| Burning
Man
A Working-Class,
Do-It-Yourself World’s Fair
by Chris
Carlsson
“After a while, the festival’s
emphasis on hedonism and overt displays of sexuality can seem like
a hipster straitjacket and the overtones of New Age spirituality
a gloss for a new type of vapid and self-congratulatory consumerism….
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. Radical
openness means no closure, perpetual process and transformation,
and embracing paradox, contradiction, and uncomfortable states.
Every instant becomes synchronistic, every contact a contact high.”
—Daniel Pinchbeck(1)
East of Sacramento on Interstate 80, I glance
to my left as a pickup truck overtakes me. A blonde woman wearing devil’s
horns is flashing me an electrifying smile, gesturing and mouthing: Are
you going to Burning Man? I smile back, nod, and give her the thumb’s
up. She pumps both arms triumphantly, and as they pull away, I’m
left euphoric by the mysteriously powerful connection that passed from
one metal box to another.
Hours later, having cleared the mighty Sierra
Nevada not far removed from where starving Chinese coolies chiseled out
the first transcontinental railroad tracks through howling blizzards,
I passed the neon blandness of Reno’s unmajestic skyline, gassed
up, and proceeded into the desolation of the Great Basin. Leaving the
interstate behind, I entered the world of rural Nevada, Indian tacos and
trailers scattered among riparian oases, separated by countless miles
of arid but spectacular landscape. The road is crowded with trailers,
buses, mid-sized sedans, usually carrying bicycles on the back, clearly
all heading north to the playa. One dirt road leaves to the right, and
under some rare shade a couple is busy spray painting bicycles light blue
against the tawny, dusty ground.
The mountain range that marks the end of
the state highway at the towns of Empire and Gerlach looms ahead. Dust
clouds appear to the east, kicked up by arrivals preceding me. No sooner
do I see them than my throat cracks, the taste of dust on my tongue. Twenty
minutes later I’m crawling in bumper to bumper traffic completely
immersed in gusting dust-filled winds, awaiting an inspection that rivals
airport security as “Rangers” try to ferret out scofflaws
and stowaways. License plates hail from New York, Illinois, Oregon, British
Columbia, Minnesota, all points between. Newly legalized Black Rock City
radio is pumping tunes into the car, interspersed with occasional warnings
that impossibly well-hidden stowaways will not elude the Rangers.
Signs line the incoming roadway. “Barter
is just another word for commerce.” “Don’t Trade it,
Pay it Forward.” And dozens of others. After a brief search for
the camp location, I park. The dust thickened on the car as I spent the
next five days exclusively bicycling around Black Rock City.
Tuesday night: like a moth drawn to the light in the inky darkness of
the desert, I pedal forward. Some kind of mad scientist has a keyboard
hanging over his neck, attached to truck horns and bellows. As his fingers
tickle the keys, flames shoot from tubes, pops and groans emerging from
invisible holes and crevices. Three dozen cyclists surround the scene,
smiling and pointing while background drum and bass machine add to the
sound.
I take a ride in the 37-foot-high “Olivator,” a vertical chair
ascent for a calm view of the lasers and neon lights chasing each other
across the nighttime playa. A dozen pyrocycles ride by, each towing a
trailer with an oil derrick on it, spouting flame at the top. Later I
am nearly run over by a motorized float full of people peering out of
a TV screen, labeled “Sony Tripatron”… Two bikes tow
a three-piece percussion ensemble, bass and trap drum set… At the
camp called Bollywood an unbelievable rock ‘n roll film from 1965
screens, Gumnaam or something like that… a blues band rocks the
house at Hair of the Dog bar, a long-time installation at Black Rock City.
Another day, a dusty sun-soaked morning,
early risers scurry about while others prepare to crash from the night’s
endless party. Cycling about, I encounter on the playa a copy of Bill
Gates’ The Road Ahead, spread open to a page on frictionless capitalism,
awaiting the arrival of art cars to run over it. Returning to the city
streets, I’m accosted by a guy with a bullhorn next to a late model
SUV. On it a camping chair says “soccer mom.” He’s yelling,
“If you love Burning Man, come and pee on this Soccer Mom’s
SUV!”
One midweek evening we ride through gusting
waves of dust to the “Man” to catch Reverend Billy and his
Church of Stop-Shopping Revue; a big gospel chorus in gold lamé
gowns swayed behind his syncopated sermonizing… it was funny and
much more overtly political than the usual Burning Man fare. I particularly
love their finale as they sing “We Ain’t Sponsored, we ain’t
sponsored, we ain’t sponsored…”
One-Hour
Scrutinizing
I went to Burning Man in 2003 as a self-designated
“Official Scrutinizer,” with a brief questionnaire offering
passersby heavy or light scrutiny. “Heavy scrutiny” meant
a 45-minute audio interview, “light scrutiny” quickly scribbled
answers to a dozen multiple choice questions. My “performance”
led to twenty-four quality interviews and countless fantastic conversations.
I wanted to explore my assumptions about class consciousness among participants,
to find out who they were, what they did the rest of the year, how they
contextualized the experience, etc.
Those I encountered filled a range of occupations:
health educator/social worker, transportation planner, teacher, math professor
(retired), testing and counselor of street kids, homeless youth study
coordinator, welder/metal fabricator, software tester, human resources
manager, environmental biochemist, teacher, freelance high tech research/marketing,
handyman/auto mechanic, community development and technology consultant,
computer repairman and apartment manager, teacher/ex-dot.com content provider,
political organizer, immigration legal aide, veterinary assistant, house
painter, builder, president marketing services/open source software company,
business/technology consultant.
They covered a full age range, too: 23-30:
seven; 32-40: seven; 41-50: five; 51-63: five. Of the thirteen women and
eleven men I spoke with, the vast majority believed there is a ruling
class (20), while their own class identification was confused at best:
7 middle class; 5 working class; 7 both; 3 neither; 2 didn’t know.
Not surprisingly, nearly all of the respondents were white (though a smattering
of people of color do attend). And due to my approach, the group was a
self-selecting subset of the larger population, people drawn to the notion
of “scrutiny,” analysis, thinking, reflection. It is difficult
to generalize about 29,000 people, and perhaps not worth trying. Also,
many have abandoned Burning Man over the years for a variety of reasons.
Thus, this inquiry is not an attempt to confront all the criticisms or
objections to Burning Man that are held.
In fact, I am not trying to defend the institution
at all—for an institution is what it has become! My own attempt
to interact with the organizers of Burning Man led to a puzzling and ultimately
absurd exchange with a self-designated media committee representative
going by the moniker ‘Brother John’. I thought to communicate
my intentions to this committee as a courtesy. Much to my surprise my
first email led to a response “rejecting” my “request,”
misunderstanding my own past attendance, and admonishing me to come to
the festival to just experience it. According to Brother John, after I’d
soaked it up for a year I could make a proposal the committee might “approve.”
I was shocked and wrote back my rejection of their authority. Brother
John then indicated that he realized it was a relationship based on mutual
agreement and they could not regulate me if I didn’t accept it,
but that the Burning Man Media Committee would expect me to submit to
them anything I wrote PRIOR to publication! I stopped myself from responding
that this policy violated all journalistic autonomy and was more akin
to the Pentagon’s approach to war coverage than the ostensible free
community of Burning Man. I held my tongue and chose to ignore them from
that time on.
Other complaints about the allocation of
money to artists, the occasionally heavy-handed exercise of authority
by drunken Black Rock City rangers, the airport security shakedown at
the gates to catch stowaways, the ever-rising price of entry, etc., have
been noted elsewhere. While I am aware of the many ways to criticize the
failures of Burning Man, my own goal in attending, interviewing and writing
was different, as you’ll see.
Commerce-free
Gift Economy
“If Burning Man is a cult, it is
above all a cult of transformation.” —Daniel Pinchbeck(2)
“… The campsite counters
the isolation in which most of the people we met live year-round…”
—Margaret Cerullo and Phyllis Ewen(3)
The people who come to Burning Man would
never say—or even think—so, but clearly the vast majority
are part of the sprawling American working class. When they’re not
at BM they have to go to work, mostly living from paycheck to paycheck
and on credit. Once a year, for fun, they go on an expedition to the desert
along with 29,000 others. And what do they do? They “set up”
on the blank dusty slate of the white, flat playa. Then they live in a
densely populated city and have a totally urban experience. But ita familiar
and strangely different city life. The lack of infrastructure beyond porta-potties
and the semi-circular layout of Black Rock City leaves room for the harsh
nature of the desert to impose itself. Commerce is formally excluded (with
the notable exceptions of ice and the Center Camp café).
I asked my scrutinees how they felt about
the commitment to a cash-free “gift economy.” Most people
were genuinely enthusiastic. Several emphasized that it was a major reason
for their coming. “…I am so attracted to Burning Man because
for close to a week I can exist without ever having to spend money, without
ever having to worry about people asking for money—it’s just
eliminated.” For a school teacher it is a “mental vacation,
a sense of relief,” while a female metal worker thought it “kind
of hypocritical,” mostly because of the espresso sales at Center
Camp. One computer geek claimed “I would love to live in the gift
economy 365 days a year!” Some of the lower wage participants, a
handyman and a veterinary assistant, were adamant: “That’s
why I come here,” and “I think life should be like this, it’s
the only way to live.” A Berkeley apartment manager, who also fixes
computers, described it as “a natural human impulse that is given
free reign and encouraged here. It’s just a normal thing that people
want to do.”
The commerce-free environment is “imperative.
I wouldn’t come here otherwise,” said a street counselor,
while a retired human resources staffer emphasized “it’s the
thing that inspired me and drew me to Burning Man… Doing something
because you love to do it rather than because you have to do it is always
refreshing and wonderful…” For one person the commerce-free
environment was a means to break down class assumptions based on consumption
patterns. “Here nobody cares how much money I make because I have
all these other things to offer. Also the people who have a lot of money
are able to see people who maybe have almost nothing—they scrimp
and they save every single penny they have to come here—[while]
it’s just like another vacation for the wealthy.”
Not everyone “buys” the story
Burning Man tells itself: “I don’t think it really is a commerce-free
environment... it doesn’t mean much to me to have this contrived,
one-week gift economy. I see efforts to create alternatives, or to transform
the world we live in, [get] co-opted and integrated by the dominant society.
There is a gift economy that already exists, the living culture in people’s
daily lives, and Burning Man is a co-optation of it, selling it back to
people. It’s a product, like ethical consumerism in some ways…”
Thousands of “alternative” people
go to the northern Nevada desert and build a miniature Las Vegas. Neon
light and techno-music and amenities of urban night life are trucked along.
A lot of people bring everything they want: the RV, the pavilion, the
sinks, the astroturf, the refrigerators and everything else. They lack
for nothing and could almost be in the suburbs. Ironically, people come
here to escape, but re-create a version of the world they left behind,
down to the carpet on the floor and the wetbar in the corner.
“Family camping embodies many anticapitalist
yearnings and a dream of a different life... It is a dream in which
there are no great inequalities and in which the market does not
determine human relationships. Yet paradoxically, these preindustrial
fantasies tie people more tightly into the market. Mass production
and mass marketing have made family camping possible for working-class
people. Families go further into debt in order to make the investment
in camping equipment. The experience of nature is mediated by commodities.”
—Margaret Cerullo and Phyllis Ewen(4)
Burning Man is a countercultural expression
of the working class yearnings described in the 1982 article above (read
it again, replacing “family camping” with “Burning Man”).
The fabled nudity, wild art, rave music, drugs and sex are all manifestations
of the specific subcultures that attend, but underneath the spectacular
behaviors are regular people. Once away from the stifling conformity of
“normal life” (especially work life), people are free to experiment
with costume, identity, and group behaviors in ways that are difficult
at home. For most attendees, Burning Man is a different world subjectively.
One way to see Burning Man is as a Do-It-Yourself
World’s Fair. The much-touted freeing of imagination it embodies
leads to entertaining and inspiring art projects from sculpture and installation
to fire-breathing dragons and galleons with crowded bars inside. Moreover,
the preponderant ethic of do-it-yourself art-making begins to permeate
most interactions, deepening human connections in ways that are usually
absent in daily lives. 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.
The art of living becomes something tangible and reinforced by recurrent
surprises of gift-giving and cooperation.
Burning Man is an enormous experiment in
relearning to speak to each other directly, and reopening and using public
spaces. It’s a hands-on, throats-on, tongues-on experience. You
learn to meet strangers with an open heart. Participants practice trust
in a practical context removed from “normal life.” Skill sharing,
experimentation and appropriation of the techno-sphere for pleasure, edification
and self-expression point to a deeper practical radicalization than what
is usually attributed to Burning Man.
Like anything worth doing, Burning Man is
fraught with contradictions. But within them are impulses and behaviors
that connect to a wider social movement that exceeds the self-conceptions
of its participants. Burning Man is a nascent attempt of the working class,
not as a class per se, but as people who refuse to be mere workers, to
recompose itself, and in so doing, to transcend class and the capitalist
organization of life that stunt our humanity.
Class
Dismissed?
“These are people without any well-integrated
social place. Their lives are characterized by job instability,
geographic mobility, divorce and remarriage, and distance from relatives…
If “getting away from it all” represented an escape,
it was an imperfect one… If it was an industrial nightmare
they sought to escape, it was the products of industrial civilization
that offered themselves to aid and abet their escape. If it was
an escape from work and the clock they envisioned, they found the
very meaning and experience of leisure defined and circumscribed
by the images and rhythms and moral valuations of work.”
—Margaret Cerullo and Phyllis Ewen(5)
America is in denial about class. This society
insists that there’s no such thing (and of course there’s
no history either, only nostalgia, the Civil War and WWII). Ultimately,
class is about power. Some people make decisions about the shape of our
lives and then there’s the rest of us. We have to work to survive.
If you have to work, you’re in the working class. You might be making
$65K/yr. but you aren’t in control of what you do, how it’s
shaped, what technologies are used, nothing. You may live paycheck to
paycheck, but because you are “well paid,” and have been told
you are “professional,” you don’t identify as a worker.
Big deal, they’ve always had well-paid workers.
U.S. politics tends to gravitate around claims
of what’s good or bad for the “middle class,” a group
that ostensibly includes everyone but the bag ladies and street homeless
on one side and the Leer-jetsetting super-rich on the other. The most
confusing piece of this puzzle in the past decades has been the gradual
disappearance of the working class, replaced in some politicians’
speeches by references to “working families,” or in the rhetoric
of leftist organizers as “working people,” but defrocked of
its status as a class. Many people in blue and white-collar jobs think
of themselves as middle class, a self-affirming status maintained by shopping
properly.
The term “class” has lost a great
deal of meaning in the United States. Does this collapse of meaning correspond
to a disappearance of referents? Are we living in a classless society?
Of course not. But the conceptual tools required to understand and make
sense of this society have been radically degraded. The key missing arrow
in our empty quiver is the one that pierces class society, that explains
the systemic dynamics that produce a small group of extremely wealthy
at one pole, and an ever greater number of impoverished at the other.
Between the extremes of untold wealth and absolute immiseration(6) most
of us live quiet lives, coping as best we can with the cards we’re
dealt.
In the U.S., where even the poorest 10% are
wealthier than 2/3 of the world’s population,(7) decades of cold
war, consumerist propaganda, and a balkanized humanities curriculum have
atomized the population into market niches and an endless series of personal
crises. The notion that the vast majority of us, who have nothing to sell
but our labor and are consequently utterly dependent on wages and salaries
for our survival, are part of a broad class of people sharing a fundamental
relationship to power and wealth in this society, is an idea that has
been overwhelmed and dismissed.
When I asked my interviewees if they identify
with the label “middle class,” “working class,”
neither or both, I got wonderfully complex responses. A 63-year-old retired
math professor explained, “I’m what they used to call déclassé.
My parents were working class. I raised myself up to the middle class,
and now … University professors—people with an upper middle
class income and a sub-lower class mentality!” A 34-year-old social
worker from Australia called himself “polyglot: I grew up in a string
of mining towns and worked as a miner, but my parents were university
educated and so was I in a country where that’s rarer than here.”
The female metal worker put it bluntly: “I would say working class,
definitely, I don’t make enough money to be middle class.”
A mid-20s teacher, on his way from the east to the northwest, explained,
“I work. I don’t really think about [class] for me. I think
about it for my parents. My mom was a nurse, my dad was a firefighter.
We were middle America, right down the middle.” A clown, who survives
in San Francisco as a veterinary assistant, reinforced the resistance
I encountered to questions about class. “I try not to think about
it much. Like what class I belong to... probably working poor... It’s
only an issue when someone else makes it an issue.” An NGO staffer
in Berkeley in her late-30s characterized her own ambivalence and downward
mobility thusly: “Absolutely I’m a middle class person. My
parents were both lawyers. I was born into the middle class in Berkeley...
But I am definitely the American working class. I live paycheck to paycheck.
I don’t own my home. I’m a wage slave…”
A 35-year-old Canadian making his first trip
to Burning Man had one of the more unusual responses: “Neither.
Because I cycle [between] jobs that pay ridiculously well [and those that
don’t]. For the least amount of work I’ve gotten paid the
highest wage and for the hardest work I’ve gotten shit wages. I’m
not middle class because I’ve been upper class and I’ve been
lower class. I was the plant manager, so I had about 150 employees underneath
me. Right now I’m working as an industrial cleaner at a ready-to-eat
plant that makes sausages. I hose everything down with high pressure,
high-temperature water, apply some chemicals that eat away at protein
and then rinse it off and sanitize it. Then government inspectors inspect
it. When people say ‘what do you do?’ I still say I’m
a biochemist… [As a plant manager] I sat down and thought ‘why
am I always tired?’ It’s because I’m not doing what
I want to do. Which led me to other questions: ‘Well, what is it
I DO want to do?’ I don’t know. ‘Well, how do I find
out what to do?’ They don’t teach ethics in school. They don’t
teach rational thinking processes in school. They don’t teach you
how to survive on your own. They teach you how to incorporate into the
system, how to be a dependent.”
After finding out how people labeled themselves
I asked what the word ‘class’ means to them, and how people
fall into one or another class.
“I tend to think that there’s only two classes: there’s
the people that have the levers of power and then there’s the rest
of us... I come here for the chaos and spontaneity to purposefully forget
that manner of thinking.”
“Class means primarily the degree of
economic self-determination that you’re able to exercise.”
“I think if you know someone’s
class, you won’t know anything about them... I think [class is]
what gets us into trouble.”
“Class to me is a relationship, like
capital is a relationship… it’s usefulness as an analytic
category has been somewhat deflated. At the same time that I think it
is still a very real thing.”
“Smash it. It’s ridiculous, it’s
horrible, it puts value on very few things and it’s all run by the
almighty dollar.”
“Class is a strata, it’s a way
of distinguishing groups so you know what boundaries to set for yourself…
I think that class distinction is more important as you go further along
and get higher up because you stand to lose more.”
“One definition is you are born into
or enter as a result of your actions. Another is a sense of upbringing
and education. Or your current circumstances. For example, my father is
a taxi driver and I live in a neighbourhood surrounded by factories, sweat-shops
and prostitution. My last form of semi-regular income was as a labourer
on construction sites, and I am regularly un/under-employed. Seemingly
working class. However, I also went to a pretty prestigious high school,
have a bachelors degree in fine arts and currently work as a community
service provider, pretty middle class.”
“It means access to resources... it’s
also a way of recognizing excellence... There’s some people that
I really admire and look up to and I consider them to be ‘higher
class’ in a way.”
“Class means being able to walk out
of your wind-blown, sand-blown domicile without a shower in five days,
looking fabulous! That is class… My idea of class has nothing to
do with money. It has to do with education… blue collar is class.
These people know their shit. But those who know, and those who can teach
and those who can show and those who just are by example, that’s
class, heavy class.”
“All class distinctions are subjective,
there are no objective class classifications.”
“I don’t understand class distinctions
personally. I don’t need money to do a lot of things, so I feel
wealthy.”
“Well birth is a lot of it... I don’t
get the class thing, by the way. I think part of it is about self-imposed
limitations, and that’s really tragic.”
“Largely birth. Birth, then education.”
The prevailing amnesia and confusion results
from a complex set of overlapping dynamics. “Globalization”
is the all-purpose buzzword describing the redesign of work, the relocation
of production within and without national borders, the rolling back of
unions and the welfare state, and the rapid and extreme concentration
of wealth and power. Another way of stating it is that since the ebbing
of profits in the mid-1970s, capital has carried out a worldwide counterattack.
The “just-in-time” pace of work (some call it “Toyota-ism”8),
the redesign and redevelopment of cities, the computerization of production,
the huge increase of incarceration, the unprecedented wave of human migration
within and across borders, all have contributed to a growing isolation
for individuals. Where once there were stable communities, neighborhoods,
and familiar faces at workplaces, where one might work for decades, now
people move from place to place and job to job, whipped by unrelenting
insecurity and the threat of being left behind.
 
The
End of Community—Long Live Community!
“Long working hours, the breakup
of long-term personal associations, and, most important, the disappearance
of women from neighborhoods during the day have accelerated the
decline of civil society, the stuff of which the amenities of everyday
life are made. In the 1980s and 1990s membership in voluntary organizations
such as the Parent-Teachers’ Association, veterans’
groups, and social clubs declined but, perhaps more to the point,
many of them lost activists, the people who kept the organizations
together. Labor unions, whose membership erosion was as severe as
it was disempowering, became more dependent on full-time employees
to conduct organizing, political action, and other affairs as rank-and-file
leaders disappeared into the recesses of the nonstop workplace.
The cumulative effect of this transformation is the hollowing out
of participation and democracy where it really counts, at the grass
roots.”
—Stanley Aronowitz(9)
What we’ve lived through in the last
30 years is a radical decomposition of the working class. Of course two
world wars wrought more destruction and unraveled societies more completely,
but the reorganization of life and work since the late 1970s has broken
down communities and ways of life that impeded profitability. Consequently,
the world is now much more transient. Everywhere people are in motion
in the greatest wave of human migration in history. Jobs have been exported,
new people have arrived with different cultures, languages, memories and
expectations. In the few places that are relatively stable, the influx
rapidly alters labor markets, urban density, housing, transportation,
pollution, and social tension. Even in the U.S., the chances of living
at the same address for more than five years is fairly small. Then there’s
the casualization of work, the rise of temporary employment, contract
labor, and the breakdown of careers and permanent jobs. Nobody lasts at
any given job longer than a few years anymore. And there is no future
at a given job. Unless you are a nurse, doctor, or something like that,
most people freelance. That fragmentary existence lacks a real sense of
shared community, neighborhood, street life, or work life. The old ways
of being in community have broken down.
This breakdown of communities and families
is a result of the furious pace of life under contemporary capitalism.
Conveniently for the needs of capital, it is precisely within those lost
social networks that alternative knowledge and counter-narratives were
kept alive and passed along. As the traditional communities of workplace
and neighborhood have been ripped asunder by plant closings, urban redevelopment,
and the new transience, the historical memories of communities that had
organized and resisted unfettered exploitation in the past have nearly
been lost too. Popular movements with memories of their own political
power based on collective action, have diminished as the physical foundations
have been kicked out from beneath them.
But this process is as old as capitalism
itself. What we are living through is just the latest in a cycle that
Italian theorists of the autonomist school have framed with the concept
of “class composition.”(10) Since capital’s counterattack
began in the mid-1970s, working class composition has been systematically
altered, or “decomposed”. By the late 1960s movements across
the planet had pushed for shortened working hours and increased pay, but
crucially, had begun contesting the very definitions of life and work
and the reasons why we live the way we do. The oil shock of 1973-74 was
the first loud response of a world capitalist elite afraid of losing its
power and determined to rein in an unruly working class by re-imposing
austerity and fear of unemployment.(11) Historic wage highs were reached
in the early 1970s in the U.S. and elsewhere. Since that time, working
hours have been radically intensified and in the 1990s absolutely lengthened,
while wages in real dollars have remained constant or diminished. In spite
of an economy four times larger than it was in 1980 (as measured by the
terribly inaccurate and misleading Gross Domestic Product, or GDP) in
the early 21st century we are working more hours per year and working
much harder, but life has not improved. Most people are just glad to have
work and income in a world where “falling” is perceived as
a real possibility, where one doesn’t have to look beyond the next
street corner to see how abject life can be if you don’t stay in
the good graces of ever-more demanding employers.
Burning Man promises its participants a reclaimed,
revitalized, reborn sense of community. Upon arrival everyone is greeted
with a hearty “welcome home” even if they’ve never been
there before. I asked my scrutinees what the word ‘community’
means:
—“The opposite of feeling isolated
and unsupported… a feeling of being able to lean on your neighbor.”
— “An investment looking for
a payback.”
— “Where you can lean on and
know your neighbors, you help each other out… You’re easy
to control when you’re just one person with no strong community
backing.”
— “Something that has its real
and its ideal sides. The ideal is a lot of sharing and thoughtfulness
and planning to make sure everyone’s ok. And the real one is knowing
that that’s the best way to take it, but not always having the courage
to do that.
— “The common ground constantly
has to be renegotiated or re-evaluated… community here is interesting
because of its temporariness… You can’t ever step outside
how our societal relations are influenced by capitalism but you can certainly
try, and I think Burning Man is a possibility.”
— “An environment, doing things
and being… It’s a platform for playing with ideas about everyday
life.”
— “All the parts dependent on
each other, all working together, living and non-living.”
— “Shared purpose, shared values.
Another type is based on geography, and is based on default… The
most profound meaning is a sense of identity.”
— “Involvement, equality and respect, safety, love.”
— “Oh God. Such an overused word
in the Bay Area, such a code word… drop the community in any speech
and it shows that you’re a good person and that you value human
interaction. It’s become the ‘motherhood and apple pie’
of the left... Community ideally is a group of people together whether
by choice or circumstance, who feel a shared interest, a shared destiny,
a shared responsibility... it’s so temporary and so tenuous [at
Burning Man] and you can just leave if you want, which is not what real
community is about. A real community, you can’t just pick up and
go, it would matter if you left.”
The normal impulse in life is to cooperate
and to do things together. The market and the capitalist economy seeks
to break that. You are tacitly pressured to hold back so you can then
sell to somebody, instead of sharing your skills and energy. Burning Man
is a chance to experience unmediated cooperation. The deeper truth of
living is somehow briefly tasted here as an extreme experience, but it’s
actually quite normal. People seek community, to connect with each other
in authentic ways, regardless of the contradictions inherent in the expensive
Burning Man experience. BM provides a context to create trust, which leads
people to envision other kinds of living and to share efforts to bring
it about.
Making
Technology Ours
One of the constituent elements of the emerging
culture visible at Burning Man is a classically working class predisposition
for tinkering, playing, innovating and doing things that are useful. And
doing it with a real sense of rugged individualist independence: “I
can fix that. I don’t need anybody to tell me how to do that, I
can do it myself.” In spite of the individualist ethic, it’s
always a collective process, handing down knowledge and techniques. Technology,
gadgets, electronics—this is how a lot of Americans do art, albeit
often unconsciously. At Burning Man people share machinery and electric
light and urbanization in a heavily technological event. As one of the
teachers I interviewed put it, “Everything here is technology, all
these bikes, the flames, the domes, the pyramids, that’s all technology.”
But people have very different ideas about technology, often independent
of their own engagement with it.
An avid bicyclist, who got involved repairing
bikes at her first Burning Man described herself as a technophobe. “When
I hear ‘technology’ and ‘tinkerer’, I don’t
relate that to fixing bikes for some reason.” Our biochemist, who
is as high-tech as a person can be, explained, “Back in the ‘50s
they said all this technology was going to save time. Well it didn’t.
I’ve got less time than I would have even 20 years ago.”
A former software engineer hilariously characterized
herself this way: “I’m pretty low-tech here, although I have
a titanium computer, a color printer, a laminating machine and two 80
gig firewire drives and all the equipment. This is my low-tech year…
I work, weld, and grind and I’m fabulously happy around tools…
I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s great. I am not a
trained mechanic. I am not a person who knows any of the crap that I’m
doing. I love not having the idea behind me that says ‘no you can’t
use this tool for that.’ I don’t know what you use this tool
for, fuck it, this is what I’m doin’ with it!”
A social worker who does research on the
street observed the same creative involvement: “One of the things
I really like at BM is that you see this endless ‘we’re gonna
take something and we’re gonna do something different with it, because
nothing’s available that let’s us do this thing’. It’s
one of the true joys and delights of being here.”
His colleague was repelled by the heavy dependence
on fossil fuels at Burning Man: “…the whole idea of art cars
that burn gasoline seems ridiculous. And these flamethrowers are all burning
petroleum-based products. But on the other hand gasoline is also used
in a lot of different, interesting, creative and beautiful ways…
Obviously we couldn’t be out here in this godforsaken place without
technology.”
The ability to appropriate the technosphere,
make it part of you, make it do what you want, is an essential aspect
of self-liberation. Gaining confidence by doing little things can lead
to challenging and reshaping bigger things. The crucial part is how the
material experience shapes one’s imagination. Burning Man reclaims
technological know-how, withdraws it from market relations and reapplies
it to activities and projects whose purpose is pleasure rather than profit.
But more importantly, the same logic and practice of technological reappropriation
potentially undergirds another life—a post-capitalist life. Radical
change on a global scale depends on our cleverness and our skills—and
our ability to use technologies in ways that enhance our humanity, our
freedom, and are consistent with interdependence and ecological sanity.
Liberated
Work vs. Useless Toil
“The historical emergence of a
huge social surplus in industrially advanced capitalist societies,
[permitted] a considerable fraction of the population to live outside
the wage-labor system, at least for a substantial period of their
adult lives. Many are marginals, hippies, freelance artists and
writers, and graduate students who never enter the professional
or academic workforces except as temporary, part-time workers. Rather
than seeking normal, full-time employment in bureaucratic, commercial,
or industrial workplaces they prefer to take jobs as office temps
or find niches that do not require them to keep their nose to the
grindstone, to show up to the job at an appointed hour, or to work
for fifty weeks out of the year….”
—Stanley Aronowitz(12)
Burning Man grew out of a subculture of people
who recognized that a life worth living takes place outside of wage-labor,
in addition to or instead of paid work. Its growth demonstrates a hunger
for social experiences outside of the “normal” economic constraints
of earning, buying and selling, as a way to deepen and extend human life.
For many, it’s also an opportunity to do good work, unmediated by
the twisted goals of economic life.
The female metal worker captured a typical approach to survival: “I
go through phases, I work for a while, and then it’ll get to the
point where I can take some time off… My life just goes on an as-needed
basis. When I can afford time then I take time, when I can’t afford
time then I make the money so I can afford time later.”
The ex-dotcommer would like to survive as
a cartoonist, but expressed a dark realism, typical of many in her generation:
“I’m not sure if I can get money doing what really lights
me up. So I would rather do something menial with my hands, or work in
a café or something, to free up my creative energy to work on my
own projects.”
The veterinary assistant/clown straddles
the split life: “Money is something I need to survive, and work
is something I need to do to have money to survive, and I have a job that
I don’t hate. That’s not what I am, that’s part of what
I am, but I’m a lot more complex than that.”
An NGO staffer who emailed his questionnaire from Vancouver emphasized
his different subjective experience when “working” at Burning
Man. “There’s a considerably higher level of fun with these
engagements—not only because of the type of work, but also because
the knowledge of the end result, the work’s temporality and the
personal connections that I have with the work.”
The apartment manager who also fixes computers
admitted, “The experience of Burning Man makes my ache greater in
my life... I go home, and I’m in planned time and I’m running
on clocks, and I don’t know how to stop that cycle... I understand
what the people who make the rules are telling me I should do with this
green paper, but I just don’t know how to translate it into something
that is fun and satisfying. By contrast, when you get ready for the Burn
you work your tailbone off. And because you’re creating something
different and new and you’re challenging yourself, even though it’s
work, it has this bonus attached. You’re doing something that’s
going to promote your survival, it’s going to help other people,
it’s going to be something really unique.”
The handyman/auto mechanic clearly wants
out of normal economic life: “I personally hate working for money.
If I could work and not have to take money, it would be great. I love
what I do. If I could somehow pull it off and not have to accept money,
I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Burning Man has a powerful effect on the imagination. It is not “real”
liberation, but a temporary faux “escape” from the economy
(that costs you hundreds of dollars). Nonetheless, it’s a real experiment,
and a direct manifestation of yearning. People yearn to escape the limits
of economic life, to be more than just “workers.” There aren’t
many chances to experience a crowd of like-minded people, sharing a collective
euphoria produced by artistic and technological self-activity. At Burning
Man there is a taste of such a post-economic life, even if the sour aroma
of the cash nexus is barely hidden beneath the playa.
1. “Heat of the Moment: The Art and Culture of
Burning Man,” Artforum magazine, Nov. 2003
2. ibid.
3. “Having a Good Time”: The American Family Goes Camping,
Radical America, Spring 1982, Vol. 16 #1-2
4. ibid.
5. ibid.
6. “The richest 1% of people in the world receive as much as
the bottom 57%, or in other words less than 50 million of the richest
people receive as much as the 2.7 billion poorest.” from World
Bank economist Branko Milanovic, 1999, cited in After the New Economy
by Doug Henwood, New Press (New York: 2003), p. 132.
7. Ibid.
8. This term is fleshed out thoroughly in Modern Times, Ancient Hours
by Pietro Basso. Verso: London 2003
9. How Class Works: Power and Social Movements, (Yale University Press:
2003). p.220
10. A thorough treatment of this tendency is presented in Storming
Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism
by Steve Wright, Pluto Press (London: 2002)
11. For a full analysis of the price of oil in combating working class
militancy, first in the so-called First World, then turning the attack
to the oil-producing workers themselves later, see Midnight Oil: Work,
Energy, War, 1973-1992 by the Midnight Notes collective, Autonomedia
(New York: 1992).
12. How Class Works: Power and Social Movements, op.cit. p. 59.
|
Pyrocycles
Pyrocycles was a mobile pyrotechnic installation designed for,
but not limited to, Burning Man 2003. The theme of the 2003
festival was Beyond Belief which invited the event-goers to
look at the mysteries of faith and spirituality and that which
is sacred. The dominant interpretations of this ranged from
a return to a tribalistic neo-paganism to empty reflections
on a lost spirituality to outright parodies of Christianity.
Ours, however, differed in that it brought the reality of President
Bush's political maneuverings in Iraq to the Black Rock Desert.
The message is simply that the actual reality of the war in
Iraq and the forces behind it must be not be forgotten in a
festival where the participants are meant to look beyond our
consciousness.
Pyrocycles built upon the propane-music technology used by the
Octopus Car. Instead of a single vehicle with a centralized
controller for the sequencing of the flames, it was a decentralized
and kinetic system. There were eight units, each consisting
of a bicyclist towing a trailer. Atop each trailer was an aluminum
tower, over ten feet high, resembling an oil derrick witha constant
small burning flame. Larger bursts of fire were controlled by
the cyclist through an electronics controller on the handlebars.
With the ability to modulate the frequency and the size of the
propane bursts while riding the trailers around, the cyclists
could orchestrate a unique visual-musical performance. Because
we were on bicycles, we were a lot more approachable and friendly
than most fire-based installations, which usually try to scare
people with large fireballs.
The depiction of oil rigs in a desert environment was intended
to evoke the landscape of oil-rich countries in the Middle East.
By towing rigs behind human-powered vehicles, we were emphasizing
the backwards nature of our society's dependence on fossil fuels,
and the subordination of our energy and foreign policy to that
dependence.
Reaction to the Pyrocycles project was mixed. Despite the explicitly
political underpinnings of Burning Man, for many participants
it is a determinedly apolitical space. For those seeking an
escape from the politics of Iraq and the myriad of other unpleasantries
they face, flaming oil rigs were a not-so-subtle reminder of
the world they wanted to leave behind. Many other viewers, however,
were struck by the appropriateness of the icons and their receptions
ranged from amusement to deep appreciation of the piece.
On a purely aesthetic basis, the rhythmic effect of the flame
and the clean lines of the metalwork were well received, and
the bikes often drew a crowd that followed the riders around.
Because of the control afforded to the riders, in many cases
we were able to provide a pyromusical accompaniment to bands
or DJs, which added an extra visual layer to their performances.
On a more detailed level, each of the trailers was adorned with
the Pyrocycles logo as well as an individual icon representing
a modern-day apocalypse. Like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
each bicyclist spread its form of destruction from a different
direction on the compass. The apocalypses are War, Media, Religion,
Overpopulation, Environmental Pollution, Globalization, Corporatization
and Oil.
Shown at: Burning Man, August-September, 2003 /
Scott Kildall, scott@kildall.com
Project designers: Brett Bowman, Scott Kildall, Sasha Magee,
Mark Woloschuk
|
|
