Lazy

Twilight, a dubious violet, lapped the edges of the fair: brass throats of calliopes flutter-gasping, pennants flutterless on their splintered poles, dust motes dancing a slow sarabande in the oblique lantern-glow.  An acrid sweetness—burnt sugar crust, singed cork, damp straw—clung to the tongue like an unfinished Ave.  Bodies eddied: a tightrope girl sprung weightless above gasps, knives rang a brief benediction over the juggler’s wrists, a pasteboard king with eyes like boiled coins received the doffed caps of butchers’ lads and beggar-wenches.  Yet under the clamour ticked the stealthy metronome of authority: inspector’s nib scratching quotas in a ledger, constable’s chain giving its catechistic clink, a doctor’s lorgnette glinting on the bearded woman’s fluttering throat.  The carnival cry bore, within its brazen throat, the iron echo of the cage already smithied to its measure.

‘Carnivalization’ is a term used by Bakhtin to describe the techniques Dostoevsky uses to disarm this increasingly ubiquitous enemy and make true intersubjective dialogue possible. The “carnival sense of the world”, a way of thinking and experiencing that Bakhtin identifies in ancient and medieval carnival traditions, has been transposed into a literary tradition that reaches its peak in Dostoevsky’s novels. The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the “joyful relativity” of free participation in the festival. According to Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin’s carnival is “the apotheosis of unfinalizability”.[27] Carnival, through its temporary dissolution or reversal of conventions, generates the ‘threshold’ situations where disparate individuals come together and express themselves on an equal footing, without the oppressive constraints of social objectification: the usual preordained hierarchy of persons and values becomes an occasion for laughter, its absence an opportunity for creative interaction.[28] In carnival, “opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another.”[29] Bakhtin sees carnivalization in this sense as a basic principle of Dostoevsky’s art: love and hate, faith and atheism, loftiness and degradation, love of life and self-destruction, purity and vice, etc. “everything in his world lives on the very border of its opposite.” Etymologically, “carnival” derives from the late-Latin carnem levare—“to remove meat” before Lent—yet the term’s semantic trajectory is less about abstinence than about a ritual suspension of ordinary constraints. From the medieval feast of fools through Renaissance mardi gras, historians trace an ambulatory theatre of misrule in which ecclesiastical and civic hierarchies briefly dissolve, the grotesque body parodies clerical austerity, and laughter becomes an act of collective knowing rather than mere diversion. Bakhtin’s archival reading of these traditions—especially their French chronicles in his study of Rabelais—uncovered what he called a “carnival sense of the world,” an anthropological constant where the temporariness of inversion allows communities to imagine otherwise unthinkable social grammars and ontological freedoms. Bakhtin transposes this anthropological constant into a poetics: carnivalization names the literary mutation whereby a work internalizes festive inversion as a governing principle of form. In such texts, no voice is granted doctrinal supremacy, official truth loses its pedigree, and the boundary between lofty and low, sacred and profane, becomes porous. Because the law is momentarily laughed out of court, every utterance enters a liminal zone—what Victor Turner would later call “betwixt and between”—where meanings are neither fixed nor infinitely relativized but held in productive suspense. The result is not anarchy but what Bakhtin terms unfinalizability: a dynamic equilibrium in which dialogue indefinitely delays closure, keeping interpretive horizons ajar. Dostoevsky functions for Bakhtin as carnivalization’s most intricate novelist. The polyphonic structure of The Brothers Karamazov places Alyosha’s monastic tenderness, Ivan’s rational nihilism, and Dmitri’s Dionysian frenzy on an equal acoustic footing; none is resolved into the other, and each is heard amplifying the others in a contrapuntal montage. The ballroom episode in The Idiot, with its choreographed swirl of aristocratic manners collapsing into scandal, stages a literal masquerade where Prince Myshkin’s radical compassion ricochets off Rogozhin’s homicidal passion and Nastasya Filippovna’s self-immolating pride. In Demons the provincial fête—replete with charades, drunken speeches, and parodic tableaux vivants—furnishes a threshold where revolutionary parody exposes the moral vacuum beneath both tsarist paternalism and nihilist bravado. Across these scenes, opposites coexist at the edge of their own negations: faith blossoms beside apostasy, purity beside vice, each gesturing toward its dialectical counterweight without fusing into synthesis. Formally, carnivalization manifests through dialogic orchestration rather than simple thematic inversion. Every character’s discourse carries its own ideological center; authorial narration recedes to a position of “loophole” witness, refusing to arbitrate among voices. Chronotopic compression—crowded temporalities, claustrophobic interiors, night-long tavern quarrels—creates pressure-cooker conditions where utterances collide and refract. The laughter that accompanies such collisions is ambivalent: derisive mockery and sympathetic solidarity share the same breath, dissolving the moral distance that normally insulates speaker from object. Through this ambivalence, Dostoevsky tests ethical possibilities unavailable to a monologic form, enabling what Bakhtin calls “co-experience” (soperezhivanie)—a reciprocal attunement that precedes any doctrinal verdict. Morson and Emerson accentuate the metaphysical stakes of this poetics: carnival is not mere stylistic flourish but “the apotheosis of unfinalizability,” a dramaturgy of humility in which any claim to final wisdom is provisionally bracketed. Because the festival’s license is temporary, its laughter doubles as admonition; the return of ordinary time will reinstate hierarchies, but the memory of their reversibility lingers, inoculating participants against absolutism. Carnivalization thus serves an epistemic and ethical end: it dismantles the habit of objectifying the other, replacing categorical perception with dialogic curiosity. Subsequent critics have cautioned against romanticizing carnival as a panacea. The Soviet context of Bakhtin’s manuscripts underscores the peril of equating temporary misrule with permanent liberation, while cultural-studies revisions note that actual festivals often reinforced power by scripting their own containment. Still, the Dostoevskian novel remains paradigmatic for how literary structure can simulate a zone of licensed transgression, exposing the contingency of social grammars and thereby expanding the conceivable. In that simulated zone, the sacred may appear in vulgar disguise, the criminal may voice prophetic truth, and the reader is invited—though never compelled—to inhabit multiple moral centers at once. Carnivalization, then, is neither decorative inversion nor sheer relativism; it is a disciplined poetics that stages the reciprocal illumination of contraries under the sign of laughter. Dostoevsky turns this poetics into an existential laboratory where love wrestles with despair, where the grotesque body signals both mortality and renewal, and where every verdict remains suspended in anticipation of the next voice to enter the hall. Through such orchestration, the novel becomes a festive commons, continuously rebuilt at the threshold where hierarchies tremble and dialogic freedom briefly attains tangible form. Antonin Artaud coined the phrase “Theatre of Cruelty” in the early 1930s to name a form of drama that would abandon literature’s polite mediation and reopen performance to what he called “the metaphysics of the plague.” Etymologically, cruauté descends from Latin crudelitas—a wounding severity—but for Artaud the wound had nothing to do with sadism: cruelty designated the implacable rigor with which life itself imposes limits, decay, and ecstasy. His 1932 manifesto “Le Théâtre et la cruauté,” later folded into Le Théâtre et son double (1938), attacks the bourgeois playhouse for reducing action to psychology and words. Against that verbose domesticity, Artaud proposes a sonic-gestural onslaught: shrill percussion, blinding light, hieroglyphic choreography, multilingual shouts, and inhuman masks meant to bombard spectators until their sensorium cracks open and dormant forces—sexual, cosmic, sacred—surge into awareness. Historically the project grows out of Surrealism’s revolt against reason, but Artaud’s itinerary is unique. A 1931 visit to the colonial Exposition’s Balinese dance troupe revealed to him an aesthetics in which meaning travels through rhythmic volleys of muscle and gong, not through dialogue. The same year, he invokes the medieval flagellant processions that treated plague as both chastisement and revelation: the stage must become an epidemic zone where audience and actor exchange breath, sweat, and terror, recovering ritual’s collective stakes. His single large-scale experiment, the 1935 production of Shelley’s The Cenci, used cacophonous drums, gigantic marionette-like doubles, and claustrophobic lighting to pulverize narrative continuity. Critics were baffled, funding evaporated, and Artaud soon spiraled into the psychiatric ordeals that marked the rest of his life, but the theoretical shockwave persisted. Theatre of Cruelty redefines mimesis as ordeal. Language is demoted to incantation; scenography turns into an alchemical furnace; the actor’s body becomes a convulsing ideogram that operates directly on the nervous system, bypassing interpretive intellect. This dramaturgy aims at a catharsis closer to Nietzsche’s Dionysian or to Aztec sacrificial logic than to Aristotle’s purgation of pity and fear: spectators are to be seized by a real, not represented, violence of spirit that annihilates habitual selves and yields fleeting glimpses of the absolute. Cruelty thus names a discipline—an ascetic stripping away of the “organs of normal sense” so that being may speak through shrieks, silences, and arrhythmic pulsations. Although Artaud realized only fragments of his vision, its afterlives are substantial. Jerzy Grotowski’s “poor theatre” carries forward the body’s ascetic exposure; Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade and Mahabharata translate cruelty into immersive ritual; the Living Theatre, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, adopt its anarchic communality; performance art from Diamanda Galás’s vocal exorcisms to Marina Abramović’s endurance pieces inherits its wager that risk, pain, and trance can pierce cultural anesthesia. Even rock concerts’ stroboscopic bombardments and warehouse raves’ sensory saturation rehearse Artaud’s demand for total dramaturgical environment. Yet the concept remains paradoxical: cruelty seeks liberation, shock aspires to tenderness, and a theatre that would destroy text can survive only by being endlessly re-written. In the end, the Theatre of Cruelty is less a genre than a perpetual provocation. It urges theatre to recollect its archaic vocation as ordeal, to let the abyssal forces of myth, madness, and corporeality erupt through civilized veneers. By treating stagecraft as a plague that infects the audience with raw being, Artaud bequeaths to modern performance a mandate to unsettle, to desecrate comfort, and thereby, paradoxically, to awaken the dormant capacity for communion that lurks within the wound. Gogol would begin by reminding us that the Russian word for “market square,” bazár, shares a Persian root with bazaar and once denoted not merely a site of trade but a roiling crossroads where itinerant skomorokhi—buffoon-minstrels outlawed by church councils as early as 1648—sang bawdy songs and mocked boyars to their faces; in that linguistic sediment he would locate the ancestral seed of carnivalization.  He would claim that his own childhood recollections of the Sorochyntsi Fair, with its pig-fat smoke, Cossack wrestling rings, and vendors hawking icons beside counterfeit relics, taught him that Orthodox gravity and pagan exuberance already cohabited in the soil, long before theorists coined any term for festive inversion. Asked about Bakhtin’s thesis, Gogol would shrug the way Chichikov shrugs when accused of trafficking in dead souls: “What other atmosphere can the Russian tale breathe?”  For him the grotesque is not a stylistic flourish but the only truthful grammar of an empire whose official hierarchies stand on stilts fashioned from paper edicts and candle smoke.  He would point to The Government Inspector, where a terrified bureaucracy crowns a penniless flâneur as its sovereign, and to Nevsky Prospect, where the gallant Piskaryov pursues an angelic courtesan until dream and daylight swap costumes.  These scenes, he would insist, are not satirical exceptions that mock realism; they are realism experiencing its own subterranean drift, the moment when declarations of order shudder against the raucous motility of living matter. Gogol would also caution that carnival laughter harbors eschatology.  In the closing pages of Dead Souls—a novel he called a “poem” on purpose—Chichikov’s rushing troika fills the horizon with dust, and the narrator’s voice swells into prophetic cadence, hinting that Russia’s redemptive destiny might ride on the same wheels that carried the swindler across provincial mud.  This entanglement of fraud and transfiguration, he would argue, is cruelty’s twin to joy’s relativity; without it, carnival decays into cabaret.  Therefore, while Bakhtin celebrates unfinalizability, Gogol would stress the apocalyptic undertow: the fair’s temporary jubilee foreshadows a final reckoning in which masks cannot be removed because they have fused to their wearers’ faces. Finally he would conclude, in the half-ironic, half-penitential cadence of the 1847 Selected Passages, that the writer’s task is to “probe the ulcer with a smile.”  Carnivalization, he would say, is not a license for riot but a pastoral duty to expose the diseased tissue beneath bureaucratic pomade so that grace—invisible yet stubborn as a santon’s footstep—may seep in.  For that reason he would greet Bakhtin’s metaphorical marketplace with a conspiratorial wink, then disappear behind a puff of snuff, leaving only the echo of laughter that sounds suspiciously like weeping. Joyce’s Dubliners and Gogol’s grotesque both treat official social scripts as fragile veneers, yet they do so by opposite logics. Gogol destabilizes hierarchy through overt carnivalization: bureaucrats inflate into caricature, material objects misbehave, and narrative voice slips into prophetic derision, turning the text itself into a fairground where categories unravel. Joyce, by contrast, practices what he called “scrupulous meanness”: the stories preserve surface realism and exact social detail, letting paralysis, petty corruption, or thwarted desire reveal themselves in understated epiphanies rather than exuberant inversions. The Dublin streets never erupt into licensed misrule; they tighten around their inhabitants with quotidian rigor. Both writers expose an empire’s moral anemia—Russia’s autocracy in Gogol, Britain’s colonial grip in Joyce—but Gogol uses the centrifugal force of grotesque laughter, whereas Joyce employs centrifugal stillness, the moment when a clock’s tick or a pub’s lamplight freezes a life’s futility in place. The kinship lies in their shared conviction that official hierarchies are staged tableaux, yet the grammar that lays them bare—carnival’s boisterous relativism versus Dublin’s muted stasis—remains distinct. In “A Little Cloud,” the shabby gentility of Little Chandler’s office, the tepid snugs of Corless’s bar, and the stuffy nursery where his child howls all enact a muted hierarchy whose power is felt precisely because nothing flamboyantly overturns it. Chandler nurtures romantic visions of poetic fame and continental escape, but each atmospheric detail—the ink-smeared fingers, the barman’s perfunctory politeness, the baby’s indignant cry—reasserts the city’s grip. Gallaher’s swagger offers a momentary hint of carnival misrule, yet the reunion only underscores Chandler’s impotence: instead of the fairground’s liberating laughter, Joyce stages a suffocating epiphany in which the father’s shouted rebuke to his son rebounds as self-indictment. No grotesque masks slide into place, no public ceremony collapses into farce; the world remains intact, and its very intactness exposes the falsity of Chandler’s private fantasies. Here the grotesque is internalized, its energies frozen into a Dublin still-life where aspiration curdles into self-contempt—an austere inversion of Bakhtin’s jubilant carnival, demonstrating Joyce’s distinctive grammar of paralysis rather than license. In “Araby,” the boy’s quest projects the bazaar as a quasi-oriental fairground—an Irish child’s private simulacrum of carnival—but the story dismantles that promise by staging the bazaar’s exotic plenitude as belated, half-lit emptiness. The streets of North Richmond Road, with their brown façades and musty air “odorous of ash-pits,” frame a quotidian hierarchy in which clerks trudge home, lace curtains police visibility, and the priest’s dead library locks desire into dust; no grotesque inversion intervenes. The boy’s erotic vow to bring back a gift for Mangan’s sister momentarily inflates the setting with fictive amplitude, yet each logistical step—the late train, the paltry coins, the count of shillings—tightens material constraint. When he finally enters Araby, the gas-jets sputter, stalls close, and two English shop-girls flirt with a young man in a banal parody of the bazaar’s promised wonder. The scene offers a flicker of carnival color—oriental vases, distant music—but Joyce withholds any Bakhtinian threshold where social orders dissolve; instead, the spectacle’s tatty commercialism exposes colonial simulacrum and adolescent self-delusion in a single glance. The boy’s resulting epiphany—“I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity”—is an inward grotesque: the masks never drop because they were illusions borne in his own mind, and the laughter that might have released objectification turns into a sting of paralysis. Thus, while the bazaar’s name and décor hint at carnival freedom, Joyce subverts the very grammar of carnivalization, yielding a still, ironic tableau in which hierarchical reality, far from being overturned, is rendered all the more inexorable by the failure of imaginative flight. But joyce’s writing is a very warm light, even through these troublesome stories something seeps out that looks painfully and lovingly real. In that way Gogol is outmatched not by greater wit but by something like vulnerability.

Joyce’s prose carries an undertow of tenderness that transfigures even the bleakest Dublin scene into an occasion for compassion.  The boy who stands disillusioned at the shuttered stalls of “Araby,” Chandler choking back tears while his infant wails in “A Little Cloud,” or Gretta listening to distant hoofbeats in “The Dead”—each is rendered through a syntax that lingers over small tremors of feeling, letting embarrassment, yearning, or regret glow momentarily before the shutter of daily routine snaps shut again.  The diction is plain, yet Joyce nestles rhythmic cadences (“Air, fire, water, earth, night”) and half-biblical echoes that bathe these thwarted lives in a faint sacramental light; epiphany hurts, but it also dignifies.  Gogol, by contrast, orchestrates a grotesque carnival where pity often dissolves into corrosive laughter: Poprishchin barks like a dog in “Diary of a Madman,” Chichikov complacently inventories dead serfs, and officials in “The Government Inspector” gibber at their own exposure.  Even when pathos flickers—Akaky Akakievich’s overcoat, say—it is swiftly snuffed out by cosmic mockery.  Joyce’s vulnerability derives from the privacy he grants to consciousness: interior monologue lets readers feel the pulse beneath caricature, whereas Gogol’s narrator keeps a performative distance, coaxing us into complicity with the joke.  Thus Joyce’s warmth does not soften the paralysis he depicts; it pierces it from within, making the failure of communion itself a plea for mercy.  In that radiance Gogol seems “outmatched” not because he lacks insight or wit, but because his metaphysics of laughter rarely pauses to cradle the wound it opens, whereas Joyce lingers there, allowing the wound to speak. A carnival troupe caught between masks and fatigue: the blue-grey jester’s face still wears its fiendish grease-paint, but his shoulders sag; the crowned woman cradles a limp child who has danced himself past exhaustion; dogs wait, an owl blinks, a tambourine and scattered cards lie mute on the floor while, in the dim left background, a procession of masked revellers files toward the gallows-shaped rig that once hoisted their props.  Gustave Doré titled drawings like this “Saltimbanques in Prison”—an ironic resting-place for itinerant performers—and the tension is palpable: costumes proclaim riotous freedom while the setting (bare wall, barred window) insists on confinement. Here carnivalization shows its undertow of vulnerability.  The grotesque demon-jester, so potent in the ring, now looks merely tired; the “queen” is a mother first, her crown a flimsy circlet of gilt paper; the child’s flaccid arm asks for pity, not applause.  Hierarchy is inverted—royals reduced to vagrants, devils turned into anxious fathers—but the inversion is no triumph; it exposes the flesh beneath spectacle, the ache beneath laughter.  Bakhtin celebrates carnival as “the apotheosis of unfinalizability,” yet Doré reminds us that unfinalized means also unsecured, precarious. That precarity is the very warmth you find in Joyce: when Little Chandler blinks at his infant or the Araby boy blushes under sputtering gas-jets, their inner tremor resembles the slack body of Doré’s child—human hopes momentarily stripped of theatrical gloss.  Gogol’s bureaucrats would have cackled at such a scene; Joyce would have paused long enough for the silence after the tambourine’s last rattle to deepen into compassion.  Doré visualizes the hinge where grotesque display passes into tender exposure, the place where carnival laughter falters and something painfully, lovingly real seeps through. Artaud would see in Doré’s bedraggled saltimbanques a prophecy of his own Théâtre de la Cruauté: the festive mask has slipped, revealing a zone where spectacle and wound are indistinguishable, and the audience, forced to confront exhaustion rather than applause, is implicated bodily in the troupe’s collapse. Cruelty in Artaud’s sense is not sadism but a rigor that strips theatre of polite mediation until it confronts life’s raw limits—birth, fatigue, hunger, death—just as the jester’s scorched‐blue face and the limp child expose the mortal substrate beneath carnival glitter. The owl’s unblinking stare, the inert tambourine, the playing cards scattered like spent talismans: each prop testifies that representation has run out of air, leaving only the somatic residue Artaud likened to the metaphysics of plague, where performance becomes contagion. In this dim backstage cell, hierarchy is already inverted—queen reduced to nurse, demon to penitent—and the spectators hinted at in the left background file past as if through a quarantine corridor. What remains is the cruel clarity Artaud demanded: a theatre that bruises perception into awakening, replacing narrative consolation with the palpable fact of shared vulnerability. The way I see carnivalization is that it is this ghost of society that, if not watched over with extreme care, could pose as a great threat. And I think this has been shown over and over again. What I’ve seen is that, as far as the political right is concerned, what we would call conservatives, if I could distill their ethos into one principle, it would be this. That, not for one second, do we, as Americans, bend to bohemians. Carnivalization is indeed a spectral force: a periodic loosening of the tissues that hold a social body together, exposing appetites and voices that the ordinary calendar sequesters behind rank, ritual, and law. Bakhtin celebrates this suspension as generative, but history shows that every carnival carries a double valence—revivifying release on the one hand, centrifugal shock on the other. When the Parisian fêtes de la Raison of 1793 crowned goddesses in cathedral naves, Burke read sacrilege where revolutionaries heard laughter; when Berlin’s cabarets in the late Weimar years flaunted cross-dressed and satirical routines, the National Socialists diagnosed moral contagion and promised surgical repression. From the Boston Brahmins deploring the “bohemianism” of Greenwich Village to the Moral Majority railing against Woodstock’s afterglow, American conservatism has repeatedly cast itself as a prophylactic against the unlicensed masque, arguing that once carnival steps off the fairground and into legislation it ceases to be play and becomes nihilism institutionalized. That wariness rests on an anthropology of fragile form: if human nature needs binding norms to tame the libido dominandi and the libido sentiendi, then any deliberate inversion of those norms, however temporary, risks tearing the veil irreparably. Hence the recurrent conservative motto—implicit in Sumner’s nineteenth-century tirades against “fads,” explicit in post-1968 denunciations of counterculture—that a republic must never “bend to bohemians.” The fear is not merely aesthetic distaste for unwashed artistes; it is political dread that aesthetic license metastasizes into institutional entropy. Bakhtin’s “unfinalizability,” translated into ideological practice, can look like a refusal ever to close the question of value, so that the hard-won lattices of family, civic duty, and inherited meaning melt into what Philip Rieff called an “anti-culture” of uncurbed impulse. In this light carnival is a ghost precisely because it haunts the borders of the polis: it is visible, palpable, sometimes thrilling, but it does not—and must not—acquire a hearth inside the constitutional house. Yet the logic cuts both ways. Conservative suspicion often overlooks the paradox that carnival’s very containment within festival limits can function as a pressure-valve, allowing the polity to vent excess and thereby fortify the norm it pretends to overthrow. Absent such ritualized inversions, societies have tended to generate darker, uncontrolled ruptures: the millenarian spasms of Münster in 1534, the ecstatic purges of China’s Cultural Revolution, or, closer to home, the January Sixth melee in which performative costuming, slogan-chanting, and spontaneous leaderless theatrics turned the U.S. Capitol into a grotesque fun-house of competing sovereignties. When no sanctioned outlet mediates ressentiment, the carnival ghost can incarnate in forms far more volatile than a dozen poets in a café or drag queens on a float. The dilemma, then, is dialectical rather than binary. Carnivalization is dangerous precisely because it discloses how much ordinary order is dramaturgy; but without that disclosure, order petrifies into the kind of brittle righteousness that Gogol lampooned and Joyce rendered in paralysis. A polity that never “bends to bohemians” risks becoming so rigid that the smallest unforeseen tremor shatters it, while a polity that elevates bohemian license into principle risks dissolving the grammar by which freedom itself is legible. Extreme care, as you put it, means guarding the threshold—neither barring the ghost outright nor inviting it to take permanent lodging, but acknowledging its cyclical visitations as a constitutional necessity, a memento that every hierarchy is provisional and every liberation mortal. Foucault is one of the great conservative political thinkers ever because his archaeology of power discloses not liberation but the ineradicable recursion of mastery.  The etymology of discipline—from Latin discere, “to learn”—reveals a pedagogic asymmetry that every révolutionnaire inherits; Foucault’s historiography of prisons, clinics, and schools shows how the nineteenth-century state merely perfected an older monastic technology of souls, translating cloistered obedience into civic normativity.  Historicity enters when the panoptic schema migrates from Bentham’s drawing board to Haussmann’s boulevards: each uprising that razes Bastilles unwittingly begets a more intricate lattice of gazes, dossiers, and statistical averages.  Thus the dream of absolute freedom becomes, in Foucault’s empirical ledger, the precondition for subtler submission—a verdict that aligns him, paradoxically, with classical conservative skepticism about human perfectibility. Lacan drives the point inward.  The subject’s demand for emancipation is structured by the Master-Signifier—a linguistic anchor that guarantees meaning precisely by installing an Other who authorizes it.  Revolt therefore completes the circuit it claims to break: the guillotine decapitates the monarch only to enthrone la Nation, le Prolétariat, or “the People” as successor sovereign.  Foucault’s genealogies supply the institutional corollary to this psychoanalytic grammar: wherever the scaffold falls silent, a diagnostic manual, a school timetable, or a health passport rises.  The militant calls this progress; the analyst names it a symptom. Conservatism in Foucault lies not in a defense of throne or altar but in an unflinching refusal of eschatological hope.  Power, he insists, is neither a possession to be seized nor a fortress to be toppled; it is a capillary medium that precedes and survives every revolution.  Like Burke, he mistrusts the tabula rasa; like Tocqueville, he sees modern equality birthing new tutelary authorities.  What carnivalization promises—a jubilant leveling of ranks—Foucault registers as a temporary redistribution of surveillance networks, soon re-encoded in biometric registers and pedagogic scripts.  The laughter fades; the dossier thickens. This diagnosis is not quietism but vigilance.  By stripping emancipation of its salvific aura, Foucault conserves the tragic wisdom that mastery is a structural demand, not a removable tumor.  The task is therefore tactical: to multiply sites of counter-conduct, to improvise local refusals, knowing they will sediment into new disciplines that must in turn be resisted.  In that perpetual contest, Foucault’s irony becomes a hard-edged prudence—the kind of prudence long cherished by conservative thought, now redirected from protecting tradition to mapping the protean resilience of command. Hauntology—Derrida’s portmanteau of haunting and ontology—names the way lost futures and unlaid pasts hover in the present as neither fully absent nor fully real.  Carnivalization, in Bakhtin’s sense, is already hauntological: it survives as a seasonal revenant that materializes the memory of medieval misrule and the premonition of yet‐unrealized egalities.  Each licensed inversion returns like a ghost that must be welcomed yet contained, reminding the polity that its hierarchies are provisional masks whose seams can split without warning. Foucault’s archaeology deepens the spectral register.  The panoptic disciplines that crystallize after the great bourgeois revolutions arise partly to domesticate the carnival spirit, converting the fair’s promiscuous crowd into docile bodies traced by ledgers and gazes.  Yet the very need for omnipresent surveillance betrays an anxiety that the specter remains unexorcised; power installs its lattice because it suspects that laughter and revolt may seep through any crack left unguarded.  Thus the ghost of carnival becomes the silent rationale for the prison timetable and the school bell, a negative imprint shaping the architecture of order. Lacan’s dictum that every uprising seeks a new Master supplies the psychoanalytic echo: the carnival crowd, intoxicated by the absence of kings, yearns for a sovereign signifier to ground its jubilation, so the ghost of authority reappears wearing a different crown.  Hauntology describes this recursion as a structural haunting; the signifier that promises emancipation is already haunted by the law it will become.  In this loop, carnival laughter and disciplinary vigilance are twin specters alternating masks at the edge of visibility. Historically, the pattern recurs from the Feast of Fools to the Paris Commune and from Weimar cabaret to digital meme-storms: each eruption of festive parody leaves behind new dossiers, new algorithms, new risk assessments.  The technologies of control are, in this sense, the sedimented after-images of past carnivals, while the next carnival will arise from the cracks those technologies fail to seal.  Hauntology offers the vocabulary to grasp that double movement: society is haunted simultaneously by the memory of inversion and by the anticipation of its return, and this dialectic scripts both the exuberance of rebellion and the conservatism of vigilance. Carnivalization, then, is not merely a holiday of suspended norms; it is the spectral reminder that norm and transgression are co-constitutive, each haunting the other’s claim to permanence.  Hauntology discloses why the ghost never rests: every attempt to finalize order paradoxically preserves the negative outline of what it excludes, guaranteeing that the laughter of the fairground, though muffled, will echo in the panopticon’s corridors and in the next revolutionary slogan alike. And this is what I was saying, is that these carnival acts, and these carnival actors and actresses, these people, they live on doing a great service to the community by entertainment. However, some a long time ago were not so good, and they profited by feeding the people things that they used to enjoy. And these things were not always holy. In fact, some of them were the opposite. And there were some carnivals that were strictly for the exhibition of the disintegrity of the human being. Carnival has always flickered between blessing and blight. In the medieval fête the juggler, the acrobat, and the puppet-master did more than amuse; they released the village from agrarian drudgery and ecclesiastical gravity, reinscribing bodies in laughter when sermons had turned them to stone. Yet the same platforms hosted bear-baiting, public mutilations, and freak exhibitions where deformity—or the racialized fantasy of it—was marketed as thrilling abomination. From the early modern “monster shows” of Bologna and Paris to P. T. Barnum’s ante-bellum museums, carnival could sanctify communal joy one hour and cash in on the crowd’s appetite for the grotesque the next; its economy thrived on the oscillation. The moral volatility sharpened in the nineteenth century when industrial cities, teeming with migrant labor, craved cheap distraction. Travelling fairs advertised wax tableaux of syphilitic flesh, “ethnological” villages that paraded colonized bodies, and burlesque revues billed as “anatomical exhibitions.” Reformers like Anthony Comstock thundered that such amusements corroded the civic soul, while journalists exposed the behind-the-canvas squalor: contortionists sleeping in straw, conjoined twins denied medical care to preserve their earning power, Black and Indigenous performers constrained by contract to reenact fantasies of savagery. In these arenas carnival’s radical equality—the leveling that allowed a jester to lampoon a magistrate—curdled into hierarchy inverted only in appearance; the spectators’ ticket purchased not solidarity but sanctioned voyeurism over bodies cast as other-than-human. Religious leaders sensed the spiritual stakes. For the pulpit, the fairground’s “unholy” fare was less about exposed skin than about inverted liturgy: false miracles, parody sacraments, laughter where repentance ought to be. The Salvation Army’s brass bands were invented partly to infiltrate such spaces with hymns, drowning out bawdy ballads at the very gate of the penny gaff. Yet attempts at outright suppression often failed, because communities clung to the carnival not merely for titillation but for the vital shock of seeing authority mocked. Even disreputable spectacles performed a social diagnostic: they revealed the shadow desires polite society preferred to repress, and by revealing them they haunted the conscience long after tents folded. That haunting endures. Contemporary reality television, influencer “cringe” compilations, and algorithm-driven outrage loops replay sideshow dynamics on digital platforms. The performer’s wagon is now a livestream; the entrance fee is attention harvested for ad revenue. Bodies outside normative grids—fat, queer, neurodivergent—are alternately celebrated and commodified, their stories cut for viral consumption. The ghosts of the nineteenth-century midway walk these timelines: each click echoes the coin dropped to stare at a tattooed woman in 1890, each abuse of personal data an update of the barker’s cold arithmetic of spectacle. The carnival that once rolled away at dusk now persists 24/7 in a luminous rectangle, posing anew the question of whether illumination liberates or merely intensifies the gaze. To honor carnival’s service without reviving its cruelties, communities must cultivate what Bakhtin called “answerability”—a reciprocal recognition that spectators and performers co-author the event. Ethical curation can preserve the liberating interval when hierarchy loosens, yet forbid the slide into predation. Where such vigilance lapses, the fair’s bright canvas sags into a theatre of disintegrity, and the spectral chorus of exploited lives—“the great unholy” of carnivals past—returns to remind us that laughter purchased at another’s degradation exacts its toll in the long, unsettled ledger of the social haunt. Carnival’s spectral caravan never truly folds its tents; it settles instead into the folds of collective memory, where each era re-stages the old barter between liberation and predation under fresh lanterns. The freak booth, the panoptic ledger, and the infinite scroll are successive avatars of the same haunted threshold where laughter dilates into cruelty and discipline masquerades as care. Yet, precisely because the fair cannot be banished without fossilizing the polity it unsettles, vigilance must take the form of responsive custodianship: to keep the midway lit enough for revelry yet dim enough for humility, to let masks fall without turning faces into commodities, to allow inversion’s brief oxygen while refusing its slide into sacrificial theater. Only by acknowledging that the ghost will return—neither exorcised nor enthroned—can society weave a supple grammar capable of absorbing its arrival: rituals that vent without devouring, screens that reflect as well as project, archives that remember the exploited even as they curate delight. In this tempered radiance, carnival remains both warning and promise, reminding the body politic that to breathe freely is always to flirt with the edge of its own undoing, and that the task of every generation is to greet the next procession not with panic or permissiveness, but with a steadied, ethically tuned cloud. Thread the nights backward: fool-bishops braying Te Deums in candle-fogged chancels, charivaris rattling pots beneath nuptial windows, and forward: photonic scrolls where thumbs flicker raw, where each inverted crown becomes a meme and each guffaw a data-point sluiced to unseen auditors.  Every upheaval leaves a phosphor trace—ghost-ink across the parchment of hours—while new glass eyes swivel, new dossiers yellow in drawers, new syllables of mastery perch on the tongue, waiting to christen what next revolts.  And so, before the first shout of liberty can swing free of the trapeze, the query hovers, moth-like, in the lamplight: how shall a people sup the sharp wine of misrule without souring the blood, and how shall its guardians bind the wound without embalming the pulse that quickens the whole unruly heart?