Call for Papers: Rupture and Liminality (original) (raw)
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The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill. For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the 'eternal' picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the whore called 'Once upon a time' in the bordello of historicism. He remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of history. (Walter Benjamin, quoted in Virno 2015: 3) The 20 th and 21 st Centuries have borne witness to several waves of movement across the globe, both within and across borders, owing either to a sometimes violent redrawing of them, or because of transnational flows which may or may not be read as a fallout of what is known in shorthand as globalization. With these changes, we have seen notions of statehood and nationhood challenged, pushing down – in many cases – on the ability for one to be stateless in a world where the power of the state is increasing dramatically. In addition, this period has witnessed a major transformation of individual subjectivities and the ways that people work with, through, contest, and exist in relation to elements of tradition, culture, and each other. Forms of relationality – in the strict sense of connections between individuals and between one's self and facets of identity and belonging – have found new ground and holds, while simultaneously facing challenges to the sovereignty of individuals to define their subjectivity. This thematic section attempts to reflect on some of these changes through looking at the space and place of liminality within cultures and peoples, at the extension of liminality towards permanence, and the ways in which permanence is managed, obtained, and addressed. Through this series of articles, the section hopes to contribute to our understandings of liminality, rupture and exile, as well as providing new thinking on the topic through what we believe is unique and original research.
Rupture and Exile: Permanent Liminality in Spaces for Movement and Abandonment
2020
The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill. For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the 'eternal' picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the whore called 'Once upon a time' in the bordello of historicism. He remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of history. (Walter Benjamin, quoted in Virno 2015: 3) The 20 th and 21 st Centuries have borne witness to several waves of movement across the globe, both within and across borders, owing either to a sometimes violent redrawing of them, or because of transnational flows which may or may not be read as a fall-out of what is known in short-hand as globalization. With these changes, we have seen notions of statehood and nati...
Introduction: Rupture and Exile: Permanent Liminality in Spaces for Movement and Abandonment
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2016
The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill. For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the 'eternal' picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the whore called 'Once upon a time' in the bordello of historicism. He remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of history. (Walter Benjamin, quoted in Virno 2015: 3)
Culture Unbound Vol. 12 Editorial
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2020
At the time of writing, it is April 2020 and large parts of the world are in various stages of Corona-lockdown. Both the severity of the penetration of the virus itself as well as the severity of the measures to combat it varies across the globe, but increasingly everywhere lives are turned upside down. Normality is suspended and it is frequently pronounced that the world will not look the same on the other side of this crisis. While we are launching a new volume, the current situation also gives renewed actuality to some of our previous publications. Not least, one of our 2016 issues is worth revisiting: Rupture and Exile: Permanent Liminality in Spaces for Movement and Abandonment, edited by Harmony Siganporia and Frank G. Karioris (Volume 8, issue 1). This thematic section is centred on liminality, a concept with which every sociocultural anthropologist and many other social and cultural theorists are well acquainted. Liminality is a concept that is most usually attributed to Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) and his Les Rites de Passage (1909), but it is also tightly associated with Victor Turner and his The Forest of Symbols (1967) or (perhaps especially) The Ritual Process (1969). While Turner departed from a discussion of liminality as primarily an attribute of rites of passage, he also expanded the concept to include "a greater variety of ambiguous situations, epochs, and spaces that might be read as liminal" (Siganporia & Karioris 2016). Van Gennep had a three-stage model of rites of passage: separation, margin/ liminality and reintegration. It is in this middle stage we find liminality. Liminality is from Latin limen meaning threshold. It is the boundary between the outside and the inside, between two entities that are separated from one another. A rite of passage is a transition from something old to something new, and liminality is the state of neither nor in between the old and the new. In the case of initiation rites-neither child nor adult. Liminality is marked by ambiguity, uncertainty
Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 2021
Our interest in liminalities follows two analytics. One has to do with what we might call the 'urban transversal'. Those rhythms emerging from disparate (pre)occupations that cut through practices, intentions, projectualities and powers, as an affective and material economy. This economy not only holds things together but also generates modes of life and becoming-urban that defy what conventional approaches to the 'economy', the 'social', the 'cultural' make of them (Simone, 2010, 2018). The other analytic is interested in how those same rhythms, in the unfolding of lives at the receiving end of dispossession, extreme poverty and destitution, articulate a tempo beyond their resilience, indicating a specific design for their politics of inhabitation (Lancione, 2016, 2019). At the intersection of these concerns arise our shared interest in the lively lexicon of the urban liminal. Looking for this lexicon means looking for what it has to say in the ways it has to say it. It is about tracing the emergence of its politics by staying with the trouble, and its ontologies (Haraway, 2016), or, from our privileged standpoint, to follow the storylines of those that have to stay with their troubles, as the only possible way to dwell on this planet, positing careful attention to how that staying with can be affirmative and anticipatory, not only of itself but of urbanity as such. And for many, this is an almost indescribable space between the foreclosure of viable inhabitation and a history of, as Audre Lorde put it, having survived everything. At a minimum, as Lauren Berlant (2011) discussed, finding ways to narrate these extended endurances beyond the metanarratives of sustainable salvation is necessary because the 'crisis' has no other side. The 'crisis' exceeds being a matter of repair or recalibration, transcends being the legitimation of transgressive action undertaken to preserve the salience of institutional forms and settled arrangements. The act of 'moving on', in an ordinary emergency, is about prosaic movements within grounds where extractive forms of belonging and becoming interlace in pluriversal ways, where the clear delineation of who extracts what blurs when the sheer volatility of settling and taking things wedges open glimmers, shadows
Liminal Spaces: Reflections on the In-Between
Architecture and Culture, vol. 5, no. 3 (2017): 383–93. , 2017
In a political present increasingly marked by bigotry and violence, the need to establish spaces where minority voices can be heard, and where alternatives can be articulated, has become ever more urgent. What kinds of places and spaces, this essay asks, make possible a true encounter and dialogue? What kinds of places and spaces allow us to challenge the binary structures and divisiveness that so fundamentally mark our current political discourse? In an attempt to offer some tentative reflections on this topic, I turn in this paper to Plato's Symposium and Luce Irigaray's critical reading of that text. Might Plato, I ask, offer useful tools for challenging and resisting a contemporary political discourse defined by simplistic binary thinking? And can he provide resources for thinking about space in terms that transcend simple dichotomies between here and there; inside and outside; us and them?
Passage Territories: Reframing Living Spaces in Contested Contexts
Interiority
This paper investigates the concept of ‘passage territories’ (Sennett, 2006), de ned as living spaces constructed from one’s passage of movement from one separate space to another, and how it extends the discussion of interiority in contested contexts. Through observations of living spaces and the narrative accounts of dwellers’ in Kampung Pulo and Manggarai neighbourhoods of Jakarta, this study draws attention to the interiority of dispersed and layered spaces occupied by the kampungs’ dwellers. In this context, passage territories are driven by a) a limitation of space that, in turn, triggers the need to acquire more space; b) the occupation of a dweller that necessitates different types of space; and c) the limited access to infrastructural resources that influence the extent of a living space’s dispersal. Through the use of drawings, this study reveals the complete interiority of living spaces consisting of spaces with diverse spatial ownerships and scales. The boundaries of pas...
Spaces, Places and States of Mind: a pragmatic ethnography of liminal critique
2013
Intentional homeless communities, such as tent camps and shantytowns are increasingly entering political and academic debates about how to solve homelessness. Dignity Village Oregon, the first city licensed, homeless-built democratically selfgoverned, non-profit transitional housing community in US history, was the result of viii Table of Contents Abstract..…………………………………………………………………………………iii Acknowledgments.………………………………………………………………………..v Dedication………………………………………………………………………………..vi Contributors……………………………………………………………………………..vii Contents...........………………………………………………………………………….viii Figures……………………………………………………………………………………xi Special Figure-Mission Statement Excerpt ……………………………………………xii Chapter One: Introduction 1.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 10 1.4 Portland and Dignity Village-Conditions of Possibility Recently and since the economic crisis of 2007-2008, what some homeless activists and critics describe as the Great Recession 7 , leniency towards grassroots responses to homelessness like tent camps and shantytowns has been only slightly warmer, but warmer still, especially in Oregon, where there is a tradition of grassroots communitarian responses to poverty. 8 Oregon's longstanding resource economy and vast wild territories fostered a legendary hobo and migrant worker economy spanning much of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries; for labor, camping and travelling to seasonal work was common, and historically high and fluctuating unemployment rates have over time merged into a common value system or symbolic imaginary 9 , a concept borrowed from Jacques Lacan ([1971] 2002), by Castoriadis (1987) and Wright (1997); a symbolically shared system of (urban) identities and attitudes towards the use of space that in this case, understands rough sleeping and impoverished shelter communities as part of Oregon lore. 10 Portland, Oregon is a city of 598,000 people. As the largest urban centre in the state, it has borne the brunt of demands for social services in a period of economic recession and rising poverty rates not seen there since the early 1960's when Johnson's National War on Poverty was declared. In Oregon, since the last recession of 2008, 120,000 people crossed into poverty bringing the total to 596,000, slightly smaller than the population of Portland, and nearly double the population of Oregon's next two largest cities, Eugene and Salem. The US national poverty rate stands at an average of 14.3%, 11
Spaces on the Move and Obliteration of Identities: Rebirth of Space and Identity
Lamjahdi Ahlam, Mary Achemlal, Omar Akfou, Mélissa Hammouti-Favre, Abdellah Elboubekri, Kebir Sandy, Francesco Caddeo, Amina Haddadi, Rachida Sadouni, Rachida Nasri, Limame BARBOUCHI
Presentations of the second PhD forum, Oujda. May, 2014