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A limen is, of course, literally a threshold. A pilgrimage centre, from the standpoint of the believing actor, also represents a threshold, a place and moment in and out of time, and such an actor - as the evidence of many pilgrims of many religions attests - hopes to have there direct experience of the sacred, invisible or supernatural order, either in the material aspect of miraculous healing or in the immaterial aspect of inward transformation of spirit or personality. Turner discovered that a potent and distinctive form of social community which he called community emerges in the liminal stages of pilgrimages. Community means relationships among people, jointly undergoing ritual transition through which they experience an intense sense of intimacy and equality, an I-Thou awareness.
Community is spontaneous, immediate, concrete... undifferentiated, egalitarian, direct, non-rational... In the process of liminal ity, the pilgrims progressively achieve a release from conformity to general norms and may experience a profound and collective sentiment for humanity which includes or is stimulated by the quest and presence of a sacred space, god and spirit. We will explore the different modes of community later in this essay. For now, let us focus on the stage of separation in pilgrimage and the experience of liminal ity. The contribution to organization theory of studying Turners social drama is in developing a postmodern theatrics that is more process ual and dynamic than dramaturgical theories advanced by Raymond Williams.
Turner acknowledges the influence of Williams in his postmodern theatre concepts, but moves off to explore the indeterminacy, liminal ity, and fragmentation aspects. This postmodern dramaturgy allows us to explore how patterns emerged in the seeming chaos of successive situations. Social drama, says Turner, is defined as a harmonic or disharmony social process, arising in conflict situations. Social drama is defined by Turner (Turner, 1982 a: 96), as an eruption from the level surface of ongoing social life, with its interactions, transactions, reciprocalities, its customs making for regular, orderly sequences of behavior. Raymond Williams' Marxism and Literature was originally published in 1977 (or thereabouts), and was deeply inflected by the readings of Victor Turner.
Raymond Williams his ideas of "dominant, "emergent" and "residual" cultural forms very much resembles and adds to the notions of Victor Turner. Williams was one of this century's most important and influential socialist intellectuals, creating a body of work which helped to transform literary studies, and to lay the foundations of those disciplines which now combine or cluster around the categories of cultural / media /communications studies. In his early formation, a love of the analytic and transformative power of literature combined with a political commitment which led to a profound exploration of and critical engagement with Marxism and, in particular, Marxist theories of culture. In Culture and Society, Marxism and Literature, and The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams attempted to set out the nature of the cultural dialectic initiated with modernity. The great idea of the men of the Enlightenment was that the world should be made a better place through the application of reason. With this, a clear mind, dedicated to the organisation of the world on scientific principles, would render human life both happier and more just.
This rationalisation, however, proved itself a double-edged sword inasmuch as, whilst materially and politically generally progressive, its implementation in all spheres radically undermined all those human practices, evolved over millennia, which, though non-rational, are very much a part of fully human needs: most notably, perhaps, those belief systems through which social and community life is organised, and which, similarly, made tolerable the awful consciousness of human mortality. After this, for Williams, literature and culture could never again be considered without those quotation marks; they were historically-contingent concepts or, in the case of literature in particular, an abstraction from the totality of writing practices in society and the construction of a whole regime private reading, literary poetics, educational institutionalization called literature. Williams developing materialist analysis of all cultural forms and practices meant an inevitable de-throwing of the place of literature in his own work; dividing lines became blurred between his critical and fictional writing and his work on, for example, television, communication technologies, sociology of culture, cultural policy, socialism and democracy, and ecological politics (Williams, 1985: 124). The tools Williams tried to develop, and offer, can be found in two ideas. Firstly, his idea that cultures consist of dominant, residual and emergent forms (discourses and practices) allows us to think about the ways in which change always contains a sort of continuity. For example, where they exist, modern political convictions very clearly often carry the structures of feeling, which would once have been expressed through religion.
Our use of the word sectarianism demonstrates this. A keen attention to semantic change in all the forms of our symbolic life, to the ways in which forms and experiences can become buried in others, apparently detached from their earlier meanings, seemingly residual but, in part, perhaps, living on in transformed ways, but still pulling with them some of their earlier feeling tones, can help us to understand the movements in a culture. In understanding dominant culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we might think of global capital as a form of global feudal despotism. Countering it would, thus, involve a renewal of what we once called the sacred akin to the renewal of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Williams, I think, was trying to find his way towards a materialist, embodied and enfolded, politics of the sacred which would be capable of addressing the fact of what Jonathan Rutherford has called modernity's excess of world over word. This means giving symbolic life to the details of our human experience which capitalist modernity suppresses or ignores, or only names in very simple, reductive or partial ways.
Creativity, for example, lies at the heart of human being. Creative labour upon the world is a source of great joy. But modern forms of work and production tend to distance the worker from, or simply not have space for, the fullness of labours creation. This truth, (known, of course, long ago) means that for some to be able to be creative, many others must become like human tools.
Recreation, then very often takes the form of types of labour (sport, DIY, gardening, etc. ) in which our labour is all our own, because such creative work on and in the world is joyful.
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Research essay sample on Marxism And Literature Liminal Ity Williams
