| In a Dionysian Pillow Fight, Apollo Isn’t Wearing Any Pants |
[Oct. 18th, 2009|10:20 pm] |
"Thanks to the potential energies of a variety of groups capable of subverting homogeneous space for their own purposes, a theatricalized or dramatized space is liable to arise.” – Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 391
The flash mob fixates on feathers in the air, fingernails pulling at pillowcases, quills stinging the eyes and the tongue and the back of the neck. But in the morning, it’s just a pile of feathers in the street. After the cleaning, where is the residual disruption of urban space? The virtual space of Youtube might witness (and here, privilege the witness before the act in its framing), even channeled through an iPhone, that technological tether of domination or liberty or something in between, depending on our scale of agency.
More pointed, unique, disruptive with contour and not just caprice, the group Improv Everywhere stages urban scenes such as the pantsless subway riders, the spontaneous (un)birthday, or the shop window jumping jacks, all of which interject within abstract space and the “perpetual dialogue between its space and users” (Merrifield, 112). What makes these scenes theater is not their production, but the production of their audiences.
While Dionysus and Apollo are both present in these productions, the grappling between them is not necessarily dominated by Dionysius, either here or in the larger scope of Nietzsche’s view, which continued to morph long after his writing and self-repudiations of The Birth of Tragedy. Apollo isn’t about to tap out. Unfortunately, Lefebvre and Merrifield truncate the reflection and the prophesy, myopic to the perspective that Walter Kaufmann, Roger Solomon, Kathleen Higgns, and Stanley Rosen all give in respect to the Dionysus/Apollo smackdown:
Nietzsche cannot be understood simply as a worshipper of Dionysus, who is not even mentioned in [Thus Spoke] Zarathustra. Apollo is the god of wisdom and lucidity; Dionysus is the god of intoxication and creativity. For human beings, to be submerged in the wisdom of sunlight is to share in the sun’s bliss (Wonne). – Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment, p. 28 Rosen later insists that self-transcendence and overcoming are not the product of self-destruction, and the arc of prophesy prefigures a certain design. Rallies, flash mobs, protests, strikes, and marches all combine elements of the Dionysian chaos and upheaval with the Apollonian organization and purpose. For Improv Everywhere, this means disrupting space with the forms and techniques of improvisational theater, documenting the moments, and disseminating the reactions and police reports to inspire further action and reflection and spontaneous doffing of pants. In Lefebvre’s terms of space, Improv Everywhere aims to infiltrate the conceived, rupture the perceived, and recontextualize the lived. While the result may not be a Marxist revolution, it does provide an aesthetic and social framework for reimagining reified social exchange, both in its orchestration of chaos and its studied disruption of space.
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