RELATED TERMS: Anthropology;

In anthropology, as discused by Victor Turner, liminality, from the Latin word līmen, meaning ‘a threshold’, is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, defined as a psychic-temporal-physical space. At this moment, participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, that is, in the liminal space, participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.

What is interest in the design of narrative environments is the condition of being in-between, or betwixt and between, the world of the story, on the one hand, and the world of the everyday, the lifeworld, on the other hand, which occurs when the participant generates and enters the storyworld instantiated by the narrative environment. In that sense, a narrative environment might be said to constitute a liminal space and progress through it similar to engaging in a ritual practice. Narrative environments may, however, only be ‘liminoid’ or ‘liminal-like’, rather than ‘authentically’ liminal, as Stephen Bigger (2009) discusses:

“The concept of liminality (the state of being on a threshold) was applied [by Turner] both to major upheavals and to performances generally, distinguishing only between ‘authentic’ liminality, and playful artifices such as the theatre which are named liminoid, or liminal-like. Liminality is viewed as an in-between state of mind, in between fact and fiction (in Turner’s language indicative and subjunctive), in between statuses. This concept has endured in performance studies and has the potential for wider usage.”

A liminal space can be a key component of a narrative environment. A liminal space can be either a physical or a temporal space, and often both at the same time, but it is always a psychic space.

Liminal spaces are places/times in which the audience is disorientated/moved from their normative assessment of ‘reality’ in order to prepare them for a different ‘reality’ presented in the main narrative space.

An account of a temporal liminal space is given by Daisetz Suzuki, a 20th century Zen Master, as cited by John Cage (1973: 88) in Silence:

“Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things become confused. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. After telling this, Dr. Suzuki. was asked, “What is the difference between before and after?” He said, “No difference, only the feet are a little bit off the ground.”

Victor Turner, 1920–1983, working with his wife Edith Turner, was an anthropologist deeply concerned with ritual both in tribal communities and in the contemporary developed world. Since the work of Turner in the 1960s, usage of the term liminality has broadened to refer to political and cultural change. During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.

References

Bigger, S. (2009) Victor Turner, liminality, and cultural performance [Review of Victor Turner and contemporary cultural performance, edited by Graham St. John, New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008], Journal of Beliefs & Values, 30(2), pp. 209–212. doi: 10.1080/13617670903175238.

Cage, J. (1973) Silence: lectures and writings by John Cage. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Thomassen, B. (2009) The Uses and Meanings of Liminality. International Political Anthropology, 2 (1), 5-28.

Horvath, A., Thomassen, B. and Wydra, H. (2009) Introduction: Liminality and Cultures of Change. International Political Anthropology, 2 (1), 1-4

Szakolczai, A. (2009) Liminality and experience: Structuring transitory situations and transformative events. International Political Anthropology 2 (1), 141-172

RELATED TERMS: Reception Theory and Reader Response Criticism; Semiotics

Intertextuality, and its cognate term, citationality, is the shaping of a specific text’s meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another.

It is likely that the design of any particular narrative environment will involve the citation other prior texts, designs, media productions and environments, from which it will derive part of its meaning. Such citation may have the character of a detournement, where the meaning of the cited item is radically altered. It is an acknowledgement that a narrative environment is, in many ways, like a collage, assemblage or montage, all practices of citation and re-contextualisation.

It is this awareness that ‘writing’, and by extension ‘designing’, involves the borrowing of elements, their re-contextualisation and the new meanings that emerge (the invention) that underlies Derrida’s practice of deconstruction, which engages with the invention that arises from re-contextualisation, the history and memory that comes along with the cited item and the tension or accord between the older and the newer meanings, which may give rise to contradictions, paradoxes or aporia (non-sequiturs, questions, puzzles).

As Edward Said (2003, 14) comments,

“Most humanistic scholars are … perfectly happy with the notion that texts exist in contexts, that there is such a thing as intertextuality, that the pressures of conventions, predecessors, and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin once called the ‘overtaxing of the productive person in the name of . . . the principle of ‘creativity,’ ‘ in which the poet is believed on his own, and out of his pure mind, to have brought forth his work.”

Similarly, Keir Elam points to the intertextual basis of theatre as a frame. Appropriate decoding of a given text derives above all from the audience’s familiarity with other texts, a skill acquired by learning textual rules. The genesis of the performance is also intertextual, as it bears the traces of prior performances at every level from the written text through the mise en scene, the actor to the directorial style and so on. In this way, any text, according to Julia Kristeva (1970, 12), ‘is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality. In the space of a single text several énoncés from other texts cross and neutralize each other’.

The ‘ideal’ audience, given this multi-layered citationality, is one endowed with a sufficiently detailed, and judiciously employed, textual background to enable them to identify all relevant relations and use them as an interpretive matrix. In practice, people bring whatever level of skill they have attained to the decoding and appreciation of the text/performance, opening to the domain of reception theory and reader response criticism.

In popular culture, intertextuality refers to the incorporation of meanings of one text within another in a reflexive fashion. For example, the television show The Simpsons includes references to films, other television shows and celebrities. These intertextual references assume that viewers know the people and cultural products being referenced.

References

Elam, K. (1980) The Semiotics of theatre and drama. London, UK: Routledge.

Kristeva, J. (1970) Le Texte du roman: approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive transformationelle. The Hague: Mouton.

Said, E. (2003) Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Sturken M. and Cartwright, L. (2001). Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

RELATED TERMS: Philosophy

Intentionality has a more commonsense meaning, relating to one’s intention or what means to do or to say, and a more philosophical sense, which concerns the directedness of consciousness towards its other(s), highlighting the dependence of thought upon the world, in contrast to an idealist view of the self-sufficiency of consciousness.

Both senses have value for design practices, in relation to its purposefulness (what it intends to do), on the one hand, and its ‘aboutness’, on the other hand (what it is about).

Intentionality in design concerns the purpose or function of the design as meant by its creator or as interpreted by its audience or users, two perspectives that may differ

In graphic design, intentionality is often discussed in philosophical terms, especially in relation to language (Noble and Bestley, 2011). Some philosophers argue that intentionality is characteristic of a concept or an intention.

In philosophy, intentionality is related to mental states such as remembering, believing, knowing or experiencing as well as to the concept of free will.

In phenomenology, intentionality is taken to mean that ideas are directed toward an object, with the suggestion that all conscious states are characterised by such ‘directedness’ or ‘aboutness’. Thus,

“One of the core theses of phenomenology is the claim that all consciousness is consciousness of an other-than-consciousness. Consciousness simply is this aiming at or intending an object. This is Husserl’s famous thesis of intentionality as the defining characteristic of the mental.” (Flynn, 2006)

References

Flynn, T. R. (2006). Jean-Paul Sartre. In Borchert, D. M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of philosophy. Volume 8: Price – Sextus. 2nd edn. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, pp.603-612

Noble, I and Bestley, R. (2011). Visual Research: an introduction to research methodologies in graphic design, 2nd ed. Lausanne, CH: AVA Publishing.

RELATED TERMS: Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet or sjuzhet); Semiotic Square

“the world has always been in the middle of things in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networking and unequal collectives.”

Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters

“As Frank Kermode has put it, man [sic] is always “in the middest,” without direct knowledge of origin or endpoint, seeking the imaginative equivalents of closure that will confer significance on experience.”

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot

Meir Sternberg (1992) counts Aristotle as taking the earliest and least explicit, but possibly the least unreasonable, anti-chronological position on narrative. This is due to his subordination of events to effects. Aristotle’s Poetics views the arrangement of events in functional terms, as a means to an end, or, more properly, in teleological terms: poetic ends determine or explain means, so as to inform their form. This teleo-logic runs all the way through from Aristotle’s universals of art to his plot rules and variables, silently incorporating temporal (dis)order.

Thus, at the most general level of teleology, the definition of art as mimesis finds its rationale for Aristotle in the universal pleasure felt in things imitated. As Aristotle’s argument descends from art through literary narrative or fiction to tragedy, it progressively refers specific forms and options of mimesis to their specific informing pleasurable effects, kinds of structure to kinds of pleasure, such as unity, surprise, catharsis.

Two of those steps, which concern the relation between chronology and teleology, bear further examination. The first lies within the arrangement of the “whole” (holos); and the second lies within the disarrangements open to “plot” (mythos).

The analysis of action outlined in the Poetics, starts by deriving the need for events to form a “whole”, which is marked by its beginning-to-middle-to-end (chrono-)logical concatenation, from the law of poetic unity. The whole will then cohere as a necessary or probable sequence between well-defined poles of human fortune and experience.

Aristotle’s “wholeness” opposes poetic structure to the mere alignment of events in history writing (chronicle, biography), with its allegedly misguided equivalents in history-like epic, because they abandon the chrono-logic of action for the chronology of an era, a life, or some other time-span covered in serial fashion to yield a “sum” or “total” of episodes.

For Aristotle, then, the opposition of integrative “whole” to additive “sum” in event linkage is all the more principled and value-laden because it ranges from the shape of chronology (tight versus loose) to its intelligibility (universal versus particular), from formal and perceptual aesthetics to ontological sense and coherence.

The next step advances from “whole” toward “plot,” no longer uniform but multiform in sequence and, ideally, even disordered for a time out of wholeness, again on poetic grounds.

Chrono-logic bends, temporarily at least, in response to a stronger, more determinate teleo-logic. Since tragedy and high epic aim for pity and fear, such effects are best produced when the events come on the reader/audience by surprise. Given this demand for surprise, the “whole” action needs to be “complicated”, i.e. in effect dechronologised, into “plot”, by way of discovery and/or reversal (Sternberg, 1992: 476).

The “complex” plot outranks the “simple” plot for Aristotle not because it breaks or deforms the natural temporality that the other preserves, but because its broken temporality best serves, indeed maximizes, the effect common to both types as tragic plots: catharsis.

Like the fiat of chrono-logising the action, the recommended dechrono-logising of the actual dramatic or epic presentation serves a purpose beyond itself: the teleology remains in control across forms and levels of sequence.

To become viable, indeed a virtue or a clear gain, disordering in these mimetic genres must involve the twisting of the “whole” into complex “plot” movement in the service of determinate and determinative tragic ends: catharsis, above all.

While the Aristotelian argument for the complex plot may well be found wanting, its logic may not. The positive thrust of this (teleo)logic culminates in the recommendation of deformed-and-reformed sequence for intensity. Given the first premise, all the rest follows by a long chain of reasoning from desired poetic end to necessary or contributory means: from pity and fear to surprise effect; from there to discovery (anagnorisis) and reversal (peripeteia); and from there to the twisting or “complication” of the chrono-logical “whole” (holos) into (de-chrono-logised) optimal “plot” (mythos).

Thus, as Meir Sternberg (1992: 479) explains the matter, the key antithesis for Aristotle’s conception of narrative is that between the chrono-logical “whole” (holos) and the optimal “plot” (mythos), the former twisted or “complicated” into the latter to form a complex plot, which is Aristotle’s preference because it better delivers, through plot surprise, the required effect upon the audience, ultimately catharsis.

Sternberg (1992: 481) notes that it is Aristotelian wholes that “begin at the beginning,” not plots. Plots may begin anywhere. Indeed, plots should preferably begin at a point later than the chronological beginning. This assists in developing both complexity and compactness. Furthermore, Sternberg continues, Horace’s in medias res originally urges the epic poet to select a coherent action, for example, that of The Iliad, from a loose extra-literary chronicle, for example, the Trojan War. The Horatian advice, then, bears on the ordering of the whole into unity, not on its disordering into late-before-early plot. It therefore derives, rather than diverges, from Aristotle.

References

Brooks, P. (1984) Reading for the plot: design and intention in narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sternberg, M. (1992). Telling in time (II): chronology, teleology, narrativity. Poetics Today, 13 (3), 463–541. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772872 [Accessed 24 June 2016].