Liminality. From Ecumenica 7 (nos. 1-2), Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen and Joshua Edelman

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1 Liminality From Ecumenica 7 (nos. 1-2), 2014 Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen and Joshua Edelman Liminality has become a key term for Performance Studies. In fact, for some scholars, this odd non-discipline s politics of remaining in the interstices between established disciplines and social sites is a mode of study that locates its interest on margins, borders, and transitions: in a word, on the limina (Latin for thresholds ) of social life. But the origin of the term liminality is quite different. It comes from the anthropology of ritual, and there is a tension between its inception and the way it has been appropriated for the study of performance. This tension makes the term central for understanding the dialogue between performance studies and religious studies today. To define liminality in a way that reflects this tension, the term may be said to designate a transitory and precarious phase between stable states, which is marked off by conceptual, spatial and/or temporal barriers, within which individuals, groups and/or objects are set apart from society and/or the everyday. In liminality, participants have lost their former symbolic status, but they have not yet attained their new significance. Liminality, then, is an in-between of potent but dangerous formlessness. It denotes the social non-space in which transformation is experienced and achieved. The term was coined by French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his 1908 book Rites de Passage (not translated into English until 1960), and developed and popularized by British anthropologist Victor Turner in his 1964 book The Forest of Symbols. To both the term described the core of certain rituals found primarily in small-scale, pre-industrial societies, in particular one that signified the transition from one social identity to another, such as from child to adult, from citizen to king, or from living body to dead corpse. Van Gennep and Turner noticed a three-stage pattern in these rituals. First was what van Gennep called rites of separation : the initiands saw their social identity stripped from them, and they were frequently isolated from the rest of the community. This was a symbolic death ; by losing their social identity, the initiands become dead to society. The second phase ( transitional rites ) takes place in isolation from society, and is ordinarily characterized by both a strict adherence to a programme of action (sometimes seen as a test ) enforced harshly by a tyrannical master of ceremonies, and a sense of impersonal, unstructured, but hugely potent commonality amongst the group of initiands that Turner called communitas. The third phase ( rites of incorporation ) is a symbolic rebirth, where the initiands are invested with their new identity and re-integrated into society in their new roles. Turner called these phases preliminal, liminal, and postliminal, respectively. In addition to personal transitions, he saw this process at work in what he called social dramas the ways in which societies could use rituals to creatively respond to crises such as the death of kings, schisms, or other disasters. Liminality resides in this middle phase, where the absence of structure makes social creativity the development of new social realities possible. 1

2 Turner then took a new path in placing liminality within modernity. Through his collaboration with the New York theatre director and theorist Richard Schechner, he became interested in what happened to the liminal in modern societies where social structures were not so clearly established that they could be discarded and remade, even in ritual. Clearly, there was still a need for social creativity in modern commercial society, but he did not observe the three-part structure of experience. His answer was that the liminal had been largely replaced by the liminoid. This was still a space of suspension of normal social rules and thus a site of playful creativity, but importantly, it had lost its connection with transition and had become something of a stable institution in itself. Under Schechner s influence, Turner connected this state of permanent statelessness with the arts and, in particular, with the emergent New York performance arts scene of the 1970s. Here was a space in which social conventions of appropriate action were willfully flouted for the sake of social transformation. And there were parallels, if not exact ones, between van Gennep s stateless initiands and Schechner s performers, whose identity floated indeterminately between their own and that of the character they played. Truth be told, however, Turner never did define the term liminiod with anything like the precision that he did liminal. Aside from its connections to (an ill-defined) modernity, creativity, and a playful fluidity with social structure, Turner was never clear as to what the liminoid was. Its lack of connection to a meaningful notion of transformation distanced it from the liminal in a way that Turner (and Schechner) too often underplayed. And yet, it served as the foundation in the ideology of Performance Studies in and around New York University. To Schechner and his colleagues, the notion of the liminoid allowed performance to move out of the stuffy, elitist confines of the theatre and become socially relevant, but our point is that Turner s anthropology did not provide an adequate foundation for this expansion. But is there another, more useful way that liminality can develop the links between ritual and performance studies? Recently, a number of scholars have become interested in the ways in which the affect of witnessing a performance can serve as a force for both social and individual change, as well as forms of change that combine the two. In her 2008 book The Transformative Power of Performance (first published in German in 2004), Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that there is a particular potency to the presence of the actor and audience together in the performance space, what she calls the radical concept of presence (99). Fischer-Lichte understands performance as an event that generates itself through the co-presence and energetic exchange ( feedback ) of its participants. The performance event is inherently unpredictable and unrepeatable, since no two performances will ever be the same. Through the performance event, established dichotomies related to with symbolic status such as spectator and actor, art and life, ritual and theatre, can be destabilized. Fischer-Lichte holds that these contingencies of performance enable experiences that always carry a liminal dimension (176). These performances, however, do not affect participants in the way that rituals do, as their social statuses remain unaltered. Liminal experience, Fischer-Lichte argues, first emerges in the body as a change to the physiological, energetic, affective and motoric state (177). This level of the spectator s experience is connected to the above-mentioned radical presence of the actor, which evokes in the spectator a similar notion of presence, as embodied mind in a constant process of becoming (99), followed by a profound sense of joy and fulfillment. Although Fischer-Lichte 2

3 clearly understands this radical presence as a transient, intense and extraordinary experience that rejects dichotomies, it is not included in her examples of the liminal. What she does announce as liminal experience tends to be less associated with the joyful. Most poignant are experimental performances that disregard conventional behavior by, for instance, inviting the audience to partake in communal abolishment of social norms or letting them bear witness to a performer s physical suffering or self-injury.. In these liminal moments established standards [of behavior] are no longer valid and new ones not yet formulated (176). Hence, to Fischer-Lichte liminal experience is often coupled with transgression of individual and social limits and as such retains the quality of unpleasantness and peril associated with the Turnerian sense of liminality. Jill Dolan, in her 2005 book Utopia in Performance, argues that the political potential of performance comes not in its ability to put forward concrete proposals, but rather, through the glimpses it offers of a sense of social connectedness that she equates with the Turnerian sense of communitas. For Dolan, performance offers moments of liminal clarity and communion, fleeting, briefly transcendent bits of profound human feeing and connection. (168). Importantly, these moments are not individual experiences; the affect is necessarily collective, shared by the audience as a group, even if not all of its members. Dolan gives the example of the collective affect that she experienced a performance of a biographical play about Art Rooney, the founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers American football team. While she personally did not understand the references, as she was not a Steelers fan, this did not matter; the performative affect was enough to catch her up in it and make her experience a sense of communitas. Dolan is keen to distinguish the affect present in these utopian moments from the assertion of any fixed and ahistorical human essence or notion of authenticity. These moments are simply too fleeing to assert any (potentially nostalgic) essentials, but rather, they offer a glimpse of how we might engage one another's differences, and our mutual human-ness, constructed as it is in these brief moments together. (31). These moments clearly resemble Fischer-Lichte s radical concept of presence, even if the nature of what that presence asserts is different. The potency that both Fischer-Lichte and Dolan are describing is not based on emotion, quite. Rather, it is based on affect. Emotion has an object: it is a particular response to a particular stimulus. We are afraid of the dark, or in love with our partner. The object of emotion is different than ourselves. Affect, in contrast, is an experience so immersive that is (nearly) impossible to differentiate between what is happening to ourselves and the self it is happening to. Emotion is what we have had time to reflect upon and relate to. Affect is autonomous, it arises out of the encounter between the body and its surroundings, other bodies or objects, or our experience of our own mental processes. It is out of our conscious control, in that it is a pre-reflexive moment of intensity that takes hold of us completely. This is the totalizing sense that is gestured to by Fischer-Lichte s term radical concept of presence and Dolan s profound human feeling, without specifying the nature of object of that feeling. It is also the overwhelming sense of undifferentiated unity that Turner placed at the core of liminality. And as he noticed, this sense is both extremely contagious (which is why it is hemmed in by so many social taboos) and politically powerful and flexible in its latent solidarity (which is why it can be used to address so many different crises). Religious scholars will recognize this as a sense of spirituality, which is often evoked in rituals of all sorts. 3

4 Might, then, these understandings of affect, presence and momentary utopias lead us to a more useful and contemporary understanding of the ways in which liminality can be applied to performance than what Schechner could offer up in the 1970s? Sadly, our answer must be equivocal. On the one hand, by taming the concept of the liminal to describe these fleeing aesthetic moments, we make the term mean something genuinely different than the concept that Turner and van Gennep developed. Meaningful use of the term liminality requires a recognizably stable social structure, which is then transgressed and that this transgression is effective in transforming it (or at least potentially so). In case the transgression is phenomenal, affective and momentary, with no real connection to (potentially) effective social change, applying the term liminality would stretch it past its breaking point. Perhaps we could use the term liminiodal to describe these cases, but it is not clear what analytical benefit we would gain by doing so. On the other hand, it is notoriously difficult to describe and analyse experiences, especially profound ones which are labeled with the term affect and which Dolan and Fischer-Lichte describe. One major benefit of liminality is that it offers a means of describing the shape of experience rather than leaving it at the level of a shapeless affect. While it may have been developed to describe a certain sort of experience rites of passage in small-scale societies scholars such as Arpad Szakolczai (2009) have begun to use the tripartite structure of the liminal as a model for the description of all experience that cannot be fully accounted for within our existing intellectual and social paradigms. Certainly this extents the concept of liminality, but it may be a helpful extension. Much of both performance studies and religious studies seek to make sense of not just of what profound (spiritual, sublime, aesthetic, etc) experiences are, but their shape, function, formation and possible modification. In engaging with concepts of religious experience (William James, Rudolph Otto, etc.), as well as the experiential model of performance studies, this could be a valid and instructive concept, even if not the one that van Gennep and Turner intended. If we are to accept this argument that, even if it is sometimes more of an analogy than an identity, liminality can be useful in making sense of the shape of performative experience, what, exactly, can it offer? We close with three tentative answers to that question. This is not, of course, an exhaustive list, but we hope it begins to show the fruitfulness of liminality as an intellectual tool. First, it is difficult to describe the relationship between affect and form whether those forms is social, aesthetic, temporal or conceptual. Liminality enables us to see how affective experiences are plastic, in Catherine Malabou s sense (2010) not only taking form, but giving it as well. Scholars and practitioners of ritual are adept at using a performative affect to address the existing form of an action, community or moment and develop it in the required direction. From a performance studies perspective, we therefore ought to ask not only how ritual and theatrical performers can make use of liminality and affect to stage the spiritual but also how we may re-think this work in light of the different spiritual needs necessitated by changes in historical, social and intellectual situations. Obviously, this is not something PS 4

5 scholars can do on their own, but as navigators in the interstices of disciplines, they may make a useful contribution to the dialogue with religious studies, theology and anthropology. Second, because notions of liminality and affect are not dependent on any particular conceptual makeup of the human subject indeed, the constitution of the subject is one of the main things liminality throws into question it can provide us a way of extending notions of performance out from the human community to include non-human actors. How do our performances interact with (representations of) our fellow creatures, the earth, the cosmos itself, or the absolute other? How do we perform (in) relation to the divine? And, when there is a tension between individual experience of these non-human entities and community-upheld established doctrines of them (as there almost always is), how can the liminal affect aid in the creative, performative negotiation of these tensions? And finally, we need to confront the reality that social roles and conventions are not as fixed as (we imagine) they were in the past. (Perhaps they never were.) In the contemporary world, even religious roles are malleable and flexible. Traditional, anthropological liminality was a model for the transformation of one solid social institution into another. It is more of a challenge to understand how one fluid convention can be transformed to another, equally fluid one. If we wish to update Turner, and develop models of experiential transformative events that speak to the condition of contemporary life and certainly, there is a need for such a thing artists and ritualists will need to conceptualize something like Turner s liminal events, even if we no longer wish to call it that. And here is where theatre and performance offer an important testing ground and experimental laboratory for human experience. It may be in the development of new liminal-like events that, in fact, we can find new ways of experiencing and understanding contemporary religion and spirituality. Perhaps we have been looking for development in the wrong field. Perhaps it is not that, as Schechner suggested, performance is developing into a contemporary form of religious or pseudoreligious ritual, but that our experience and understanding of religion and spirituality in the digitalized world is becoming more performative, even theatrical. Works Cited Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans. from the German by Saskya Iris Jain. London: Routledge, Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. New York: Columbia Univ. Press,

6 Szakolcazi, Arpad. Liminality and Experience. International Political Anthropology 2.1 (2009): Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology. The Rice University Studies 60.3 (1974): van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Trans. from the French by Monika Vizedom and Gabriella Caffee. London: Routledge, Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press,

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