I was asked not that long ago by an acquaintance who happens to be an artist about the concept of the liminal. What could she read on the subject? She wanted to imagine that her mixed, Amerasian identity (Chinese-American) entitled her to a special, permanent, liminal status outside the mainstream from which she could critique it.
Liminality is a term coming out of anthropology of the 1960s. Victor Turner in Forest of Symbols--itself a phrase from Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil--uses the 'liminal' to describe a trembling phase, betwixt and between. So for example, coming of age rituals which turn children into adults, or single people into married people, or conversions that turn heathens into believers. These are people who are, as Turner says, no longer in a category but not yet categorized.
But this is not exactly true. The 'liminal' is not used by Turner as a radical category; it is a teleological category. That is: we know how the game ends before it begins, so rather than describing something alive, it describes something dead. And those theorists, artists, counter-culturalists who want to claim the status of the liminal are fooling themselves if they think it's the mark of the avant-garde.
We can see why a concept of 'liminality' is attractive, since none of us wish to be easily pigeonholed, especially by the people who want to pigeonhole us, but we've got to also understand why the concept of the liminal doesn't avoid this.
Liminality belongs to a family of concepts which really emerge from quite a conservative way of thinking, a sociological mode where the key term is integration. A society is integrated, and against the forces of integration stand the deviants, deviants who are there by choice, or by some temporary condition, e.g. the homeless, or children on the way through their Bar Mitzvah to the company of their co-religionists. An integrative view of society poses the normal as static, and the deviant as dynamic. The study of the liminal from the perspective of the normal concerns itself with bringing the deviant into the fold. Caring for it, since it obviously is in a dangerous way, and caring for it as a shepherd cares for wayward sheep, by providing the authority for the rites of passage back into the integrative whole. Indeed, authority will invent rituals of straying from the fold all the more to control the disintegrative tendencies endemic to any integrationist view of the world.
Now we can see through the falsity in this dualism (of static/dynamic mapping onto normal/liminal) if we simply put on our thinking cap: imagine the normal as dynamic instead of static, and suddenly all of the moral force fades from the normal. We get then normalization as a self-serving mode of power and not a helping hand to the wayward, nor an innocent teaching tool for the callow. One dynamic force wants to preserve its priority over another dynamic force. A not-so-terribly-stable tradition maintains itself precisely by generationally harnessing the dynamic elements of the young and the structurally outcast for its own purposes.
The conservative eye can recognize the "deviant" because it has got in mind a view of the 'normal.' And of course we know the normal: property ownership denoted by contract, protected ideally by the law and materially by the police, rated on a scale of saleability. Any space or group that is not yet under anyone's specific jurisdiction is subject for claiming, or naming, but only on the basis of a cash transfer and title, or appraisal of credit worthiness, so a payment is made to Authority to "transfer" ownership, in what really is just a "taking" from the commons, or a subordinate group makes its faltering bid for recognition, constituting itself in the act, let's say, a protest march, and so we have a shift from the "improper" to proprietary, from liminal to normal.
Both the powerful and the weak latch onto the security of this dyad, the normal/liminal, because it evades the much more difficult and properly political/philosophical questions of how the world ought to be divided up, for what purpose and not merely for whom.
Note that to be marginalized is not the same thing as to be liminal. Marginality simply means that you're out of favor with the center. You're weak relative to their strengths. But liminality proposes something different. It is a phasal development, a shift in identity, a shift in terminology, a shift in jurisdiction, and it is potentially explosive insofar as the liminal can go either way: we can survive the hazing or you can die trying. Without death as the event limit, the liminal does not move, as it were. But death hovers only as an abstract form of terrorizing, only to press neophytes headlong into the mainstream. Death during initiation is rare and a scourge, to be avoided at all costs, but to be threatened for the purposes of scarring a memory, to permanently link the anti-social with the death fantasy, so as to make the palliatives of civility that much more acceptable.
Of course some spaces or groups which have names, identities and mailing addresses, can still be liminal, but only insofar as the paint has not dried, only so long as the operating procedure is without a manual, or if a manual exists, then insofar as in spite of the manual the operating procedures are de facto the wild, wild west. And our metaphor of the wild, wild west signifies the untamed, and so on, but what really happens there is that a man learns to be a man, so to speak, learns in other words, the factors of civility, what are the basal social rules to live and let live. The wild west is not lawless in the slightest: it is the imaginary which society employs to let its deviants discover on their own the benefits of society, and of course the deviants are expected to discover precisely the relevant factors that make mainstream society so comfortable with itself.
So in this style of thinking, spaces or groups can be liminal, but only insofar as they have what we can think of as transformative energy, but transformative toward quite a conservative telos, the reproduction of society as it is.
So we can see the attraction to this concept of the liminal from a conservative side: it presents a core-periphery model, and all the time that we discuss the so-called 'liminal,' what we're really doing is underscoring the normal, without really bringing our attention to it, without defining it, without being able to see the eye through which we look. We are saying that the weird and out-of-phase groups, activities, practices, foods, music, etc. really want to become mainstream, they really want to become us--but let's not talk about us, let's talk only about their desire to be us, and the strange contortions they go through to do so. This blindness to our own eye allows us to easily coopt any new challenger into our own dynamic without so much as a hiccup, so long as they phase in. Take rap music for example, so ubiquitous it's on Broadway. And the marginalized rappers sing about selling out to gym shoe makers.
Now of course there are some genuine sell-outs on the part of the weak, avid participation to enforced normalization on the part of those who go through the liminal experience. Fine. But let's just apply the old distancing stand-by of political theory, that this "need" to be "normal," is not natural, but historical, and not only that, but historical in the sense that the relevant groups to this process themselves receive their self-understanding from having internalized the core-periphery model, i.e. the normal-deviant model. Plenty of us have learned that we are deviant on the way to becoming normal. But let's think outside of this dichotomy which only serves those who decide what is normal.
It becomes clear at this point that we might do better to think of counter-cultures as not merely counter-mainstream, but as entities to themselves. Thus lets give up the planetary model, where sub-cultures revolve around the sun, dying to be consumed. Let's have instead a universe model, where there exist many, many suns and planets, all of them birthing and dying at their own rates, some of them folding into one another by hook or by crook, but most of them simply operating in their own space, gazing at others perhaps, picking up on the tactics and techniques of others perhaps, but essentially operating under their own respective laws. And some of these planetary systems will operate without a sun, or with rotating suns, and some will not revolve; they will do the shimmy-shake.
Cultures develop immanently. Liminal phases, insofar as this concept can be useful outside of a conservative context, would apply not to a genuine relation between sub-cultures and mainstream cultures, but rather to the self-development of groups, as internal differentiation, and not towards a known end, but towards whatever fate happens to befall the culture in its self-engagement with its own vitality, its own uncertainty. If we want to imagine a liminal dynamic element at work, an energy without category, let us look to the dynamic processes within groups: to board meetings, planning sessions, brainstorming, recruiting seminars, accidents of fate and luck, all those moments where the ship changes course, takes on water but keeps on sailing, where the natural unstructuredness endemic to any and all communication makes itself manifest. I'm not at all talking about the romantic figure of the genius--a scurrilous lie to the ages----but rather the liminality which comes through sustained concentration, real research, active articulation of that which hitherto went without saying, and let's not only include deliberative work: accident and borrowing from outside the fold, putting old hats in new boxes, and the wearing of ideas out of fashion can have meritorious effect on one's outlook.
Let's just not reserve a wholesale category of people to the liminal, neither those rites of passage which merely lead back to the confident center. This is offensive and misreads any and all non-mainstream movements as proto-mainstream.
We are then left, of course, with the moral questions we must make among competing value-spheres, among the pluralism in our ways of life--to be solved a different day--but let's at least not preemptively interrupt the working out of these moral questions by employing a concept of liminal which assumes social integration rather than operating without that assumption.