Theorising Liminality between Art and Life: The Liminal Sources of Cultural Experience

This contribution offers a psychosocial theorisation of the notion of cultural experience/experiencing. Building upon interdisciplinary scholarship on liminality, and developing some insights from Donald Winnicott, an argument is developed which brings to light the distinctively liminal sources of cultural experience. A liminal experience, in a nutshell, involves a temporary suspension of limits that permits a transition to a new set of limits. For this reason, liminality concerns the emergence of novelty just at the moment in which ‘something’ is in the process of becoming. Schutz’s phenomenological notion of a ‘world of everyday life’ permits two related contrasts: first a contrast between the relative stability of a workaday canonical ‘world’ of experience and action and a number of artfully enacted ‘worlds within worlds’ such as art, play and sport, and second a contrast between both of these and circumstances of transition in which people find themselves in a phase of becoming that is ‘between worlds’. It is proposed that cultural experiencing be grasped as liminal experience of a world within a world that happens between worlds: a world within and between worlds. This idea that cultural experience or cultural experiencing has its source in liminal transition is illustrated through a number of examples.