102 Philosophical Frames
Turkey.^28 Studying the case of Merve Kavakçı, a U.S.-educated woman
with fashionable headscarf who was elected deputy to the Turkish
Parliament, Göle maintains that the transcultured and crossover per-
formances of such veiled women in spaces formerly forbidden to them
both by secularists and by the Muslim tradition enact a liminal way of
being public. They are neither Islamic nor modern, neither private nor
republican, but between established social identities and codes. The mode
of publicness that ensues is negotiated and renegotiated in a series of
micropractices that performatively modify the existing republican space
of appearances. As such, publicness is construed as a field of possibility
rather than as a structure or an institution.
ranslating the above into the (modernist) language of politi-T
cal philosophy, liminality would then have to do with groundlessness,
understood as the possibility to change the way things are; to recreate the
world, as it were. The performative as opposed to the normative is the
liminal precisely because it is the moment in which the unpredicted may
occur, the unforeseeable may appear and a new mode of relationality may
emerge. The liminal, then, seems to testify to the contingent character of
all human structure and discourse, on the one hand, and relocates free-
dom in the ambiguity of public relations, on the other.
Individuals who find themselves in liminal situations can no longer
depend on former meaning and behavior structures within the field of
normality. Instead, liminality compels the use of imagination and creativ-
ity in working one’s way out. This character of liminality accounts for its
role in bringing forth social change. The most genuine liminal situations
are instances of crisis where normative structures collapse and new ones
are yet inexistent. Turner’s idea of “social drama” corresponds to such
instances. These are “public episodes of tensional irruption” or “units of
aharmonic or disharmonic process, arising in conflict situations.”^29 While
a series of gradual processes may cumulatively result in major transforma-
tions in social structures, dramatic events or conflict seem to “bring fun-
damental aspects of society, normally overlaid by the customs and habits
of daily intercourse, into frightening prominence.”^30 This is why a given
social unit becomes most self-conscious when a crisis-provoking breach
occurs in the normal functioning of social relations.