Temporary Organic Matrix

ConFest is distinctly liminoidal. Children in the care of adults aside, attendance and participation are most certainly voluntary. Common to liminoid performance genres, the event is critical and subversive and, as such, a 'proto-structural' system of potential alternatives, a 'precursor of innovative forms' (Turner 1982b:52). However, ConFest is quite different from any of the performance genres to which Turner gave specific attention, or the types Handelman develops. Fundamentally, it is an organic process. This means that, in contrast to projects patronised by distant administrations (like the Community Arts Program of the Australia Council) and controlled via vertical organisational models (such as 'community', 'arts' or even 'Fringe' festivals), it functions via 'local action that works'. That is, each event is DiY - 'grassroots', self-organised and spontaneous. Les explains:

The community group finds out what works - action research - then lives it, talks about it, experiences it and the ideal, the best praxis, emerges from the shared living together ... What we do and how we do it emerges or unfolds from our living and communing in an organic way ... In the organic unfolding process those involved, those who know it, unfold it. Things are done by those best placed to do it together. [Therefore] local knowings and local interests are involved.17

With particular emphasis on current events, Les idealises: 'the directors have no power whatsoever [at ConFest] ... It is totally local-lateral once it gets underway. It is totally organic, totally spontaneous. It is consensual evolved spontaneity. What works is repeated. What's enjoyed is repeated'. Like Rainbow Gatherings, responsibility for infrastructure maintenance is, ideally, de-centralised and shared. And its spatial and temporal parameters are, again ideally, occupied spontaneously.

ConFest's organicism is translatable into several interdependent characteristics each holding a share in ConFest's success. It ensures that the festival is: co-operative - where participants are mutually responsible for achieving collectively desired outcomes; tolerant - with an open respect for, recognition and celebration of, difference/otherness; autonomous - characterised by a safe and trusting environment where personal freedoms are granted and social experimentation permitted, and; immediate - with a relatively unmediated experience of palpable, sensuous and familial connection (with others and the environment).18 Despite a resurgent culture of factionalism, intolerance and paranoia within DTE (see Chapter 3) and obvious departures from some of these traits (see Chapter 8), ConFest is a liberated zone potentiating 'growth' on personal, social, political and cultural levels.

Hakim Bey and the TAZ/Immediatist Project

Hakim Bey's 'TAZ/Immediatist project' is a 'struggle' which, he claims, 'opens itself potentially to all kindred spirits & fellow warriors', and which seeks to expand and multiply 'until it infects or even becomes the social' (Bey 1993a). Bey's anarchist-liberatory 'project', which is interested 'in results, successful raids on consensus reality, breakthroughs into more intense and more abundant life' (1991a:115) amounting to the refusal of and challenge to received ideas, structures and forms of control (ie. the media, the Church, nuclear family, work, education), holds a distinct capacity to recalibrate Turner's limen, and, moreover, to illuminate the organic character of ConFest. It thus warrants my attention here.

Described as 'the Marco Polo of the marginals milieu' (Black 1994:105), the enigmatic Bey19 is an American libertarian-anarchist philosopher, subversive poet, proponent of 'edge Islam' and author of The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism (or The TAZ) (1991a).20 In advocating 'creative destruction' of the 'old Consensus', Bey has been labelled a 'postmodern "anarchist"' (Zerzan 1997/98:79) - or in Bookchin's (1995) denunciation, a proponent of 'lifestyle anarchism'.21 Indeed, critiquing the cultural landscape of 'too-Late Capital', Bey is a post-structuralist strategist and provocateur of the imagination. 'Be prepared', he counsels, 'to drift, to nomadize, so slip out of all nets, to never settle down' (1994a:44). His project consists of exposing 'the enemy' ('separation' and 'sameness' via mediation and commodification), and inciting 'the cause' ('the new autonomy' of 'presence' and 'difference': strategically lived in a 'third position' [the insurrectionary TAZ] or achieved via revolution [the self-determined 'jihad']). His work is prescriptive. Real liberation, he argues, cannot be achieved via the attainment of phantom needs manufactured under capitalism. Readers are offered existent and possible tactics for the realisation of 'the new autonomy', which can only be achieved in the direct presence of the Other, of an immediate community - the immanently 'Social'. The cause amounts to the strategic realisation of free associations of individuals - non-mediated, non-authoritarian, non-hierarchical.22

Under 'too-Late Capitalism' people have become immiserated largely through their separation from others - through mediation. The most comprehensive statements come from the manifesto Immediatism (1994a)23 and Media Creed (MC). While all experience is necessarily mediated - the human body is itself 'the least mediated of all media' (1994a:10) - what is heralded as 'the Immediatist movement' amounts to a critique of major public media ('the Media'). That is, those media, especially TV and virtual reality, which demand little imaginative participation, and which commodify the human subject. In the course of Bey's theoretical career, he has offered several responsive strategies: first, investment in the 'intimate media' (ie. books, zines, community radio and possibly 'the Web' - see below); second, refusal of the major public media and commoditisation (that is, 'to vanish from the grid', to 'withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear' [Summer Land; 1991a:102]), and; third, the achievement of the 'necessary revolution', the 'greater jihad' (1996).24

Here, it is the first two strategies, intercallibrated, that interest me. These are the organic grounds of the TAZ, recommended as a key strategy since it provides a context for the nonviolent alteration of existing structures. Bey suggests that what he calls 'direct action' might be more assiduously designated 'indirect action' - 'symbolic, viral, occult and subtle rather than actual, wounding, militant, and open' (Media Hex [MH]).25 As for describing the TAZ, although we are faced with difficulty since he remains deliberately obscure about this concept (1991a:99), we are provided with some ponderous cues. The following is the closest to any apparent definition:

The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. (ibid:101)

This implies that the TAZ exists not only beyond control 'but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving ... beyond the State's ability to see' (ibid:132). Therefore, its greatest strength is its invisibility. It remains invulnerable so long as it remains invisible.

As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle. The TAZ is thus a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies. (ibid:101)

Waging war on 'molar and molecular lines' (Deleuze and Guattari 1982), the TAZ is thus a 'deterritorialised' mutation of desire.

Bey provides some classical examples of the deterritorialised TAZ from the past and present including: 'pirate utopias' (such as the Republic of Salé), the North American Wilderness (especially Croatan), 'drop-out' tri-racial isolate communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Paris Uprising of 1968, and countercultural and permacultural communities (Wilson 1995; Bey 1991a:116-24). 'While it lasts', the TAZ 'fills the horizon of attention of all its participants ... [and] it becomes (however briefly) a whole society' (MH). Therefore, it is essentially an immediate community - ephemeral, unmediated sociality, a kind of experimental laboratory for 'Immediatism'. Indeed, despite the view that the TAZ '"exists" in information-space as well as in the "real world"' (1991a:109),26 Bey reveals the TAZ to be a higher form of 'immediatist organisation', which may emerge from other 'action groups'.27 Immediatist organisations have several goals which are in fact both objectives and strategies: 1) conviviality ('the coming together in physical closeness of the group for the synergistic enhancement of its membership's pleasures'); 2) creation (the collaborative production of 'necessary beauty' outside all structures of hypermediation, alienation and commodification); 3) destruction ('Beauty defines itself in part (but precisely) by destroying the ugliness which is not itself'), and; 4) a reconstruction of values flows from the collective intensity of immediatism (MH). Ultimately the TAZ 'breaks its own borders and flows (or wants to flow) out into the "whole world"' (1993a).

As an immediatist organisation, there is one basic rule of the TAZ: that all spectators must also be performers. Such dissolution of the boundaries of separation is covalent with what Bey calls 'festal culture' - the culture that flowers in the corporeal, nonregulated, noncommodified festival. Bey informs us that the ancient concepts of 'the jubilee and saturnalia originate in an intuition that certain events lie outside the scope of "profane time", the measuring-rod of the State and of History. These holidays literally occupied gaps in the calendar - intercalary intervals' (1991a:105). Nodding towards Bakhtinian carnivalesque, we are reminded that such 'gaps in the calendar' are realms of the infinitely permeable body. The festival is carnal - it 'functions as the crucial insurrectionary praxis or principle of social mutability' (Boundary Violations 1994b). It amounts to a temporal 'uprising' - a 'peak experience', a temporary state of 'non-ordinary' consciousness:

Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day otherwise they would not be 'nonordinary'. But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns - you can't stay up on the roof forever - but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred - a difference is made. (1991a:100)

Despite the paucity of a fixed definition or clear criterion (or possibly, because of this), 'the TAZ' has become something of an anthem. Elaborated upon in Bey's later work, it has emerged as a prescription for insurrection - appropriated by multitudes as a catchphrase for immanent transgression.

ConFest as TAZ?

For ConFest, the TAZ holds immense explanatory power. Yet, ConFest does depart from themes central to the TAZ. First, ConFest is not entirely 'invisible' - it has not avoided publicity or the attention of the state. As a populous periodical event, media representation and state intervention are likely. Yet, local, regional newspapers are the main carriers of stories. Though ConFest received attention in the major media in its initial phase, DTE Vic has remained relatively unexposed. The Co-operative normally promotes events via the 'intimate media' - bill posters, community radio, alternative newsletters/zines and primarily the DTE newsletter. As for governmental controls, permits are required from local councils to operate a ConFest. DTE must be authorised by, and maintain communication with civic and regulatory bodies including the local police. Undercover police surveillance is a constant probability. The revelation, in October 1997, that the then decommissioned Victorian Police Operations Intelligence Unit previously had DTE on file, came as no real surprise to members.28 Further, as a Co-operative Society, DTE is legally obliged to comply to operational rules and regulations of the 1996 Co-operatives Act. Not secret or closed, DTE is therefore most unlike a Tong. Seasonally recurring, ConFest is more accurately a periodic or calendar autonomous zone.

Second, since ConFest has a gate price and also a food/craft market, the event is not a total withdrawal from commerce. However, the gate price is low (especially for members), it is free for children under sixteen, there is no hired 'security' and all participants (including site crew) are encouraged to pay the entry fee. Takings are used for future events and possible seed funding for allied projects. The market is a marginal vending and consumption zone, operating in conjunction with community/workers food kitchens, village potlatches and campsites.

Therefore, although ConFest operates 'within the law' and via the money economy, it remains clandestine, is largely unmediated and substantively non-commoditised. It is most like a TAZ. The TAZ is characterised by an anarchical organicism clearly resembling that which unfolds at ConFest and that which participants desire. The TAZ is a convivial distillery for the several organic traits I have found recognisable at ConFest. It is an anarchical moment of becoming paralleling the limen.29 In a world of hyper-mediated experiences and disembodying entertainment, DTE enables an environment where multitudes are licensed to play, express dissent and form uninhibited coalitions. Presence and difference are there sought after and exulted. In such a populous, diverse and unpredictable space, much that transpires does remain 'invisible'.30 DTE, like other neo-tribes (eg. Rainbow Family, Burning Man and earthcore) utilise the Internet (with a website and email-group). This indicates DTE is an 'Immediatist organisation' which, by its own criteria, maximises the possibility for 'insurrection'. However, though ConFest resembles a TAZ, the diversity of participants and the spectrum of discourses, genres and practices present make for a clamorous event characterised by a discord and contrariety that deviates from the ideal TAZ. I am therefore inclined to regard ConFest as a calendrical autonomous zone (or CAZ) accommodating numerous TAZs.

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