Breaking Boundaries

Varieties of Liminality

Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, Harald Wydra, Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, Harald Wydra

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782387671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

Liminality has the potential to be a leading paradigm for understanding transformation in a globalizing world. As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and meanings in situations that fall between defined structures and have uncertain outcomes. Based on case studies of some of the most important crises in history, society, and politics, this volume explores the methodological range and applicability of the concept to a variety of concrete social and political problems.

Part I

Framing Liminality

Chapter 1

Liminality and Experience

Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events

Arpad Szakolczai

Introduction: Liminality in the History of Thought

The term “liminality” was originally developed by anthropologists. This volume’s second chapter, by Bjørn Thomassen, covers these origins, so this essay will start by discussing the use of similar terms in philosophy and sociology.

Liminality in Philosophy

Liminality should have been, but was not, among the founding terms of modern anthropology. It was, however, the very first word of philosophy. The Latin “limit” is equivalent to the Greek peras, so “liminal,” in the sense of removing the limit, is identical to apeiron, the famous “first word” of Greek philosophy (Patočka 2002), contained in Anaximander’s first fragment. The word became a central category of Pythagorean thought, and Plato and Aristotle discussed it in well-known disquisitions.

The reason the term is little known in modern thought has much to do with Kant, who based modern rationality on the opposite concern: the limit as “boundary” (Gentile 2003; Goddard forthcoming), key to his “critical” philosophy. The great difference between Kant’s view of the world and Plato’s is obvious in their respective cosmologies, which were essential to the philosophy of each, though again at opposite ends: Plato’s is laid out in one of his last works, the Timaeus, whereas Kant’s is contained in his first works, devoted to astronomy. For Plato and the Greeks, the world is a cosmos, and any search for knowledge must start by recognizing its ordered, harmonious beauty. This is why Plato is calm, serene, and composed—a beacon of light even after twenty-five centuries. For Kant, however, the world that surrounds us, including our own everyday experiences, is chaotic and impenetrable: the “thing-in-itself” cannot be known.

Hence the consequences: “Kant’s life is best described as a heroic struggle to discover order within chaos or, better, an effort to fix human thought and behavior within its proper limits” (Fiala 2004: vii). This statement, and its place in a prominent publication, can be taken as representative. It serves well to indicate the highly problematic “spirit” animating Kant’s work. If the world outside is perceived as a chaos, then there immediately emerge fundamental negative and positive basic guiding principles that can never be questioned again. Negatively, it is pointless to try to distill and understand, humbly, the inner structures and beauties of this, our world—an attitude not fully endorsed by Kant but rendered explicit by the subsequent waves of his “neo-Kantian” followers.¹ Positively, Kant argues that the sole ethical position is to take up the challenge and heroically confront this chaos. Such heroism, however, is extremely peculiar and most problematic. Instead of meeting a real challenge encountered in one’s concrete life, which requires composure, determination, and courage, it involves an abstract fight against the entire world perceived as chaos. From a Platonic perspective, the Kantian attitude does not lie along an ethical-intellectual axis of courage and cowardice, but rather one of humility and hubris.

The second part of the quote goes a step further that warrants serious consideration, as the author calls it “better.” Here, praise of Kant’s heroism is transmuted, not simply into an example to be set, but a Law: without the “philosopher” imposing such limits, it implies, we would be lost in the wilderness. The quotation marks above are intentional. Words have their meaning, and Plato, the inventor of philosophy, designated it to mean not abstract thinking, but rather an emotional commitment: love (philia) for wisdom (sophia). Plato’s designation also targeted the Sophists, who did not share such an attitude but instead twisted words to gain fame and money. This was certainly not Kant’s aim—yet the attitude of fighting doggedly against a presumably chaotic, hostile, alien world is not philosophical either. It is perhaps Gnostic.

So what exactly does Kant say about the “limit”? This question leads to the heart of Kant’s Gnosticism, as Kant performs a series of subtle operations that make it impossible to discuss the “unlimited,” amounting to a genuine “revaluation of values.”

Characteristically, through a series of steps Kant sketched an attractive agenda concerning the very foundations of thinking that both ignored the classical agenda and concealed the peculiarity of his own way of proceeding.² First, Kant identified the limit as purely negative; then, in searching for a positive meaning of limiting, he took the second, crucial step of matter-of-factly taking for granted that “limiting” is a purely mental concern, the limit itself having no reality—one simply could not be “at the limit”; then, in a third step, he defined this positive meaning as a “boundary,” something that—in contrast to a limit—“determines what it bounds,” so that, “through the act of excluding, a boundary encloses, and determines a completeness and unity” (Goddard forthcoming: 4). The result is an infatuation with limit and law that ignores the fact that Plato’s concern with eidos (origin of the term “idea”, but more explicitly incorporating both words and images) was to restore measure, not to define a completely bounding limit. Thus, although German idealism pretended to revitalize Greek philosophy, it actually misconstrued and thereby betrayed this tradition.

After Kant, the system was immediately felt to be missing something having to do with the reality of human life, society, and experience, but the force of Kant’s way of thinking proved practically irresistible. The most important effort to depart from the confines of this legacy came not with Hegel—who remained imprisoned within Kant’s problem-setting—but with Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, founders of philosophical hermeneutics who tried to return to the classical agenda to seek a more secure foundation for studying experience. Dilthey became convinced that Kant was wrong in arguing that experiences are so chaotic that only the “transcendental mind” can “construct” an order among them—an argument that still animates the hubris of “theory” and the various “constructivist” movements in the social sciences. Instead, the task of philosophy is to understand the very structure of experiences.

Dilthey sought this inherent order of experience in the right places—history and biography—but did not manage to identify it and complete his work. This was partly because he was still entrapped in the epistemic limitations of his times, like the reading of Plato as an “idealist” or the lure of “objective science.” Consequently he was attacked, even ridiculed, by his most important intellectual opponents, the neo-Kantians, who managed late in his life to marginalize him, just as the Durkheimians marginalized van Gennep.

Nietzsche made parallel efforts, focusing on the personal dimension of experience. However, he was not trained as a philosopher. His most important followers, especially in this regard, were social and political theorists like Eric Voegelin and Michel Foucault, who arguably escaped infatuation with the Kant-Hegelian agenda better than Husserl, Wittgenstein, or Heidegger. This leads us to social theory, where Dilthey’s and Nietzsche’s impact was transmitted and rethought by the foremost founding father of sociology, Max Weber.

Liminality in Sociology

The case can be made that even sociology’s first word was a synonym of “liminality.” Sociology starts with Saint-Simon and Comte, who made the central claim that with the Revolution, France had arrived at a crucial moment of transition. Their work focused on the historical process leading to this juncture, and on the solution that would end the crisis.

However, in conceptualizing situations of transition, the pioneers of sociology followed an Enlightenment logic caught in between two extremes: on the one hand constructing teleological schemes, projecting an inevitable, linear development in history; on the other taking upon themselves the desperate responsibility of “solving” the crisis. The dilemma returned with Marx, similarly caught in between proclaiming the unavoidability of communism and preaching the revolution (Poggi 1972). Anything still relevant and interesting in historically oriented social theory tries to overcome this legacy of Comte and Marx, and of Kant and Hegel; and is mediated through the work of Max Weber.

The two main sources of inspiration for Weber’s “method”—here understood in the original sense, as a “way” of proceeding—were Dilthey and Nietzsche. Beyond the early “methodological” writings, Dilthey’s impact is most visible in Economy and Society, especially the opening chapters focused on the “meaning” of social action as part of a search for “interpretive understanding” (Verstehen) beyond neo-Kantianism. His reading of Nietzsche drove Weber’s comparative history of civilizations and strikingly informs the opening sentence of his “Sociology of Religion” chapter, which defines its aim as “to study the conditions and effects of a particular type of social action” (Weber 1978: 399). Derived from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, this approach was then taken up by the most immediate followers of Weber (not yet afflicted by the impact of Parsons), like Norbert Elias, Franz Borkenau, and Eric Voegelin. Later Foucault labeled it the “genealogical method” (Szakolczai 2000, 2003).

The central issue of genealogical analysis is the exact nature of the “conditions” under which a new phenomenon emerges—a new social practice, political institution, or world religion. In the footsteps of Dilthey and Nietzsche, Weber used several terms to capture these “conditions’: “stamping experiences” (Weber 1948: 268–70, 280); the “psychological states” characteristic of major religious figures (ibid.: 270, 277–79); and in particular, their “ordinary” or “out-of-the-ordinary” (außeralltägliche) character, a central term in Weber’s theoretical framework, and the background foundation for one of his most important theoretical innovations, “charisma” (ibid.: 271–72, 286–95; 1978: 215–56, 41–54, 400–401, 1111ff.). However, Weber never conceptualized out-of-the-ordinary situations and “stamping experiences.”

Theorizing the “conditions of emergence,” or the fluid, out-of-the-ordinary states with a formative impact on institutions and practices, would remain a primary concern of Weber’s most important followers. Elias prominently uses the word “stamp” (Elias 1983: 39; 2000: 268–69, 517–18) and—like Borkenau—returns to the problem of “transition,” beyond its trivial Comtean meaning (Elias 1983, 2000; Borkenau 1976, 1981), but even they failed to produce a comprehensive study of the Renaissance as a crucial period of transition (Szakolczai 2007). Just as importantly, clarifying the nature of experience was at the core of the later theoretical work of Nietzsche- and Weber-inspired scholars, most importantly Voegelin, Koselleck, and Foucault. Though none of them were trained as sociologists, they worked in the intersection between philosophy and the social and political sciences, focusing on their anthropological foundations.

Eric Voegelin theorized inbetweenness using the term metaxy. He claimed to have discovered it in Plato, but the discovery was probably equally the work of his own interpretation.³ He emphasized that most key figures in political thought had endured particularly stressful conditions of wars, civil wars, or invasions, arguing that “symbols” are “engendered by experiences” (Voegelin 1956–87, 1997–99; for more details, see Szakolczai 2000, 2003). Similarly, Reinhart Koselleck connected the rise of modern political thought to the religious and civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, introducing the term Sattelzeit (“saddle” time) for formative transitory periods, providing a crucial analysis of critique and crisis, and connecting major inflections in the history of thought to such periods with terms like “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” (Koselleck 1985, 1988, 1989). Finally, Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge” and “genealogy of power” linked epistemic discontinuities with institutional practices, while in his last work Foucault introduced the term “problematization” to analyze the connection between experiencing crises and innovations in thought (Szakolczai 1998, 2000, 2003).

Retrieving Connections

Our line of investigation has delineated the following problem: Modern philosophy, following Kant, drew attention to the “limit” as a heuristic device, reducing formation to limiting, measure to boundary, and eidos to idea as “representation,” ignoring what happens when somebody is actually “at the limit.” Hence, the productive, formative aspects of experience have been played down. The most important late nineteenth-century philosophers, Dilthey and Nietzsche, tried to go beyond the impasse of Kantian thought by focusing on personal lived experience, moving beyond the fixity of the subject and the reduction of experience to objectivity. Sociology, on the other hand, devoted much attention to uncertain, stressful periods of transition. Beyond teleological schemes and titanic attempts to “solve” the “crisis,” Weber and his followers were similarly interested in the formative aspects of such periods. The question now is how to connect the two.

This problem was solved by Victor Turner, who in a series of unfortunately posthumous papers argued that “liminality,” a concept developed by studying rites of passage or through a processual analysis of unstructured situations, actually solves Dilthey’s old problem of the inherent structure of experiences, moving definitely beyond the epistemological horizon defined by Kantian thought.

Liminality as Experience

Turner Meets Dilthey

Victor Turner did not encounter the work of Wilhelm Dilthey until the late 1970s, casually. He immediately perceived an affinity between his own work and Dilthey’s, arguing that it takes an anthropologist to understand the significance of Dilthey (1985b: 210). The encounter could not have been more momentous: between continental philosophy and Anglo-American social or cultural anthropology, beyond the dominant rationalist and empiricist paradigms, it opened the way to solving the perennial problem of modern thought concerning the nature of experience.

Dilthey intuited that human experience is not chaotic and random, to be “constructed” and ordered by the abstract categories of the transcendental mind, or by a concrete, hubristic theorist; rather, experience has a structure of its own. However, he never managed to capture the exact nature of this structure. Van Gennep and Turner, on the other hand, tried to place the triadic, sequential, processual structure of rites of passage at the core of anthropology, overcoming the Durkheimian classificatory logic that was further perpetuated by Lévi-Strauss. Turner took up van Gennep’s ideas and solved these problems, but his efforts were buried in a few posthumous essays. The solution is the recognition that the sequential order of a rite of passage is the structure of lived experience.

Experience as Rite of Passage

Saying we “had” an experience clearly means something much more comprehensive than merely perceiving an “object” and becoming convinced of its real existence. Having an experience implies that something happens to us—and the word “happen” must be taken seriously, as any experience is above all an event.⁴ Exactly because it simply happens, an event is unique and fleeting; it involves not just our senses, but our entire existence as well. The consequences are subjectivity and manifoldness. Subjectivity results because existential involvement renders our understanding of our own experiences one-sided and opaque. Manifoldness is due first to our facing so many events in life that they overwhelm us; and second to our participating in events, which pushes us to realize that everyone around us has a similar but also a different viewpoint, which in turn helps us to acknowledge perspective.⁵ Thus, the way we assess experiences must not be just subjectively meaningful. Seemingly, we are back to Kant: if we want to go beyond mere fancy and partiality, we have to resign ourselves to a watered-down knowledge of the most important part of our world: human experiences.

Understanding experience as a rite of passage offers a solution...