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Act 1: The Bet
Anteroom – You are a spectator seated in the anteroom waiting for the curtain to rise,
and the play to begin. What you have yet to see is that the theatre never stops; it is all
around you. Do not expect to neither stay on your side of the presidium arch; nor will
actors remain on stage; they mingle with the audience, and at any moment you will
realize you are actor as well as spectator and leap onto the stage. This play is a trilogy,
the theatrics of spectacle, carnival, and festival awaits you. Spectacle is a repertoire of
illusions; carnival theatre has the task of bringing the back stage on stage; festival theatre
is life affirming yet easily co-opted. I will show you what spectators, even actors, are not
meant to see, that the trilogy is not off or back stage but already engulfs you. Theatre
never ceases.
What is Antenarrative Theatre? “Ante” means "before" and a "bet." It is pre-story, the
bet that you and I can concoct a story that will transform the world (Boje, 2001a). I bet
you the theatrics of capitalism can be changed. New scripts are written and old ones
rewritten daily, but few understand the process. My bet is a new theatrics of capitalism
will rise out of the eternal clash of spectacle with carnivals of resistance.
Antenarrative is key to understanding complexity and chaos dynamics of the Theatres of
Capitalism. I do not want to just say that corporations have scripts and executives and
mangers act as directors and script editors. This we know. I want to move to a new
understanding of the complexity effects of so many stages networked across so many
organizations; our performances are suspended in a web of scripts. It is time we
reclaimed authorship of the drama we live.
Antenarrative is the building block; it is molecular to spectacle, carnival, nor festival
theatre. Antenarrative emerges from the chaotic soup out of which the scripts, plots,
characters, and an entire dramaturgy of capitalism gets constructed and reconstructed.
Antenarrative theatre is also a more a Deleuzian "line of flight," a non-linear line of flight
that like the fluttering butterfly, can set off chaos effects with a flap of its delicate yet
ingenious wings. Admit it spectator, you follow the fashions, the fetish has you.
The three theatres of action (spectacle, carnival, and festival) are transformed by the
action of antenarrating. Antenarrating is not good or bad. It is both, a between, and a
beyond coherent. Antenarrative is the grammar of the theatrical action. It intensifies and
resists oppression. Antenarrative theatre is the mimicry of the Third world economies to
put a McDonalds on every city block, and buy all the Fetish brand labels money can buy.
In its Theatre of Action, antetheatre can create or resolve global problems, exacerbate or
calm crisis. The Antenarrative Theatre of action I am most interested in is lifting the veil
to reveal the illusions behind the theatrical performances on the contemporary global
stage of capitalism. Awaken spectator! I wish you a more conscious capitalism, perhaps
one that has more festive performances that will break the unconscious connections
between spectrality, carnivalesque, and the violence from hyper competition.
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The “creative (re) organization” (Montuori, 2001) of capitalist theatre demands not only
new frames of reference, but also understanding the dynamics of self (spectator meet
actor), and the re-organizing complexity of capitalism. Lots of courageous people create
carnivalesque resistance movements to the global spectacle of over-consumption,
sweatshops, and other excesses of late modern capitalism. What I am after is an
antenarrative theatrics, a theory of the constant organizing, disorganizing, and reorganizing of the Trilogy: the interplay of spectacle, carnival, and festival. This
necessitates creative thought and action, an understanding of the dialogic of order and
disorder between theatre and antenarrative, between grotesque and romantic. I am not
expecting a synthesis in festival, or the elimination of one side of the dialectic of
spectacle and carnival. Rather, in the dialogical interplay of the trilogy, I hope for more
festive space for capitalism.
This book has a plot. In the first act I want to introduce some special language, like
antenarrative theatre, and tell a story about 11 White Cadillacs. You will find another
scenes that talk of types of spectacles, capitalism, and postmodern critiques, as well as
the seven elements of dramatics I call the Septet, which I apply to Enron.
In the second act of the book, Theatres of Capitalism, I would like to explore how
carnival opposes spectacle in Disney, McDonalds, Las Vegas, Post-11, and Enron (this
time looking at types of spectacle). Organizations are using theatre to accomplish
Disneyfication, McDonaldization, Las Vegasization, and now Enronization. Each is a
different style of theatre, and as these proliferate and interact, it can be argued we become
characters, either as customers or employees. For example Disney organizes themselves
explicitly as concentrated spectacle theatre, where employees are no longer employees
but cast members, wearing not uniforms but costumes, and instead of working, being on
stage. Disney theme parks are theatres within which people walk on the stages of
Tomorrowland, Adventureland, etc. Increasingly we witness organizations and city
centers becoming more themed in more diffuse acts of Disneyfication. Firat and Dholakia
(1998) write about the new Theatres of Consumption, the political economy being
changed by theatre. McDonald’s uses a more concentrated mechanistic theatre, one
where every word, gesture, and action of employee and manager is scripted. As we will
explore, Disney and McDonald’s are also diffuse spectacles. Post-11 and Enron are
megaspectacles that vie for our attention on the global stage. With Enron, I will show
how concentrated, diffuse, and megaspectacle intertwine in a self-organizing dynamic
theatrics.
In the third act, we turn to scenes that look at rescripting the theatres of capitalism. We
offer hope for script changes. This includes more festive (less workaholic) work,
interventions into Enronized cultures or the robotic McDonaldization Theatre. We seek a
more Festive capitalism. Corporations are hiring theatre consultants to change their
performance scripts, find more effective characterizations, and re-direct corporate theatre
(Saner, 1999, 2000; Schreyogg, 2001). I fear this is just more managerial control, a way
to script our every breath. There is an emerging critical theory of theatrics. Work by
Augusto Boal (1979, 1992, 1995) has long addressed how Theatre of the Oppressed is
related to more exploitative forms of capitalism, but also what do to about it. It is no
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accident that Boal sees in Aristotle the trick, the cathartic move by which spectators leave
a theatre and purge the tragic flaws they saw on stage. Liberation is possible. Boal and
Freire works with community groups to express, then rescript the aspects of oppression
they experience in their local economy. I have adapted their advice to look at how work,
McDonaldization, and other theatrics can be staged and rescripted to be less oppressive.
In the final act, I summarize what I mean by a more “conscious capitalism? By
"conscious capitalism" I mean a world where producers, distributors, and consumers
understand Fetish and the relationship between spectacle, carnival and festival theatres of
capitalism. I seek to complete Adam Smith's project, and unite Moral Sentiments with
the Wealth of Nations. I do not think that spectacle or carnival will replace by festive
capitalism. Rather, I think that understanding the trilogy and its theatrics can bring about
more consciousness by all the players. Economists are beginning to notice that beyond
profit extraction is greed, and that to control it ethics and economics must be reunited.
Can we improvise to create festive spaces that are life affirming? This will require acts
of social creativity, and surviving the challenge of complexity (Montuori & Purser,
1997). In theatre there is both cultural creativity and social oppression. Montuori and
Purser (1997: 2) point out that the social aspects of creativity have been largely neglected
so it is reduced to individualism.
Persons I Acknowledge - My lovely wife Grace Ann Rosile work in theatre in college.
She helped me express so many ideas; I do dedicate this book to her. My dad was a
showman, as you will see as you read the 10 Cadillacs account. He wanted spectacle to
be better than it could be. In March, before he died, Dad asked me to investigate the
spectacle of oil and the presidency. This was well before Enron became scandal. I want
to thank Steve Best and Douglas Kellner for tutoring me about spectacles and
megaspectacles. I want to thank Gurudev Shree Chitrabhanu, who took me along in
November 1997 on a tour of India. As I saw India, I was even more resolved than before,
that world capitalism is a tragic theater, led by the misguided spectacle of inhumanity to
all sentient beings. I would like to look at what Gurudev has taught me, that Ahimsa can
guide us in creating a non-violent way of doing business, an alternative philosophy to
Predatory Capitalism. Thanks also to Pramoda Chitrabhanu for her work on compassion
for animals in India. Thank you Alfonso Montuori for giving me creative license to pull
together ideas about capitalism and theatre. And I appreciate you the reader for reading
this book.
The scenes of Act 1 are necessary for you to understand the bet.
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