The concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone has been around for some time now. The basic premise is that it is possible to create a space outside the confines of everyday society and culture that allows for a more fully expressible aspect of self. A common example given of a TAZ in practice is the Burning Man festival that occurs every fall in the Nevada desert.
While the concept has some merit and certainly can be a useful tool for more extreme social experimentation than is allowed in every day human culture I would argue that the system itself creates a false positive in terms of results and at best does nothing to change the status quo and at worst reduces the willingness and capacity for people to engage in real social change.
Why would this be the case?
Using Burning Man as an example we see a system that purports to create an anarchist utopia where all social conventions have been questioned. A space where the economy of supply and demand has been replaced by a gift economy. Where imagination is limitless and possibility endless.
While this is a lovely vision, by creating a space wherein one can feel as if this freedom is true, it reduces the chance that most people who experience it will work towards such possibilities in the real world outside the festival gates. I am not saying that the experience can not be amazing and profound. What I am saying is that by creating a scale model of that possibility one need not manifest it in their daily lives since they know they have access to it, like clockwork, every September. I am of course leaving out that subset of the attendees who go only for easy sex and access to drugs. What I am talking about are those who do sincerely believe in the utopian qualities of the festival.
The reality of such spaces is that they exist by virtue of the economic systems we have in place outside the zone. Not everyone is equal or has equal capacity since we only have what we bring inside the zone which, again, is determined by where we are in the outside world. The very structures that gave rise to the abundance there are reinforced upon reentry to the real world. After all, we need to make even more money this coming year so we can have even better blinky gadgets to give away next fall.
Because the feeling of radical freedom has been met in this space there is little to no need to make that potential a reality. It is uncountable the number of people I have met who spend 360 days out of the year in buttoned down desk jobs only to “let their freak flag fly” during a week of adultery and debauchery that is made permissible by some idea that the rules are different in Black Rock City. While the actions may, from some perspectives, be permissible, the consequences of those actions remain beyond the confines of the event.
The irony of course is that far from freeing themselves from the confines of social structures and rules they are wholly adopting the rules and confines of a different culture. No true questioning has gone on. What has happened is the wholesale transference of one externally imposed value system with another. The rules are the rules and they will simply follow them even if the rules change. The freak who emerges from the desert is not the “true self” but simply a mirror of the same rule following self within a different context. Not only that, but they are probably more willing to accept the structures of daily life knowing they will have an outlet in the fall.
I do not want to deny that there is the occasional true transformation. However, I would contend that this is by far the exception rather than the rule.
This relates to performance in some very interesting ways.
First, what we create between the performers and the audience is a kind of TAZ. The rules of reality have been suspended as we all go into the collective hallucination of the performance piece. Be it a play, musical, dance, opera or music piece we are, for the duration of the work, transported, in spirit if not in body, to somewhere wholly other.
At the same time the very trap of Burning Man and other TAZs also exist. We, the makers of the work, create this space and this experience for our audience and ourselves. But what happens next? What guarantee, if any, do we have that the ideas and transformations from within the work will in any way transition out to the real world and effect true social change?
This may not be a concern for most people who work in live performance. After all, there are plenty of people whose primary concern is simply to create a diversion. A little entertainment to take the edge off the stresses of every day life. But for those of us concerned with truly transformative works of art how do we proceed? How do we take the possibility and potential in the work itself and build from that the beginnings of alternative social structures.
How can we facilitate not just the temporary transformation of a few hundred audience members, but of society as a whole? Is that even the role that art and performance can play?
If it is, I would argue that we need to get beyond the TAZ and out into the very social fabric upon which the zone rests. The TAZ may provide us with a nice laboratory setting, but unless and until we are getting real world results, the efforts are nothing more than experiments on mice in mazes.
