The Liminal Trickster

"Hermes...the divine trickster..the god of boundaries and the transgression of boundaries."--Walter Burkert

The carnival represents repressive de-sublimation of existential angst that is not a phobia meaning a fear of some object. Angst is a generalized anxiety that has no specific object, but still casts a shadow of fear over all existence. The Carnival is the opiate of oppressed people that dulls angst by redirecting psychic tension in another direction. The Latin noun “angor” (distantly related to German "angst") means strangulation in addition to anguish, torment, trouble, and, vexation. Langman interprets the Carnival as highly organized capitalist consumerism intended to de-sublimate aggression for channeling disenchantment away from the social status quo. The concept of the Carnival is cultural relative reality meaning Life could be organized in a different way: in this sense the carnival is artistically negative, or critical in Adorno’s definition of negative dialectics. Symbolically the Carnival is the ontology of a false situation.

Liminality is an important second dimension of the Carnival that is symbolized by the archetypal figure of the Trickster representing the liminal state of being between the sacred and the profane. “Liminality” comes from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold.” German scholar of Greek mythology, Walter Burkert, interprets the Trickster archetype as the boundary crosser in ludic playfulness having access to the re-creative power of life. Limbo (limbus) means in Latin, “edge or border.” The boundaries crossed include those of the social status quo. The Trickster (Greek Hermes, Roman Mercury, Native American Cherokee Coyote) mocks all authority. The divine messenger Hermes was the god of economic commerce; he invented lying; and would sometimes change the messages to and from the other Olympic gods to his own liking! Jungian psychologists consider Hermes the archetype of narcissistic disorders. Spiritual leaders are viewed by some cultures as Tricksters such as the Norse mischief-maker, Loki, who can shift shape and whose gender is variable, or ambiguous. The symbol of the Trickster often plays the role of a clown; however, the laughter and playfulness is actually sublimated hostility. Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. “People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise. The trickster in most native traditions is essential to creation, to birth” (Wiki: Byrd Gibbens, Professor of English at University of Arkansas at Little Rock; quoted epigraph in Napalm and Silly Putty by George Carlin, 2001).

French ethnographer, Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957), first coined the term “liminality” in his famous work, “The Rites of Passage,” (1909). Liminality is a special time during transition of social status, or new being such as engagement to marriage, death to burial, graduation to official award, youth to adulthood, outsider status to insider, or Pentecost. Gennep organized the anthropological liminal sequence pattern as 1.) Pre-liminal break with an old order; 2.) Liminal nameless disorientation and restructuring; 3.) and Post-liminal new being. These transitional phases are done in a strict sequence and completed by a Master of Ceremonies. The liminal phases are both destructive and constructive. Interestingly, Karl Jasper coined the term “Axial Age” as a time of radical change and collapse.

British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-1982) discovered Gennep’s study of rites of passage, but further develops his work “Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture” (1978) to encompass both the political and cultural realms by applying liminal states to the individual level, group level, and postmodern industrial society as a whole. Turner described the liminal as “bewixt and between” characterized by order reversal, uncertainty, fluidity, malleability, new possibilities, new perspective and scrutiny of culture. Any person or group not fully integrated into society is considered liminal such as undocumented refugees, persons in jury trial, teenagers, or transgender persons. A church congregation during worship is in liminal space. The relationship of psychologist to patient is liminal. Liminality is the revolt against the objective finality of defining human beings as some-“thing” since it is essential that consciousness is not objectified by the Other (Hegel). The participant’s personal agency is empathized by combining thought and action in ritual instruction. During the Post-liminal phase a “communitas” (John, Graham St., 2000, “Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance”), or community forms around the camaraderie of groups that share the same liminal experiences. Turner defines three types of communities that form post-liminal groups: 1.) Spontaneous-Ecstatic, 2.) Ideological-Utopian Obstructionist, and 3.) Normative Reformist. The nameless liminal phases are too intense to be a permanent state of being, but they are also dangerous because liminal periods can be subject to manipulation and distortion if there is no Master of Ceremonies.

Authentic subjective liminal experience can be replaced by inauthentic “Liminoid” experience (term coined by Turner) that has no transformative power, but only objectively performs nihilistic mimetic rivalry. Liminoid experience is the opiate of the people. Liminoid is spectacle that generates endless meaningless chatter. Liminoid experience is the trickster’s clown act devoid of the possibility of authentic identity formation and transformation consequently the person attempts to stay in a permanent state of liminality. 

Turner wrote “…for young people, liminality of this kind has become a permanent phenomenon...Postmodern Liminality,”(Kahane Reuven et al., The Origins of Postmodern Youth, 1997,New York, p. 31). The Liminoid suspension of time is not for real personal transformation, but an inauthentic escapism from endless tragedy through hedonistic consumption and narcissistic rivalry. Rock concerts, nightclubs, sports events seek to reproduce Liminoid experience in advanced industrial society by creating an in-between space outside the everyday cultural norms.

The symbolism of Arthur Fleck as the Joker is clear. Traditionally, adopted children are viewed as liminal since they are not with their natural parents, but are not parentless. Fleck smothered his mother, not his father: the reverse of Oedipus, an adoptee, who unknowingly killed his father at a crossroads (in-between). Fleck’s career is to provide hollow liminoid experiences which are in parallel to a downward destructive spiral of his unlived life overtaken by frenzied parasitic processing (Meaning Crisis: Ep. 13, Dr. Verveake, at 34 min.) in complete isolation. In an hypnogogic Jungian state Fleck is able to tap into archetypal images that he mimics in a desperate reach for some kind of intelligibility of being. However, Fleck’s carnival is one of unlimited demonic de-sublimation that attracts a spontaneous communitas of other persons since the Joker is King Carnival--the Trickster Himself. During a rage riot following a police shooting, a protester upheld a sign that read, “We are All Clowns,” to make clear the film is about class-based struggle and the reifying objectification of unique human beings whose lives must be lived.    

  

Liminal Dance