the spontaneity and emotional passions often associated with medieval bodies. A desire for unmediated experiences and feelings, for a body which provides a sense of home, is understandable in a culture whose internal referentiality has made it banal. (Mellor and Shilling 1997:26)

As ConFest hosts such 'solidarities', it approximates the carnival of medieval Europe described by Bakhtin (1968). By contrast to the 'romantic grotesque' which is 'marked by a vivid sense of the private and isolation' and to the 'individual carnival' of literature, where laughter is 'cut down to cold humour, irony, sarcasm' (1968:37), the carnival is never distant from 'the laughing chorus of the market place' (ibid:439), it is 'the people's second life':

While carnival lasts there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by all its participants. (Bakhtin 1968:7)

the stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other. (Bakhtin 1968:25)

Turner's general neglect of the liminal body has already been conveyed (Chapters 2 and 6). With communitas, Turner arguably had the greatest opportunity to chart the terrain of the collective corporeal. After all, he proclaimed that we may be 'beginning to learn the ambiguous, ludic language of what Bakhtin calls "the people's second world", which is ultimately always charged with communitas, the likely possibility of immediate human communion' (Turner 1983b:190, my emphasis). However, the communions Turner had in mind seemed to be clinically social, apparently not sensual. They were collectivities of minds and souls, but not bodies.

Orgiasm and Conviviality: Communitas Corporealised

According to Maffesoli, 'Prometheus has been put in doubt'. Positioned in the French tradition of theorising the everyday, Maffesoli promulgates a sociology of 'postmodern sociality'. Cannibalising numerous thinkers, especially Durkheim,6 and borrowing from Bataille,7 he expounds the re-enchantment of contemporary social life. Maffesoli claims that, today, 'Dionysian' forces of emotional renewal - signified by the 'relativisation of the work ethic, the accentuation of the body, polymorphous perversity, ideological disengagement, periodic groupings of consumption, networks of amorous camaraderie, the importance of dress and cosmetics' (1994:156 in Evans 1997:226) - are pervasive.

In Maffesoli's opinion, the relativistic emotional/aesthetic age of postmodernity is characterised by the appearance of nebulous 'neo-tribes' and 'neo-communities' resisting the universal codes of morality constructed and imposed by the Promethean rationality of the modern era. These protean aggregations are cultures of sentiment and aestheticisation, which he, rather controversially, argues are 'trans-political', distinctly disengaged from the political and returning to 'local ethics', or an 'empathetic sociality' (Maffesoli 1996:11). This sociality, or 'underground centrality', 'bestows, like the Freudian unconscious, strength, vitality, and "effervescence" to social life' (Evans 1997:227). In 'underground centrality', one discovers 'puissance' the 'inherent energy and vital force of the people', which Maffesoli distinguishes from institutional power or 'pouvoir' (Maffesoli 1996:1).8

The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy (1993) is of special interest, since it is here that Maffesoli sails remarkably close to the Turnerian project.9 At the beginning of the work, we are warned that a:

city, a people, or a more or less limited group of individuals who cannot succeed in expressing collectively their wildness, their madness, and their imaginary, rapidly destructure themselves and, as Spinoza noted, these people merit more than any 'the name of solitude'. (1993:8)

As Maffesoli has it, in 'the face of historic time dominated by production and parousia, there is a poetic and heroic time, a time of the amorous body, a second and hidden time around which are organised endurance and sociality' (1993:31). In this secret, ephemeral and 'unproductive life' of 'Dionysian ludism', there is a desire for loss, for spending. Therefore, it is the orgiastic which is the source of society's renewal. Though Maffesoli reveals little evidence of its presence in everyday life, the 'orgiasm' clearly reaches a licentious, contagious and unrestrainable climax in the festal - those moments occasioning transgressions of imposed morality (ibid:92).

Although attention to Eros and the sexualised body represents an advance on Turner, strong parallels are apparent. Echoing Turner's discourse on the prophylactic role of ritual/festive inversion and communitas, Maffesoli asserts that periodic resistance to power and the transgression of norms precludes revolt: to refuse festival 'is to expose oneself to the return of the repressed, to encourage a brutal and bloody explosion' (1993:95). In another way, Maffesoli produces a trademark Turnerian (Nietzschian) denotation of social reality, stating: 'confronted with the laborious Prometheus, one must show that the noisy Dionysus is also a necessary figure of sociality' (ibid:21). The opposing social phenomena carry a strong hint of Turner's 'structure' and 'anti-structure'. The orgiasm is regenerative - it reinstalls the status quo:

In the same way that revolt or revolution permit an energetic new elite to supplant a sleeping, exhausting dictatorship, and through this allows for a startling of the political and social, thus the disturbance or festive orgiasm is a sacrificial expiation which allows the proper virtue of the sociality to be restored. (1993:97)

Maffesoli's attention to a transgressively sensualised sociality resonates with Bey's approach. Both the 'orgiasm' and 'the TAZ' are 'unproductive' - either depict an immediate demesne of joy and desire. For Bey, however, the 'festal culture' of 'the TAZ' is overtly pregnant with creative possibilities arising from 'radical conviviality' (Boundary Violations 1994b). The TAZ/Immediatist project is a struggle for presence. In Bey's view, the physically divided are also the conquered and controlled. He contends that

true desires - erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual - are best attained in a context of freedom of self & other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation. (The TAZ1991b)

As an immediate domain, ConFest is a return to 'archaic grotesque', to the natural 'body of the people'. There, otherwise hidden, closed off and commodified, 'the feral body' is uncovered and celebrated. 'Puissance', or perhaps more astutely, 'radical conviviality', transpires in the heat of spontaneous fire circles, conferences, 'funshops' and conspiratorial conclaves. In this contemporary hub of clandestinity, there is a collective sense of 'going back', exuviating layers of cognition, 'getting out of the head and into the heart'. As participants drop their defences and become mutable, shed finite personas and go grotesque, lose their selves and gain the world, this is a centre of 'sensual solidarity' - indeed, a most corporeal communitas.

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