What the Hell Is Liminal Space?

The Twilight Zone is an example of a liminal space.

[quote]To be in a liminal space means to be on the precipice of something new but not quite there yet.

I heard this phrase a lot with film critics about a decade ago. These days, it's an aesthetic, basically a transitional location such as an abandoned building or "a school hallway during summer." It's both familiar because it's your school, but weird and unsettling because it's empty and you're never there in July, so it looks and feels different.

It’s also used a lot in Performance Studies. Theatre performances, rituals and ceremonies can be considered liminal spaces: places where things are temporary, in flux, and conditional, between two fixed states.

I’ve rarely come across it outside of academia.

It is Limahl.

limininal shpache

I hate things I don't understand, I hate when people know things that I don't, and I despise learning new things!!

In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold")[1] is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.[2] During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold"[3] between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).

The concept of liminality was first developed in the early twentieth century by folklorist Arnold van Gennep and later taken up by Victor Turner.[4] More recently, usage of the term has broadened to describe political and cultural change as well as rites.[5][6] 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.[7] The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.[8] The term has also passed into popular usage and has been expanded to include liminoid experiences that are more relevant to post-industrial society.[9]

You sound like an idiot OP

It’s some faggy art history word or something. A sage-smudging anthro professor I had for an easy elective was always climaxing over this term. I wrote a paper on Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged house and the wisdom of genus loci and she loved me.

*genius

Purgatory.

R9 But I am a faggy Art History person!

Cosmic.

I've known about this term for a long time because I've always been fascinated with fog/mist, which creates a temporary liminal space, possibly the first one our ancestors encountered. It's like stepping into another world for me, and it sucks that it only happens mostly just in the autumn where I live.

So it’s a foggy faggy underwater hallway?

That’s pretty specific.

Apparently, fens are big liminal spaces and I don’t know what the fuck they are either!

The backrooms

Think Datalounge 27 years ago.

Do all of these qualify as liminal space? And if not, which ones don’t?

The grand staircase at the Met Gala is a liminal space in many celebrities' celebrity.

The dress at r20 looks like one of those trashy geode cakes.

Red Carpets are often liminal spaces. Queen Jada arriving at the Oscars. Expecting her coronation.... Little did she know on the precipice of disaster.

“Precipice of Disaster: The Jada Pinkett (No longer) Smith Story: A Memoir.”

You've heard of Schrodinger's Cat? The box in which that cat is "maybe alive" and also "maybe dead" at the same time is an example of a liminal space. In it,anything may happen.

Think of a long, winding staircase. We know what it's for: going up inside a building or going down. But a hurricane has come. The building is below sea level. Will that staircase be s passageway like always, or will it be flooded, maybe up to the third floor? We don't and cannot know until and unless we go and look for ourselves. That staircase, during hurricanes, is liminal space. Unpredictable things happen there.

Hell, the entire state of Louisiana is liminal space whenever a storm approaches, and a storm can come anytime, not just during the official hurricane season. It's neither safe nor a disaster zone AND still kinda BOTH simultaneously.

A twilight place--neither day nor night and, somehow, also both day and night too.

So this is a liminal space? Are there different rules defining interior and exterior liminal spaces? Is anything surreal an automatic liminal space?

The flag on the coaster. 😳

R26 is a candid pic of The DL

R28 Teetering on the brink of decrepitude and obsolescence?

This page is loaded with examples. You WILL understand what liminal space is once you've read it. I promise.

I’ve always loved the gloaming, so I guess I’ve been attracted to liminal spaces all along.

If you believe TikTok, any retail space without people in it- especially if the decor is dated.

I don't think that something like an abandoned building is necessarily a liminal space. It's something between two states. Like a ghost!

OP, read Gramsci, perhaps Althusser and Guy Debord, of course Said, van Gennep and Spivak and someone irreverent such as I dunno, Anaïs Nin, or the diaries of Nancy Cunard, and then get back to us afterward.

in my day it was popular with physics and philosophy burnouts... popularized by both the superstitious and people that wanted to appear intelligent... liminal space is/was frequently a layman's way of describing the equivalent of wormholes. Or even pocket spaces themselves (hilbert, euclidean, or frankly, just basic geometry to the visual-spatial challenged)... because how else would you try to explain it to someone especially when theorists are entirely sure they exist nor what they would look like. So, ultimately, it became something idiots that did one too many drugs would between ancient aliens and aztec apocalyptic cults.

Nancy had liminal space in her cooter between lovemaking with her Mandingo lovers of the Harlem Renaissance.

I actually just read this word for the first time a few days ago. I even texted it to my son so he'd also be aware of the newly discovered word. So I am a little behind.

Well isn't that sweet. Now off to the Food Trends thread to complain about raspberry coulis and avocado toast.

r37 that's all it really is... it's a buzzword, they've just learned, so it's going to be overused and applied to everything as if it was "smurf" because where they first learned it has become the definition and once a definition is set.,. it is difficult to deprogram.

Does Bella Hadid's Snatched visage evoke Liminality?

People get it in their head that certain terms make them sound intelligent.

I noticed that “weaponized” is used constantly now, about everything.

^^^heads

I feel so much smarter now. Thank you OP for bringing this to my attention.

R5 Hi, Liza!

Now explain intersectionality, please. Thanks in advance.

The space between your ears.

you in danger gurl

What r7 said. It shouldn't be new to you, unless your education is based on Twitter.

it is not a scientific term.

they are in the house.

I repeat

they are in the house

R20: another brilliant transformation of a Metropolitan passage into a liminal space

I always understood the term to mean a space in a building that's neither one thing or another, like the area an elevator opens on to, a space you pass through to get to a space, place or room that has a distinct purpose.

r49 no, not really.. thought the most frequent place it has heard is within geometry, physics, or art classes.

But it is the equivalent of whether you call a bra.. a titsling or brassiere.

R45 - Intersectionality = New Shimmer; it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!

r45 Histrionics 101.

Recognizing that different demographics crossover into each other and have different experiences to the majority of said demographics when they meet other variables. In theory, this could be discussed seriously, rationally without issue... in practice, it creates a social hierarchy where the most allegedly 'oppressed' based on the most simplistic differences are granted authority based on these factors rather than substance... thus the more different you are from the majority, the more power alleged oppression in the world that by the rules of social equity must be reversed, and thus the more power you have among social justice collectives.

Bardo is definitely a liminal space, between death and rebirth

Best not to be caught too long there

Bardot was a speakeasy featuring Joey Arias trying and failing to channel Billie Holiday. It was always liminal space for our crowd because we would transit through very quickly with hellos and must runs, because nobody wanted to linger. There was no there there.

OP's cumdump ass is a liminal space.

Others have mentioned what it is, but I just want to add that I'm certain I've heard it most often in architectural discourse.

Maybe you just need to read more OP.

In The Shining, liminal was used a lot. Hotels are an example of liminal space. Hallways. IN the sense of time elapsing too. The hotel is stuck between the now and the past. It's not in a set period of time. What's old and what's new? It' seems all mixed up in The Shining.

^ liminal space was used

As R34 suggested, liminal space/liminality as a concept has been established in the social sciences and the humanities for the last 50 years. In anthropological studies, it's fascinating.

This is so bizarre. I just Googled Robert Fripp’s Diary and was reading his last entry and that word showed up. I had never heard it before. I pop over here and here’s this thread!

R63: you just experienced the Jungian Synchronicity

A gift from the Universe

R34 I don't see what Anaïs Nin could possibly have to do with abandoned malls.

R66 - if the bitch had frequented Victoria’s Secret more brick and mortar retail wouldn’t be in the mess it is today.

Can we do the soundtrack?

R66 yes that is the reason to include one irreverent reference. Did you never play these games? I did, in grad school. You'd take, say, Cities of the Interior, Ladders to Fire and use word salad to work it into an interrogation of rites of passage for a bourgeois woman of the intelligentsia, interpolated by hegemony as being assigned subaltern status in Paris and New York, and in her own psychoanalysis under the hegemonic Otto Rank. Yada yada. Leading to Dead Malls via a Lévi-Strauss and Freud referenced examination of liminality between interior and exterior, life and death, and fetishized commodity supply chain ethics in current contexts.

It's just the space between your ears Rose.

R69 No, I did not play these games in Grad School. I missed out! Maybe explain in a little more detail? Such as what the fuck is this?

[Quote]interpolated by hegemony as being assigned subaltern status in Paris and New York