Dancing in the streets and the architecture of authority

July 23rd, 2007

A couple of years ago, on the stunning Copacabana beach in Rio de Janerio where the mountails march right down to the water, my companion and I were drawn by the sound of drumming. Walkinh North along the beach, we came to a phalanx of Samba dancers, about ten people abreast and at least a block long ? members of a Samba school particing for Carnaval, we were told. There were people of all ages, from tots of four or five up to octogenarians, men and women, some gorgeously custmued and some in tank tops and shorts that constitute Rio street clothes. To a nineteenth-century missionary or even a 21st religious puritan their movements might well have seemed lewd or at least suggestive.
But the samba school danced down to the sand in perfect dignity, wrapped in their own rhythm, their faces both exhausted and shining with an religious kind of exhaltation. One thin latte coloured young man dancing just behind the muscians set the pace. What was he in real life ? a bank clerk, a busboy? But here, in his brilliant feathered costume, he was a prince, a mythological figure, maybe even a god. Here for a moment, there were no divisions among people except for the playful ones created by carnaval itself.
As they reached the boardwalk, bystanders started falling into the rhythm too, and, without any invitation or announcements, without embrassament or eben alchohol to dissolve normal constraints of urban life, the samba school turned into a crowd and the crowd turned into a momentary festival.

This is to me is an extraordinary passage from an extraordinay book entitled Dancing in the Streets. A history of collective joy

Engagement is about people, and how and why people come together. In many ways it is asking this question many times over that I gravitated from thinking about marketing and business as inflexible and interruptive to thinking about successful communication being about engaging all stakeholders.

In fact I did blog about this book earlier I’m just so depressed Why having communual fun is vital to healthy happy individuals

But reading the book cover to cover, it seems that Dancing in the Streets tells us a great deal about us and society. Also I did correlate Dancing in the Streets with another book entitled The Architecture of Authority, created by my good friend Richard Ross.

From a Montessori preschool to churches, mosques and diverse civic spaces including a Swedish courtroom, the Iraqi National Assembly hall and the United Nations, the images in Architecture of Authority build to ever harsher manifestations of power: an interrogation room at Guant?namo, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and finally, a capital punishment death chamber.

The word is control, control of the few over the many, the social engineering that goes with control.

As Ross says

The Santa Barbara Mission confessional and the LAPD robbery homicide interrogation rooms are the same intimate proportions. Both are made to solicit a confession in exchange for some form of redemption.

And that’s why authorities hate crowds, you just can’t control them.

But why the need for such control and where does it start and where does it end?

Ehrenrich states

Nor can the growing size of human societies explain the long hostiity of elites to their peoples festivals and estatic rituals ? a hostility that goes back at least to the city states of ancient Greece, which contained only a few tens of thousands of people.
It was not a concern about crowd size that lead to Pentheus’s crackdown on the maenads or Romes massacre of its Dionysian cult. The repression of Festivities and estatic rituals over the centuries was the conscious work of mean and occassionally women too, who saw in the a real and urgent threat. The aspect of “civilization” that is more hostile to festivity is not capitalism or industrialism ? both of which arefairly recent innovations ? but social hierarchy, which is far more ancient

Ehrenrich touches on one of my themes the explosion of the counter culture that started with Rock ‘n’ Roll, a whole rising up of youth culture to challenge the social, sexual, religious, culture mores of an older generation.

Even Jim Morrison got arrested for lewd behaviour in public, politicians, the great and the good saw Rock ‘n’ Roll as the work of the Devil. Robert Johnson sold his soul at the Crossroads to become one of the worlds first most celebrated blues guitarists. Today, we forget how Elvis and his gyrating hips seemed so dangerous he could not be filmed below the waist.

And is it not strange that the family unit is the preferred unit of choice.

we can reproduce, we can work, we can offer a modicum of sense of place, class and responsibility, as long as the the unit functions.

And back to the architecture of authority

Interestingly he (Ross) not only invokes Foucault, but suggests that the spatial structures of interrogation, incarceration and prosecution operate, as Foucault suggests, by subverting relations of communication. Maybe in the thirty years since Foucault wrote we have moved closer to the sort of disciplinary society he warned against? Maybe Ross understands Foucault better than the legions of American political theorists who regularly get him wrong?

And why is Foucault important? Well… he

seeks throughout his work to make sense of how our contemporary society is structured differently from the society that preceded us. He has been particularly influential precisely because he tends to overturn accepted wisdom, illustrating the dangers inherent in those Enlightenment reforms that were designed to correct the barbarity of previous periods (the elimination of dungeons, the modernization of medicine, the creation of the public university, etc.). As Foucault illustrates, each process of modernization entails disturbing effects with regard to the power of the individual and the control of government. Indeed, his most influential work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, paints a picture of contemporary society that sometimes resembles George Orwell’s 1984. He explores the ways that government has claimed ever greater control over and enforcement of ever more private aspects of our lives.

More on Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of The Prison

Ours is the society of the spectacle, the epoch without festival. We can “regard?” but no “particpat?”

And people do not embrace what they cannot create. Why would you. Culture becomes throw away, redundant, and so therefore do we.

Instead of generating their own collective pleasures, people absorb, or consume, the spectacles of commercial entertainment, nationalist rituals, and the consumer culture, with its endless advertisments for the pleasure of individual ownership.

And

Debord bemoaned the passivity engendered by constant spectatorship, announcing that “the spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep

Indeed what is Television or indeed any media without any form of interaction?

As Goethe wrote and Ehrenreich quotes

Carnaval is a festival that really is not given to the people, but one that people give to themselves

If this is the case we can understand the We Media for a We Species, we can understand YouTube, Current TV or MyNuMo, wealth of Networks blogs and self expression

John R. MacArthur poinys out

Ross intuitively understands that the aftermath of 9/11marked not the end of American ?innocence,? but rather capitulation to a deep craving, common to all nationalities, for submission and control. That awareness, one of the disturbing currents running through Ross?s work, is what sets it apart from more objective efforts to document the latest trends in worldwide authoritarianism

My journey has also taken me to believe that organisations and controlling ideologies need to be questioned, its just that in a consumerist society we are not required to take part. We are just required to spend. It seems a monumental shame that the only answer we have to wealth and posperity is a monetary one.

The subtlety of authority

Beginning with the Montessori circle at his children?s school, Ross reminds us that coercion starts young and wears many disguises. A less subtle photographer might have opened with grim images of public school architecture?for who can avoid making the association between the layout typical of a postwar American high school and that of a prison?

And Ehrenreich tells us that

At some point, in town after town throughout the northern Christian world, the music stops. Canival customes are put away or sold; dramas that once engaged a town’s entire population are cancelled; festive rituals are forgotten or preserved only in tame and truncated form, the estatic possibility, which had forst been driven from the sacred precincts of the church, was now harried from the streets and public squares

Ehrereich goes onto say

The loss, to ordinary people, of so many recreations and festivals is incalcuable, and we, who live in a culture almost devoid of opportunities either to “lose ourselves” in communal festivities or to distinguish ourselves in any arena outside of work, are in no position to fathom it

And we are the poorer for it.

But yet again, human nature is a robust thing and I wonder if we are not reclaiming the streets so perhaps we can once again dance in those streets? Albeit within the ecology of the digitally connected world.

Where the architecture of authority as yet has no real place.

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