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Liminality
May 26, 2009
When we are unsure of ourselves, the world we have constructed for our safety begins to loosen, and even to fall apart. All the ways in which we deceive ourselves, all the little lies we tell ourselves to give us confidence, lose their persuasive force. Yet it is precisely in such "self-conscious" moments that we can play with common sense in new ways.
Victor Turner, a seminal theorist on the transformative nature of ritual, described what he called the liminality of the performance. During the liminality of the performance, participants in a ritual are momentarily freed from the bonds of their socially constructed world. Liminality dissolves the cognitive structures determined by the traditions of the community. Turner says that "liminality and the phenomena of liminality dissolve all factual and common sense systems into their components and play with them in ways never found in nature or in custom, at least at the level of direct perception."
This reminds me of imagination (as defined by the poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Imagination is "the living power and prime agent of all human perception. Imagination dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create..."
What imagination is to the self, the liminality of ritual is to the community.
Liminality unleashes playfulness by undoing thinking. Liminality occurs in the moment before new thinking takes over, in the qualiadelic stage of ritual whenour gestures express the subjunctive -- the could be and would be states of being, states such as desire, hypothesis, possibility and supposition.
Victor Turner was keen on the idea that play is central to the power of ritual. There is a sense, which we all have, that play is precognitive, that it somehow comes before, or is at least near the deepest roots of thought. It has certainly come to be somewhat of a truism that people who think too much do not seem to know how to play very well.
The virtue of ritualing is that its play helps us to step out of the box and to open the doors of perception. Ritual is commonly thought of as routine, but it is not. It seems like it ought to be refined, or formal, but it usually isn't. Instead, it is filled with spontaneity and exaggerated, often unconventional, behavior.
The unexpected and the un-asked for always keep popping up in ritual. This is an aspect of ritual that we tend to overlook. Ritual is like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, because just looking at the world through the framework of ritual changes the world.
We start out in the act of ritualing as one person and we wind up as another. The same goes for our communities -- rituals are commonly supposed to maintain the status quo, but they have a sneaky habit of transforming our traditions. Conscious ritualing moves us to respect and to question reality at one and the same time.
Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine.
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