The Eerie Comfort of Liminal Spaces
November 1, 2022 8:01 AM Subscribe
The aesthetic is clear (and lovely to me) but I'm unsure why it is called liminal... it's a transition into decay? Irrelevance? None of these images suggest immanent transformation to me, but perhaps collapse. Like an empty hallway is liminal in some strict sense of the definition because it links other spaces and is somewhat in-between them, but that is not really enough to be suggestive of transition? The focus seems to be on emptiness and its dreamlike qualities.
It feels more like a mapping of the concept of a Thomasson onto modern spaces that are themselves, due to societal shifts (principally COVID-19) being overtaken with purposelessness.
Seems like proponents could benefit from folding in Marc Augés concept of a non-place and Mark Fisher's concept of non-time.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 9:41 AM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
It feels more like a mapping of the concept of a Thomasson onto modern spaces that are themselves, due to societal shifts (principally COVID-19) being overtaken with purposelessness.
Seems like proponents could benefit from folding in Marc Augés concept of a non-place and Mark Fisher's concept of non-time.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 9:41 AM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
I tend to think of liminal spaces as less a function of where than a function of when. But I'm saying this as a 46 year old woman in 2022. I'm pretty sure my entire life right now is a liminal space.
posted by thivaia at 9:46 AM on November 1, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by thivaia at 9:46 AM on November 1, 2022 [8 favorites]
Like an empty hallway is liminal in some strict sense of the definition because it links other spaces and is somewhat in-between them, but that is not really enough to be suggestive of transition?
It's pretty common to refer to spaces that people pass thru briefly on the way from one place to another as "liminal". Hallways, train stations, airports, etc. all fit this definition.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:55 AM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
It's pretty common to refer to spaces that people pass thru briefly on the way from one place to another as "liminal". Hallways, train stations, airports, etc. all fit this definition.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:55 AM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
Perhaps, but if you look at a selection of these "liminal spaces" online a significant number of them are not hallways or other sorts of "connecting" spaces you describe.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 10:05 AM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by lefty lucky cat at 10:05 AM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think that thivaia has it that there is now a secondary definition of "liminality" that encompasses things that highlight the space between our present and our past (abandoned malls, decaying theme parks etc) that stands alongside the more traditional {hallways, sidewalks, etc}
posted by gee_the_riot at 10:12 AM on November 1, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by gee_the_riot at 10:12 AM on November 1, 2022 [7 favorites]
Have you ever been in a large hotel or conference center, gone through the wrong door, and found yourself in a maze of empty corridors where the silence is almost eerie compared to the hubbub just a few meters away?
I love those places. I could live there.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:48 AM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
I love those places. I could live there.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:48 AM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
thivaia: “ I'm pretty sure my entire life right now is a liminal space.”I think this is it exactly. It's liminal in the sense that there's an overwhelming feeling of, "How much longer until the lights go out for good?"
posted by ob1quixote at 11:22 AM on November 1, 2022 [8 favorites]
Maybe related, hereabouts in Ireland some people talk about Thin Places where the spirit world is separated from the reg'lar world by the thickness of a robin's egg shell. It's where poets make words; and the troubled seek solace. Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochairtaigh is an exploration of these windows in the soul.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:43 AM on November 1, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:43 AM on November 1, 2022 [9 favorites]
I was surprised that the article dated liminal to the 20th c; isn’t it a straight translation from Latin, threshold, Janus, in/out past/future etc?
"Limen is a word of equivocal semantics "
Perfect. Stopping there.
posted by clew at 1:56 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Limen is a word of equivocal semantics "
Perfect. Stopping there.
posted by clew at 1:56 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
Have you ever been in a large hotel or conference center, gone through the wrong door, and found yourself in a maze of empty corridors where the silence is almost eerie compared to the hubbub just a few meters away?
Oh man, this brings back memories.
I had one internship at a company that had leased only a small fraction of an otherwise empty suburban office block. There were literal plastic curtains across the halls which delineated what was occupied from dark hallways and abandoned cubicles littered with whatever the previous tenant had abandoned in place. I'd spend my lunches just wandering around the building. It was such a rush to suddenly transition from the hustle and bustle of the office to eerie abandoned silence, and weirdly an even bigger rush returning to the comforting sounds of the office after having ventured deep into the ruins.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 2:37 PM on November 1, 2022 [7 favorites]
Oh man, this brings back memories.
I had one internship at a company that had leased only a small fraction of an otherwise empty suburban office block. There were literal plastic curtains across the halls which delineated what was occupied from dark hallways and abandoned cubicles littered with whatever the previous tenant had abandoned in place. I'd spend my lunches just wandering around the building. It was such a rush to suddenly transition from the hustle and bustle of the office to eerie abandoned silence, and weirdly an even bigger rush returning to the comforting sounds of the office after having ventured deep into the ruins.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 2:37 PM on November 1, 2022 [7 favorites]
RBNS: I'd spend my lunches just wandering around the building. It was such a rush to suddenly transition from the hustle and bustle of the office to eerie abandoned silence . . .
In ~1969, I was 15 and living in Canterbury. I heard about the 700m Tyler Hill railway tunnel [long since abandoned] and one afternoon decided to walk through it. The thought being the deed when you are an impulsive teenager, I set off forthwith without a torch or telling anyone. The South end of the tunnel (nearest town) had been fenced off and boarded up but a recent assault by vandals had prised open part of the barrier so I slipped down the embankment and started off along the darkness. The North end was revealed as a single pixel of light and I walked briskly along until I stumbled over a pile of loose bricks. After a few minutes of more cautious progression and I was out in the fresh air again.
5 years later, the tunnel collapsed, more or less where I had tripped over the pile of bricks, and part of the Cornwallis Building of the University of Kent at Canterbury above was destroyed in a dramatic subsidence event. When I grew some sense (it comes with imagining your own children coming to harm), I reflected on what a dip-shit I was as a teenager. If I'd tonked my head trip&falling in the tunnel, it would have been a long time before anyone found my recumbent body and likely the rats would have gotten there first.
posted by BobTheScientist at 5:15 PM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
In ~1969, I was 15 and living in Canterbury. I heard about the 700m Tyler Hill railway tunnel [long since abandoned] and one afternoon decided to walk through it. The thought being the deed when you are an impulsive teenager, I set off forthwith without a torch or telling anyone. The South end of the tunnel (nearest town) had been fenced off and boarded up but a recent assault by vandals had prised open part of the barrier so I slipped down the embankment and started off along the darkness. The North end was revealed as a single pixel of light and I walked briskly along until I stumbled over a pile of loose bricks. After a few minutes of more cautious progression and I was out in the fresh air again.
5 years later, the tunnel collapsed, more or less where I had tripped over the pile of bricks, and part of the Cornwallis Building of the University of Kent at Canterbury above was destroyed in a dramatic subsidence event. When I grew some sense (it comes with imagining your own children coming to harm), I reflected on what a dip-shit I was as a teenager. If I'd tonked my head trip&falling in the tunnel, it would have been a long time before anyone found my recumbent body and likely the rats would have gotten there first.
posted by BobTheScientist at 5:15 PM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
I remember watching Star Trek TNG as a kid having this weird fixation on what it would be like to just hang out in the hallways of the Enterprise and I feel like this is tickling similar parts of my brain.
There's something about dwelling in spaces intended to be passed through thoughtlessly.
posted by Reyturner at 8:54 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
There's something about dwelling in spaces intended to be passed through thoughtlessly.
posted by Reyturner at 8:54 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
Vibe: a strong feeling with loose definitions.
posted by blue shadows at 10:28 PM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by blue shadows at 10:28 PM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
I did one of those sleepovers at the Museum of Science when I was in cub scouts. Thinking back, it's amazing to what lengths they kept us kids from doing the one thing we were all there to do: wander around the museum after dark. The evening of the sleepover we had nonstop programmed activities which culminated with a planetarium show that got out at 12pm. And even when we got back to our sleeping bags there were strict rules about how the only thing you could do was get up and to go the bathroom--I visited the bathroom so many times that night, just so I could walk around a bit. And then in the morning they got us all packed up very quickly and into the Omni theater right after breakfast. And when the movie let out, the museum had opened for general admission.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:17 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:17 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
Sorry, that should be 12am. They kept us awake until midnight in the hope that we'd be too tired to get up to anything mischievous. And breakfast was cold cereal served in the Friendly's that used to be on the second floor next to the pedestrian bridge.
Hey, remember when there used to be a random Friendly's inside the Museum of Science? I think there's also something interesting about spaces which don't fit in with their surroundings. It wasn't like today where they have the food services next to the gift shop--the Friendly's was literally inside the exhibit hall with a full facade and everything.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:17 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Hey, remember when there used to be a random Friendly's inside the Museum of Science? I think there's also something interesting about spaces which don't fit in with their surroundings. It wasn't like today where they have the food services next to the gift shop--the Friendly's was literally inside the exhibit hall with a full facade and everything.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:17 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Having intrusive thoughts about a guy recounting his meeting the Devil at a cross roads to sell his soul for guitar skills and describing how eerie and liminal the vibe was.
Have you ever been in a large hotel or conference center, gone through the wrong door, and found yourself in a maze of empty corridors where the silence is almost eerie compared to the hubbub just a few meters away?
Those spaces are probably where you'd meet the devil these days
posted by Reyturner at 7:16 PM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
Have you ever been in a large hotel or conference center, gone through the wrong door, and found yourself in a maze of empty corridors where the silence is almost eerie compared to the hubbub just a few meters away?
Those spaces are probably where you'd meet the devil these days
posted by Reyturner at 7:16 PM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
The aesthetic is clear (and lovely to me) but I'm unsure why it is called liminal... it's a transition into decay? Irrelevance? None of these images suggest immanent transformation to me, but perhaps collapse.
I just reread House of Leaves, which is a whole horror story about a liminal space, but... to me, one of the key attributes of liminal spaces is a sense of waste. Lifelessness, in the specific sense of an area which only exists for functional purposes yet doesn't have a function.
Nature is rarely part of people's ideas of liminality. (Though if nature qualified, it would specifically be the bushes that corporate centers grow on the outsides of their sidewalks.) Liminal spaces are man-made—literally mechanical. Yet they're machines that do nothing. Spaces that are filled with the semblance of purpose, but with no actual purpose.
There's a glitzy hotel nearby where I live, one that's extraordinarily (even implausibly?) huge. It's got a bar, which is usually well-occupied. It has a little shopping center just beyond that, which is two stories tall for no discernible reason; theoretically, this is for the sake of its residents, but it has about as many stores as it's got full-time residents, and it doesn't outwardly advertise these stores' presence. Beyond that lies a giant multi-layer conference center, the sort that hosts insurance salesmen cheating on their wives rather than adorable anime dorks—but however they handled this addition, it couldn't be neatly added to the existing floor plans, so beyond the eerily large and empty shopping strip lies another bizarrely-long hallway whose only purpose is to connect one space to the other. It's empty, but it's empty and up-scale, as if it's selling you on the idea that you're amidst glamor even as you traverse what feels like a half-mile's worth of sheer nothingness.
When conventions aren't in town, the bulk of the building feels like one large liminal space: this empty, cavern at the end of an empty trail, waiting to be filled. But a part of that, for me, is that even when it's full, it feels liminal, because... insurance people? That's a solid Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B existence to begin with. So you have this giant, extravagant space whose entire design is awkward, for the sake of a purpose that itself feels disconnected from reality. Gears and gears and gears, only half-grinding, for a purpose that itself feels purposeless to begin with.
I feel like it's connected to late-stage capitalism in the sense that we increasingly have a society whose primary cultural output is bullshit. The politics is bullshit, the business is bullshit, tech is bullshit... there's a Twitter thread going around about how basically every new tech product for the last 20 years has revealed itself to be a fraud, now that Uber costs more than taxis used to, Airbnb is destroying rent costs, dating apps make it harder to date, so of course now it's all NFTs, because we've given up on any part of the grift but the grift itself. (Hell, even AI-produced art feels directly connected to this, somehow.)
But at the same time, the sheer emptiness of all these spaces feels like a canvas, to some extent. I watched the director's commentary for the mockumentary Mister America, which as a film is almost a liminal space in and of itself—it's the feature-film byproduct of a parody of movie-review podcasts, you can't get more niche than that—and one of its creators talked about his obsession with VHS tapes. Once upon a time, all these old movies were built on giant sets with teams of literally hundreds of people, and now they only exist in piles of generic tapes in the most shitty degraded format, sold at garage sales for 5¢ apiece, so unpopular that nobody bothered digitizing them. The whole "all of human culture readily available online" dream literally could not be bothered with these relics of an empire that we tell ourselves still exists, but is mostly just a long-dead dream. You can mourn it, or you can celebrate it, mock it, repurpose it, make something new with it. Perversely, the fact that it's otherwise useless is what makes it such fertile ground for repurposing and invention.
YMMV, but for me, that's why people find liminal spaces so compelling. They're wonderful spaces to dream in. And the wonder comes from the emptiness, the sadness, the slight sinisterness, and the sense that the decay you mentioned is not even a byproduct of collapse or the passage of time: it was part of the design, utterly intentional, baked in from the very start. Systemically cancerous—not harmful on the human scale, but symptoms of a society that stopped knowing why it was building what it was building, and went on building anyway.
Jon Bois's 20020 has a great line about this, where, discussing Atlanta's compulsive need to build and discard new sports stadiums, somebody says: "People were broken in those times. In terms of purpose, and community, and everything else, they were fractured. A healthy society does not do this. And given eternity, they finally realized it."
That's liminal space in a nutshell: the vision of eternity that lets us acknowledge how fractured and lost our world's become.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:36 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
I just reread House of Leaves, which is a whole horror story about a liminal space, but... to me, one of the key attributes of liminal spaces is a sense of waste. Lifelessness, in the specific sense of an area which only exists for functional purposes yet doesn't have a function.
Nature is rarely part of people's ideas of liminality. (Though if nature qualified, it would specifically be the bushes that corporate centers grow on the outsides of their sidewalks.) Liminal spaces are man-made—literally mechanical. Yet they're machines that do nothing. Spaces that are filled with the semblance of purpose, but with no actual purpose.
There's a glitzy hotel nearby where I live, one that's extraordinarily (even implausibly?) huge. It's got a bar, which is usually well-occupied. It has a little shopping center just beyond that, which is two stories tall for no discernible reason; theoretically, this is for the sake of its residents, but it has about as many stores as it's got full-time residents, and it doesn't outwardly advertise these stores' presence. Beyond that lies a giant multi-layer conference center, the sort that hosts insurance salesmen cheating on their wives rather than adorable anime dorks—but however they handled this addition, it couldn't be neatly added to the existing floor plans, so beyond the eerily large and empty shopping strip lies another bizarrely-long hallway whose only purpose is to connect one space to the other. It's empty, but it's empty and up-scale, as if it's selling you on the idea that you're amidst glamor even as you traverse what feels like a half-mile's worth of sheer nothingness.
When conventions aren't in town, the bulk of the building feels like one large liminal space: this empty, cavern at the end of an empty trail, waiting to be filled. But a part of that, for me, is that even when it's full, it feels liminal, because... insurance people? That's a solid Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B existence to begin with. So you have this giant, extravagant space whose entire design is awkward, for the sake of a purpose that itself feels disconnected from reality. Gears and gears and gears, only half-grinding, for a purpose that itself feels purposeless to begin with.
I feel like it's connected to late-stage capitalism in the sense that we increasingly have a society whose primary cultural output is bullshit. The politics is bullshit, the business is bullshit, tech is bullshit... there's a Twitter thread going around about how basically every new tech product for the last 20 years has revealed itself to be a fraud, now that Uber costs more than taxis used to, Airbnb is destroying rent costs, dating apps make it harder to date, so of course now it's all NFTs, because we've given up on any part of the grift but the grift itself. (Hell, even AI-produced art feels directly connected to this, somehow.)
But at the same time, the sheer emptiness of all these spaces feels like a canvas, to some extent. I watched the director's commentary for the mockumentary Mister America, which as a film is almost a liminal space in and of itself—it's the feature-film byproduct of a parody of movie-review podcasts, you can't get more niche than that—and one of its creators talked about his obsession with VHS tapes. Once upon a time, all these old movies were built on giant sets with teams of literally hundreds of people, and now they only exist in piles of generic tapes in the most shitty degraded format, sold at garage sales for 5¢ apiece, so unpopular that nobody bothered digitizing them. The whole "all of human culture readily available online" dream literally could not be bothered with these relics of an empire that we tell ourselves still exists, but is mostly just a long-dead dream. You can mourn it, or you can celebrate it, mock it, repurpose it, make something new with it. Perversely, the fact that it's otherwise useless is what makes it such fertile ground for repurposing and invention.
YMMV, but for me, that's why people find liminal spaces so compelling. They're wonderful spaces to dream in. And the wonder comes from the emptiness, the sadness, the slight sinisterness, and the sense that the decay you mentioned is not even a byproduct of collapse or the passage of time: it was part of the design, utterly intentional, baked in from the very start. Systemically cancerous—not harmful on the human scale, but symptoms of a society that stopped knowing why it was building what it was building, and went on building anyway.
Jon Bois's 20020 has a great line about this, where, discussing Atlanta's compulsive need to build and discard new sports stadiums, somebody says: "People were broken in those times. In terms of purpose, and community, and everything else, they were fractured. A healthy society does not do this. And given eternity, they finally realized it."
That's liminal space in a nutshell: the vision of eternity that lets us acknowledge how fractured and lost our world's become.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:36 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
"In Us, Peele uses the metaphor of the divided self to explore what lies beneath contemporary America, its double consciousness, its identity, sins and terrors."
posted by mikelieman at 1:53 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by mikelieman at 1:53 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
« Older “I wanted there to be less of me” | The man who saved countless lives Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by kokaku at 8:47 AM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]