Betwixt and between: the liminal art?

Constrained, Unconstrained and Surprised in a Global Context (Part #5)

Tao Jiang comments on another fable in Zhuangzi, namely the celebrated story of the butcher, Cook Ding, as offering the most illuminating example of the distinctive Zhuangist understanding of personal freedom within the lifeworld:

Cook Ding is portrayed as performing a fantastic feat of untangling the massively intricate body of an ox. With charming details and poetic flair, the story describes the butcher's supremely attuned senses and Dao-guided actions when running his chopper through the ox's body. Every touch and every move of Cook Ding's is conducted in perfect rhythm as if he was performing some grand ancient ritual, a highly scripted and constrained occasion. His execution is exquisite and precise, hitting all the right notes, while smoothly cutting open the ox's body without hacking his way through.

There is a space in the joint, but the chopper's edge is thickless; if you insert what is 'thickless' into the space of the joint, of course there is plenty of room to manoeuvre the chopper.

As a result, he has not changed his chopper for 19 years, whereas even good butchers have to change theirs every year.

The references to "thickless" and the "space in the joint" recall accounts of the liminal and liminality -- of "betwixt and between" -- whether in myth or in aesthetic experience (Living as an Imaginal Bridge between Worlds: global implications of "betwixt and between" and liminality, 2011; Bibliography of "Betwixt and Between" -- including references to liminality and Neti Neti, 2011).

One valuable clarification of experience of the liminal is offered by Bronton Cheja and Jais Booth, introduced by citing Victor Turner:

The term liminal has initially been used historically as a phase in the Hero's Journey, and refers to the phase after the seeker has left the familiar context of social life and before attaining the spiritual insight which reveals a vaster realm of understanding which is then brought back to the community. Thus it has been referred to as betwixt and between, i.e. a place of indeterminacy and unknowingness which tests the seekers' determination and courage. (Forest of Symbols, 1967).

The authors' purpose is thereby to clarify understanding of the aesthetic character of liminality as they proceed to summarize (Liminal Art, Oakland Wiki, 2005) -- an understanding developed in their later work to the effect that:

The liminal is a threshold, i.e. a threshold of consciousness. The threshold being crossed is between ordinary, mundane consciousness and the higher vibrational dimensions of being. Liminal art and poetry is inner-driven expression seeded with spirit, that by its nature manifests with a transcendent quality. This spirit expresses itself in every form of art, its transcendent essence being the sole determinate of a liminal work. A liminal artist/creator crosses the threshold of ordinary mental reality, entering the realms where myth, spirit, wisdom and enchantment arise, to create a work from those deeper, more primal, more encompassing realities. (Myth, Magic, Mystery: the Liminal in Art, Liminal Art Salon Publishing, 2009)

Any reference to liminal art is helpful in highlight the contrast between the aesthetic experience, with which liminality is associated, and the artefacts potentially enabling that experience. However the liminal experience may well be denatured by art as a misleading reification of it.

Reservations aside, the question raised by such articulation is whether there is a mode of living between conventional sides, modes or choices -- living on the bridge between them, effectively between the perspective of the frog and that of the turtle. As that bridge, they together point to a context through which to explore the possibilities of living "in between" the divisive choices by which society is currently faced -- at a time when there are many calls for new thinking and reflections on a "new Renaissance". A concern is whether the requisite cognitive nature of such collective emergent insight might well be "missed" in some way, as previously discussed (Missing the New Renaissance? 2010; From Changing the Strategic Game to Changing the Strategic Frame: missing cognitive possibility in changing the system not the planet, 2010).

As noted with regard to liminality, the need for bridges is typically obvious. They provide a means of traversing from one "side" to another across a modality which cannot be readily traversed otherwise -- a preoccupation now articulated in the periodic Bridges Conferences. Unfortunately as yet, the essentially binary cognitive mode associated with walking, which is natural on either side, cannot seemingly be used on the medium which separates them (Transcending duality as the conceptual equivalent of learning to walk, 1994)..

Each "side" is furthermore typically associated with a different perspective. The bridge is the means of transition between such perspectives across what may well be a psychosocial discontinuity -- a boundary with even a price to pay, as in toll bridges. There is an element of choice in being on one side or the other. Typically one cannot choose to be in the "middle" -- between them. Such considerations have all been exploited through metaphor.

The modality in question recalls arguments for the possibility of travelling the cognitive world along what have been metaphorically described as songlines or dreaming tracks (From Information Highways to Songlines of the Noosphere, 1996). This argued for the possibility of global configuration of hypertext pathways as a prerequisite for meaningful collective transformation.

The challenge is how to enact and cultivate such pathways as the pattern that connects (Cultivating the Songlines of the Noosphere From presentations by representatives to embodying presence in transformation, 1996). The butcher fable highlights the greater challenge of how to walk such pathways, inviting exploration through other metaphors (Walking Elven Pathways: enactivating the pattern that connects, 2006; Climbing Elven Stairways: DNA as a macroscopic metaphor of polarized psychodynamics, 2007).

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Betwixt and between: the liminal art?