The Rhythm of the Saints by: Stewart Clegg Introduction Reflexivity isn't what it used to be. Reflexivity, no longer the preserve of a largely formalist, formulaic and limited theoretical conversation, is, according to Lash and Urry (1994) a property of a system of flows. Created and recreated in these flows are spaces and signs, significations and semiotics, symbols and mobile subjects and objects moving through circuits of power framed by meaning, space and time. The critical variable in meaning is reflexivity: some subjects are able to be more acutely reflexive than others because of specific configurations of space and time which flow through them. Flows channel through institutional spaces characterized by different 'governance structures'. Institutional spaces are both regionally and organizationally elaborated through space and time by different constitutions of meaning-governance structures. Regionally, some are thickly fabricated by multifarious flows channelling through contiguous nodes, such as the capital cities of the postmodern world. Others are spaces from which flows retreat or remain absent in a vicious circle that empties out life chances thus contained: the ghettoes of the UK and the USA, the wastelands of Eastern Europe. Within the saturated spaces of rich flows governance is less by either market or hierarchies and more by either or both of these being embedded in networks. Many flows are risky as organization power circuits stretch and spill beyond the capacities for reflexive monitoring and management that they are inscribed within. At risk are embodied selves seeking to manage whatever circumstances they are in, circumstances of escalating existential uncertainty. Reflexivity, in thick circuits, defines these states increasingly in aesthetic terms, in both work, where design and symbolic manipulation overtake traditional labour processes, and in play, where subjects check in and out of different avenues for self expression. The absence of resources for reflexivity in work means heightened opportunity for reflexivity through low-cost stylistic innovation through ghetto culture. Initially, I want to consider one such, as a case study, expanding the horizons of the project begun by Lash and Urry (1994) to the Atlantic shores of Brazil and the city of Salvador. Salvador, Bahia Salvador was founded in 1549 by Tom de Souza, first Governor-General of Brazil, on a hill overlooking the Bay of Bahia, in a strong defensive position. At the centre of the settlement was a plaza, known since 1807 as Pelhourino, named thus when the authorities established there the pillory at which slaves were whipped. The old historical district of Salvador takes its name, Pelhourino, from that instrument of torture once located in its heart. In times past, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Pelhourino housed the elite and the aristocracy of Brazilian society. They lived in large mansions and townhouses, built from fortunes amassed from the profits of the Recncavo sugar plantations, the expropriation of slave labour. In and amongst their homes were many beautiful churches, ornate in the Portuguese way, testament to the economic surplus extractable from slaves, sugar and surveillance reinforced by the whip. By the nineteenth century sugar was not the staple that it had been. New colonists elsewhere in the Caribbean had realised the profitable combination of black bodies, green fields and white expropriation, and the profits accruing to the prime movers lessened greatly. By the end of the nineteenth century the old elite were down at heel. New bourgeoisie took their place: businessmen and bankers - capitalists - who, influenced by the prevailing positivist philosophies of progress, sought a space outside the unhealthy, crowded and unsewered historic city. Slowly Pelhourino changed. No longer the social magnet of this city, its population shifted as the wealthy formed homes elsewhere. Not all abandoned Pelhourino but seepage produced a net outflow. The 1930s saw the complexion of the district rapidly change. Many Syrian, Lebanese and Italian migrants moved there. In 1932 the police moved the prostitution district into Maciel, in Pelhourino. The area declined rapidly into a largely ungovernable space of drug addicts and prostitutes in which 1 few people ventured easily at night, in which many people lived illicit lives, the old town houses being subject to multiple occupancy, often by squatters, who practised lifestyles far removed from those of the rich and famous who had once lived there. Fires, started by unsafe and illegal tapping into the electricity supply, decay and dereliction, threatened to wipe out the legacy that imperial settlement had bequeathed to the world in Salvador - the finest collection of Portuguese baroque colonial architecture in the Americas. By 1991, the area was completely derelict, with over thirty buildings a year collapsing, despite it having been placed on the World Heritage Registry of UNESCO in 1984, after an initial report on the district in the 1960s. By 1994 the picture had been reversed totally. Today the whole district has been sewered, repaired, refurbished, and repainted in the vibrant pinks, blues and yellows of the colonial stucco that fronted the buildings. Today, Salvador, the city in which Pelhourino exists, is the second most visited tourist spot in Brazil (Lamb 1994: 42). Just four years previously it was only the eighth most visited. Today, many bars, restaurants, museums, arts and crafts shops, workshops, cultural troupes and schools occupy space that previously was virtually ungovernable, non-taxable and unliveable. Few spaces can combine the elements for marketing place-image as successfully as Pelhourino, but, it is worth recalling, just four years previously it existed as such a place-image hardly at all. It appeared, to all intents and purposes, an ungovernable space, peopled by an underclass. The initiative for cultural revitalization was taken by the State Government in 1991 to commit the funds necessary to save Pelhourino before it was too late. Why, in 1991, after the need had been evident for many years, did the project start? Many explanations have been advanced - that the State Governor, newly embarked on a third term, had intimations of mortality and wanted to have done one really big good thing while he still had opportunity, is a popular explanation in governmental periodicals. This, however, is not the whole story. As Caetano Veloso (1994: 83) points out, one contributory factor was the organizational basis provided by cultural resistance. Non-Brazilian audiences may know of this resistance through The Rhythm of the Saints. The Rhythm of the Saints The Rhythm of the Saints was the title of a best selling record released by Paul Simon in 1990. The opening track introduced a new sound to many ears - recorded in Pelhourino Square, Salvador, Bahia, in Brazil - the sounds of Olodum. A martial, insistent, hypnotically rhythmic beat, the sound of a troupe of drums, percussive and shuffling, behind a typical Paul Simon lyric, 'The Obvious Child'. The name of the troupe of drummers was Grupo Olodum. Olodum and Pelhourino have become inseparable since the founding of the former in on April 25th 1979, in Pelhourino, the centre of old Salvador. Olodum means The God of Gods or The Supreme God in Yorubß. Although music fans may know Olodum as a band, they are, in fact, much more than that. They are a social and a cultural movement. Inspired by the profound example of Bob Marley for black consciousness they began as a movement of cultural resistance, of the outcast, the dispossessed and the despised, drawn from the ranks of the droguistas and prostitutas who congregated in Pelhourino, the then decaying heart of Salvador, Bahia. While the voice was inspired in part from the reggae music of Marley, and the Bahiano traditions of tropicalismo, to be found in Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Maria Bethnia, to name only the most famous Bahian artists, it also drew nourishment from the surrounding culture of syncretic religion, the blend of African animism and Catholic rite that is institutionalized as the church in Bahia. Samba is the music of the people of Brazil, the people brought from Africa as slaves to work the sugar plantations and the latifundia economy of imperial Portugal in the New World. Forced to adopt the religion of their oppressors, the people infused it with a parallel system of beliefs, deities, and saints, in the Macumba, which preserved and recreated the animism of traditional belief-systems in Africa. Olodum built on this heritage, taking it further to create an imagined community (Anderson 1983) through its imagery of Africa, especially in the recreation of the Ashanti rhythms of Ghanaian music. Moreover, it had a particular liminal space in which to develop - the traditions of Bahiano Carnival. 2 Carnival, derived from the latin carnelevmen, has common characteristics wherever we encounter it: theatricality; being, however briefly, what ordinarily you are not; a zone and a space in which one can try out various masks, sometimes literally, sometimes, more metaphorically, as identities which define sensibility. Traditionally, carnival reversed social orders and sanctioned transgression - a space of release prior to Lent, a space of pleasure prior to a period of denial. In Bahia, since about 1950, carnival has been synonymous with the trios electricos. Evolved from a simple old 1929 Mustang, with a loudspeaker transmitting the music of Dod and Osmar, musicians from Recife, the trios are now a spectacular procession of articulated trucks, with musicians and dancers on top of a revolving platform, itself built over a massive bank of speakers, flanking each side of the truck. The amplification is loud, the music pulsating, the costumes colourful and the dancing marvellous. The trios are today predominantly the voice of the Afro-blocos, the black Bahiano version of the escola de samba, that, starting historically with the Filhos de Ghandy, first imagined, and thus created, a space in the latin carnival in which black people could parade with dignity and without fear.