Liminale Texte. Insights from the Edge

This contribution’s central thesis argues that some texts oscillate between social fields, such as sociology and literature, without ever being able to be fully assigned to one of these two fields. Liminal phases are characterized by their positioning between social fields and boundaries, they bring together the separated and mix the known in unknown ways. To this end, Victor Turner’s concept of liminality is applied to texts that oscillate between writing cultures in the sense of Susanne Knaller and Stephan Moebius. Liminality here means an existence between social fields, an existence in between spaces. Liminal texts assume the function of a bridge between the boundaries (Osterhammel) that separate social fields such as literature and sociology. They have an experiential character of their own and surprise the fields and social actors. After explaining the terms »liminality« according to Turner and »liminal texts« according to Knaller and Moebius, the article develops the phases of liminal texts as a theoretical concept. Therefore, I propose a concept of the production of liminal texts, which is divided into liminal actors and liminal phases. Liminal authors are characterized by their experience with the boundaries between social areas, classes and groups. In this way, they experience different belief systems and conceptual worlds, so-called doxa (Bourdieu), by touching social boundaries and crossing such boundaries. In this respect, liminal authors are characterized by a cleft habitus (Bourdieu), which depends on the experiences of different social worlds. In this way, they sometimes develop a precise sense of the multiple truths (doxa) and boundaries that exist between fields, classes, and thus between actors. Since these habitus are also partly the habitus of writing actors, it can be deduced from this how the diverse texts of social climbers, which creatively combine literature and science, subjectivity and objectivity, can also become liminal texts. In this way, the experience of thresholds and boundaries and also the liminal transgressions of these boundaries become embedded in writing about the social. Liminal texts as products of liminal actors are thus an expression of the limits of social space. Their product, the liminal texts, are thereby an investigation and consequence of the social world. In this way, they describe the social through their experience of the fragmentation in this social world. As border crossers through the social world, they can report on these liminal experiences in their texts and thereby trigger them as aesthetic practices. Liminal actors use their experiences quite consciously and intentionally to throw themselves into the struggle for the doxa of a field. As explained above, liminal actors experience different kinds of doxa, which means that liminal texts can be understood as an expression of struggles over the logics of fields and their demarcations. These struggles are always concrete and thus bound in time and space in the social realm. Liminal phases are characterized by the struggle for the interpretation of social worlds, such as the struggle for naming what, for example, sociology or literature is and how work and writing may be done in these particular social fields. This is how liminal phases react to the restrictions of fields and fixed definitions of boundaries, undermining them like a mole (Hegel). In these liminal phases, liminal texts work to create new connections and to undermine fixed definitions with indeterminacy. In this way, actors consciously use their liminal texts to reinterpret fixed boundaries of and between fields and to throw themselves into the struggle for these boundaries. In this article, I will interpret three such liminal phases: Deliterarisation (Lepenies) and The Long Turn of the Century (Knaller/Moebius). Finally, I will discuss in more detail the liminal phase triggered by the genre of autosociobiographies, also addressing the literary design of this specific liminal phase. The emergence of the genre of autosociobiographies is understood as a liminal phase, which is interpreted using the example of the text corpus of Annie Ernaux. Ernaux’s texts are considered liminal because they are situated between sociology and literature and report on the liminal experiences that have produced Ernaux’s perspective. A perspective of liminality from the place in between: Insights through writing from the edge.