Liminality

Summary:

Liminality is the threshold state—neither here nor there, between what was and what will be. Victor Turner’s term for the disorienting middle passage of transformation. Like the moment after you’ve quit but before you’ve left, still sitting at your desk, already gone.

Analysis:

Turner drew on Arnold van Gennep’s studies of ritual. Limen means threshold in Latin. The liminal phase is the middle stage of the rites of passage—after separation, before reintegration. You’ve left the old identity but haven’t yet become the new one. You’re suspended.

Liminality disorients because the usual rules don’t apply. Social structures dissolve. Hierarchies blur. You don’t know who you are because you’re betweenwho you were and who you’re becoming. This is terrifying. Also generative.

Anthropologists describe liminality as temporary. I’m less certain. Some of us never complete the passage. Rather, we become each passage we navigate, collecting them as part of our being. Transforming into permanent residents of the threshold.

Thus, I live here. Between cultures. Between languages. Between eras. Between centuries. Between emotions. Between truths. Between the person others expect or imagine and whoever I’m still becoming. The threshold isn’t a place you pass through. Sometimes it’s where you build your house.

I should also point out two additional concepts that are closely related to my views on liminality: Derrida’s Hauntology and Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie.

Examples:

Airport terminals, waiting rooms, hotel lobbies—spaces designed for passing through
The weeks between diagnosis and treatment
Engagement: no longer dating, not yet married
The immigrant who’s left home but hasn’t arrived anywhere
3 a.m.—neither today nor tomorrow