of utopia. (Michael, interview September 20th 2005) Creating the temporary illusion of a commerce free world is not a cheap endeavor, considering the amount of cash that was undoubtedly spent before Michael as an interviewee-with-no-cash crossed the threshold entering Black Rock’s utopian universe. As mentioned before, in the state of Nevada massive expenditures spurred before the event have, in fact, even helped Burning Man gain local political support, as power follows the money trail leading from Reno right through Gerlach. In my own experience, for my first year flying over from Europe, preparations to enter ‘utopia’ cost me nearly two thousand dollar in airfares, entrance tickets, petrol, food, water, and camping gear. The year of my research it was considerably less, but even still then it was one of the most expensive ‘one week holidays’ I have ever had. Aside from the high costs, my money was mostly spent in exactly the huge alienating corporate 89

The alluring shortness of being

I think it is precisely for this reason that Burning Man as an event can only work for a short period of time. Trying to answer the question if consumers could ever really escape the market, and if so, how such social spaces would look like, Firat and Dholakia published a book called Consuming People (1998). In it, they urge that, since consumption is inevitable, a solution may be found through the consumption of experiences that offer new social possibilities and new social identities through acting, doing, and being, instead of passively consuming. Striving for a concrete example of a place where this would happen, the authors describe such possible marketemancipated spaces as lively, expressive, creative, and necessarily temporary ‘theatres of consumption.’ From Ramie’s essay ‘Fear and Loathing in Black Rock City’. Posted on tribe.net, April 16th 2006.

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like a particular moment in time, it is incapable being reproduced. (Kozinets 2002:20) According to Kozinets, both speed and temporariness refer to singularity, a hypercommunity is experienced as interesting and strong and better than the real thing not despite the fact that it is short-lived, but precisely because of it. Bounded by space and time, and differing from year-to-year and even day-to-day, Burning Man’s hypercommunity is safe from reproduction, cooptation, appropriation and assimilation into the market.

As a theatre of consumption, Burning Man offers a similarly social alternative to the mainstream market culture, but in the end it is an enclave that cannot be permanent or totalized. Harvey seems to acknowledge this fact when he states that the event does not so much goes against commerce as it goes against alienating markets. This is why Black Rock City is created as an environment where commerce can be temporarily suspended, so that people can explore what is of essential value: In conducting the experiment in temporary community that is Burning Man, we have tried to create a special arena in which the realm of commerce ceases to intrude and interfere with vital forms of human contact: contact with one’s inner resources, contact with one’s fellows, contact with the larger civic world, and, finally contact with the world of nature that we cannot buy and control.127 The more communal act of gift-giving manifests community, but in the end, gift-giving as an economy is simply not sustainable. For the duration of two years, Kozinets analyzed Burning Man, asking himself mainly the question we have been asking ourselves here, only in fancier terms: ‘is communally enacted consumer emancipation possible?’ He concluded that, if possible at all, it has to take place in hypercommunity context, and must therefore be conceived of as temporary and local. Kozinets defined hypercommunity as a “well-organized, short-lived but caring and sharing community whose explicit attraction to participants is its promise of an intense but temporary community experience” (Kozinets 2002:25). Burning Man’s gift-economy, its negative market discourse and the positioning of production and consumption as forms of self- expressive art, serve to temporarily distance consumers from particular market logics and corporate interests, rather than lastingly and from markets per se. What I find interesting in Kozinets argument is that he identifies speed and dynamism as major cultural-social determinants, when he hypothesizes that temporariness and speed of change are key cultural factors providing a community’s members with a sense that they possess an authenticity that can evade corporate appropriation. By dissolving shortly after it forms, the hypercommunity becomes locked into a historical moment, seen as singular and priceless because, exactly

In the end, I think that Burning Man is not necessarily about escaping the market or being a non-commerce event. Instead, by being an ephemeral time out of time, it is a well-thought out attempt to ameliorate some of the social deficiencies of the markets. To inject some much-needed emotional and social heat into social relations by causing people to question what they thought they knew, to reexamine ossified ways of living, and to see the flexibility that can exist within a social system that is ultimately propped up only by our consent to live within it. In doing so, it releases tremendous amounts of creative energy, forms strong communal bonds and shows that there might be another way: As Max phrases it, weeks after we have left the playa: You just need to remember the sincerity, the understanding, the acceptance. Remember the generosity of the artists, the makers of food and trinkets, the mixers of music and drinks. Remember those things when you go into places where the commercialism is overwhelming, and you will be able to remember that there is another way for us to be. (Max, interview September 22nd, 2005) This exemplary way of life is important as Burning Man is seeping out of the playa more and more. As it faces the world, it might leave its hypercommunal context behind, but it sure takes a way of life home.

On: http://www.burningman.com/preparation/newsletters/2006summer/06_news_sum1.html, accessed June 1 2005 127

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Part IV:

Social Impact

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-7- Every Day Burning: Keeping the Flames Alive

-7Every Day Burning: Keeping the Flames Alive My head hurts. The alarm clock obviously doesn’t care about this physiological defunct, and relentlessly keeps assaulting my ears and the throbbing skull they are attached to. Once again, it is the thought of coffee that eventually drives me out of bed. Exactly what I need right now: a gallon of water followed by lovely, black, bitter sweet coffee. A friend of mine living in the city has a caffeine molecule tattooed on his back. He has been to Burning Man seven times now, and is deeply involved in the San Franciscan Burners scene. I start to believe that the combination cannot be entirely coincidental… If this is fieldwork, and I have to be a participatory observant, then I sure as hell stumbled on one active research population. Last night was mayhem again. Well, all day actually. It started with a small, informal meeting with some DPW volunteers at the office, where I was assigned to take notes, followed by drinks to celebrate the up- and coming construction of Black Rock City. Then I had to go to Victor so that we could ‘playafie’ the old bike he had given me the week before. Up until that point the bike had a few essential parts missing, such as front and rear breaks. Victor being ‘Bike-Pirate-Victor,’ of course his mechanic – and social - skills needed to be lubricated with several pints of beer. After having my bike fixed and pimped, it was time to rush to a potluck dinner at the Sound of Mind crew’s loft, where some of the camp’s members were discussing the logistics of the next ‘fun-raising’ party. ‘Sound of Mind’ holds notorious parties in San Francisco, and from experience I can now say that their private gatherings are equally wild. I had to leave early though, as there was the last subway into Oakland to catch, where the Crucible hosted its annual Fire Arts Festival. The Crucible has been around since 1999, when several pyrotechnically inclined Burning Man artists decided to initiate a non-profit educational facility where arts, industry and community could meet. In a huge industrial warehouse with an adjacent 2,5 acre outdoor arena, year round classes are given that range from welding to kinetics to fire performance, as well as several big events. The Fire Arts Festival is probably among the most notorious of the program, and I think I have just discovered why. Maybe it was my initiation into fire breathing that gave it away. Or Dr. Megavolt, who theatrically fondled his twin-set of 1.000.000 volt Tesla coils with me more or less standing next to the sizzling thunder bolts. I don’t know, it could have been the metal Hand of God, spitting flames that seemed to reach all the way to the stars and that had the hair on my arms burn, or that last fiercely burning concoction its maker made me down. Most likely, it was a combination of all things: a jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring open-air exhibition of fire performance, fire sculpture, and interactive fire art; an annual homage to the flame. I had been here for the daytime opening ceremony two days ago, where I joined some workshops and lectures, but the night is something else altogether. Flames flickering on the antlers worn by stilt walking performers; dancers spinning flaming balls and hoops of fire, metal sculptures blazing, and fire itself being sculpted to form a blazing tornado that towered above the more than 5.000 people present. Amazing! And certainly not for the weak at heart - or those with alarm clocks going off in the morning. Sigh…

Recently, I stumbled upon a lovely biological coffee shop a few blocks up from where I live. Apparently it is open 360 days a year, including Christmas, New Year’s Day and Thanksgiving - just not during Burning Man. The pink haired woman who runs it met her husband on the playa ten years ago, and the two of them together haven’t missed a single burn since. Every time I walk into her shop I have to eat more of her home baked goodies, for free and without taking no for an answer, and listen to an endless stream of playa-related stories. Recently, she has lifted our relationship to a whole new level by actually giving me samples of her coffee beans so that I can enjoy my own freshly brewed ‘cuppa’ whilst doing my transcription tasks at home. Bless her. This morning, at a distance, the prospect of her coffee is enough to get me out of bed and up and… well… maybe not so much running but at least moving. I have to move, because I have a busy schedule lying ahead of me. First up is an interview with Michael, who brought the first officially approved rave night to the playa. I am meeting him at the Temple, just around the corner of my house in Hayes Valley. The Temple is a temporary art project made by David Best, who has been bringing similar stunning temple-like structures to Burning Man for years. This one is sponsored by the City Hall in collaboration with the Black Rock Arts Foundation, and it already has been here for a couple of months. In three weeks time, it will not burn like it would at Burning Man, but be dismantled and stored. I will be sad to see it go, because I have spent so many great hours there, doing interviews, taking notes, reading or just relaxing. It is a beautiful spot, and, like on the playa, people are always interacting with it. Some are writing messages, some make little shrines, some meditate, some make out. I heard that the police arrested the first couple who scribbled their names and hearts on the plywood frame, but by now I think it is clear that this piece of art is there to be used – not just looked at. After our healthy breakfast and inspiring interview, Michael promised to take me to Berkeley, where the monthly ‘really, really free market’ will again take place today. He’s got a lot of stuff to give away, and I am hoping to score some basic furniture in return. Reciprocity at its finest! My room is already becoming very nice just by gifts people have given me, but I still need some practical items so that I can make it a bit more organized. I have read about Berkeley’s market on tribe.net – an online community generated website that keeps me posted on the dozens of Burning Man related events taking place in the Bay Area every week - and apparently it is a very nice gathering, with people juggling, making music, art and what not. The prospect of an afternoon in the park with some sun instead of the San Franciscan fog is appealing, and I hope I can take a little nap because tonight is the Anon Salon party which, according to my new-found friends, I could not possible miss in my research scheme. I think the motive might be a bit less altruistic, and deals more with them being in need of my sewing skills - the ladies want to wear funky costumes tonight but cannot even get a thread through the needle. I agreed to help, and join them to the party afterwards, as long as they would feed me food and gossip. Most of the bigger, notorious, popular and trendsetting parties in San Francisco and vicinity such as the Anon Salon one, but also those organized by the Space Cowboys, Get Freaky, Sound of Mind, El Circo, Opulent Temple of Venus, Deep End, and House of Lotus carry a heavy burner vibe, as far as music, decoration, fashion and attitude are concerned. They stand as an ongoing testament to the growing year-round influence Burning Man and its participants have on San Francisco nightlife. Likewise, in the city, a Burning Man influence is felt in public art, street fairs, local businesses, educational facilities, and community services. In many perspectives, San Francisco and Burning Man have merged and morphed, symbiotically feeding off one another so that occasionally it is impossible to say which is influencing what. But it doesn’t end there. Even though I didn’t do my fieldwork in San 92

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Francisco for nothing, I could have visited Burning Man related events pretty much worldwide. It seems that Burning Man has grown way beyond the dusty borders of Black Rock City, beyond the borders of San Francisco even, and is now ready to take on the world at large. Burning Man might just be coming to a town near YOU.

culture; from negation to affirmation; from rebellion to role model. More than just an annual event, it has become a way of life that inspires people to reconsider their relationship to the outside world. As people incorporate and perpetuate its ethos on the playa, they bring home its message of civic responsibility, self-expression, self-reliance, community and the gift. It is an idea and concept that I want to put to the test in this final chapter of my thesis and argument.

Leaving Traces We believe our future lies outside the plastic fencing that encloses Black Rock City. Our city, in this scheme of things, is like a heart. Steadily beating, it annually pumps activists and energy back into what is called the default world. Having changed ourselves and having helped to change the lives of others, we now think that it's time to change the world that we must live in every day.128

As I hope to have shown so far, as Burning Man evolved each year has been rife with challenge and response, struggle and accomplishment. Each year saw the steady growth of Black Rock City’s population, and the community it represents. This chapter will be all about people taking that message home, and starting to incorporate it in everyday life and culture. Looking back on Burning Man’s forming years now, they have all offered a piece of the assembling puzzle, a step in the development, and lessons learned. In its evolvement, Burning Man has changed from a reactive endeavor, rushing always to secure survival, to a proactive movement, relatively stable and ready to spill into culture at large. This is what denotes my analyses of Burning Man having gone from the counterculture to the 93

When I left to do my fieldwork in 2005, my research proposal still focused mainly on Burning Man’s gift-economy and the communal ties that would flow from it. However, once in San Francisco and busy with my actual research, I got the strong feeling that Burning Man had already perpetuated its message of gift-giving, and was now slowly yet surely moving on to the next phase. As I was watching the signs, it felt like a significant and archetypical move was taking place: from birth and learning, to adolescence and rebellion, to maturity and stabilization, to offspring and cultural infiltration. Even though the clearly demarcated and classically framed theoretical framework on the gift and social cohesion would have probably given me a far better structured perspective to work with, chasing a vague concept of cultural growth and change suddenly seemed infinitely more interesting and timely. Fortunately, next to my intuitive ‘gut’ feeling, I was also presented with concrete proof that Burning Man was maturing into more than an annual counter- or subcultural escape from the alleged mind-numbing structures and alienating markets of daily life. In San Francisco, there were public Burning Man related art projects such as David Best’s Temple, but also 128 From the 2005 afterburn report. At: http://afterburn.burningman.com/05/future.html, accessed March 16th 2007.

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smaller and practical ones like the fire pits on Ocean Beach or the band shell made from recycled material in the Panhandle Park. Next to art, there were several very active Internet forums and widespread web communities that were connecting people – one of them being me - on a scale that I had not yet seen the year before. In real life, there were Burning Man related community services, voluntary projects and donation centers. Huge communal live-work projects and art complexes had been initiated in several cities’ industrial estates. I had been to Burning Man related events in London and Amsterdam, and knew about others taking place in countries as far-fetched as China, Taiwan and Greenland. In San Francisco, Burners had risen to positions of political power at City Hall, initiating, among other things, a think tank for local artists. In Seattle, Burning Man devotees had opened their own bar and music recording studio. In Arizona, Burning Man followers had build a charter school, where Navajo fifth-graders were learning to spin fire and helping to build an outdoor amphitheater for their community. It felt like Burning Man was spilling out; tipping over; leaving marks.

Black Rock City Year Round

To me at least, the year of my research, 2005, felt like a turning point in Burning Man’s existence. Maybe ‘tipping point’, would be a better way of saying it - a concept put forward by Malcolm Gladwell as “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire (2001:7). In interviews and online, many Burners mentioned his book appositely called the Tipping Point to me and said how they saw parallels between Burning Man entering a new phase and such social epidemics as described by Gladwell, in which ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. Maybe so, it is hard to say, but I do know that in San Francisco, Burning Man has left a definite and unavoidable mark on the city, and it seems that the rest of the country and even world is next on the list. You know there is at least something big going on when Jim Mason, conspirator of the Smiley incident and initiator of Borg 2, posts an online announcement in which he publicly ‘serves humble pie’ and announces 2006 to have been better than 1996, and declares his faith in the future spreading of the event: Did I drink too much coffee or did this last round out on the flat earth not restore confidence in what a mass of humanity, well fortified with a sense of creative entitlement and a gang of their pals with which to scheme and implement the contents of their imagination, might in fact be the most impressive force to reckon with on the planet? […] So in general, I must admit (yes, even to Larry) that the entire thing was simply stunning and amazing this year. A massive creative potlatch and conflagration of human wondering far past what most of us ever thought was possible. Yes, 2006 was better than 1996. Ok, there I said it. What I saw out there this year was the best demonstration to date that unscripted enthusiasm for participatory creative work can be a successful civic and cultural engine at a societal scale - not just at the local dimensions where we usually enjoy its pleasures. That the collective cultural upchuck and symbolic incantations of 40.000 creators can be better than one involving 25.000. And the one which enables and enfolds 100k or 200k or 500k in years to come, can be better and stronger still. Which begs the obvious question: can it work at a civilizational scale? Some of us continue to wonder.129 Of course, I do not think that anyone would seriously think that Black Rock City could be held year round, let alone work at a civilizational scale, but it is definitely leaving marks and traces within culture at large. The part where Burning Man is spilling out of the playa is also the part where it moves away and beyond its countercultural predecessors. To Harvey at least, the renaissance that I, and others with me, have been sensing within Burning Man can be seen as a return to the avant-garde approach to social progress, which got replaced by countercultural movements in the fifties and sixties: the hippies, the punks, and others who did not want to reform society, but simply wanted to be apart from it. Now, as Burning Man evolved to its latest phase, it has become more a matter of wanting to be a part of society - not apart. So maybe I have been given too much attention to Burning Man’s social background; to all those countercultural collectives stemming from after the fifties, but I still think that Burning Man would not be where it is today without this background.

On tribe.net: http://bm.tribe.net/thread/d9a92588-303f-47db-9873-78e86bfc2981, accessed March 15, 2007. 129

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Apart from content, the counterculture’s commoditization, appropriation and co-optation by mass culture has given the Burning Man organization valuable insights on how not to do things. The terms ‘Burning Man,’ ‘Black Rock City,’ ‘Decompression,’ and ‘Flambé Lounge’ have thus been trademarked, as well as the Burning Man’s image and logo. Commercial sponsorship is refused, there are no trinkets and branded goods for sale, MTV who wanted to do a special has been halted in its tracks and the lawsuit over that one pornographic film with Burning Man footage has been won. This has all been part of Burning Man’s preservation, and about keeping its integrity intact. Now, with Burning Man seeping out into the world at large, it becomes especially important, as there is more to gain - and to lose. This is why, as of 2004, the Burning Man organization has implemented an official ‘Black Rock City Year Round’ program, with two full-time staff members and another two parttimers, its own position on the Burning Man website, a digital forum, and a weekly newsletter. The Internet is of crucial importance for Burning Man’s year round implementation, with digital communication tools fueling the continuous flames. In interviews, many people have expressed to me how hard it was to come home - ‘back on earth’ as it were - after having left Black Rock City, and how they felt the need to stay connected. Throughout the years, several ways of keeping in touch with the Burning Man spirit have been initiated and maintained, and the most obvious tools towards this goal were, and are, the many digital forums, list-servers, bulletin boards and community generated websites that are either directly or indirectly linked to Burning Man. They keep people informed and connected, but Harvey insists that they are not, and will never be, a substitute for community. To him, the Internet is first and foremost a tool to bring people together, not from behind their respective computer screens but in real life: “I’d advise all of you to get on the Internet, not for the sake of having stupid, vicarious, anonymous experiences in cyberspace, but for the sake of meeting one another and getting together again” (Harvey 1998). And indeed, small tribes of people are getting together and ‘living the playa,’ if only for a short period of time, more or less in all continents now. As the Burning Man website states: While Black Rock City during Burning Man is a physical and temporal manifestation of the community, it is by no means the entire experience. It is a way of life, and a way of looking at the human condition, and it is not limited to the yearly gathering in the desert.130 Local events reminiscent of Burning Man are taking place in Canada, Greenland, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, China, England, Spain, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand and Paris. It would be easy to say that such events are just another excuse for a wild party, but I personally think that such presumption would be erroneous. Because just as Burning Man is more than the sum of its obvious bacchanalian aspects, so there is more than that prospect to bring people together outside the playa. As the above quote states, Burning Man is a way of life and a way of looking at the human

130

On: http://regionals.burningman.com/network_letter.html, accessed May 28th 2007.

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condition. Above all, I think, it is most of all a way to reconsider one’s own position in this life. Many people have a transformative experience at Burning Man that makes it hard to go back to the old way of living. They have seen what happens when creativity, non-commerce and community reign, and they have seen what the human imagination can accomplish. Now, instead of waiting another 51 weeks to have that empowering feeling again, Burners actively seek to rekindle the flame. The stage is set for what some refer to as the ‘Burner Diaspora’, and it is all about staying connected, building community, and bringing Burning Man’s message back home, year round.

Going home to Decompress

This is exactly how I ended up in London for a Burning Man Decompression party in December 2004. Back then, I was already interested in the possibility of using Burning Man as the topic for my master’s research, but that was not even the main reason why I went. Back then, above all, I simply had been infected by the same virus that had caused Decompression in London to happen in the first place. Like the organizers and other visitors, I was trying to bring a shard of the playa back into the default world, no matter how temporarily, and to connect to the community again. The term ‘decompression’ refers to a period of time spent by deep-sea divers at various depths on their way to the surface, so that they might gradually adjust to surface pressure and avoid the bends. By analogy, decompression parties, ‘decom’ or ‘decomp’ are small local events for Burning Man participants to help ease themselves back into everyday society after the ‘big event.’ Its entry on Wikipedia reads: “It is not uncommon for Burning Man participants to experience ‘post-burn blues’, and decompression events can help alleviate the feelings of loneliness and separation that can occur.”131 As stated on the Burning Man website: Before the playa dust has completely settled and our heads have stopped spinning, many of us gather in the months after Burning Man to ‘decompress’ by taking one more communal plunge into the depths of what we found so affirming and memorable at Burning Man. 131

On: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_party, accessed May 22nd, 2007.

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Decompression becomes an opportunity to dust off and share again feelings, art, performances, memories and stories from the playa; to reconnect with family and friends; and collaborate to create new art. It is, at its simplest, a reunion. But it is also a showcase of what is most inspiring about Burning Man, brought back into the city and the rest of the year.

[Burning Man] has obviously grown tremendously, but that hasn’t changed what it’s about, which is a chance to embrace our diversity and connect with other people that we normally wouldn’t get a chance to meet. Hopefully, that attitude transfers into our daily lives, and will continue to spread in wildfire fashion. (Marian Goodell, interview September 20th 2005) When I interview Michael right after Decompression, he comments on the social and community aspect of the event: Isn’t it bizarre? I mean, really, don’t you think it is bizarre that people have apparently drifted apart so much that the minute you give them a fire pit and a bunch of people around it and let them smile at each other and say hello and welcome, everyone is like Eureka and Homecoming and Heart warmed and all that, and for the rest of the year they will go through the greatest lengths just to be in such a social environment again. What does that really say about our socalled civilized society? (Michael, interview September 20th 2005) Interesting enough, to me at least it seems that Decompression is about the only time that people are ‘allowed’ to look back, to thrive on last year’s accomplishments before having to spend time and energy planning the next, or filling in the days in between. And these days in between can get quite busy. In San Francisco, in the five months of my research, I attended a Burning Man film festival, a mobile art festival parade called the p-ART-iciPARADE, the local ‘No Spectator Day,’ the three day Fire Arts Festival, a beach clean-up followed by a Borealis barbeque, the Desert Art Preview, the opening ceremony of David Best’s art project, Burning Man’s open house office party, Black Light Bowling; Berkeley’s really, really free market, several stitch ‘n bitch costume making sessions, Precompression and Decompression. And of course dozens and dozens of Burning Man related night parties and fun(d)raisers. As said before, Burning Man and San Francisco are indissolubly linked to each other, so it is of little surprise that Burning man would leave its biggest mark, and busiest agenda, on that city. But to say that it is confined solely to San Francisco would be underestimating the reach of its tentacles. For Decompression reunions are now taking place in Los Angeles, Portland, Flagstaff, San Diego, New York, London and Tokyo. And apart from Decompression, there are numerous other events put forward by Burning Man’s small army of so called ‘Regionals.’ The Regional Network is dedicated to keeping Burning Man’s spirit alive all year, and yes, it might have started in San Francisco, but it has now turned global.

In San Francisco, Decompression has been organized by the Burning Man organization since 1999, under the name of the Heat the Streets F(a)ire. Both years in which I attended Burning Man - 2004 and 2005 - I went to Decompress afterwards. And I must say, whereas London’s 24 hours of Decompression was already quite a happening, with about four hundred people in a huge squat at the edge of town, it was nothing like this homecoming. In San Francisco, Decompression must be the ultimate block party; a line of warehouses spanning four blocks in the Potrero Hill neighborhood, where six thousand people dressed in their ‘playa best’ gather to experience a slice of the sights, sounds, and sartorial creativity of Burning Man, transported to an urban environment. Maybe this is what Chinatown is to the Chinese, or a climbing wall to the alpinist: not quite the same, but with the same feel; at least good enough to make you crave the real thing again. And of course, to be among kindred souls, because if there is one thing that struck me about Decompression, and pretty much about all Burning Man related events, it is the sense of community. According to Marian Goodell, Burning Man’s Mistress of Communication, this is exactly the intention: 96

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freedom of others to create and organize. But it does protect the way of life that Burning Man has come to represent.133

The Regional Network

Already in 1997, the Burning Man organization appointed their first so called Regional Representative in San Francisco, whose initial function was to act as a sort of information provider on behalf of Burning Man. Soon, Austin, the North Bay and Canada got represented as well, and what became known as the Regional program was officially born. As Zac Bolan, Canada’s first Regional contact, puts it: When I returned from Burning Man first, I was feeling extremely lonely and alienated from the people around me who had not been and who did not understand what I had experienced. So in order to convey some of the magic, I began showing slides [of Burning Man] to friends. Soon word got out and I was doing slideshows for friends of friends, even out of town. I contacted the organization to ask for more material, and was then asked if I would be interested in becoming the Regional contact for Canada. Hell yeh! Acting as a Regional kept me sane during these early days. I was able to form my own support network until a regional community came into being.132 It must have been different then, because back in those days Burning Man was still much more under the radar than it is now, and very little people knew about it. In the late nineties, as the number of people attending Burning Man had been increasing, so did the sense of community between people and the urge to stay connected. The role of the regional networks and representatives consequently changed as well, from information providers to community builders; bringing people together on a local level through e-mail lists and by organizing local events. As of 2004 the Burning Man organization undertook the formation of a formal network between all its regional contacts. The network was kicked into being with the launch of the Regional Letter of Agreement, a document designed to establish a written understanding of the relationship between each Regional contact and Burning Man, ending with the lines: What I have tried to describe to you in this letter is a vision of how our culture can sustain itself upon a larger scale. I believe the Network we propose holds very close to the Burning Man ethos. It does not dictate the content of ‘radical self-expression’ — that can only come from you and other members of your community. It does not exploit you economically or infringe upon your freedom or the

The letter was then followed by a legal agreement that translated all of its content into an actual contract. The idea of a signed legal document immediately fueled debate among Burners. The linkage to ‘Kentucky Fried Franchising,’ or ‘McDonaldization’ was made; complete with assumptions based on hefty licensing fees and cookie cutter replicas of a pre-packaged product. There was talk of cultural imperialism and the imposition of a topdown system designed to rigidly control the content of local activities. There was again fear of selling out, of going commercial, of imposing an organized structure upon an otherwise spontaneous process of cultural dissemination. When I talk with Harvey about why sentiments like these keep being expressed throughout Burning Man’s existence, he states that it is only natural that people should think that way, because that is how it has usually gone for them: “They reason from experience. Nearly everything they ever felt authentic that succeeded in the larger world became commodified” (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005). However, he stresses, experience should show that Burning Man has not been corrupted, and neither will such a thing ever happen with the Regionals. Quite on the contrary, the legal form is only there to protect Burning Man’s integrity, or, as Harvey phrases it in the above quote, to ‘protect the way of life that Burning Man has come to represent,’ and to stop it from being exploited. Because this is where it could possible go to if local events were to be given free reins. Already now, Harvey insists, he sees supposed ‘Burning Man’ parties that are held, the proceeds from which go unaccounted for, in which vending is allowed and top DJ’s are booked for large fees. Such events can sometimes become indistinguishable from any which commercial entertainment. Says Harvey: I don’t wish to sound paranoid. I am sure that many of these efforts are inspired by naive enthusiasm and are well-intentioned. But as the national cachet of Burning Man continues to increase, it takes very little imagination to foresee how the core values of our community could eventually be diluted and perverted into the larger world. Indeed, if even one group organizing a ‘Burning Man’ event does so unscrupulously or illegally, this could discredit and endanger the activities of every other group.134 The representatives are there to keep their respective environments free of such events, as well as checking for any other misuse of Burning Man’s name, logo or image. There are now over 90 regional contacts, and many of them put on their own Burns, by their own name and often fame. Austin, for instance has its Burning Flipside, Arizona Toast, Georgia Alchemy, Oregon the Phoenix Festival, Washington Playa del Fuego, and Utah Synergy. In New Zealand the event is called the KiwiBurn, in Hawaii Rebirth, in Mexico Fuente Eterno, in Canada Nütopia, and in Quebec Ignition. Since 2004, the Euroburners have 133

132

On: http://regionals.burningman.com/regionals_history.html, accessed May 28th 2007.

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134

On: http://regionals.burningman.com/network_coverletter.html. Ibid. as footnote 132 above.; both accessed May 28th 2007.

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their own festival in Europe, Spain, under the name Nowhere. In November 2007, South Africa will join the list with its own Regional burn known as Afrika Burns. Marian Goodell says she is very happy with those regional things: “We own the logo and the idea but we don’t feel there can only be one Burning Man. We’d be quite happy to see events all over the world” (Marian Goodell, interview September 20th 2005).

responsibilities to participants. Organizers must also assume responsibility for abiding by local, state and federal laws. 5. 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 condition than when we found them. 6. Radical Inclusion Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community. 7. Communal Effort Our community promotes social interaction through collective acts of gifting. We value 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. 8. 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.

Because the Burning Man organization do indeed own the logo, name and idea, and because the aforementioned fear of dilution and assimilation into the market and marketing, steps have been taken to assure the integrity of any Regional event. This is why the Regional contacts have to sign a contract; acting as a guarantee that all activities that do take place, do so by abiding to the core philosophies and modes of social organization that are at the heart of Burning Man. In March 2004, all existing contacts therefore received an invitation to an online conference, in which each section of the agreement was reviewed, questions and concerns addressed, and the goals of the network outlined.135 Eventually, ten core principles were formulated to describe the goals shared by all members of the Burning Man Network, and that need to be uphold when planning events and organizing in the local areas. These core principles are: 1. 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 in experience. 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. 2. 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, appreciation of 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. 3. Radical Self-reliance Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources. 4. Civic Responsibility We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic The conference was held via web conferencing software donated by Webex — another example of the gift economy at work, since Webex asked nothing – neither money nor marketing - in return for their generous donation. 135

9. 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. 10. 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. Even though it was not done purposely, when looking at these ten principles, they practically convey a summary of the things I have been talking about in the greater part of my thesis; the section on Burning Man’s structural sociality. It is not that I have been checking boxing as I went, but in the end, I guess that any omission would have made Burning Man’s sociality feel deficient, thus burdening my argument with the same irksome sense of incompleteness. It seems that everything that Burning Man has become, all the lessons learned, has been for a reason, namely to find the best way of solidifying community through a transportable model of participation and involvement. Says Harvey: People want to bring the sense of community they have on the playa with them into their daily lives. So year-round, they’re connected to a community, wherever they might be. It’s a time for people to come together, bond, rehearse their experience of what they learned and who they are. That’s just a good thing for people to do. And this isn’t something we dictated. It’s the [Burning Man] culture that does this. (Harvey, interview October 15th 2005) The success of the Regionals shows that to have such community is much looked after. The by now nearly ninety Regional contacts motivate community members to converge in physical locations consistently and almost globally. The plurality of these structures and events has motivated the Regionals to even host each other for touring events. Numerous relationships on the local, national and even continental level have resulted from the evolution and expansion of Burning Man into daily life.

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If I take myself as an example, I have been on the Euroburners mailing list for two years now, and have been both host and guest for several European community members. I have posted events and been told about events. I have posted a questionnaire and received countless insights. I have even contributed to an art project and found artists a venue. And the same goes for my fieldwork. Even before arriving in San Francisco I had registered myself on tribe.net, an online social network community similar to hyves, facebook, myspace and friendster, though mostly oriented on Burners from the Bay area.136 Through postings or even just by having my profile online, I got in contact with several respondents, found a house, a car, a job, and was made party to countless insights into San Francisco and Black Rock City. Literally, from the day I arrived I had a whole network of people seeking contact and conversation, introducing me to valuable key informants and inviting me to a gamut of physical gatherings. By having myself as a clear cut example, I believe that the Regional Network, the digital tools and the community that flow from it comprise a year round increase in social capital. What such social capital means, both in theory and practice, and how it works itself out is something I want to look at next.

Social Capital

Though relatively marginal within anthropology, social capital is a core concept in business, economics, organizational behavior, political science, and sociology. Much to the exasperation of anyone trying to research it, the definitions given to the concept differ as much as the fields in which it is used. The conceptual confusion is only made bigger by the diverse terminology used to refer to the term, such as social energy, community 136 As from September 2006, tribe.net counted 500.000 users. For a closer look, visit www.tribe.net.

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spirit, social bonds, civic virtue, community networks, social ozone, extended friendships, community life, social resources, informal and formal networks, good neighborliness and social glue. In general, though, we can summarize that social capital refers to the advantage created by a person’s location in a structure of relationships. The term ‘capital’ might be misleading, because, unlike traditional forms of capital, social capital is not depleted by use, but in fact depleted by non-use: ‘use it or lose it.’ Portes suggests that the concept behind social capital is nothing new in sociological terms. He points to the early work of Durkheim and his emphasis on being connected in a community as an “antidote to anomie and self destruction” (Portes 1998:2). More recently the value of social capital was identified by Bourdieu (1986) and given a clear theoretical framework by Coleman (1988, 1990), who was the first to subject the concept to empirical scrutiny and develop ways of operationalizing it for research purposes (Baron et al. 2000:8). However, both for the purpose of this thesis as in the broader discussion on social capital, the term is now most commonly associated with the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who successfully exported the concept out of academia and into ordinary language. Whereas Coleman and Bourdieu both saw social capital as a resource possessed by individuals, Putnam additionally defined it as an attribute of communities, focusing on norms and trust as producers of social capital: The core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value. Just as a screw driver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective) so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups. (Putnam 2000:18-19) Although Putnam had already published a series of articles on social capital, what gained him and his use of the concept most prominence was his landmark study Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000). In it, he made the painful argument that, during the last forty years and particularly during the last twenty years, the social capital of Americans had begun to disintegrate, and would now be at a historical low.137 According to him, during the fifties and sixties, America was rich in social capital; Americans were idealistic, trusting, altruistic, and politically engaged. They bowled in leagues, participated in political campaigns, joined neighborhood associations, entertained guests, and regularly attended religious services. However, since then there has been a precipitous drop in all types of social connections: political, civic, religious, workplace, community service, and even informal social bonds. Americans have become less connected and lost social capital both individually and societal. Rejecting most of the established hypotheses accounting for this decline, such as suburban sprawl, increased mobility, generational change, and pressures on time, Putnam ultimately identifies television watching as the ‘main culprit’ in the erosion of social capital; supported by statistical evidence that the average American household spends four hours a day watching television and possesses 2.4 television sets. At the end of the century, Putnam concludes, not only were Americans watching more TV, they also watched it more habitually, more pervasively, more as entertainment instead of information, and more often alone. Such finger pointing in the direction of television and its subsequent erosion of free time resonates with ideas by Harvey, and indeed, in a speech for the Cooper Union in New York, he quotes Putnam and contributes to the discussion: 137 Even though the data and statistics to support Putnam’s theses are all taken from before 1998, they are still valid, for, as a more recent study by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears concludes, “given our analyses of the highest-quality nationally representative data available, our best current estimate is that […] the types of bridging ties that connect us to community and neighborhood have withered” (McPherson e.a. 2006:372).

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If you could take the roof off the average suburban house and witness what is going on there, you would see each separate family member in a separate room watching a separate TV that has a separate set of commercials on it hawking a separate lifestyle. And if you looked more closely, you’d see that they’re surrounded, barricaded, by all this stuff they’ve bought to support these lifestyles that are being sold to them. This is hardly connective. (Harvey 2000) So even though Harvey acknowledges the ills of television, he sees it as part and parcel of a larger system, namely capitalism with its ubiquitous mass marketing techniques and lifestyles ‘for sale’. It is the simulation of being through commodities and empty images, resulting in spiritual damage that is hard to document in statistics, but that, according to Harvey, has produced the greatest evil in our world.

a wake of social connections. Specific reciprocity, in contrast, is the act of doing something for others only if something of equivalent value is offered in return. A barter economy, in which goods of equivalent value are exchanged, is an example of this type of reciprocity. Regarding the efficiency of the two models, Putnam makes an important observation when he writes that “a society characterized by generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society based on barter. If we don’t have to balance every exchange instantly, we can get a lot more accomplished” (Ibid.21).138 Generalized reciprocity is thus conducive to greater efficiency and production. It is also less exclusive, and more open to other distant circles still linked in the network. Putnam sees reciprocity to be a variable by which two ideal types of social capital networks can be distinguished, namely bridging (inclusive) and bonding (exclusive). He describes their difference by noting that, […] the weak ties that link me [Putnam] to distant acquaintances who move in different circles from mine are actually more valuable than the ‘strong’ ties that link me to relatives and intimate friends whose sociological niche is very like my own. (Putnam 2000:22-23)

Both Harvey and Putnam agree that the outcome of disconnection and isolation, so of a decline in social capital, creates dire consequences, on a societal, individual, economic, bodily and emotional level. Putnam furthermore points out that a decline in social capital is a problem because social connections are important for the rules of conduct that they sustain. Networks of community engagement foster mutual obligations, which in turn create sturdy norms of reciprocity, which in turn reinforce trustworthiness, which in turn lubricates social life. Research into the cumulative effect of social capital would indicate that the well connected are more likely to be “housed, healthy, hired and happy” (Woolcock, 2001:12), or, in Putnam’s words: Hard evidence [exists] that our schools and neighborhoods don’t work so well when community bonds slacken, that our economy, our democracy, and even our health and happiness depend on adequate stocks of social capital. (Putnam 2000:27-28) Reciprocity in Putnam’s analysis of social capital takes on two forms, that of generalized and specific reciprocity. Generalized reciprocity is defined as the idea of: “I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road” (Ibid.21). This form of reciprocity is what Hyde’s, and, in extension, Burning Man’s gift economy relies upon: a very open social network between many persons strange to each other where the act of gifting builds social bonds. What solidifies these bonds are the expectations, or a perceived set of obligations, that everyone will participate and do something for others somewhere down the road, leaving

This explanation describes ‘bridging’ networks as the weak, looser ties that unite others to distant, broader social circles and are inclusive; while, in contrast, ‘bonding’ social networks describe the intimate ties that form around group identity and specific criteria for inclusion – i.e. the exclusion of the stranger. Bonding social capital would be especially good for undergirding specific reciprocity and mobilizing solidarity. Bridging networks, by contrast, are better for linkage to external assets and for information diffusion. As Xavier de Souza Brigss (1998) phrases the difference, bonding social capital is good for ‘getting by,’ but bridging social capital is crucial for ‘getting ahead.’ Moreover, bridging social capital can generate broader identities, whereas bonding social capital bolsters our narrow selves. It is for this difference that on Burning Man, theme camps which are typically characterized by strong in-group values and aesthetics need to stay open, inclusive and have a public function that gets people to enter into the camp’s bonded circle of people. These intimate networks thus become bridged to the larger population. As participants trust in the network and trust in other members to act as they do, greater social relationships between more diverse people occur. Thus it is in truth, by definition, that the Burning Man network sustains generalized reciprocity as a cornerstone through the moral obligation members hold to each other and themselves as a whole. Needless to say that in a way, the larger population can be seen as a bonded network because the criteria for inclusion are relatively well defined, and based on the exclusion of those who are not devoted to the Burner ideal and do not follow ‘the rules of the game,’ but even still so the system is not closed. Precisely because the community is not just based on intimate ties, anyone who is genuinely interested can gain entry, and anyone can extend the network even further by introducing new members. Let us once again remember Burning Man’s core principle number six, formulated by the Regionals, that deals with radical inclusion: “Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.” Basically, the way I see it, participation in the community is the prerequisite for belonging to the community, thus making the bridged social network more active and extended. We have to remember here that participation is also creation; self-expression and art. As people utilize bridging networks to access Obviously, as opposed to barter, monetary exchange would have the same benefits, but, as we saw before when discussing the difference between the gift and commodity, money is not a very good conductor of reciprocity and thus a poor builder of social capital.

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material, labor, and knowledge in the philosophy of generalized reciprocity, bonded networks are formed around the creation. These networks disperse if members move on to other endeavors of creation, which strengthens the network and keeps the community fluid and open. The evident increase in relationships, however, quantifies the community’s strength. Considering that generalized reciprocity is at work in such networks, it has the power to cut out, or at least undermine the capitalistic competition for resources, and to rival the capabilities of mass production. As discussed before in the chapter on gift-giving, the result is not an economy of scarcity, such as with capitalism, but instead an economy of abundance, from which all individuals can reap the benefits. And, as this chapter hopefully shows, as Burning Man’s burgeoning community gains more and more strength on the local level, the implementation and benefits of its bridged network become equally strong. Putnam (2000:20) reminds us that this is beneficial to the social network as a whole, but it also bears practical importance on an individual level, specifically in that A well-connected individual in a poorly connected society is not as productive as a well-connected individual in a well-connected society. And even a poorly connected individual may derive some of the spillover benefits from living in a well-connected community. In other words, a poorly connected individual, utilizing a well connected community, can more readily access the labor, knowledge and resources needed to create and produce a vision; the spillover benefits of reciprocity become clearer. As individuals begin to share in the spirit of general reciprocity, a certain kind of infrastructure to support this sharing emerges. Individuals from ‘outside’ of the community can have access to such infrastructure and thus extend the network even further. In my case, both before and during my fieldwork, I as a poorly connected individual with little contacts in the Burning Man community was able to use a Burner community list-serve on the Internet. The community, connected via the list-serve, responded as its members were chatting about event ideas, jokes, and general community dynamics, and I could smoothly tap into their wellconnected social network. A little side note is in order here. Because although Putnam does not deny the existence of computer-mediated connections and the possibility of virtual communities, he finds them to be significantly less important to the maintenance of social capital than civic associations, which, as a political scientist, he identifies as the glue that binds the American community. To Putnam, the computer, like television, would mostly isolate and privatize American’s leisure time: “electronic technology allows us to consume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone” (Ibid.217). His view on community existing ‘before’ the (advent of) computers, not ‘in front of’ it, has been debated, for instance by Wellman and Gulia, who write: Pundits worry that virtual community may not truly be community. These worriers are confusing the pastoralist myth of community for the reality. Community ties are already geographically dispersed, sparsely knit, connected heavily by telecommunications and specialized in content. (Wellman and Gulia 1999:355) So maybe, with this in the back of our mind, we could say that social capital might not be all that low, but simply that networks and communities have changed. This is also what McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears conclude in their analyses on social isolation in America: Whatever the reasons, it appears that Americans are connected far less tightly now than they were 19 years ago. Furthermore, ties with local neighborhoods and groups have suffered at a higher rate than others. Possibly, we will discover that it is not so much a matter 101

of increasing isolation but a shift in the form and type of connection. (McPherson e.a. 2006:373, emphasis mine) Such shift would move away from community as a solitary and rather homogeneous group of densely knit neighbors, such as which Putnam envisions and sees lacking, towards an internally more varied social network of friends and workmates who do not necessarily live in the same neighborhoods. These different, formal and informal organizational networks of human connectedness have become less interwoven, and no longer form an organic whole from which solidarity would arise automatically, in the Durkheimian sense. Instead, they have become independent, autonomously functioning tribes, characterized by what Afke Komter calls ‘segmented’ solidarity: One might therefore describe the ongoing change as a transformation from organic to ‘segmented’ solidarity: separate, autonomous segments, connecting (if at all) with other segments no longer out of necessity and mutual dependence bust on the basis of voluntariness. (Komter 2005:211) As opposed to Durkheim’s organic or mechanical solidarity, characterized by ‘homogeneous segments’ based on congruence, the segments on which Komter sees contemporary solidarity to rest are characterized by diversity and plurality, with mutual connections that are more loose and less ‘organic’ (Ibid.212). Without her acknowledging so, such a view resonates strongly with Maffesoli’s argument based on us currently living in the ‘time of the tribes,’ or, better said, in a time in which the mass is tribalized again; and in which “it is less a question of belonging to a gang, a family or a community than of switching from one group to another” (1996:76). Instead of talking about segmentation, such as Komter, Maffesoli argues for a current development of ‘elective sociality;’ an increasing identification of individuals with various ‘neo-tribes’ which share a set of interests, beliefs, and an ethical consciousness that functions as a form of social identity. Maffesoli finds the interplay of such contemporary tribalism to be organized into polycentric nebulae; ephemeral and organized as the occasion arises. The glutinum mundi of solidarity hereby exists of a series of overlapping and multitude interconnections, a ‘networks of networks’ or ‘urban mosaic’ (Ibid.145-147). The social organization created by the paradigm of the network and nebula might be loose and diffracted, but it still provides structure; ‘a solid organicity’ that can serve as the basis of new forms of solidarity and sociality.

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A new Kind of Community

I have talked about Maffesoli before when discussing the Durkheimian essential of collective effervescence and ritual in the formation of community. Indeed, within Maffesoli’s framework of the Dionysiac thematic; with his subsequent emphasis on affect and vitalism; the feral and festal; the wild and imaginary; the ludic and orgiastic, his analyses proves highly suitable when talking about Burning Man and the ephemeral tribes that constitute its community on the playa. However, when transporting his model to what we might call the Burning Man movement, or at least its year round community, we hit upon essential differences. These differences have everything to do with the fact that I think that Maffesoli, no matter how articulate, has eventually produced a one-sided and flattened out image of our current time of the tribes that cannot account for the possibility of social and political critique, and in which the neo-tribes that characterize it are essentially non-political. Consider the following quotation:

Dionysus by Night’, where “each 24-hour period will cycle between reflective (conscious) content contrasting with a nighttime concern for ecstatic (subconscious) expression.”139 If ever it was, Burning Man has long stopped being just ‘madness,’ ruled over by the God of wine, intoxication and chaos. Nowadays, Apollo, that solitary God of ‘reason,’ claims his more harmonic and orderly co-presence through lectures, healing areas, conferences and dreamlands. I believe that it is this two-party system that gives Burning Man, no matter how ephemeral of a city, greatest potential for a future expansion and year round implementation.

There is no better way to sum up the efflorescence and effervescence of neo-tribalism which, in various forms, refuses to identify with any political project whatsoever, to subscribe to any sort of finality, and whose sole raison d’être is a preoccupation with the collective present. (Maffesoli 1996:75) Maybe I could begin to agree with Maffesoli if the political project was strictly defined as something imposed from above; ‘policing society’ as it were, but today’s political activity, that taking place within contemporary sociality, seems to be of a different nature. Often, it is more of an emancipatory form for political construction; an experimentation with innovative forms for ‘bottom up’ politics. And even though the proposed new kind of political order can take on utopian forms – in the sense of nondystopian as well as idealized –, to me that does not mean that there would not be any political potential. Maffesoli, in contrast, completely disregards this, preferring instead to speak of the mass’ withdrawal or ‘aloofness’ from politics. To him, neo-tribes possess a secretive, resilient cultural resistance that is inherently passive - hence its strength. In the end, the time of the tribes is a ‘transpolitical’ time: “one intends less to ‘act’ on the social, to affect society, than to take from it all the well-being one can and to best enjoy this well-being. Political disengagement, the derision of which politics is the object, is not a transitory epiphenomenon” (Ibid.48). As said, Maffesoli sees all this summarized by the metaphor of the Dionysiac, and I can certainly see how this emblematic figure would feel at home on Burning Man. But there is another side to the festival, and especially to its insertion into culture, that is quite different, and that might just brings Apollo to the stage. In The Contemplation of the World: Figures of Community Style (1996b), Maffesoli, in Nietzschian fashion, explains their dual nature: Dionysus the god of a ‘hundred faces,’ the god of versatility, of play, of the tragic and the loss in the self casts his shadow over our societies. It is no longer the presence of a celestial Apollo, luminous and rational, who prevails, but rather that of the more earthly figure, in whom obscurity and ambivalence have their place. […] It is Dionysus, that treelike divinity, emblem of the pleasures lived in the here and now, hence of the sensorial, who stands opposed to Apollo, the Uranus God, torchbearer of the celestial light, that of pure reason. (Maffesoli 1996b.61/72) At Burning Man, Dionysus provides the important sense of vertigo, transgression and quest for transcendence, but he does so by engaging creatively with Apollo’s inclination for order, organization and the achievement of goals. Thus, in the year of my research, on the corner of ten o’clock and Bipolar, there was the popular theme camp ‘Apollo by Day,

Burning Man is more than a party, more than its Dionysiac excess, and its year round realization equally revolves around more than simply attending regional gatherings that exist apart from the world, as does Black Rock City. Currently, it seems that the greatest challenge is to radically reinsert the core values of Burning Man’s culture into what is called the default world, and to ‘live the playa’ year round. Such is explicitly not a lifestyle such as Maffesoli sees shared by the members of a neo-tribe, but a way of being in, and looking at the world that has less to do with form, appearance and consumption, and more with structural issues, ideology and decommodification. Expanding on Maffesoli, Andy Bennett reminds us that lifestyles are indissolubly linked to consumerism, in that they … describe the sensibilities employed by the individual in choosing certain commodities and patterns of consumption and in articulating these cultural resources as modes of personal expression. (Bennett 1999:607) According to both Bennett and Maffesoli, because a lifestyle would be such ‘freely chosen game’, it liberates individuals by offering them avenues for individual expression through commodities. Again, it seems to create a gap between the Burners community and a neo-tribe. Let me illustrate by quoting from Harvey: A lifestyle, with its panoply of status coded goods, is a commodified version of what we used to call a way of life. Marketers have learned to sort us into separate stalls like cattle in a feed lot. Using focus groups, it's endlessly possible to invent new and appealing lifestyles which give us the illusion we are making lifestyle statements and are members of imaginary peer groups. That these fashions require no participation in the life of a community is not the concern of the merchant. (Harvey 2000) 139

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I guess that the way Harvey sees it, a lifestyle would be the exact opposite of his so deeply cherished ‘radical self-expression,’ where everyone is challenged to look deep inside and find that true inner part that makes his or her unique, and then contribute this to a public environment. Indeed, it is vital that self-expression is seen as a communal gift, for it is then possible to blend the often volatile and individualistic self-expressive urge with a communal ethos. When being at Burning Man and looking around me, I personally found that Harvey’s inclination to completely disregard commodities might be a bit utopic. In Black Rock City, like any other city, the ‘cool kids’ were rather easily distinguished, and valued as such. Those with better outfits, gifts, domes and transport often reap admiration and attention, and some minor form of practical segregation based on these flourishing or lacking qualities does exist. Likewise a sort of ‘Burners fashion style’ can be distinct and easily recognized in San Francisco’s streets and nightlife, and even though a lot of it is ‘handmade’ or altered, coolness does not always come cheap. The fact that there would be no conspicuous consumption involved in any of this is an obvious illusion and far from the truth. A critical eye can also argue that not nearly all of Burning Man’s 40.000 participants stay connected year round and live by the ten principles as formulated by the Regionals (which, as quoted from Harvey before, do indeed “protect the way of life that Burning Man has come to represent”). However, the fact remains that Burning Man is no longer just a Dionysiac fest, subculture or neo-tribe, but indeed a way of life for an ever larger number of people, and a way of life that is starting to leave marks on the culture at large for all that. These marks go beyond fashion statements, parties, or ‘being cool,’ and take it into the realm of ideology, ecology, charity and the future.

were we. Suddenly, the song got interrupted for a special broadcast, in which a guy was jabbering about some disaster somewhere in the country and there being a need for canned food, water, and, especially, bottles of alcohol for the rescue workers. He was asking everyone to hand in all surpluses they might have at the Center Camp cafe. Yeh, right, I remember thinking, aren’t we all rescue workers in need of a drink?… So that was how the news of New Orleans reached me. Looking back on it now, it is not that strange or insensitive that I would first assume it to be a prank - if there is one thing that Burning Man thrives on it is the omnipresence of irony and pranks. I guess that I just could not believe that during that one moment, when the whole world seemed to be made of such perfect bliss, a natural catastrophe far greater than anything the USA had ever experienced before could strike somewhere else. It seemed too unreal; another of those random rumors that swirl through Black Rock City. “They’re serious,” one of my neighbors who had arrived on the playa only that morning insisted, “New Orleans is gone, a hurricane by the name of Katrina blew it out to sea.” In the next few hours and days, news trickled through slowly on the playa. For the participants, the playa’s main portal to the outside world is still and only its, rather limited, WiFi connection. Other than that, there are no outside newspapers or radio reception, no televisions to watch, no cell phone connection.

Ideology & Future Plans The essential point of Burning Man is not what it is now but what it suggests for the future, which is not just a new cultural form but the possibility of a new way of being, a kind of radical openness toward experience that maintains responsibility for community. […] Burning Man, in fact, is increasingly taking on a double mission: In one way, it models what the world could be, and in another it embodies dedication to changing what the world is. This is, to say the very least, an intensely challenging vision. (Pinchbeck 2003:176) One day at the playa, according to my notes it was already Thursday, I was at my camp organizing some data and filling up my notebook. The radio was on, tuned in to one of Black Rock City’s over fifteen radio stations – I don’t even remember which one – and it’s hilarious announcements and groovy tunes had me smiling from ear to ear. As my friend started slicing limes and crushing ice to make us some cocktails, friends and neighbors soon came over and within no time our small, improvised camp was full with people chatting, laughing, singing and dancing. Someone cranked the radio volume up even further: Tom Waits’ piano was still drinking, and so 103

On the second day after Katrina had passed through, the Burning Man organization made satellite images of New Orleans, as well as the latest news, available at the playa’s Network Operations Center. I went there, and it still seemed surreal. Surreal - and devastating. What had once been a beautiful, historic city and region had been wiped away, leaving many Burners without the option to return to their homes and quite literally stuck in the desert with all worldly possessions left. In the Center Camp café I found Disaster Relief buckets which had been put down to collect money. Luckily, in a city based on gift-giving, people were now also freely gifting money. Apparently, as I read later, within 48 hours, “with zero PR or advertising or formal pleas from Angelina Jolie or the Red Cross and sans any blank-eyed stares from our useless president,” 40.000 dollar was gathered at Burning Man, along with seven tons of food and a huge supply of bottled water. 140 But the efforts extended beyond material or monetary help. 140 From: Burning Man defies Katrina. How can a huge, feral party in the desert possibly matter? By Mark Morford. San Francisco Chronicle September 7, 2005,

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Several participants took Burning Man’s message of communal effort, civic responsibility, community building and gift-giving off the playa and into the area’s where Katrina had hit most hard. For me, their humanistic efforts stood to testify that Burning Man has really grown beyond the dusty borders of Black Rock City. More than just an annual event, Burning Man has become a way of life that inspires people to reconsider their relationship to the outside world. It is ideology through empathy, the combination of what Maffesoli dubs the polis, the political order that he sees us currently moving away from, and the thiase, the realm of identification that would characterize a neo-tribe. I think that the Burning Man community makes its thiase political; the sense of ‘weness’ preconditions individual and communal action - on a political and ideological level. Herewith, the ten principles are not just ideology or dogma, but truly a lived ethos. This final section of my thesis will be about the implementation of this ethos in everyday life, and the ‘Burners without Borders’ will commence it by showing how.

Katrina and the Burners without Borders

Already during the event, theme camp Katrina was initiated, where participants started their own relief efforts. Within days, a groundswell of aid and volunteers flowed from there. According to Tom Price, a journalist and Burner who stayed in New Orleans for nearly half a year, it showed that Burners had very well learned something in their secluded desert that could be of value in the real world:

When Burners started hitting the Gulf Coast, the question of whether Burning Man is more than just a big art party in the desert stopped being some boring art-house debate or pedantic argument yelled over drinks at the Make-Out Room. This is about as real as life gets. […] For many victims here, the help they're getting isn't from the government they've paid and fought and bled for; it's from a bunch of artists widely derided for the self-absorbed pointlessness of their behavior.141

One group, in particular, stood out, and it went by the name of ‘Burners without Borders’ (BwB). It included members of Black Rock City’s Department of Public Works, known as the DPW, and volunteers who had helped build the Temple of Dreams. Arriving on the Gulf Coast, they encountered a Vietnamese community in Biloxi, Mississippi, whose members were mourning over the broken remnants of their Buddhist temple. Ironically, the finalization of this recently constructed temple had occurred a mere twelve hours in advance of the oncoming storm. Then Katrina’s winds had swept it all away, leaving a large community without its spiritual and social core. Apparently, the ad hoc crew of Burners immediately set to work. Over the course of the next three months, they reconstructed the shattered temple. In doing this, the group was guided by the culture they had absorbed at Burning Man. Communal effort, radical self-reliance and civic responsibility – three out of Burning Man’s ten golden ten principles - were certainly in evidence. The Burners had arrived in the disaster zone already equipped with clothes, blankets, gear, a crane, a tractor, heavy machinery, water, fuel, generators and disparate skill sets. Having Burning Man experience, they knew what was required to survive and labor in a landscape stripped of usable resources, and they especially knew how to build community in a vacuum.

After three months in Biloxi and that job done, they moved to another needy Mississippi community, Pearlington: a rural and more devastated region from which over seventy percent had been destroyed. There, they continued debris removal and rebuilding. Amid this ruin, another one of Burning Man’s basic principle emerged, namely radical self-expression and artistic creativity. As newspaper clippings readily agree, this, more than anything, distinguished Burners without Borders from other relief groups. At the end of each working day, the crew began to fashion art from the appalling sprawl of storm debris. And every Saturday they would invite the locals over in the evening for drinks to watch the structures go up in flames with them. In an interview done for the Reno Gazette, volunteer Carmen Mauk is quoted saying “It was a place to come together around a fire. I think it was cathartic to the entire community to see their rubbish turned into art.”142 Over a total of more than eight months, 299 volunteers cycled through the ranks of Burners without Borders. They provided one million dollars worth of free demolition to homeowners,143 knocked down sixty homes, recycled tons of lumber into new homes, and fetched an untold number of runaway boats and sheds, as well as supplied water, beds, fuel, food and clothing to hundreds of people. They build shelters for rescue workers, canopies for those in line and solar powered WiFi connections so as to In: Burners bring help to victims of Katrina. By Kristin Larsen. Reno Gazette 9/5/2006. Demolition agencies were charging anywhere in between six and ten thousand dollars to knock down a house. In keeping up with Burning Man’s currency-free mode of exchange, BwB provided the service for free.

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coordinate donations coming in over the Internet. In a very practical sense, it seems that the very skills needed to survive at Burning Man would be the skills needed to respond to disaster. In the words of Tom Price: It turned out what we learned in the desert had very practical implications. Sure, there're the topical things; Burners tend to be, in general, pretty creative, self-reliant types who can handle being in a chaotic, unstable environment. So when they started hitting the Gulf Coast, they were prewired to know what to do: build shelter. Make food. Keep cold things cold and dry things dry. But more than that, all the talk about radical self-reliance, about operating in a gift economy, about thinking and acting from a place of civic responsibility – all that hot-air crap turned out to be exactly what was needed when things fell apart. Partying in the desert, it seems, was in some weird way like boot camp for a disaster.144 Beyond pure practicalities, by recreating what had been a sacred place, by transforming the remnants of human trauma into art, and by allowing people to redeem their sense of loss by making and burning art, I think that the Burners without Borders fulfilled more than a material need. Like on the playa, its motto of ‘building community through art, and action’ instilled a vital spirit in the default world of Missisipi that was both challenging and needed.

Born from the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, Burners Without Borders is volunteers dedicated to building community through social good works that reflect inclusion, self- reliance, civic responsibility, gifting, and above all, the belief that doing good can be fun, and done with style. Take action. Join us.145 As Burning Man’s culture expands outward, it is all about the reinsertion of its values into the world at large. The Burners without Borders project is certainly a good example of the shapes and forms this insertion can take, but it is by no means the whole picture. Specifically the combination of ideology with art has brought forth the Black Rock Arts Foundation, also known as BRAF, a not-for-profit organization, which raises money and distributes grants in support of community-based art and civic renewal.

The Black Rock Arts Foundation

Already in May 2001, the Burning Man organization founded the Black Rock Arts Foundation to help artists create interactive art experiences in places other than Black Rock City, particularly in civic contexts through an annual grant cycle. While Burning Man provides ample opportunity for artists to bring their work to a receptive audience, BRAF was born specifically out of the desire to help artists create the same genre of experiential art in the default world, and to reach and affect a much bigger public than that in the desert. Like on the playa, art as sponsored by BRAF is not there to be put in vaults or be removed in any other way from the realm of experience, but should instead have a communal function, as stated in the mission statement on its website: The mission of the Black Rock Arts Foundation is to support and promote community-based interactive art. For our purposes, interactive art means art that generates social participation. The process whereby this art is created, the means by which it is displayed and the character of the work itself should inspire immediate actions that connect people to one another in a larger communal context.146

Since my research, the Burners without Borders have continued to undertake humanistic projects. At Burning Man 2006, they collected 42 units of lumber; six full semi-trucks of recycled building material, which got donated to Habitat For Humanity and used to build homes for low-income families in Reno. In Chicago, BwB artists mentored students at a high school, showing them how to create to create art from ‘found objects’ and turning this into sculpture gardens on rooftops for the benefit of commuters on the city’s elevated trains. Worldwide, there was the International Clean Up Day, in which public parks and beaches all over the world got a thorough clean. In Nevada, the Black Rock Solar project has just been initiated, in which hundreds of kilowatts of solar power are build and given away in poor rural communities, and in Asia there are even two Tsunami Relief Efforts still going on. On the Burners without Borders website it reads:

As Harley Dubois, vice president of the Black Rock Arts Foundation emphasizes in an interview, BRAF is there for artists who are creating not just for the playa, but in that spirit for other places. She immediately 145

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nuances this though, because like at Burning Man, everyone can be an artist, and BRAF is especially keen on personal projects in which everyone can participate, bring in ideas and work together. That way, art in a social context generates participation that can eventually create social change: The object of the Black Rock Arts Foundation is to take whatever that is that you have when you go home [from Burning Man] as meaningful for you and to bring it to fruition in your home the other weeks a year. So instead of waiting for Burning Man and waiting and waiting you bring it home with you and you manifest it for yourself. This way it will be different for everybody and it will be in your own home and it will become part of your world which will then affect other people and hopefully create change over time. (Dubois, interview July 26th, 2005)

In Burning Man’s birthplace, the San Francisco Arts Commission has partnered up with BRAF to bring eight Burning Man art projects to the city so far, with a ninth and tenth on the way. The trend began in the summer of 2005 when a key symbol of the Burning Man culture came home and was put on display in the heart of the city’s newest showcase boulevard, Octavia in Hayes Green. In the press release, the decision to choose longtime Burning Man artist David Best to build his temple is explained: The Mayor along with the Arts Commission engaged Best to create a new work to recognize the contribution of Burning Man to the cultural life of the Bay Area, and to emphasize the city’s dedication to community, environmental sustainability, and art made from recycled materials.147 At: http://www.sfartscommission.org/pubart/about_us/press_releases/2005/6-905.htm, accessed July 2nd, 2005.

In true Burning Man fashion, Best’s Temple was a temporary art project, only present from May to September 2005. Although in the end, it was dismantled rather than burned, it still had interactivity written all over it. And I mean that literal. City officials first freaked out when people started writing on the art they had commissioned, and a local resident even told me how she had seen how the first couple scribbling on the by then still pristine wooden structure got arrested by the police, but by the time I arrived in the city, at the end of June, the Temple had already been plastered with drawings, text, stickers, and objects left behind – just as Best always likes to see happening with his art.

According to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Temple has been both a hit and a learning experience for the city. Jill Manton, the city’s Art Commission’s director of public art and the main person who executed the Mayor’s idea to bring the Temple to San Francisco, is quoted saying “It’s the first time in my 22-year career in public art that a piece has pleased everyone. Everyone was excited about bringing Burning Man to the people.”148 The Temple and its success paved the way for more interactive and Burning Man related art projects to be brought into the city’s public areas, such as Michael Christian’s Flock, displayed in Civic Center Plaza for three months; Passage, a giant scrap-metal sculpture of a mother and child displayed on the Embarcadero; and Pepe Ozan’s Dreamer in the Golden Gate Park. These projects have all adorned the playa at one time or another, and indeed the newest trend seems to be not to burn the art at the end of Burning Man, but to erect it someplace else or even ‘tour’ with. Exemplary of this is the art made by the Flaming Lotus Girls, which has been part of our own Amsterdam based Robodock festival for the last three years. However, there are also art projects made specifically with BRAF grants, such as Stan, the Submerging Man, an 18-foot bell diver covered with 45-r.p.m. records in a park south of Market

147

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Street, and three temporary public sculptures from reclaimed and recycled materials, displayed in different neighborhood parks under the name of ScrapEden SF. The list goes on and, and by now, in the year 2007, we can even slowly add art projects from outside of San Francisco. BRAF is, for example, (partly) funding a fire art festival in South Africa, and a new Temple project in Detroit, where Best will be using reclaimed car parts instead of wood this time. Like the art created by Burners without Borders, the ‘Temple of the American Dream’ will arise from the detritus of America’s great Rust Belt. In the words of the Dream Project’s web site: A driving goal is to involve the community and local artists, spreading the message that all of the people can participate and create together. Through broad-based community participation, the project will cross the great racial divide that has plagued Detroit's art and city revitalization for years.149

areas, but I do think that the thought behind BRAF and its aims to ‘inspire art, community and civic participation’ hold potential for the future. Venturing beyond San Francisco and into the world, the Black Rock Arts Foundation often collaborates with the regional communities we talked about before. Both strive to integrate the Burning Man ethos into the world by nurturing interactive arts events, projects, and community building. Practically, regional contacts automatically become members of BRAF, and a representative group of contacts serves on its art grant advisory committee. On a deeper level, as far as spreading Burning Man’s ethos on a worldwide level is concerned, I guess that whereas the regional contacts are there to protect its image and culture, BRAF is there to furnish the movement with funding. If we are to believe Harvey, the Regional Network, including Burners without Borders and the Black Rock Arts Foundation, exist as social instruments towards Burning Man’s so called ‘diaspora;’ intended to disperse or spread its originally localized ethos. The network has the Burning Man culture reaching outward in self-propagation; leaping across the bright orange trash fence that encloses Black Rock City, into the world at large. According to Harvey, now is the time to try to influence the very culture against which Burning Man’s participants traditionally rebelled. Maybe, as some of my respondents have claimed, this is the time that signifies Burning Man’s tipping point, and in which it indeed will affect local politics and eventually global change. Maybe, in a few years time, Burning Man as a festival will have made itself redundant, swallowed by the regional events it inspired. Maybe Harvey is right when, asked about the future of Burning Man, he answered, while pointing at Black Rock City, “In the fullness of time, maybe this will disappear - because it will have served its purpose. The children will have left the nursery.”150 As one leaves the playa, there is the inevitable succession of exit signs, saying things like ‘Welcome… to the Default World: … Whose fault… is that?’ and ‘Move The World… Change Yourself.’ When I drove out in 2005, the last two sign read ‘What happens… in Las Vegas… stays in Las Vegas…What happens in…Black Rock City…doesn’t stay in…Black Rock City.’ Personally, I really believe that an event that is capable of manifesting such change on an individual level - as most of my respondents testified it had done -, does indeed hold potential to manifest such change on a global level. And maybe, just maybe, in another decade or so I will be writing, not just a final chapter, but a whole dissertation on Burning Man’s legacy to the world.

As the Black Rock Arts Foundation has more grants to give away (250.000 dollars in 2006), more art will trickle out with the intention to bud more local actions into global projects and bring more people into contact with the Burning Man culture. It is a slow process, and it might sometimes seem insignificant to simply have a few temporary projects on display in public From: Burning Man counterculture seeks social, political influence. By Don Thompson. Las Vegas Sun September 1st, 2003.

150 149

On: http://www.detroitdreamproject.org/

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Conclusion

Conclusion Ancient religious ritual used to be full of vigorous, joyful celebrations where people would lose themselves and do wild things. Burning Man is a lot like that, but it's not simply a party. If people are schlepping their stuff to the desert and living in a harsh environment -- there has to be something bigger going on. (Kozinets 2005:3) This thesis has demonstrated that, as the manifestation of the festival’s classic time out of time, Burning Man is a typical playground secluded in space and time. But it is more than just its obvious elements of excess, fun, hedonism, transgression and celebration. Through narrative, ritual and irony, Burning Man participants establish a dynamic contrast between the festival world and everyday society, in which the former takes on a heightened reality and represents an alternative world made over by festival-goers’ views of law enforcement, art, economics, self and community. It is a world in which the usual rules and standards are ignored, inverted, subverted or simply danced around, in order to reestablish contact with one’s self, the other and the world at large. Going against what are perceived as alienating, individuating and numbing structures of society, Black Rock City’s physical and social infrastructure is consciously devised to bring a sense of community to its heterogeneous citizens. It does so by presenting a lived-in, ritualized reality in which participation is emphasized over the spectacle, creation over mediation, experience over meaning, proxemics over comfort, self-policy over regulation, art over anaesthetics, the gift over commodities, and a way of life over a lifestyle. In ritual liminality, people play with elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them. Betwixt and between two stages or statuses in life, participants are emotional and often physical removed from their everyday life and identity. It is both a potent and dangerous stage, in which the temporal distance can cause alienation and anomie, but also offers room for reflection and regeneration. Nowadays, though, in our secular, individualized and fragmented West, the sensory domains of the liminal have been replaced with and reduced to the liminoid; a set of entertainment genres and empty spectacles flourishing in the leisure time of society, no longer in a central driving place. The age of science and technology has driven us towards the manageable and the feasible, and with the following decline of meaning and wonder, our disenchantment with the world, each other and ourselves was complete. As Harvey Cox in the introduction to his Feast of Fools phrases it: Mankind has paid a frightful price for the present opulence of Western industrial society. […] While gaining the world he has been losing his own soul. He has purchased prosperity at the cost of a staggering impoverishment of the vital elements of his life. These elements are festivity –the capacity for genuine revelry and joyous celebration, and fantasy –the faculty for envisioning radically alternative life situations. (Cox 1969:7) It is necessary to have a resurgence of hope, celebration, liberation, and experimentation in the West; a return to our celebrative and imaginative

faculties; a homecoming to the realm of festivity and fantasy. In this thesis, I have tried to show how Burning Man does exactly that: bringing the liminal, festive, performative and transformative back in its weeklong ritual. As I have argued, immediatism and social criticism wrapped in art and selfexpression, projected on the blank screen of the Black Rock Desert, cause a re-enchantment that is made to last far after the festival is over. Anthropologist Margaret Thompson Drewel, building on the earlier work of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, writes that in Yoruba culture, “rituals operate not merely as models of and for society that somehow stand timelessly alongside ‘real’ life. Rather they construct what reality is and how it is experienced and understood” (Drewel 1992:174). Burning Man works hard to represent itself as a new reality. On the website it is stated that the festival is a critical response to corporate America and an antidote to consumerism, but also, rhetorically, added to this “Where else, but in America, would people be invited to pack their belongings, journey into a desert wilderness, and there create the portrait of a visionary world?”151 There is an expectation and excitement in the festival atmosphere that makes participants feel that they are contributing to a powerful social force. Ritualized reality is brought back home and there alters the very concept of what reality should look like. In 2005, the year of my research, the Burning Man was built and set ablaze for the twentieth time. I do not think that anyone could have predicted, back on Baker Beach in 1986, that a spark was being put not just to an effigy, but also to the start of a (r)evolution of such social force. During those first years, Burning Man’s reality was certainly not that well constructed or constructive. There were no rules, yet, and what had started as a small participatory community soon turned into a dissociated mob. When the event moved into the desert, by its very nature the new location and duration made it the perfect temporary autonomous zone in which people could momentarily play outside of mediated structures and control systems; an escape from society that was rather anarchic in nature. Like Bey argues for his Temporary Autonomous Zones, such spaces were always temporal in nature though, and any form of empowerment lay within the escape, not the re-entry, of structure. Burning Man, however, evolved from this, and instead of opposing or escaping society it took the other route by letting structure in, and by becoming structured itself. The new direction was both needed for the festival’s immediate survival as characteristic of its future agenda. Burning Man went civic. Becoming a city did not only entail the presence of an infrastructure, regulatory instances, an outer perimeter, prime real estate, and zoning, but also more and more heterogeneous citizens. In order to unite these people, an ethos slowly started to start shape, with the specific intention of creating community; bringing forth a shared sense of sociality, ideology, aesthetics and ethics. The idea of an impermanent community manifested in those occasions, events, or rituals distinct from everyday life and structure is not new. Turner saw an egalitarian state of communitas to take place within liminality, Maffesoli showed how a neo-tribal sociality would arise out of the orgiastic, Bey argues for the complementation and completion of Self and Other in temporary autonomous zones, and Firat and Dholakia conceptualize emancipatory communities in theatres of consumption. However, the communal characteristics of these social forms are epiphenomena of other experiences – of initiation, puissance, immediacy, or emancipation - and not the basis of their attractiveness to participants. Kozinets therefore suggests the term hypercommunity to describe a wellorganized, strong, caring and sharing community based on impermanence, such as he saw manifested at Burning Man. On: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1998/98n_letter_win_1.html, accessed July 19th 2007.

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In this thesis, Burning Man’s ongoing experiment in community has indeed been traced and shown to work, but that has not been the end of the story, nor, as I have argued, the end of the experiment in, and experience of a Burner’s community. In its latest phase, Burning Man is about the coordination of a dynamic, growing global community; a connective regional network bringing events and cutting-edge art into communities worldwide. It is about re-inserting the Burning Man culture and values in everyday life, and as much about fun as it is about social and political change. In the end, Burning Man is no longer contained within any counteror subcultural form, divided from society through self-imposed metaphorical fences of opposition, isolation, or escape. Instead, moving beyond its one week existence, it is “changing the world through art cars, bone towers, Danger Ranger, smut shacks, fire cannons, Glitter Camp, fighting robots, exploding men, princess warriors, pulsing soundscapes, neon skies, metal dragons, and Dr. Megavolt” (Doherty 2004:subtitle). Apart from changing the world, I think that Burning Man shows us a world populated by a fluid, but strong community – an image that seems to go directly against the modernist assumption that social life would be falling apart. At the same time, even though Burning Man acknowledges the dynamics of sociality and society, it does not comfortable fit into what can be seen as ‘postmodern’ theorizing on the alleged fragmentation, instability, and more or less superficiality of contemporary tribes, formulated for instance by Maffesoli.152 Rather than being squeezed into any existing theoretical mold of community, ritual or festival; stripped of its many layers and its essence laid bare and fixed under a social-scientific microscope, the world of Burning Man is a kaleidoscopic and dynamic world; processual and constant in the making. Though never dull, it has not been the easiest world to grasp, describe or structure. I guess that possibly like with all social life, the harder I tried to pin it down; the more I tried to concretize and inscribe all those abstract and theoretical debates, the further my subject seemed to get away from me - both on a conceptual as well as empirical level. After all, Burning Man is still a highly experiential, unmediated, participatory phenomenon – and takes great pride in that. Even being a participant observer instead of square participant caused some internal strife at times. My scientific endeavors made an emphasis on the latter feel like I was ‘going native;’ jeopardizing my academic objectivity, whilst my position as a visitor of the festival made an emphasis on the first feel like I was a so called ‘yahoo;’ a spoilsport of everything Burning Man stands for. In abstract form, Maffesoli described such anthropological anguish as a “complex ‘Situationism,’” where an observer is simultaneously, if only partially, implicated in the situation he is describing: “Competence and appetence go hand in hand; hermeneutics supposes that we are a part of what we describe; requires a certain community of outlook” (Maffesoli 1996:5). According to him, such approach is necessarily if we are ever to come to understanding of individuals and groups. Overcoming scientific rigidity, a researcher has to look beyond his or her current concerns of individualization and alienation, and see the affirmative puissance of sociality that lies below the surface of social existence. In Maffesoli’s view, socials sciences’ methodological and theoretical tools of abstractism and statistics for producing trivial quasi-scientific analyses of social life are simply worthless when researching the bubbling, secretive, imperfect forms of sociality which he saw characterizing neoStrictly speaking, I think that Maffesoli would reject the postmodern/modern dichotomy insofar as, like all simplistic dichotomies in social sciences, it does violence to the complexity of society and the extensivity and intensivity of social networks. For Maffesoli, the term postmodernity is only really to use insofar as it raises the issue of what is termed ‘tradition’ still remains at the heart of the modern era. For me, it is a discussion I no longer want to enter at this point, hence my choice for putting ‘postmodern’ in between quote signs. 152

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tribes. In the words of Abby Peterson, summarizing Maffesoli’s point of view in this matter: “Perhaps contemporary social theorists are more alienated from social existence than social existence is itself alienated” (Peterson 1997:324). Through all my digressions and disorder, I sometimes cherish the vain (in both sense of the term) hope that Maffesoli might have approved of my attempts at coming to terms with Burning Man’s very bubbly sociality. In hindsight, I have certainly lived up to his worthy advice on how to follow most closely ‘the bumpy route taken by all social life:’ Thus, rather than trying to fool ourselves into thinking we can seize, explain and exhaust an object, we must be content to describe its shape, its movements, hesitations, accomplishments and its various convulsions. (Maffesoli 1996:5) By describing Burning Man’s shape, movements, hesitations, accomplishments and various convulsions, the key element of transformation that has played such a vital role in the process has certainly affected me as well. It has been an interesting process; self-expressive, selfreliant and most definitely participatory. And next week, when the Man burns and its world will start anew, even though I will not be there to witness it, little sparks of it will always stay within my own renewed world.

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Appendix A - Glossary

Appendix A - Glossary 10 Principles: the 10 core guiding concepts of the Burning Man project. Ancestors: spiraling, tornado-like dust plumes that traverse the playa, either produced by wind or by heat from large fires, like the Man burning. Art Bike: kissing cousin to the art car, the art bike is a decorated or ‘mutated’ bicycle, and is the preferred method of transporting oneself around the playa. Art Cars: see Mutant Vehicles. Baker Beach: San Francisco beach where Burning Man originated. Black Rock: A large dark rock formation at the north end of the playa. Black Rock City: The annual, temporary city created by the community of Burning Man participants. Black Rock Gazette: Newspaper produced on-site in the desert during the Burning Man event. Black Rock Geyser: A water truck, frequently pursued by pedestrians and bicyclists for it's brief but refreshing shower. Though the water can be quite hot, the moisture helps to relieve the desert heat. BLM: Bureau of Land Management, government agency which administers public lands, including the Black Rock Desert. BMOrg: Short for Burning Man Organization, this term is actually a common misnomer. The actual name for the organizers of the Burning Man event is the "Burning Man Project". BRC: Black Rock City Burn, the: Reference to the actual event, and activity, of burning the Burning Man statue. Burner: One who has attended Burning Man, and takes the spirit of the event back with them to the default world. Burning Man Shock: More or less the opposite of Culture Shock, a state of happiness, euphoria and freedom which sets in while attending Burning Man, after one has conformed to "normal" life for too long. Cacophony Society: A randomly gathered network of pranksters and eccentric individuals, united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the mainstream of culture. Camp Arctica: The camp on playa where participants can purchase ice to keep their perishables fresh, and their bodies cooled. Proceeds from ice sales are donated to local charities. Camera Obscura: A darkened room or building fitted with a specially designed lens which projects an outside image onto a screen or table inside. Cattle Guard: A closely spaced group of horizontal pipes placed in a roadbed at fence line to prevent cattle from escaping and yet allow vehicles free access. Center Camp: Large circular area and structures located in the center of Black Rock City. Chasing Shadows: Dashing across the playa in pursuit of brightly burning objects, only to arrive after the crescendo, or when the object has already burned to ashes, and then doing it again and again to the point of exhaustion. Concrete Stake: Heavy-duty steel stake with a series of small holes along the length. Coyote Man: Community legend about a local resident who runs with coyotes at night. Culture Shock: A state of melancholy, anger or frustration which sets in trying to readjust to ‘normal’ life after one has attended Burning Man. Danger Ranger: Founder and icon hero of the Black Rock Rangers.

Decompression: A party held one month after Burning Man to give participants a brief chance to return to Black Rock City. Offers relief from the Reality Bends. Default World: The rest of the world that is not the playa during the Burning Man event. Dehydration: Medical condition that results from not drinking enough water. DMV (Department of Mutant Vehicles): The team of dedicated volunteers who review and register Mutant Vehicles, giving them permission to drive on the playa during the event. Donner Award: Annual award given to the individual, or group, who pushes the limits of personal survival through stupidity, inattention or just bad luck during the event. DPW: Department of Public Works. Dust Devils: see Ancestors. Earplugs: Small foam ear inserts used to reduce loud noise. Earth Guardians: A subgroup of Burning Man participants who work with the BLM to care for the Black Rock Desert. Earth Guardians are trained in Leave No Trace techniques. EL Wire: Electroluminscent Wire. Cool, glowing stuff used to make moving objects and sculptures out of light. The must-have accessory for the event! Exodus: the process and organization of the mass participant departure from the playa at the end of the event. Exploding Man: Legendary fireworks performance. Fire Breathing: A technique whereby someone blows a flammable liquid across a torch or match to produce a large burst of flame. Fire Dancing: The most popular past-time on the playa. The art of dancing with fire, usually in the form of poi, staff, hoops, fans, or other devices. Fire Walking: A technique of walking barefooted on live embers, best performed after moistening the feet. Fire Jumping: A technique of jumping over a burning fire, sometimes with negative results when two opposing jumpers collide in mid-air. Gifting: A core tenet of the Burning Man ethos, gifting is the act of giving something (material or otherwise) to another person without any expectation of receiving something in return. Heat Exhaustion: A more serious form of dehydration. HELCO: Fictional corporation which attempted to buy Burning Man in 1996. ICS: Incident Command System, an action plan to be used by the Rangers in the event of serious emergency. Jack Rabbit Speaks: Internet-based newsletter produced by Burning Man organization. Java Cow: Community legend which appears with hot coffee at sunrise on the morning of the Burn and asks the question: “Do you want cream or sugar with your coffee?” Khakis: Durable, tan-colored clothing which has become the standard uniform of the Rangers. Not to be confused with the ubiquitous tan-colored GAP clothing worn by business-casual office drones the world over. Lamp Posts: The series of vertical lighting fixtures which line walkways and delineate areas of BRC. Lamplighters: the volunteer group who lights kerosene lanterns each night of the Burning Man event to illuminate the esplanade and promenades, providing participants with valuable navigational aids. Leave No Trace: A philosophy learned during a rigorous 3-day backcountry training expedition, during which participants are taught to clean up after themselves completely. Also one of the central tenets of the Burning Man festival. No, really, we're serious about this. Lingam: The erect penis: companion to Yoni, and a symbolic of creative power. 114

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Man, the: Term used for the Burning Man statue. Media Ho’s: Members of the Burning Man Media Team. Their mission is to cajole the media into presenting fresh and interesting stories about the event. They can be recognized by their silver cowboy hats. Miss Information: Legendary distributor of wisdom at Playa Info. Can be recognized by her bright green plumage. MOOP: Matter Out Of Place. Litter, debris, rubbish. Mutant Vehicle: a motorized conveyance that is radically, stunningly, (usually) permanently, and safely modified. Larry Harvey likens Mutant Vehicles to “sublimely beautiful works of art floating across the playa like a Miro painting.” Licensed by the DMV, these vehicles are an important part of the Burning Man experience. Newbie: Any person who is attending Burning Man for the first time. Can often be recognized by the call they utter when coming out of the PortaPotties on Tuesday: “That wasn't so bad.” Nose Tators: Playa dust nostril plugs that form during the event; spelling derived from a contraction of ‘No Spectators.’ No Spectators: Another central tenet of the Burning Man philosophy. By blurring the line between audience and performer, everybody is a superstar at Burning Man. Obtainium: Any useful and valued material which is found or obtained for free. Open Playa: the portion of the playa that is within the pentagonal event space, but is used exclusively for art installations rather than camping space. Participant: Uh, that would be you... Piss Clear: The 2nd newspaper to appear in BRC. The name is derived from the survival axiom “Drink so much water that you piss clear.” Platina: The uniform sheen on the surface of any object which has been on the Black Rock Desert for more than an hour. Playa: Spanish word for beach. Playa Chicken: Community legend of a rare species of vicious, carnivorous chickens reputed to live in the Black Rock Desert. Any strange phenomenon that is not readily attributable to any known cause may be blamed on Playa Chickens. Playa Foot: a common malady where one's feet become dry and cracked due to prolonged exposure to the highly alkaline desert floor. Playa Info: Information booth located in Center Camp. Playa Madness: Mental condition that occurs after being out in the Black Rock Desert for more than a week at a time. Playa Name: originally spawned by the need for unique names on the staff’s 2-way radios, playa names have become almost ubiquitous, and are often used to provide an individual with an ‘alternate’ personality/persona. Playa names are traditionally given to a person, rather than taken on. Playa Platforms: What your footwear immediately becomes after it rains on the playa, when 2-3 inches of mud rapidly accumulates on the bottoms of your shoes. Playafication (adj.: playafied): the process by which all participants' shoes/feet, hair, tents, carpets, furniture, vehicles, etc. become the same serene shade of playa-tan due to ubiquitous dust build-up. Poi: traditional Maori dance prop popular with fire performers. Made with a knot of wick at the end of a rope. Potlatch: American Indian term for a gathering or festival in which gift giving is featured. Project, the: Term for the Burning Man Project, organization name. Quinn River: Located at the northeast side of Black Rock Desert, this springtime river empties onto the playa and then driess up during the summer. Ranger HQ: The actual building and base of operations for the Rangers. 115

Ranger Station: The general, public accessible, campsite/complex and base of Ranger operations. Reality Bends: Cramps felt in the mind and spirit after returning to the "real" world after spending a week in Black Rock City. Best remedied by Decompression. Rebar: Cheap steel rods often used for tent stakes. Recompression: parties and events put on by Burners before Burning Man to get inspired for their upcoming playa experience. Regionals: the global representatives of Burning Man who help connect Burners with fellow Burners off playa, while producing events and upholding the 10 Principles. Sensory Overload: Just attending Burning Man. This is generally a blissful state, however, there is some sadness in the realization that a human can only witness a tiny fraction of the vast, non-stop, brilliant activities occurring during the week-long festival. Survivally-challenged: Politically correct term for any participant whose judgment is impaired by drugs or alcohol. TAZ: Temporary Autonomous Zone (term coined by writer Hakim Bey). Theme Camp: A campsite which artistically presents an idea or concept and is designed to be interactive with participants. Village: Affinity group of theme camps. White-out: A dust storm which produces near-zero visibility. Yoni: ‘Vulva,’ the primary Tantric object of worship.

Appendix B - Respondents

Appendix B - Respondents Justin, interview July 17th 2005 Justin has been going to Burning Man on and off for the better part of the last eight years. He also happened to be my housemate, and a gatherer of Burning Man related data that even I have not been able to surpass. At breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and one formal interview in the beginning of our acquintance, he told me all about Burning Man’s evolvement throughout the years, and how it had began to influence the party he himself organizes in San Francisco: Howard Street’s yearly How Weird Street Fair. Cosmo Heartbear, interview July 19th 2005 Cosmo has been attending Burning Man for six years now. In the ‘default world’ he is a software engineer, but on the playa he holds spiritual sessions in his ‘shamanic healing shack.’ This year Burning Man was apparently so powerful for him, that he decided to give up his job and pursue his much preferred path as a healer. I was especially interested to hear about this spiritual side of Burning Man (he is part of the HeeBeeGeeBee Healing Camp “Think of us as the calm in the middle of the storm;” a camp where you can take classes or just participate in yoga, massage, meditation reiki, channeling and all sorts of more or less ‘New Age’ activities), and about the apparent ongoing transformation that Burning Man brought him. Harley Dubois, interview July 26th 2005) In the eighties, Harley came to San Francisco to visit a friend, and never left. She first learned of Burning Man in 1991, while living in a household populated by Cacophony Society members. She decided to make the trek to Black Rock City on a spur-of-the-moment decision, and has been working with the organization ever since. Today, she is the Director of Community Services, where it is her job to listen to what participants want, and make it happen. Her long list of responsibilities include placing all services, camps and villages, managing ingress and egress, managing the volunteer process, and overseeing Playa Information Services, Greeters, Burning Man Recycling, Earth Guardians, the Lamplighters, the Bus Depot, Town Meetings, and many staff meetings and functions. As Director of the Playa Safety Team Harley oversees the Rangers, the Gate and Perimeter, and the Emergency Services Department. From her, I especially wanted to know all about the civic structure and the people making and using it. John Prochnov, interview July 26th 2005 John has been attending Burning Man for three years, but has just accepted a full time position as ‘human resources manager’ at the Burning Man office. In this position he brought me in and guided me, and especially spent many an hour answering all my questions. We also did one official interview, in which I asked him all about the switch he made from corporate life to a life at an office still, but the Burning Man office nonetheless. Laura, interview July 28th 2005 I met Laura in 2004 on the playa, and back in San Francisco I gladfully stayed in her house for another three weeks where she took me to all the Burning Man related events and friends and happenings. Yet another example of the Burning Man gift-economy. When we met up again in 2005, I officially wanted to know all about her five previous playa experiences, as well as about the over 250 weeks in between.

Julie Chaase, interview August 7th 2005 Julie went to Burning Man two times, and her story is a bit like mine. After attending the festival for the first time, she knew she wanted to write her MA thesis for her studies in Theater at the University of Colorado-Boulder on the festival. And she did, in 2002. Her main question involved the possible transfer of Burning Man’s week long community on the playa into opportunities for collaboration in web-based text and art, hence forming a real community online. As I definitely see certain links between the Burning Man festival and the World Wide Web, I wanted to hear her position on this and on community in general. Of course I was also very curious to hear about her thesis project. Luckily, I managed to get hold of her while she was working in San Francisco, writing theater reviews for the San Francisco Weekly. LadyBee, interview August 10th 2005 Ladybee a.k.a. Christine Kristen, was a burner and an artist who got the unique opportunity to combine her passions almost 10 years ago when she was hired to help bring art to Burning Man. “I’m just someone in the community who came along at the right time and had the right qualifications,” LadyBee told me, referring to her MFA in sculptures, visits with artists around the world, and work as an artist in New York and San Francisco. Today, she is in charge of the artist proposals. Me being there at the right time, I wanted to know everything about art on the playa, the Borg 2 rebellion and her take on that. Randy Bohlender, interview September 2nd 2005 This was the only person I actually did an ‘official’ interview with on the playa itself. He was unusual enough for this, and even though I was still not feeling well, the talk I had with him still strikes me as one of the most… satisfying. Randy had been to the playa three times before, every time distributing thousands small bottles of water to the community. This is all not very exceptionally, but the fact that Randy is a born-again Christian, and even stronger, a pastor, is. When I asked him why he and his church team would choose to spend so much effort and resources to give water to a group that, at least on the surface, seemed to be proudly at odds with much of what the church has stood for down over the years, he simply replied: “to show that God loves in a practical way!”. We talked about many things, but mostly about the giving and altruism and art on the playa and in society. It really was an amazing interview. And then of course, as the playa gives, the playa takes, when I wanted to transcribe this particular tape, it turned out to ruined probably because of the playa dust (yes, alkaline eats away everything). Luckily I made some notes during the interview, but this missing tape is still making me sad. John "Chicken John" Rinaldi, intoxicated monologue September 10th 2005 Has been part of Burning Man since 1996, and a very big part as well. Always the trickster and always the (sometimes very deviant) clown, Chicken John has never shunned the limelight, both on and off-playa. After giving up on the bar that he owned for several years in San Francisco – and that has always been a meeting place of the more raucous burners – in 2004 he started his BORG 2 project out of dissatisfaction with the art on the playa that year. Borg 2 was all about a democratic art selection process, intended to eventually bring more (collaborative) art to the playa instead of what he perceived to be a growing emphasis on parties. Unfortunately Chicken John is still a very busy man, so I didn’t get as much time to ask him as much as I wanted, but the little time I had for ‘interviewing’ was very interesting, and showed me a very critical other side of the ever-changing coin that is Burning Man. The latest news (July 2007) is that Chicken John is now 116

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running for mayor in San Francisco. With a little help from the Burner’s community, he hopes he can bring some much needed life and Burning spirit into local politics. 2005 Jensen, interview September Attended Burning Man for the first time in 2005, where he absolutely did NOT enjoy himself that much. I met him right after the event through common friends, and was curious to hear about any possible criticism he might have towards the festival and its ideologies. Why never to come back? What was it that he disliked so much and what could I learn from this? 12th

2005 Zac Bolan, interview September Zac became the first Regional representative for Canada way back in 1998, and still holds the Calgary Burners under his wings. ‘His’ Burners come together a few times over the year, hosting an annual ‘Prairie Fire’ regional Decompression event for two years now just outside of Calgary. There have also been other events such as a Kanadian Broadcasting Korporation party, SantaCon, summer & winter Solstice gatherings, attendance at local arts events/openings, potlucks, socials, dancing, mayhem, and general brou ha ha. In a newsletter, he shares ideas on camping, art, supplies, costumes, how to navigate 5000 kilometers trekking from year-round home to playa home, and how to survive plus 40 C for a week when coming from a land generally associated with igloos. Needless to say, when I spotted him at the Burning Man office for a meeting, I wanted to know everything about his regional program and subsequent cultural insertion. 19th

Scarecrow, interview September 19th 2005 Has been part of the DPW (Department of Public Works, responsible for the massive task of building, maintaining, and cleaning up Black Rock City) for about six years now, and is actually getting paid this time. Scarecrow is on the playa for about three months a year, taking care of things before and after the event. As Burning Man is such a massive part of his life, I wanted to know about any perceptions he might have on the possible future of Burning Man, and changes throughout the years. Michael, interview September 20th 2005 Michael Michael a.k.a Danger Ranger discovered the Man in 1988, presented it to the Cacophony Society, and is still with it to this date. Nowadays, he is one of the most significant figures within the organization; one of the six members of the LLC project staff. In 1992 he founded the Black Rock Rangers, meaning that he literally oversees the security and survival of the Burning Man community. He also created the first Burning Man mailing list/data base, produced the first issue of the Black Rock Gazette (the official Burning Man newspaper on the playa), established the Burning Man Archive, and drove the first art car to the Black Rock Desert. With him I was most interested in what he could tell me about the history and growth of Burning Man, and the many roots it historically has in Californian countercultures. Marian Goodell, interview September 20th 2005 Maid Marian attended Burning Man for the first time in 1995, and has been going ever since. In 1996 she joined the Burning Man staff as the so called ‘Mistress of Communication.’ In her own words, during those early days: “if Burning Man were to be an embodied being, I would have been its voice.” Just like John, Marian comes from corporate life, where she previously worked as a project manager for a software cum web development firm. As she now also manages all legal, business and accounting aspects of the festival, I wanted her to specifically tell me more about the structure of the 117

organization (they are now a limited liability organization) and the changes that she saw happening throughout the years. Maximillian (Max), interview September 22nd 2005 Six-time burner, playa DJ and producer in everyday life. Heavily involved with the ‘El Circo’ collective and the breakz scene, both on and off-playa. In 2004, Max was still living together with Laura, where I stayed with after Burning Man. Also with him, for the greater part we talked about how San Francisco and the playa influence and appropriate each other, and how dynamic this system really is. Fernando, interview September 22nd 2005 Four time burner, normally living in Los Angeles. Just like Max part of the El Circo collective, where he performs ‘circus style’ on and off playa. For the past two years, next to preparing for the playa nearly all year, he has been investing a lot of his time in the L.A. Decompression parties. I wanted to see if he could pin point some differences between the Burner scene in San Francisco and the one in L.A., and hear about any thoughts he made have on that matter. Michael Gosney, interview September 24th 2005 Ten time burner, “and still hooked.” In everyday life he manages the Green Century Institute “dedicated to the evolution of sustainable communities in the 21st century;” continues to hold Digital Be-ins; and is in general a very busy bee, making links between technology, sustainability and the rave (psychedelic) scene. On top of this he is a dj, playing both full on psychedelic trance and more down tempo sets. He has been responsible for the first ‘Community Dance’ on the playa, as a result of ongoing frictions between ravers and the Burning Man organization, and I wondered if he could enlighten me on the what I perceived to be an ongoing matter of friction between the ‘established’ Burning Man order and the rave scene that is so omnipresent on the festival now. Daniel Pinchbeck, conversation September 29th 2005 Four time burner and a special one for me as it was through his book Breaking Open the Head (2003) that I first learned a little bit more about Burning Man. Later I found out that he had also written several articles on Burning Man, for sources such as Artforum and Wired. His emphasis is mainly on the ritualistic, spiritually sacred and transformative aspects of the playa – which he puts in words with great fervor and enthusiasm. The conversation I had with him was especially helpful because he was able to put Burning Man in a much larger context of utopian experiments and living in the here and now. Crash, interview October 1st 2005 Five-time burner, living in San Francisco on Haight Street, just around the corner from my own house. Outside playa life a personal trainer, and motor bike fanatic. On the playa part of the animal rescue patrol: “We will make daily collections of pesky playa creatures who are running free causing disturbances to the camps and/or streets of the City. Our trained staff will use the latest in animal reform practices to allow these potentially dangerous animals the chance to be reintroduced to life on the playa. They will be tagged and have the opportunity to be adopted/auctioned to a responsible Black Rock City citizen.” Because of his involvement in San Francisco nightlife (being the official and democratically chosen director of the “Nightwatch” project in the Haight Area, designed to make the nightlife there more happening and free), I was most interested in how he saw Burning Man to influence San Francisco, and the other way around.

Appendix B - Respondents

Law, interview October 1st 2005 John Law’s self-ascribed task is to ‘prevent cultural arteriosclerosis.’ His career as a prankster (a label he prefers to ‘artist’) began in 1977 when he joined The Suicide Club shortly after arriving in San Francisco at the age of eighteen. After that, he has been involved with The Suicide Club, Cacophony Society, Survival Research Laboratories, Seemen, Circus Ridikulus and Laughing Squid, among others. In 1990, he brought the Man to the desert. In 1997, whilst sitting in a hot tub with Harvey and Michael, Paper Man LLC was formed in order to own and control the name and service mark “Burning Man.” One year later Law leaves the Man behind. In 2007, he shocks the Burning Man community by filing suit against the Burning Man organization because he feels that ‘everyone owns Burning Man.’ The outcome of the trial is still unknown, but so far it seems that the community is pretty torn between those supportive and those protective. Because I already knew that Law had always been more in favor of the smaller, wilder, less structured version of Burning Man, I wanted to know how the change had been for him, and why he eventually left. Michael Drunkennurse, interview October 3rd 2005 Second time Burner from London. I met Michael in 2004 on the Decompression party in England. We continued to write emails every now and then, and from that contact I know him to be deeply involved with the Euroburners community and the newly initiated version of Burning Man in Europe called ‘Nowhere.’ I wondered if he could tell me a bit more about any possible differences between Europe and the States in this perspective, and what his views on these would be. I also knew he had been volunteering in New Orleans after the burn, not being called ‘drunkennurse’ for nothing, and I wanted to know how he saw this to be related to all his obvious transgressive behavior on Burning Man. In extension of this, I also wondered how he thought about the greater issue of the effects Burning Man might have on everyday society. Larry Harvey, interview October 15th 2005 Needs little further introduction. Started the event in 1986, apparently as some sort of healing ritual for a rough break up with his girlfriend at the time - which he btw denied in our interview, but which has turned out to be a pretty popular myth in the media. These days, he is the executive director of the Burning Man organization (Borg). He serves as chairman of Burning Man’s senior staff and Black Rock City LLC, its executive committee. He also co-chairs the organization’s Art Department, scripts and co-curates Burning Man’s annual art theme, and collaborates with artists in creating aspects of the art theme and the design of Black Rock City. He produces Burning Man’s annual newsletter and writes articles and essays for the website, sometimes under his pseudonym ‘Darryl van Rhey.’ As spokesperson for Burning Man, he is frequently interviewed by reporters, and he has lectured on subjects as diverse as art, religion, civic planning and the rise of cyberculture in the era of the Internet. Larry is also a political planner. He supervises the organization’s lobbying efforts and frequently attends meetings with state, county and federal agencies. What I wanted from him was easy: as much information as I could get. Harvey has obviously thought things through, so I got what I asked for.

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Re-presenting the Present: the (R)evolution of the Burning Man Festival

Appendix C – Finance

reimbursements, conference calls)

FINANCIAL CHART153 2005 Cash Expenditures Cost of Goods for the Ice and Café sales (not including buildings and staff)

Amount in $ 135,270

Costumes / Uniforms

18,722

Donations (from ice sales revenue)

44,635

Education and Training

8,191

Fees, BLM

710,404

Fees, Credit card and Bank service charges

163,642

Fire Safety Services and Supplies

156,099

Fuel (heavy equipment, vehicles, generators)

113,671

Gifts, Promotions, Royalties

13,552

Honoraria / Grants, (theme art)

437,973

Insurance (property, liability, workman's comp, vehicle)

231,737

Internet (hosting fees, POP accounts, Starband in Gerlach)

37,700

Local Agencies (County law enforcement, Highway Patrol, Piute Nation)

114,500

Materials and Supplies (shade structures, signage, firewood, lighting, décor and props, cleaning supplies, photography, archiving)

214,927

Meals and Food (meetings, commissary, non travel)

183,837

Medical Services and Supplies

190,432

Office and Computer Supplies

56,176

Outside Services (legal, consultants, accounting)

69,458

Outside Services: Independent contractors (DPW crew, information technology, ranger management, commissary and administrative support)

511,049

Payroll (office: administration, board)

1,759,93 4

Postage (newsletters, tickets, survival guide, postcards, etc)

50,190

Printing (newsletter, what where when, survival guide, gate materials, postcards, stickers, black rock gazette

99,983

Rent (San Francisco offices, and Nevada property)

259,223

Rental (heavy machinery, small equipment and tools, portable buildings, staff radio equipment, cars and trucks, office trailers)

506,195

Repairs, Maintenance, Cleaning

27,749

Shipping / Freight

14,780

Small Equipment and Tools

52,308

Tax and Licenses (state and federal income, payroll, misc.) Telephone (San Francisco and Nevada offices,

515,859 52,824

On: http://afterburn.burningman.com/05/financial_chart.html, accessed August 5th 2007

153

119

The Man and platform (materials, pyrotechnics, technicians, labor)

136,304

Toilets (and related costs)

447,180

Travel (airfare, mileage reimbursements, food accommodations for meetings, BLM, public relations, training, etc.)

133,547

Utilities (San Francisco and Nevada)

67,243

Vehicle (registration, repairs and maintenance)

42,992

Watering for dust abatement (equipment rental, contractor services) Interest Sub Total

Asset Acquisition Computers and Electronics (including radio equipment) Furniture and Fixtures Land and Building Improvements

218,669 7,605 7,804,560

Amount in $ 64,677 826 151,649

Leasehold Improvements

12,020

Machinery and Equipment

46,978

Trailers and Portable Buildings

17,180

Vehicles

47,044

Increase in Merchandise Inventory

18,244

Increase in Year-end Current Assets (cash, pre-paid expenses)

234,000

Sub Total

592,618

TOTAL

8,397,178

It is often said that trying to explain Burning Man to someone who has never been is like trying to explain color to the blind from birth. This thesis takes up exactly that challenge, showing the remarkable story of Burning Man as it went from the countercultural to the cultural; from reactive to proactive, from growing up to spreading out. It tells the tale of how a spark to an effigy might just ignite a social revolution. Let the burn begin…

RE-PRESENTING THE PRESENT

Back in 1986, on a San Franciscan beach, two friends decide to burn a wooden man-like figure. Now, more than 20 years later, this ritual is the closing act of a weeklong art event held in the Black Rock Desert, where over 35.000 participants are greeted ‘welcome home’ at its dusty gates. The Black Rock Desert has become Black Rock City, and the random burn of a man has become the Burning Man: a festival, community, and social movement.

Re-Presenting the Present THE (R)EVOLUTION OF THE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL

THE (R)EVOLUTION OF THE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL Larissa Quaak | Master Thesis Cultural Anthropology