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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. 1 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 2 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. 3