Festival, Anti Festival, Counter Festival, Non-Festival‪.‬

A colleague recently reported on a study she read which indicated that people who spend at least an hour per day alone were more productive both personally and professionally than those constantly in the presence of others. I surmise that this fact might puzzle the former colleagues with whom I worked as Dean of Residence at a small college of the University of Waterloo in the late 1980s. At our annual retreat for residence assistants, a substantial portion of the workshop activity involved discussing the possibility of suicide among young people away from home for the first time, and perpetually stressed by the requirement for high achievement in University. The message sent by the counsellors and Christian ministers who directed our sessions was that the residence assistant's job was to keep the women and men who lived on their floors busy and sociable with others. We should worry, we were told, about people who spent time alone in their rooms. When I countered that I should personally worry about people who never spent time alone in their rooms, who avoided opportunities for reflection and contemplation, my comments were met first with blank looks of confusion and then with vigorous repudiation. It was clear that for this bouncy, outgoing lot of undergraduate residence assistants -- as well as for the professionals who guided their work -- the very concept of wanting to be alone indicated pathology. In the residence, we were fortunate not to have any suicides during my Deanship, and I do not know if in fact the residence assistants, busy with their own work, actually managed to prevent any solitary activities. But the inscription of this process reminded me that the panopticon so tellingly theorised by Michel Foucault (1977) lives in many institutions -- not just the prison. Perhaps the obsession with students maintaining constant sociability is not truly about personal mental health. Maybe it is more about the question of what people might be getting up to behind those closed doors, away from the gaze and surveillance of others. Not only suicide, but other heinous sins of contemporary Euro North American society -- drug-taking, alcoholism (someone who drinks alone is almost definitionally alcoholic), masturbation -- can be solitary practices. Surely, mainstream culture contends, a healthy person would not pursue such behaviours. Sociable is good; solitary is bad.