The Opening Ceremony: Immaterial Regulation and the Imaginary Architectures of Pleasure

This paper addresses the relations of production caught up in the architecture and event of the travelling street fair. Making reference to the organizational, material and spatial arrangement of the fair itself, analysis will move between one account of these relations as they are portrayed in the formal public ritual of the opening ceremony, to another, obscured account that can be traced in the immaterial and invisible architectures of laws, regulations and mores that underlie and determine this arrangement. It will discuss the locus and extent of ‘imaginary distortions’ (after Louis Althusser) and relationships, or charaktermaske (after Karl Marx), thus revealed.