burning man, rules, sacrificial logic
This is, by the way, the tenth or so time I've tried to post this. I'm leaving Blogger for MovableType or even a homegrown creation at the first opportunity. Either Blogger has seen little of the cash that Google received from its IPO, or Blogger is being horribly mismanaged. Or both. In either case, I smell "good-thing-crushed-by-corporate-incompetence" . . .
Thanks to Thomas and Edison for indulging my whim to speculate about games and Burning Man.
Thomas is quite right to point out that rules sustain the “zone” of indeterminacy. But this is true of any game/event (though my hasty sketch may have implied that I didn’t think this was true of BM). Certainly the rules oriented toward environment, community, and safety permit the event to take place on such a large scale without being shut down by the authorities or harming the environment. And, yes, BM does have what it calls “rangers” who are responsible for ensuring that the rules are followed.
But the question isn’t (for me at least) what sustains the dilation of the zone with regard to this zone not being shut down by the authorities or self-destructing, but rather what, on a more theoretical level, occasions this dilation in the first place. Or, to put it another way, I’ve presented Burning Man as a significant “advance” in the “technology” of the game/event – so how has this technology been altered or reconfigured? My suggestion is that the advance consists of two components:
1) the absolute dilation of the zone of indeterminacy to the perimeter of the event itself.
2) the revelation of a more extreme zone at the heart of the original zone.
My (strong) intuition is that 1 could not occur without 2, that 2 “sustains” 1 or is at least one side of a double-gesture; but at this point, I can’t rationally justify my intuition. The logic I’m working with, though, is one of a scapegoat or a sacrifice. In a board game, say, a game piece or token is a sort of self-representation that’s offered up to chance while one sits comfortably outside of the board itself; at Burning Man, one no longer sits comfortably outside of the board – but this is made possible or effective (psychologically speaking, perhaps) by setting up a new, more extreme version of the player-token relationship. The Man is the new, more extreme token (40 feet high on a platform of around 20-30 feet) which, at the climax of the festival, is offered up to a more extreme form of chance (being burned to the ground). One of many details I’ve left out so far that may be worth considering at this point is that the Man is placed at the physical center of the event and becomes the primary directional reference – the streets radiate outward from the Man in concentric (but incomplete) circles and when one has lost all sense of direction (especially easy at night), one can always reorient oneself by discovering where one stands relative to the Man. Perhaps I’m speaking only for myself at this point, but this directional dependency helps cement the feeling that the Man represents a part of oneself.
Here's a satellite photo, courtesy Google maps, that shows the circular "streets", pentagonal permiter, and the site of the as-yet-to-be-built Man (clearly the picture was taken prior to the event; the campsites go in the spaces between the streets). If you take a look at the actual Google maps page (click on the link above or on the picture), zoom in all the way to get a sense of the scale. If I recall correctly the diameter of the circle made by the outermost street was a little under 2 miles last year.
3 Comments:
Hey Jay,
Got your mail - I'll write back soon. It's definitely time to go out for beers &c!
If you want help moving to some other blogware, let me know. I've set up movabletype and wordpress (I prefer wp), and I've been using livejournal for a while. I'd be happy to help you get started on any of these.
Talk to you soon!
I'd like to know a bit more about the dilation of the zone of indeterminacy. "Imagine the zone of indeterminacy fully dilated," you said in your first post on this topic. This, you said in part "obliterates the distinction between participant/player and observer". But does it not also obliterate the event (or game) itself.
These rangers, for example. Presumably their authority applies within the perimeter of the Burning Man Festival, and not outside it. Well, then surely there's a sense in which indeterminacy is still structured within the perimeter?
Or am I missing something?
I think my problem here has to do with my inability to imagine the event retaining any determinable given the dilation you propose.
No, I don't necessarily think you're missing something; most likely your confusion is a result of lack of clarity in my first post.
Zones of indeterminacy are always, to some degree, structured -- in fact, I think I can safely say that the "concept" of an absolutely unstructured zone is at least incoherent if not self-contradictory.
If I established or implied an analogy between structured/unstructured and closed/dilated, then I shouldn't have. By "fully dilated", I mean simply that the zone "stretches" to the perimeter of the event itself.
In most events or games there's a field, usually in the center of the event, in which an encounter with chance takes place. This could be a football field, a soccer field, a chess board, or even a stage, canvas, or sheet of paper. The point is that the encounter with chance is more-or-less contained within this zone. Moreover, at most events, there are "players" and there are "onlookers". Sometimes communication takes place between them, but generally the distinction is clear because the "players" are, by definition, the ones on the inside of the zone. At Burning Man, this distinction is no longer clear -- there is no centralized "main event" and there is no priveleged and "safe" position from which to observe the event from the audience's "bird's eye view". This is part of what I mean by the "full dilation" of the zone -- to be outside of the zone is to be outside of the event itself, because the zone extends all the way to the perimeter of the event (but not, as you point out, beyond it).
I think there's also a confusion (not helped by the website) over the concept of "rules". I would argue that there are two kinds of rules -- one kind which concerns the "civic structure" of the event (analogous, perhaps, to the layout of a soccer field, the grid of a chess board, or the 52 cards in a deck of cards) and another kind which structures the confrontation with chance that takes place within the zone (the rules of soccer, how you play chess, what makes poker different from blackjack). At Burning Man, this latter sort of rule could be said to include, among others:
-- no money can be exchanged during the event (with one controversial exception -- coffee & ice can be purchased at the organization-run "center camp"), but items can be bartered for or given freely.
-- every attendee must provide for her/his own water, food, shelter, and so on.
-- every attendee should strive find a way to contribute to the event in a meaningful way (e.g., through bring/constructing art, performance, offering some kind of helpful service to others, or just assisting with the set up or break down of a camp).
Examples of the former kind of rule might include: no animals or pets, leave no "matter out of place" on the desert floor, take out everything you bring in, only human waste and thin, single-ply toilet paper in the portable toilets.
Dilating the zone does away with neither set of rules. But it does, in addition to eliminating the performer/audience distinction, push the the stakes of the game/event itself from the realm of a primarily symbolic (and controlled) encounter with chaos toward a more "real" (but still controlled) encounter. In the traditional game/event, chance "makes its mark" on the teams, the interaction of strategies, the unfolding of the piece of music, etc. At Burning Man, chance -- as channeled and directed within the fully dialted zone by the rules of engagement which structure that zone -- "makes its mark" on the participants themselves, on individual human beings qua essentially social and creative beings.
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