Evan Bones Kendall's Site

The Show -- Narrative and Agency

There are a number of ways to look at this, but I suppose in its essence it is simply attention-getting. For Sustainability to be sustainable, it must capture the attention of the masses.

As I understand it, insecure times bring out the worst in most people. A few are put to test and come out heroic, but most take orders from somewhere else. There arises a lack of agency. A perfect example is in how the kings of capitalism recently lost their agency and need both the federal government and super rich private individuals to be the heroic rescuers. These were supposed to be our leaders. Racism is rampant in prisons because they are insecure. I'm talking Maslow's hierarchy type of security.

Agency is not a resource in the same sense as clean water...or maybe it is. Life with dirty water is sustainable; nature proves it. Life with people who are not agents of their own lives is survivable, but not thrilling.

Life is supposed to be thrilling, with the only real threat coming from freakish weather, fire, or earthquakes. So we have imaginative art, an artificial way of reaching our core aesthetic appreciation, the level on which we can be thrilled (sorry, thrilling emotions rarely come from PhD dissertations). It can be argued that aesthetics are directly linked to our emotions, and, so, just as an imposing building creates a sense of dread or respect, imaginative art creates feelings of pride or disgust.

The show is the spectacle that people want to see and in seeing it and in performing it, it becomes a part of the culture. I leave the morality issue alone for now, but I'll take on the issue of performing it.

Creating and participating in spectacle is different from rubbernecking to see what's going on. Voyeurism may be unavoidable, but avoiding all (and even just too much) public life has long been considered evidence of weirdness or pathology.

So spectacle that is created by the people who are also actively involved in making it what it is, is probably better than spectacle whose size is measured by the number of TV sets tuned in.

The end message: Go local.