Recycling Victor Turner's Liminality: Finding Sociology under Discourse

“The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another.”

Bataille on love- Story of the eye




It is curious to read Victor Turner's presentation of 'liminality' in his essay on communitas. Curious and funny because it takes on the tone rather of a television screen you happen to be watching through a window in a house adjacent to yours, too far away to hear the sound. Dance without the music: absurd. Perhaps this is the way in which Turner himself is liminal. He even talks about the beat generation with all the charm of an ageing old man, eager to assure his young, eager-to-be-old audience, which side of the liminal he falls on, which is the general tone of so much of early Social Anthropology, barring perhaps Pritchard, who at the very least is weird.

We are never given a sense of the performative linguistic dimension of liminlaity: how does it feel. One can still venture guesses based on how anthropology has placed it as a phase between phases rather like life as a dicontinuity between two continuities, as Bataille likes to say. At least one behavioural dimension is the same across the board: in any coming of age ceremony we are not ourselves, we cannot be ourselves because it is here that we learn that we are not ourselves. And so fractally even the group reflects the sum of its fragments, I'm thinking for example of mass 'baptisms' for witchcraft practitioners.

In one sense Turner writes a bit like a mummified beatnik, liminality he says is about communitas, about a moment of deep humanity, more 'happy ending' philosophy. This struck me however as counter, counter-intuitive since at moments when we particularly 'aren't ourselves' are we not essentially, extimate, strange and uncanny to self and world? Wouldn't such a 'timse-space' follow the structure of what Lacan describes as psychosis? I mean a colleague actually made this suggestion a month and a half back, about possession. I felt a little depressed hearing this, but after a month of self-therapy I think one can pursue this idea: that for the liminal to be liminal it would mean the self becoming alien to the self. At that moment is it a question of culture/order being asserted again at the highest point of departure from the self, a control mechanism, or is it a question of exposing the world that lies beyond a very particular horizon? After all even R.D Laing distinguished between succesful and disastrous crossings of horizons and Jung talked incessantly about how 'Thus Spake...' had to be read as properly cultic text, that required indoctrination, or else...

Its curious to talk about Laing when I talk about the liminal beause the inherent schizoid connection comes up: how does the liminal relate to 'ontological insecurity'? To existential, economic, political and psychic vulnerability? Why do we separate the terms liminal and precarity for example, intuitively in Sociology?

It is here in this kind of discourse I feel that we really tend to see an underside, a hellish world on the other side of the conceptual strip, or band. As with the entire tradition of Sociology, the concept of liminality seems addressed rather in the fashion of an ageing paternal figure assuring a child that he, the old dude, falls on the right side of language and law. 'The liminal is good...it is human...we need the human...community is good' etc. Honestly if people still need to get paid to say such things, its not surprising people on the right side of normality see the humanities and social sciences as wordy moral science.

Sociology and social anthropology today have an obsession with proving normality and most modern sociological theory to my reading has ended up being a kind of defensive gesture in front of a Turing or more realistically a captcha test, 'finding ways to prove we're human'- which just goes to show why the fear of a human that turns out to be machine is perhaps a particuarly horrific thing for most people, thank you Ciggie. And literally all Sociologists say, psychology is BS. I profer many lols, barring a few evolutionary stragglers and psychotic empaths, Sociology is yet to expose the fact that human society works not through 'positive inversion' - we do a ritual and stop wanting to kill each other- but precisely through inversions of 'positive inversion' at the very least: who cares about the holy sanctity of discourse lets start counting moves.

Lets restart here, and not be straight-jacketed old men trying to prove their sanity and love for group interaction; lets start with Mary Douglas: disorder, of self, body, surroundings, socieity or cosmos, is both dangerous and frightening.

Lets summarize our opening motif: the liminal is minimally dangerous, and human, in precisely an inverted way, it shows that the extimate lies at the heart of the human 'ex-perience', we are all, organs outside, with no touchy surfaces inside.




Primitive Classification : Marcel Mauss has a few planets for dinner

Marcel Mauss created as a foundational Sociological concept what I intuitively feel must surely be a universal childhood dream: to live in warped or queer space-time. Perhaps one aspect of disciplinarity that Foucault leaves unconscious is the Newtonianization of experiential space-time and even aesthetic intuitional categories, like causality (for a total challenge to this read Pritchard's Azende, or my upcoming blog entry on the same). We come to live increasingly in a panotpic cell- no I don't mean language is the prison of the soul (more lols proferred) - but the literal physical experience of living in a cube, normalizing eucledian space and making time some mystery beyond comprehension: I mean thank god for Alfred Gell and his Series B time perception (basically time as block universe).

Despite all the flak affect theory gets in sacred 'traditional sociology' its quite clear that the foundation of the discipline in Mauss and Durkheim's 'Primitive Classification' is based on a kind of affect, in fact its still unclear to me why Durkheim is not really the founder of affect theory and perhaps the first Sociological theory of disco trance sociality but of the 'good' kind where we get high off a flesh of a few gods.

This is in fact the primary point of dispute between Mauss/Durkheim and Levi-Strauss: is totemic classification produced by the circulation of social sentiment, or does the self-organizing social mind, create sentiment through classification. Taking up the latter (Levi-Strauss' view) in detail would be time consuming, because it is elaborate, but definitely worth a later blog post. To be brief Levi-Strauss sees symbollic systems as productive of perception, and attempts to distinguish artistic, 'primitive' and scientific systems, as ontically similar but epistemically differentiated. If I start with Mauss/Durkehim then the idea that I'm working with here, which is that modern classificatory systems are serialized rather than synchronic, and occasional rather than being universal, would be a natural product of the fact that classificatory systems are produced by events, and taking the Levi-Strauss on the other hand we would have to admit that modernity sees a kind of burning up of the protective sheild provided by the self-organizing social mind.

So to summarize, this is the idea I'm working with:

'And, as Mary Douglas (1966) has recently argued, that which cannot be clearly classified in terms of traditional criteria of classification, or falls between classificatory boundaries, is almost everywhere regarded as "polluting" and "dangerous."'(Turner 108).

For Durkheim and Mauss primitive classifications, for example the Chinese system of temporal organization that we are all familiar with, with multi-layered differentiated schema, or even our astrological systems, or things like vastu etc. classify both space and time and each society has a different way of arranging space-time and causality. A really inspiring idea: the social is a mind that works without any individual agency that produces a way of organizing the literal world. Another factor of great credit to Durkheim/Mauss and Levi-Strauss is that they do not unlike 21st century Levi-Straussians use the term 'cosmology' preferring far more the less fanicful but more systemic 'classification'. Perhaps the only thing that stands in the way of a more robust sociological theory is the fact that they separate science from myth. Science makes the environment while myth makes the world.

They manage to show that classification is scientific but neglect to show that science is also classificatory in the 'primitive'/cosmic sense; perhaps it seems gratuitous to say, since now there are no 'other' worlds, there are only historical thought collectives, there is capital, there is discourse, and at best there are small-scale epistemic variations, like alternate modernities, but we no longer seem to have 'worlds'. Curiously at the historic moment we classify classification, the possibility unclassified classifying classification ceases to exist.

Seriality : Things-in-the-world in excess of words

Dante had one of these old-manee 'in my days...' things to say, that was definitionally the literal essence of what the entire species of old-men says, like a kind of clarion call of old-man discourse. Dante was proud of the fact that provical romatic Italian had more words for emotions than actually existent emotions.

A movie by Jamie Uys, 'The gods must be crazy', provides in a brain-numbingly simplistic way, the opposite possiblity. The movie is based on a small group of Kalahari tribesman, who live in primitive classificatory heaven a little away from Botswana in the 1980s. The movie starts with a nature channel type anthropological commentary on the tribe and its perfect assimilation into nature. Their needs perfectly match their means. For them there is only the small world of the Kalahari bush, and then outside that in a kind of 4th dimensional space, the gods, who live at the end of world (think about Douglas Adam's joke about the 'Restaurant at the end of the world' being a moment rather than a place). Things outside their classificatory apparatus like the sounds of passing aeroplanes are brought into the mythos, as for example as the incontinence of the gods.

One tragic morning however a pilot drops a coke bottle that falls unharmed into the Kalahari world. The bottle at first a source of amusement and immediate extraordinary use value ends up being, because it is a kind of hyper-useful , bewtiched object, a point of violent strife among the innocent bushment. Finally one of the tribe (they have no cheifs) decides the gods must have gone crazy to send then only one of these hyper-objects, and plans to go on a voyage to the end of the world to dispose the object.

George Dumezil, the old nazi-indologist, once said something quite interesting about primitive classification. He argued that classification distributes the same object across different genre. A horse is a symbol of divine power in relation to a king like God, a symbol of sacrifice in relation to a war-like god and a symbol of profane materiality in relation to an powerful aristocrat. The same object is refracted differently across different layers of the same classificatory system. 

In the case of the Gods going crazy in the Kalahari however what we find is very specifically one object, buckling, or pivoting two series, which are not part of the same classificatory schema. Here in relation to the Kalahari,modernity itself is just another classificatory schema, but produces in fact the most regularly repeated classifcatory event, the encounter of pre-modernity with modernity. Things that are visible and apparent within one classificatory schema become like shadows or ghosts in the other. 

The movie is littered with these beingless footprints. A journalist from america who visits Botswana on a whim, and is lost in the bush for a while is told that the cause of her guide falling on her, is that he is running away from a rhino which had come out to stamp the fire. This is something that rhinos in this symbollic universe regularly do, but she refuses to believe this could be true. 

Visually a simple way to imagine this intersection or rather dijunction is a sphere entering the flatworld in Abbot's novel 'Flatland'. But rather than there being a lower dimension and then a higher dimension (russian doll like or nested) here there are two separate disconnected classificatory systems that cut or produce dinjunctions at particular point. 

                                            For all those who don't know what Flatland is check 

                                            out the video and to all you mathematicians 

                                            and 'science is godders' please for heavens sake 

                                             educate yourselves, read 'The Jealous Potter'

The dark horizon of New Knowledge: Deciding whether rituals are obssessive or pyshotic

Perhaps one of the most productive instances of the consumation of this particular kind of event, is the discussion on Foucault in Butler's Gender trouble. I've already annoyed half of the people I know consciously and the other half unconsciously by repeating the contents of this debate, so let me summarize the basic idea before the guillotine is wound up. Butler and Foucault agree that the Victorian era rather than being repressive of sexuality produces a burgeoning of sexual discourse, quite precisely sexual classification. 

Foucault goes on to pose through the entire period where he writes the History of Sexuality as well as the lectures on the Hermeneutics of the Subject to produce a kind of alternate possiblity, what Butler in a latter article criticizing Foucault describes as the 'prediscusrive' and right through in Gender Trouble describes as the outside. Quite simply the pre-discursive might be described as existence or experience that has not been classified, or in a more direct way experience beneath discourse. This may even be as Tom Boellstroff demonstrates experience that does not register within the language of the person experiencing it. I have already described this here as disjunctive. 

This debate however also points in other directions. We might return to our Levi-Strauss and Mauss-Durkheim question and ask again, is it affect that precedes new classsification here or is it classification that creates the possiblity for new affects. In any case we can be sure that primitive classification, which by now I hope you've muscle-memoried, doesn't mean, classification by primitives but rather the classification that constructs specific and shared socio-perceptual worlds, is not limited to a kind of 'completed case'. One doesn't have to have a totally perfect sealed of classificatory system to have classification outside of the newtonian-modern. 

We are consistently creating ways of classifying things that baffle us for things that are dark or unknown to us. 

A great example of this is one of Sociology's sister disciplines Criminology, especially in its initial behavioural pre-foresnsic phase. There's of course a lot of work on how racial profiling was one the starting points for this discourse, and how this is reflected in the Conan Doyle stories. A more modern and equally fascinating example of the same is the Netflix true crime series 'Mindhunter'.

The series depicts the emergence of the discursive category 'serial killing' (much ado is made about whether it should be sequence or serial as the word used). Two detectives out sheer 'wonderment' decide to investigate the category of repeated ritualistic killing. They do so by interviewing already convicted serial killers and developing patterns of behavior, and predicting with great accuracy the profiles of future serial killers. 

Here we have the perfect Sociological object. The series even starts with the perversely named 'Holden's' (its a real story but I believe and hope the names were changed) love interest Debbie quoting Durkheim on deviancy: 'Durkheim says all forms of deviancy are simply a challenge to the normalized repressiveness of the state'. 

Here two systems of classification again intersect. Serial killing is fascinating to these detectives precisely because of its classificatory, literally ritualistic nature. MOs are repeated, like totem poles, killers are drawn to revisit their sites of horror rather in the way a believer is drawn to a religious site. What is more curious however is that while these killers clearly exhibit signs of hallucinatory psychosis, they lose their heads  etc. what is perhaps shocking is how in a very 'banality of evil' way they more predominantly display clear signs of neuorsis, or what Freud calls obsessional behaviour which accurately maps out as the basic grounds for religious ritual.  It is precisely for this reason that the killers interviewed rather than being shy about their knowledge are eager to analyse it and share their own classificatory bases. This makes their discourse amenable to classification for the Detectives, who seem to employ a kind of primitive classificatory procedure themselves, to reconstruct the intersection between their worlds and the worlds of the killers. In a bone-chilling way, the two series are usually buckled by certain objects, normalized in the world of the detective but made uncanny by the killer: shoes for example form one very tragic example. 

                                                                        -x-

The initial deployment of primitive classification by Mauss and Durkheim seems to be in a kind of pictorial sense very close to Walter Benjamin's philosophy of translation. There is no fully one enclosed world, merely fragments of worldness, between which translatory passages are made. Levis-Strauss in his latter works, the Mythologiques and the Jealous Potter, draws out a version of this describing exactly how these translations occur. The mytheme for Strauss appears to be exactly a kind of moving, differential element, between myths, with myths coming together like broken shards of a pot to fit together to make more meaning than either one alone could do. This isn't Benjamin's view of course, but one interesting deployment of a theory of translation.

However what this particular brand of Sociology (and by this I mean Sociology in general which has been tainted too deeply by Durkheim's unfortunate move of making a moral bifurcation the foundation of the discipline) seems to miss some very crucial ideas. Primitive or world building classification is not: 

a. Exclusively anti-scientific

b. Necessarily 'good 'sacred' 'pure' or 'happy'

c. Ever completed (i.e there is always an excess to classification, which is why the little section at the beginning of 'The Gods must be crazy' is simple but accurate)

What I have attempted to do here in a circuitous way is to describe the liminal not as some kind of modern emergence, or even as the gap between classificatory systems, but the foundational site for the building of classification. The liminal to me is precisely that which exists but has not been categorized. This is also why the liminal is so close in many ways to the radical, the weird and the uncanny, it is not borne of a distinction between purity and impurity, it is clearly disorder, what Douglas calls dirt. Here classification doesn't exist in the mind or the social or in nature, or in between them, but very precisely in the disorganization of matter. 

The principle of liminal classification is not synchronic but serialized. 

And it exhibits in the most commonplace (mundane, rather than sacred or profane) scenarios extraordinary complexity. Consider for example banter on modern dating apps. Typically in urban settings these exchanges involve a kind of acephalous libidinal economy. The premise is already that serendepity has to be imagined rather in the way like the fantasy of a virtual reality machine. It essentially lobotomizes the previous modicum of paternalistic love, which was based on a kind of sentimentalism. Here we see a more Levi-Straussian libidinal economy, a kind of quasi-legalistic series of exchanges. Very clearly classificatory systems are drawn from and Indian and western pop-culture, analysed and actually put into play. This is precisely what Sociologists who dismiss the variegation of definitions of sexuality and gender as well as of psychological dispositions and neuro-diversity miss, and in missing replicate Turner's 'old-man' error. In fact the combination of these two classificatory systems alone (leaving aside the relfexive castigation of them and the co-terminuness of reactionary 'Indian cultural' classificatory attachments to each of these systems) produces a literal somato-socio-pyshic world of its own. In fact the initial interrogation of these groups of categories is so intense that it is quite likely that these will produce very robust systems, since they are more amenable to political and logical contradiction, more supple. 

What we miss when we dismiss such systems as being 'western/westernized fantasy' are precisely that in many ways, before we watch our first romances, we are entirely unschooled in love, and if we must agree with the Sociological greats then surely we can on how it is with the idea that we learn  'love'; that is not as something 'natural', but a socially organized way of interacting. There is nothing natural under the forms of flirtation we learn from sitcoms, the idea that marriage involves a ring and a proposal or the entry of non-normative terms into a culture that at least for 75 years has had no actual words for certain forms of existence. There is nothing natural about unclassified existence either. 

Instead the two, the body and the words that cut into it, live in a consistently intertwining chain of effervescent, negative chaos.