How do the ideas of Bey compare with those of Turner? To begin with, these authors possess divergent religious, theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds. The anthropologist, Turner was a Catholic neo-Durkheimian dialectician and cultural performance theorist. An anarcho-queer Sufi-libertarian, Bey is a practitioner of heretical Islam, subversive poet and a proponent of 'outsider art'. Bey is clearly motivated by a contempt for oppressive structures - especially the alienating and immiserating consequences of 'the Media'. Turner, by contrast, acknowledges a recurring pull towards 'structure', the resolution of ambiguity and disorder. Drawing upon non-hierarchical earth and body oriented spiritualities, Bey is a champion of desire - the sensuous life. Though interested in 'lived experience', Turner, the Catholic, denied to liminality carnal 'transgressions'. Bey's 'rootlessness', hemp sacrament and all-round queerness makes Turner look virginal.
Despite his later claims, Turner was largely a pre-postmodernist. Bey, on the other hand, clearly articulates a postmodern cultural landscape inciting post-structuralist tactics for the realisation of autonomous community - the immanently 'Social'. As such, today's 'psychic nomads', claims Bey, have a desire for 'camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, "liberated" bits of jungle and badland, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars' (1991a:107). A complexity of anti-authoritarian and autonomist tendencies are envisioned, and they will derive from:
the mess of anarchist, libertarian, syndicalist, council communist, post-situationist, primitivist, extropian and other 'free' tendencies. A kind of insurrectionary 'noise' or chaos of TAZs, uprisings, refusals, and epiphanies. Into the 'final' totality of global capital it will release a hundred blooming flowers, a thousand, a million memes of resistance, of difference, of non-ordinary consciousness - the will to power as 'strangeness'. (Primitives and Extropians 1995b)
And the conflagration of weird units is united in its objective: presence and difference in communion.
This brings us to the striking parallels between the two. Besides their eclecticism, they share a utopian tendency. Both authors are motivated by a sense of loss, of fragmentation, of attenuation of community. In Turner, this is in part a Durkheimian derivation, and in Bey a libertarian-anarchist Situationist legacy. Yet, the same milieus have nourished a healthy, albeit divergent, optimism. The 'utopian trace' trope is a good example of this. For Bey, the 'anti-pessimist' (1996:54), zines, books, theatre, film and radio retain 'the utopian trace' - 'the last vestige of an impulse against alienation, the last perfume of the imagination' (yet TV rapidly erases that trace) (1994a:36). Similarly, for Turner, liminoidal genres hold 'traces of the original': carnivals and festivals are the 'residues' of seasonal rites; theatre and film - the utopian trace of forgotten liminal ritual (1982b:25). Furthermore, Immediatism's demand for 'Utopia Now' (Bey Permanent TAZs1993b) is not so distant from 'the apocalyptic agency' of communitas.
More specifically, in so far as their theoretical mechanics are concerned, both are disposed to dialectical thinking - despite Bey's claims that the TAZ is 'outside the dialectic'. In their resistant possibilities, anti-structure and Immediatism are noticeably resonant. For Turner, anti-structure, 'the primary void of precosmic freedom' (1992:133), is 'the necessary antagonist' in society, since it is the key to the reconstitution of structure. Similarly, for Bey, immediatist organisations and gatherings like TAZs, are the antithesis to the immiserating world of mediation, potentiating social transformation. Both are temporary; but the effect may be lasting. Though it is a subject to which Turner gave no direct attention, his efforts nevertheless highlight what amounts to temporary and periodic anarchism. 'Anti-structure' is analogous to 'anarchism' since, while not devoid of organisation, both pull away from, strip down and reveal hidden contradictions in, and perhaps 'overcome', hierarchy or 'The Totality'.
It is no wonder, then, that 'the TAZ' and the 'liminal' (or, more precisely, liminoidal) sound like remarkably similar qualities of human experience. Each writer evokes a compatible understanding of the potentiality of contexts of temporary horizontal sociality/community. For both, there is something essential in the human convergence of the cult, the rite and the festal. They regard the spontaneous, creative urges from below with equal respect. And both the TAZ and limina are moments of becoming. Liminoidal moments can also be TAZ-like phenomena. And the TAZ is most certainly a liminal state of affairs. What I have called 'the three modalities' are alive and well there. Yet it remains curious that Bey, a most proficient poacher of ideas, has not evidently encountered or acknowledged Turner. Therefore the meaning and background of liminality - its etymology, its roots in ritual analysis and its metaphorical telegraphing (especially as 'liminoid') - have gone unnoticed. This said, Bey has developed, quite independently, a postmodern anarchist take on it.
Ultimately, parallels extend to incorporate limitations. Although it would be wrong to suggest Bey has attempted to construct a universal social theory, the TAZ does suffer from weaknesses akin to those found in Turner. Like Turner's communitas, a TAZ is non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, and non-differentiated. It is homogeneous, utopian, idealistic. Bey does not account for the presence of 'constituencies', internal disagreement and conflict within or between the TAZs he offers as examples. Furthermore, that their participants are 'autonomous' raises the question of a state of heightened or 'non-normal' disputation between 'constituents' over such things as the meaning and purpose of the experience. Therefore, shortcomings in Turner's scheme are replicated in the TAZ.