Buy More Stuff

With Christmas less than a week away, it’s Buy More Stuff season!

Trying to define or describe Buy More Stuff is complicated.

Call it street performance, call it culture-jamming, call it schizophrenic capitalism at its finest, Buy More Stuff looks like a very polite protest attended by earnest, young, well-dressed professionals. Here and there, a head of bright pink hair or particularly prominent facial piercings make you wonder exactly what slice of the Seattle populace these protesters might represent.

The group stations itself in the heart of the shopping district at peak hours of holiday gift-buying frenzy with their iconic signs and fliers. Their message is clear, succinct, and limited to a few phrases: “Buy More Stuff!” “Hurry!” “Or else they’ll run out of stuff!” “Or you’ll run out of time!”

Passersby stop, confused.

Some ask who the protesters are working for: Does the mall pay you to do this?

> No, just here to get the message out. Buy More Stuff!

Some are angry: What are you, like, die-hard capitalists or something?

> No, just want to encourage everyone to Buy More Stuff!

Others are sure they’ve seen through the irony: You’re being sarcastic, right?

> No sir! 'Tis the season to Buy More Stuff!

My favorites are the smug passersby who act like they’re in on the joke. They smile or raise an awkward fist in solidarity with what they’re reading as a progressive, performance-art commentary on the state of American consumerism. They get it. They're hip. And then they walk into Macy’s. To Buy More Stuff.

Freud describes the phenomenon of “disavowal” as a compromise made within the human psyche when it becomes necessary to believe two contradicting things at one time. I don’t actually believe that something bad will happen if I say “Macbeth” while inside a theatre. And still, I never say it. And I chide anyone who does. Disavowal.

We accomplish the act of disavowal by splitting our ego in two. One part serves what Freud calls the “reality principle” and the other serves the “pleasure principle.” Hence the “there are no calories in cookie crumbs” scene of disavowal. I know better, but I do it anyway. The fantasy is not actually believed. But it’s not not believed either.

The Buy More Stuff protest is so potent because it takes aim at the fantasy-producing disavowal at the heart of the western capitalist project. We know that stuff will not make us happy. We know that buying more stuff will not fill the holes in our lives. We know that buying more stuff for our loved ones will not make them love us more or defend us from abandonment. And yet, we walk into Macy’s.

The embodiment of sobriety and reason in their three-piece suits with professionally lettered signs, the Buy More Stuff protesters are not ironic. They are not, in fact, trying to get people to Buy Less Stuff through some sort of reverse psychology street ministry.

Instead, Buy More Stuff asks us to hold our fantasies accountable. In doing so, the protesters reveal the sometimes uncomfortable disavowal that is subtly taking place within each of us as we indulge in the pleasure principle of consumption.

Now excuse me, I have to go to Macy’s…

Deterritorializing Directing

When I first began directing, I spent a lot of time looking for the right way to do it. I directed my first full length show before ever taking a directing class, so my sheer bewilderment about the job description wasn't that surprising. For a long time I thought that somewhere, somehow, there was a right way to do this strange task that I'd suddenly fallen in love with. If only someone could tell me how!

I've been feeling the pain of Platonism a lot lately. About 2500 years ago, Plato spread a nasty rumor that ideal, perfect forms existed somewhere out there and that we should live our lives in their pursuit. In his vision, every material thing is ghosted by an ideal version of that thing. In the Platonic model, failure is basically guaranteed, because shorn of the responsibility of actual existence, the imaginary, ideal thing is always superior. The material manifestation of it, striving towards but never reaching the ideal, is always inferior.

If I were the "ideal" director, I would come to every rehearsal with a perfect vision of the scene and have an impeccable structure for getting us to that result. I would know exactly how to communicate with my actors and designers. I would rarely be lost or despairing, but even if I was, I'd have the ideal method for dealing with that anxiety.

Oh Plato. What have you wrought?

Deleuze and Guattari's vision of the world is perhaps more useful for the theatre director. For D&G, "Forms and subjects, organs and functions are 'strata' or relationships between strata" (1KP, 297). Our interpretation of the world builds up in layers like the layers of rock you can see in a cliff wall. These interpretations harden into stratified systems that seem so real they can trap us inside them. We believe in these systems, and suddenly the maps that we've drawn to help us understand the utter un-mapability of the world become more real than the territory they attempt to contain.

Directing is a messy art form. Each time I do it, I go in with a plan: a certain relationship between forms and subjects that I hope might produce the play I want to see. And each time I find myself re-inventing the wheel. Deleuze and Guattari describe deterritorialization as the process that breaks up stratification. It's a movement in an unexpected direction that disregards existing strata. Deterritorializing forces scratch out and re-write the map, not based on a destructive urge, but out of desire and necessity. They make new forms and new modes as they move in a new way through the old territory.

"Flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new" (1KP, 60).

Everytime I direct, my core notion of what it is to be a director - what it means to make art collaboratively yet in pursuit of a specific vision - changes. This constant flux is the pleasure and the challenge of this work.

So Plato - I hope you're listening! I'm releasing the notion of the ideal directoral technique! If you're looking for me, you'll find me bumbling about in the rehearsal room half-lost, half-inspired, trying to hold on to the reins of these Deleuzian forces of deterritorialization.