if you have just watched Spirited Away and, while trying to figure out how come it has affected you so much, understandably sought the solace of the wikipedia page discussing the film’s main themes, you will be aware of the role played by Liminality on making the film so meaningful to watch.
on the other hand, if you - heretical disbeliever - haven’t watched it (or checked the wikipedia article) the movie’s title should be enough to convince you on the issue. the original japanese title is ‘Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi’, which wikipedia kindly translates as ‘The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro’. a lot of things get lost on translating the title to english.
first, there’s an issue with the kid’s names. one of the most powerful images in the film has Chihiro signing away her name to the hag yubaba, which in turn gives her a new name: Sen. aside from a providing a good representation of the power of the contract in cultural imagination, and making you wonder what would be the narrative equivalent of signing away your name in our password-oriented contemporary societies, the scene has the merit of stating the whole business of the film: quite plainly, chihiro/sen’s search for her own lost identity. it is crucial, then, that the spiriting away is not simply of chihiro, but of both chihiro and sen: the ambiguity of the name, and the child’s desperate effort to either remember or rediscover who she is, are the fundamental liminar experiences on which the entire narrative relies. actually it’s TERRIBLY KIND of miyazaky to say so on the VERY TITLE, which we can take as enough support to the point above to let the matter rest.
second, kamikakushi . kamikakushi is a folkloric japanese term literally meaning ‘hidden by gods’, and while ‘spiriting away’ might be a beautifully appropriate way to put the concept, it might also lead us to overlook its mythical implications - especially in the absence of the ambiguity provided by adding ‘sen and chihiro’ to the title. it appears that the folkloric japanese gods get people kamikakushied, so to speak, out of anger. if you’ve read girard’s ‘violence and the sacred’ you’ll know, in turn, that angry gods are the very province of Liminality in sacrificial communities, and a mythical symptom of socio-symbolic Trouble Times.
(here it’d be fun, but probably unprofitable, to comment on english-speaking cultures' allergy to ambiguity. comically enough, the brazilian portuguese title is quite simply 'chihiro's trip'. blessed be all brazilians in denial)
one major component of girard’s thought has to do with the blankness of human desire. it we’re not afraid to ravage the issue out of all recognition, we can present it as such: humans don’t know what they want, so they look to other humans to figure it out. other humans know as little as the first ones, and look to other humans to figure it out. nobody quite knows what to do. repeat until extinction of the race.
the race not being so far extinct to the best of our knowledge, it arises that something in the dynamics of imitation must allow for the convergence of people’s desires towards a certain object. in ‘mimetic speculation’ (1985), andré orlean has shown how it so happens that this is exactly what comes about if everyone imitates everyone else: everyone ends up doing the same thing.
the issue can perhaps be extended to encompass the very formal properties of language and of the emergence of such funny things as subjective identity (this argument is slightly less lazily presented here). identity comes about through a certain relationship with The Other. it is forged on looking at everyone else while everyone else does the same, and seeing through the other’s eyes a certain imaginary version of yourself. this makes it a bit flimsy, to be sure, especially considering the passage of subjective time and our need to change as life (or social norm) requires. chihiro goes through that: she has to grow old(er), she loses her name, she enters a spirit-land of ambiguities bewildering enough to rival Hades’ best efforts at nonsensical comedy, she has to find a new place in her own life and in other people’s, and to cross through liminality towards either a new stability or death - with severe costs in identification either way.
what is more, social identity comes about when a community manages to do the same thing as a whole and assign certain differential places to certain of its members. girard’s specularity of desire, however, is mimicked in the specularity of social violence: violence committed against a member of a community will engender reprisal over reprisal until either an ever-widening cycle of revenge ends up in the extinction of the community or the community finds a way to polarize all of its violence and make it converge upon a single half-arbitrary victim. hence the formal mechanics of sacrifice as a social life-preserver. crucially, when new violence arises, or when social stability is somehow threatened, society starts to drift dangerously close the the realm of nobody knowing what they want or who they are. ambiguity rules! the gods get angry! liminality takes hold of mythical thought!
there is A LOT to be said about the power of liminality and the formal properties of girard’s notion of specularity. it’s the foundation of greek tragedy, the biblical apocalypse, and actually of at least one narrative in every mythical record. if that’s not enough for you, suffice it to say that it’s the operating principle behind ‘batman - the dark knight’ and any other passable representation of the joker (cesar romero’s included with honors). if it’s what makes spirited away touching, it’s also what makes the original version of ‘dark water’ some creepy-ass shit. it’s the logic behind the appearance of every meme, and possibly the fortunes of academic peer-reviewed publications. it’s the cornerstone of the bildungsroman, and the very structural background against which any mental activity or social process takes place (or fails to). it's the reason why it took humanity ten thousand years to come up with a decent god of confusion (fnord). on a more personal note, i think liminality might be what makes kibbutz life so irrevocably awesome - like no other type of travel that i know of, volunteering suspends the regular rules of ordinary life and sends you to this kind of otherworld where, things and identities being so much NOT well established, you kind of have the joy of recreating them all from scratch. quite interestingly, as you travel, the subject (ideally) shifts as much as your surroundings - as much as its objects.
it’s also behind some other things worthy of more careful consideration:
first, it’s behind the emergence of money - and in a sense of any human institution. money is the very thing towards which desire converges in the thick of its primordial object-less specular mimeses. financial crises, in turn, are precisely what happens when the ordered system of convergence towards money falters. stock market crashes and bank rushes are, in their own particular ways, prime instances of liminality taking hold and of people tumbling about trying to get around the very institutions they put in place - often by undermining them entirely. (institutions are, of course, the contents of the socio-symbolic order, and their instability is the instability of the system of social differences itself, etc!).
second, it’s behind the rise to power of charismatic figures in times of social unrest. Szakolczai argues that while the trickster - a character present in virtually every mythical system - occupies a marginal and out-of-place position in the social order during normal times, in times of crisis he’s likely to be the very point of convergence of the whole social order. being the one who always lives a liminal existence anyhow, he’s also the prime candidate for society’s search for new order when liminality takes hold of it. this is supposed to be the path by which a totalitarian regime takes hold of social disorder.
that the same mechanics should underlie such a variety of phenomena is enough to give pause for thought. but finally, and to sum this up with the inevitable post-post-x-ism twist, liminality can probably be said to be behind our very understanding of liminality itself.
consider the divide between continental and analytical philosophy. lacking the austere comfort of positive evidence and formal logic, continental philosophy becomes in a very dangerous sense a matter of faith. and faith, as girard would probably point out, is specular in nature and subject to rules that are not those of thought itself.
there is, however, more to the matter. this very specularity is what might make continental philosophy so much the more appropriate for social studies than the hard, tightly-wound positive sciences. it can be said - if we are allowed one last shameless mutilation of scientific rigour - that no amount of evidence and formal logic can ever be enough to equip analytic philosophy to understand meaning itself. the way the object is construed in positivism suspends all possibility of self-referentiality, which is the precondition for thinking about meaning, about the subject, about social processes, and about humanity in general.
in turn, the soft, wanky continental sciences of meaning - where you dive so deep into meaning that it stops making proper sense - operate almost by definition precisely in the realm of liminality. looking at meaning itself is its regular functioning - the approach disturbs the order of differences on which meaning relies and opens up a freakish world of ambiguities and uncertainties. continental science, then, operates in the spirit-world - in a permanent state of exception from itself. maybe this is what allows charismatic leaders like girard, barthes or althusser to rise to power - and to so brilliantly, and ambiguously, draw some sort of sense out of the general mish mash of social life.
on the other hand, if you - heretical disbeliever - haven’t watched it (or checked the wikipedia article) the movie’s title should be enough to convince you on the issue. the original japanese title is ‘Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi’, which wikipedia kindly translates as ‘The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro’. a lot of things get lost on translating the title to english.
first, there’s an issue with the kid’s names. one of the most powerful images in the film has Chihiro signing away her name to the hag yubaba, which in turn gives her a new name: Sen. aside from a providing a good representation of the power of the contract in cultural imagination, and making you wonder what would be the narrative equivalent of signing away your name in our password-oriented contemporary societies, the scene has the merit of stating the whole business of the film: quite plainly, chihiro/sen’s search for her own lost identity. it is crucial, then, that the spiriting away is not simply of chihiro, but of both chihiro and sen: the ambiguity of the name, and the child’s desperate effort to either remember or rediscover who she is, are the fundamental liminar experiences on which the entire narrative relies. actually it’s TERRIBLY KIND of miyazaky to say so on the VERY TITLE, which we can take as enough support to the point above to let the matter rest.
second, kamikakushi . kamikakushi is a folkloric japanese term literally meaning ‘hidden by gods’, and while ‘spiriting away’ might be a beautifully appropriate way to put the concept, it might also lead us to overlook its mythical implications - especially in the absence of the ambiguity provided by adding ‘sen and chihiro’ to the title. it appears that the folkloric japanese gods get people kamikakushied, so to speak, out of anger. if you’ve read girard’s ‘violence and the sacred’ you’ll know, in turn, that angry gods are the very province of Liminality in sacrificial communities, and a mythical symptom of socio-symbolic Trouble Times.
(here it’d be fun, but probably unprofitable, to comment on english-speaking cultures' allergy to ambiguity. comically enough, the brazilian portuguese title is quite simply 'chihiro's trip'. blessed be all brazilians in denial)
one major component of girard’s thought has to do with the blankness of human desire. it we’re not afraid to ravage the issue out of all recognition, we can present it as such: humans don’t know what they want, so they look to other humans to figure it out. other humans know as little as the first ones, and look to other humans to figure it out. nobody quite knows what to do. repeat until extinction of the race.
the race not being so far extinct to the best of our knowledge, it arises that something in the dynamics of imitation must allow for the convergence of people’s desires towards a certain object. in ‘mimetic speculation’ (1985), andré orlean has shown how it so happens that this is exactly what comes about if everyone imitates everyone else: everyone ends up doing the same thing.
the issue can perhaps be extended to encompass the very formal properties of language and of the emergence of such funny things as subjective identity (this argument is slightly less lazily presented here). identity comes about through a certain relationship with The Other. it is forged on looking at everyone else while everyone else does the same, and seeing through the other’s eyes a certain imaginary version of yourself. this makes it a bit flimsy, to be sure, especially considering the passage of subjective time and our need to change as life (or social norm) requires. chihiro goes through that: she has to grow old(er), she loses her name, she enters a spirit-land of ambiguities bewildering enough to rival Hades’ best efforts at nonsensical comedy, she has to find a new place in her own life and in other people’s, and to cross through liminality towards either a new stability or death - with severe costs in identification either way.
what is more, social identity comes about when a community manages to do the same thing as a whole and assign certain differential places to certain of its members. girard’s specularity of desire, however, is mimicked in the specularity of social violence: violence committed against a member of a community will engender reprisal over reprisal until either an ever-widening cycle of revenge ends up in the extinction of the community or the community finds a way to polarize all of its violence and make it converge upon a single half-arbitrary victim. hence the formal mechanics of sacrifice as a social life-preserver. crucially, when new violence arises, or when social stability is somehow threatened, society starts to drift dangerously close the the realm of nobody knowing what they want or who they are. ambiguity rules! the gods get angry! liminality takes hold of mythical thought!
there is A LOT to be said about the power of liminality and the formal properties of girard’s notion of specularity. it’s the foundation of greek tragedy, the biblical apocalypse, and actually of at least one narrative in every mythical record. if that’s not enough for you, suffice it to say that it’s the operating principle behind ‘batman - the dark knight’ and any other passable representation of the joker (cesar romero’s included with honors). if it’s what makes spirited away touching, it’s also what makes the original version of ‘dark water’ some creepy-ass shit. it’s the logic behind the appearance of every meme, and possibly the fortunes of academic peer-reviewed publications. it’s the cornerstone of the bildungsroman, and the very structural background against which any mental activity or social process takes place (or fails to). it's the reason why it took humanity ten thousand years to come up with a decent god of confusion (fnord). on a more personal note, i think liminality might be what makes kibbutz life so irrevocably awesome - like no other type of travel that i know of, volunteering suspends the regular rules of ordinary life and sends you to this kind of otherworld where, things and identities being so much NOT well established, you kind of have the joy of recreating them all from scratch. quite interestingly, as you travel, the subject (ideally) shifts as much as your surroundings - as much as its objects.
it’s also behind some other things worthy of more careful consideration:
first, it’s behind the emergence of money - and in a sense of any human institution. money is the very thing towards which desire converges in the thick of its primordial object-less specular mimeses. financial crises, in turn, are precisely what happens when the ordered system of convergence towards money falters. stock market crashes and bank rushes are, in their own particular ways, prime instances of liminality taking hold and of people tumbling about trying to get around the very institutions they put in place - often by undermining them entirely. (institutions are, of course, the contents of the socio-symbolic order, and their instability is the instability of the system of social differences itself, etc!).
second, it’s behind the rise to power of charismatic figures in times of social unrest. Szakolczai argues that while the trickster - a character present in virtually every mythical system - occupies a marginal and out-of-place position in the social order during normal times, in times of crisis he’s likely to be the very point of convergence of the whole social order. being the one who always lives a liminal existence anyhow, he’s also the prime candidate for society’s search for new order when liminality takes hold of it. this is supposed to be the path by which a totalitarian regime takes hold of social disorder.
that the same mechanics should underlie such a variety of phenomena is enough to give pause for thought. but finally, and to sum this up with the inevitable post-post-x-ism twist, liminality can probably be said to be behind our very understanding of liminality itself.
consider the divide between continental and analytical philosophy. lacking the austere comfort of positive evidence and formal logic, continental philosophy becomes in a very dangerous sense a matter of faith. and faith, as girard would probably point out, is specular in nature and subject to rules that are not those of thought itself.
there is, however, more to the matter. this very specularity is what might make continental philosophy so much the more appropriate for social studies than the hard, tightly-wound positive sciences. it can be said - if we are allowed one last shameless mutilation of scientific rigour - that no amount of evidence and formal logic can ever be enough to equip analytic philosophy to understand meaning itself. the way the object is construed in positivism suspends all possibility of self-referentiality, which is the precondition for thinking about meaning, about the subject, about social processes, and about humanity in general.
in turn, the soft, wanky continental sciences of meaning - where you dive so deep into meaning that it stops making proper sense - operate almost by definition precisely in the realm of liminality. looking at meaning itself is its regular functioning - the approach disturbs the order of differences on which meaning relies and opens up a freakish world of ambiguities and uncertainties. continental science, then, operates in the spirit-world - in a permanent state of exception from itself. maybe this is what allows charismatic leaders like girard, barthes or althusser to rise to power - and to so brilliantly, and ambiguously, draw some sort of sense out of the general mish mash of social life.
liminality is a phase transition duh
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