On Liminality
I’m sitting 35,000 feet above the ground. The cabin is low-lit and the only audible sound is the gentle hum of the Boeing 787’s engine. This is the perfect place to reflect about liminality.
Something is “liminal” when it occupies a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary. As I’m cruising across the Atlantic Ocean I’m no longer where I came from and not yet where I’m going. The monitor in front of me gives me the time at origin and at destination. The time in the plane though, is suspended.
In anthropology, the concept of liminality has been used to describe the transition phase of a rite of passage between childhood and adulthood. It’s usually associated with a feeling of disorientation and ambiguity that stems from shedding your old self without having fully integrated the next phase of life.
Transient spaces like hallways, malls, roads or airport lobbies are also liminal. We seldom notice them, we only pass through them to get to where we want to go. How many hotel corridors or shopping mall escalators can you recall? Their architecture favors the functional over the aesthetic. You recognize liminal spaces more by the template they reproduce than by their particular features. They are the neglected realm of architecture.
Our disdain for liminality seems to extend beyond physical spaces. It might just be the central feature of our mental geography. As much as we want to fight it, we are binary creatures making sense of the world through absolute categories: “right/ wrong”, “male/female”, “progressive/conservative”, “national/ alien”. Everything that stands “in between” those bounded wholes becomes inconvenient at best and often suspicious. An anomaly that must be brought back into more recognizable territory.
As someone with a dual citizenship, I’m often asked whether I feel more French or more Italian. How about a blend? Or neither? These options never seem to be a possibility to begin with. A telling example of our inclination to force thresholds back into preset boundaries.
What would a world where we celebrate thresholds look like?
The plane has docked at the gate. People are frantically grabbing their suitcases, eager to leave this seven hour-long liminal experience and anxious to rejoin the comfort of a bounded reality.