Planning Chaos: Proto-Community

The principal term denoting the way a ConFest unfolds and operates is 'organic'. The word is an extremely appropriate metaphor. It immediately invokes several related terms and processes - 'local' or 'grassroots', 'self-determined', 'interdependence', 'balance' - all of which are integral to the unfolding or 'growth' of a ConFest. ConFest possesses DiY status. I have already referred to Les' relevant description of ConFest's social organicism as 'local action that works' in Chapter 2. There, I drew attention to the core traits of ConFest (co-operation, tolerance, autonomy and immediatism - see Appendix D), all of which are dependant upon the vouchsafing of a relatively spontaneous community process.

The ongoing negotiation of such organicism reproduces a proto-cultural community event. Proto-cultural events are, according to Handelman:

occasions and happenings which are yet to be given form but are emergent and divergent configurations of routine and mundane life ... [P]erformance [is] the seedbed of form [and, over time] ... logic coalesces ... the structure of performance tending to give way to the performance of structure (1990:20-1).

Despite the qualification that one's experience within the 'closed phenomenal world' of ConFest is far from mundane, the definition is relevant for ConFest in two senses. First, there are many proto-performances and concretisable or replicable processes occurring simultaneously on-site, as the moments when 'action in concert supersedes reflection in common' (ibid:20) are manifold. Second, the entire event is on every occasion proto, as a result of its organicism. Being perpetually in-composition renders the event distinct from most other community events, since, despite divergences from this ideal, the received strategy is to embrace fresh ideas, to welcome autonomous units (individuals and groups), and, ultimately, to encourage the contributions of all participants who 'work for ConFest'. Over successive events, and perhaps years of repetition, the infrastructural arrangement, workshop operations, market set-up, the presence/input of locals and authorities, and the Conference/Festival balance itself, were all negotiated in situ. Original enactments, impromptu spaces and subevents, often by a process of refinement, became successful working mechanisms of the total ensemble. Through compromise, ad hoc innovations became recognised components of the ConFest script. The result of such processes is that which participants know as 'ConFest' - the collection of negotiated 'structures' which are 'performed' - yet there is always something unexpected to be discovered around the next bend in the path.

ConFest is an extraordinarily unpredictable social landscape, generating a desired feeling of uncertainty amongst liminaries. And, the peculiarity that seduces participants back to this environment, another consequence of its organic logic, is its unpredictability. Its predictable quality is its very unpredictability. Cestrum, commenting that the event is permeated with a 'sense of organised anarchy', provides a common grok on the experience. Though ConFests possess familiar landmarks and presupposed arrangements (even though the site itself may change), every event is characterised by disorderliness, a derangement of the familiar, a sense of chaos that is indeed cultivated by DTE's ConFest Committee; an experience highly sought after by ConFesters who have invariably interpreted this as a kind of 'magic'.

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