Conclusion

In making ConFest accessible to interpretation, it has been necessary to renovate the concept of liminality while remaining conscious of the concept's utility. A critical deconstruction uncovered the essentialism lying at the heart of the Turnerian project. For Turner, the telegraphed 'realm of pure possibility' of the limen is an inviolably sacred ritual community. Discussion revealed that such a paradigm holds public events as transcendent, uniform, 'ritual'-exclusive and given - classically demonstrated in the Turners' approach to pilgrimage. This paradigm provides a limited theoretical lens, since it cannot apprehend, or account for, the political and heterogeneous contextuality of liminal arenas themselves, nor the 'subjunctive' embodiment they condition - that is, as contexts for multiple performance genres, arenas subject to interpretative contestation and moments of inter-, and alternate, corporeality.

My approach to ConFest is informed by recent contributions to the study of public events, complementary thought, and the event itself. I have regarded ConFest as an organic hyper-liminal zone, which I articulated via the elaboration of two key conceptual themes. First, social organicism, a grassroots anarchist strategy, contextualises the ConFest experience. This is an experience I have found resonant with Hakim Bey's TAZ, the theory of which, despite qualifications, has proven useful. Secondly, the event is characteristically hyper-performative. A postmodern threshold, ConFest - by way of embodied multi-alterity, ramified genres and a network of neo-tribal constituencies - is a unique context for the three authentication triggering modalities, or limina, outlined. Offering a labyrinth of possibilities, pathways and nodes of identification, it is a matrix of (re)creative potential.




< BACK

NEXT >




Footnotes
Appendices
Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
References: A-L
References: M-Z
Chapter Two Contents
Thesis Contents