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Jasun Horsley returns to podcasting this coming month to explore the all-embracing subject of liminality and how it pertains to the now-familiar domains of pop culture, meta-psychology, existential detection, parapolitics & conspiracy lore, philosophy, autism, and extra-consensual perception.
This is a 9-minute taster of things to come compiled of outtakes from various aborted or only half-realized attempts over the past month (including a few bits used during ~ what turned out to be ~ my brief warm-up for the new Zero Books podcast, Zero Squared, with Doug Lain).
The Liminalist: The Podcast/Between will alternate between conversations with fellow liminalists (writers, musicians, filmmakers, philosophers, psychologists, alternate researchers, et. al) and solo spiels by Jasun.
Songs featured in “Liminal Criminal” audio: “El Mariachi,” by The Freak Fandango Orchestra; “Song for My Peeps,” by Art of Flying, “Creeping Crazy Time,” by Big Blood. Film audio excerpts from Devil’s Advocate, Fight Club, The Shining.
Liminality can be understood as providing four different contexts: spiritual or religious, social, political, and psychological.
- Originally the word was coined by anthropologists to refer to religious ceremonial practices, during which participants were led by ceremony masters from one state (and status) to another, such as in a coming of age ritual. The liminal stage is the intermediary one in which the initiate is on the threshold (līmen) between his or her old status and a new, as-yet unknown one.
- Socially speaking, liminality refers to periods of chaos in which old structures, institutions, traditions and mores, have all broken down or been destroyed, and in which new ones have not yet been established. Societies can be stuck for a long time in this state, when the previous unity is broken but the various now inchoate elements are forced to stay together.
- In the politics of liminality, the future is unknown. This means there can be no ceremony masters, because no one has gone through the process before, so there is no one to lead people out of it. This allows for the emergence of false ceremony masters who fill the void created by people’s need to be guided. These self-appointed leaders perpetuate liminality because their power and authority depends on the disorientation and helplessness of others.
- In psychotherapy, liminality describes a stage in the individuation journey when a person’s old personality (ego) and the accompanying beliefs, values, and standards, have begun to break apart, but in which no coherent new self has as emerged from these “ruins.” In a sense, to leave the liminal stage at an individual level means to become functional within it, to accept liminality as the human condition, not as a means to an end but as the end itself.