ConFest is a paroxysmic exemplar of society's 'subjunctive mood', by which Turner meant a mood of 'wish, desire, possibility or hypothesis', a world of 'maybe', 'could be' and 'as if' - the mood of were, in 'if I were you' (Turner 1982c:83; 1984:20-21; 1992:149). As opposed to the indicative mood, according to Turner, subjunctivity is a transcendent and reflexive circumstance.1 Yet, what of the body's role in subjunctive performance, in art, in play? Though Turner was not exactly an anthropologist of the body, there is little to prevent the extension of his ideas to embrace embodiment. Indeed, it could be argued that at ConFest, since one's art is public - on display, on parade (or 'presented' as in Goffman [1971]) - the body, as 'the least mediated of all media' (Bey 1994a:2), is the principle medium of communication.2 Nevertheless, I take subjunctivity to implicate the conceptual, transcendent and physical spheres simultaneously. The subjunctive 'mood' is, therefore, a ludic3 circumstance which may be ideational, numinous and corporeal.

The subjunctive culture of ConFest is a unique product of licensed transgression - the 'gay abandonment', reversal or 'negation' (Babcock 1978) of 'form' common to seasonal/calendar celebrations and to tourist behaviour. As Turner had it, such events carry 'the essence' of liminality: they are characterised by 'free or ludic recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird' (Turner 1982c:82). Categorical confusion reigns as liminaries may be androgynous, at once ghosts and babies, cultural and natural, or human and animal (Turner 1977:37). In a 'time out of time', with the world turned upside down, mere mortals may become deified (cf. Meyerhoff 1978:231). Bakhtin's (1968) rendering of the medieval carnival is analogous. According to Bakhtin, the carnival celebrated 'temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions ... it was hostile to all that was immortalised and completed' (1968:10). At such a juncture, '[t]he order of things is dislocated and everything becomes full of emotion, allusive ... representational' (Da Matta 1984:238, my emphasis). Such 'representational' events (Handelman 1990) may sustain the status quo as 'the aspects of order that are inverted remain the mould for the inversion' (ibid:52). Nevertheless, an inversion may become disconnected from its origin, emerging as an 'authentic, transformative alternative, one that attacks in all seriousness the foundations on which it was erected' (ibid:49).

At ConFest, one passes across a threshold into unpredictable 'banana' space-time, a 'bohemian moment' (Moore 1998a:173) wherein 'the forces of uncertainty in play' (Handelman 1990:70) are valued and consequential. Outside (or in modernity), where play is tightly framed and uncertainty 'domesticated', it has become 'frivolous' and 'inconsequential' - dismissed as irrational, mere 'fantasy', 'pretence', consigned to the devalued territory of 'make-believe' (ibid). ConFest is a 'play-ground', a 'crazy' peripatetic zone where there may be little preoccupation with 'the act of arriving' (Da Matta 1984:223). As Huizinga remarked, play invariably takes place within 'forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain' (1950:10). Once inside the 'forbidden' zone, participants discover or expect that the subjunctive mind, body and spirit is permitted and valued, that one may wander without need for direction, that routine dictates of (re)productivity are placed in abeyance, that normative gender configurations are openly ruptured, that the boundary between play and work is blurred, that risks may be taken.

In this way, ConFest approximates the open-theatricality of Neo-Pagan gatherings, where participants:

delve into aspects of other cultures and mythologies that they find captivating [and] become ensconced in the excitement of becoming amid a highly charged atmosphere. Reality is momentarily suspended or abrogated ... one steps out of one time into another and enters an enclave within which it seems anything may happen. (Hume 1997:6-7)

And such enclaves may be ruled by chaos, hosting unbridled destructiveness. One commentator, 'on several hits of liquid 2CB, DMT, and hash oil', narrates his experience of the apotheosis of the Burning Man Festival:

It was as if the pits of Hell opened up and fire shot out into the sky ... [T]he air was filled with smoke and incense and sweat and screams and laughter, there were people wandering around in all stages of insanity from slight drug-induced hazes to downright schizophrenic babbling, burning everything in sight, revelling in the total annihilation of all structure. (Tussin)

Yet, such threshold crossings and cataclysmic moments wherein the death of structure is engineered are highly consequential. They potentiate renewal in highly idiosyncratic forms. This is precisely the sentiment Orryelle received in feedback to his Labyrinth:

Some people freaked out a bit, went through some kind of cathartic death, but ultimately emerged stronger and stranger. Many tales of joy and fascination, of having discovered 'another world'. Those who got really lost mostly eventually found ... themselves. Some have even expressed 'life-transforming' experiences, while others just had fun!

Of course, the total experience promises analogous effects. Gum drives the point home:

[ConFest] is a transformation point. Where people are transformed 'cause they're loosened from the constraints of society, and they're then allowed to become something else. And they then go back and they're different. I mean they get back in society and ... they're never the same again. I don't think anyone that comes here is ever the same again.

In a general sense, ConFest effects a break down of routine rules and practices, followed by reformation or readjustment, a process echoing the 'programmed deconstruction' (Handelman 1990:65) and reconstruction of identities in passage rites. Novices are especially known to experience 'disequilibrium' (Schechner 1993:40). They approximate paidia (Greek for 'child') which, according to Caillois, stands for 'an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, carefree gaiety ... [and] uncontrolled fantasy' (in Turner 1983a:106). Deconstructive turbulence is evident in the alterations of the habitual, balanced body. The body is 'opened, made provisional, uncreated ... so that it can be re-created according to plan' (Schechner 1993:40). Yet, like Burning Man, there is no telos, no institutionalised sequence of aesthetic/performance modes orchestrating 'resocialisation' within a single cosmic order, as in Sinhalese exorcisms (Kapferer 1983). There are certainly 'transformative consequences for contexts and identities beyond the setting of ... performance' (Kapferer 1979:13). However, given the plenitude of performance venues, genres and workshops/playshops (many of which operate via deconstruction-reconstruction principles), there are many possible sources of de/reformation, effecting uncertain consequences.

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