festivals and the cultural public shpere 1

7/21/2019 Festivals and the Cultural Public Shpere 1

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Festival notes: March 27 th, 2012-03-28Block IFestival as direct communication/ a direct culturalencounter:

How festivals negotiate and communicate collectiveidentities?

How do they foster political opinions?

How do they impact community building?

How they figure as means of critical intervention?

How they perform places?

Since the end of the Cold War there has been a tremendous proliferation of festivals inEurope. No one can say how many festivals exist in Europe today. 2000? 3000? Probablymore. With this quantity, the unique profile of many festivals has become blurred and theconceptual orientation less transparent. What a festival program must contain in order to earnartistic approval, what prestige it must acquire or sustain, how many visitors it must get, howmuch of the budget has to come from sponsorship, how many jobs, reviews, newspaper writeups and radio and television minutes of coverage it must generate... becomes a matter of unrealistic expectations, controversy and quantity-obsessed debate. In a festival world andaround cynics abound; festivals are easy to criticize and easier to gossip about. So festivalsget overshadowed by their own mythology or pitted against the successes of another festival.Compared disparagingly with the proliferating theme parks. Classified in statistics with thecongresses industry or trade shows. Unfairly measured up by the yardstick of visual artsbiennials and film festivals, whose commercial interests behind all the glamour the performingarts festivals simply cannot contain. (Dragan Klaic, The Future of Festivals)

Factors that frame contemporary festivals in Europe and around the world: migration, culturalglobalization, erosion of distinction between high-brow and low brow culture, etc.

How festivals generate meaning?

Festivals as collective effervescence (Dukrheim 1912) = channels for expressingand consolidating as sense of community (i.e. from Ancient Athens to festivals of theFrench Revolution)

Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere


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Locating arts festivals as instances of the cultural public sphere:

What is public sphere?For Habermas, it is a mediating instance between public and private authorities

through the vehicle of public opinion. An emancipated public sphere was a goal,where the validity of every political consequence be made dependant on a consensusarrived at in communication free from domination.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated fromabove against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over thegeneral rules governing relations in the basically privatised but publicly relevantsphere of commodity exchange and social labour. The medium of this politicalconfrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: peoples public use of their reason. (Habemas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 27)

When Habermas wrote about the public sphere as a concept, he intended to designatea zone of mediation between state and individuals where individuals could cometogether to engage in reasoned argument over key issues of mutual interest andconcern, creating a space in which new ideas and the practice and discipline of rational public debate were cultivated. These sites were the emerging a associationalspaces such as coffee houses, clubs, newspapers, theatre and arts, and art criticism.(Janelle Reinelt Rethinking the Public Sphere for a Global Age)

Reinelt critiques Habermass idealism (and often oversight) when it comes to issuesof inclusion/ exclusion; class, gender, etc.

What is the relationship between a communicational form such as print and itssocio-political context? What kinds of popular participation are made possible in agiven context of publicity, and whose interests are best represented in a particular

public sphere? (Arvind Rajagoptal Introduction in The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in media history )

View I: Positive reality of festivals along the lines of Habermas in terms of communicative action as opportunity to realise discourse about public goods

View II: A more critical stance of Bourdieu which emphasises structure and themeans of drawing and reproducing distinctions within societies.

Between the beginning of the century, with poetry, and the 1880s with theatre, theredevelops at the heart of each genre a more autonomous sector or, if you will, anavant-garde. Each of the genres tends to cleave into a research sector and acommercial sector, two markets between which one must be wary of establishing aclear boundary, since they are merely two poles, defined in and by their antagonisticrelationship, of the same space. (P. Bourdieu The Rules of Art , 1995)

Habermas, Adorno, Horcheimer also worried about decline of public sphere withcommercialisation


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1. (relating to Habermas) How ideas, beliefs and norms inform festival

organisation? How these aspects create and influence content and bringfourth effervescent experience?2. (relating to Bourdieu) How are these contents (often idealistic) embodied

in the real world of industrial power relations, networks and scarceresources?The latter acts as constraining factor limiting the scope and outreach of contentand determining what can and cannot be realized.

Block II:

The Public Sphere of Literary Festivals

What do literary festivals and Habermass notion of cultural public spherehave in common?

The both emerged from literary salons of 18 and 19 century mainly in Parisand London.

Contemporary literary festivals are, of course, not the direct descendants of the earlier literary salon, but they serve similar functions in that they are oftenestablished explicitly for promoting the exchange of ideas and to link arts and

politics. (Liana Giorgi Between tradition, vision and imagination) The first literary festival of the 20 th century was the Cheltenham LiteraryFestival (1949)

Our case studies:Hay-on-Wye festival (1988)The Berlin Literary Festival (2001)The Borderlines Festival (focuses on Eastern Europe; takes place in differentborder city every year)

Space: no longer a salon, but local council (Cheltenham), youth centre (Hay), public hall (Berlin); salons-urban/ located in metropolitan cities, contemporaryfestivals are more mixed:City/ Country/ World = they aspire to overcome the urban/rural &centre/margin binaryPeter Florance, founder of Hay, committed to show that culture and literarylife is not concentrated in the capital. He is also starting new literary festivalsin different places of the globe;Objective: cultural encounter to open new spaces for ideas and to supportwriters and literary institutions of those countries


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Festivals, even if large in size, are concentrated in time and this allows costcontainment in a way that also makes them attractive as regenerationinstruments for somewhat marginal places.Hosts:

18 th & 19 th century salons: mostly women as salon hosts

Hay: Peter Florance, director/ founder = theatre actor with background inmodern and medieval literature

Berlin Festival: Urlich Schribner, director = architect

Borderline festival: Urlich Janetzki founder/ director = runs LiteraryColloquium Berlin

The role of media:

Very importantInterview format is widespread: discussion between a journalist and a writer Media sometimes contributes directly to festival organisation: Berlin festivalis supported by Der Spiegel and Deutchland Kultur Radio; Hay (Guardian)

Format of events:

Entertainment: pleasure through intellectual discourse, performance of thewritten word (and of other kinds), food & drink For P. Florance the core of the festival is getting together to discuss books, artsand politicsLiterary festivals are harder to stage for general public than others (i.e. music,film festivals)Dominant format: focus on the individual artist-author & discussion; movingaway from mere presentation of the works to discussion about creative

process in social context.

Politics:To present authors, but also to discus social and political developments with

reference to books (Hay includes the Raymond Williams Lecture on Cultureand Society)Berlin Festival: international, interested in post-nation, multiculturalism, exile;opening German literary public to outside voices

Internationalization:

Towards discovering world literaturesDebating topical global issues

Organisation:

Usually run on not-for-profit basis


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Engaging a lot of volunteersHay: ticket sales + Guardian sponsorship of 50.000 per/a + Wales ArtsCouncil; employs up to 15 peopleBerlin Festival: budget 6000.000 (City of Berlin gives 450.000; sells 30.000tickets per/a)

Workshop/ Discussion: Media (commercialization) & Public Sphere(Habermas, Bourdieu, Rajagoptal);

Hay-on-WyeJaipur Literary Festival (the Rushdi incident)

festivals and the cultural public shpere 1

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