Liminality

Liminality is an anthropological term describing a state of transition, originally used to describe cultures undergoing change. It comes from the Latin limen (pl. limina) which means threshold and recalls a passage through a doorway from one space to another.

Architects can speak of liminal spaces and developmental psychologists of liminal periods, characterizing a place or time’s function, its facilitation of change or demarcation of a boundary, as the reason for its existence.

Psychologists use this boundary definition when they refer to subliminal messages, which infiltrate under the threshold of awareness or attention.

The root also manifests in more common words such as sublime and limit, which focus on single, straightforward aspects of its meaning.

But liminal itself retains the subtlety of the concept, one that mixes boundaries and passageways. Existing as it does as a break in a wall, a doorway, and by synecdoche a threshold, cannot represent anything other than a simultaneous separation of two spaces and connection between them. It’s the synthesis of the dialectic of separating and connecting. And perhaps of lumping and splitting.

By adding the -ity suffix, English makes a state out of it. Liminality, the state of crossing a threshold. Along the axis of time instead of space, it adds another layer of contradiction and tension. It freezes the act of transition, trapping the subject in a perpetual instant of change, occupying neither space and both. The state of being between states.

It recalls the tension between nothingness and being, and the resolution to it that we find in becoming.

If we consider the present itself, the now of our subjective experience, as the threshold between the past and the future, serving as both boundary and passageway between them, then we can see being present, being in the now, as the liminality of our conscious mind.

And perhaps we need to fully grasp the concept of liminality to truly make sense of the world.

Regardless, I think there’s something beautiful about the word, not just how it flows off the tongue, but also how it conveys this subtle concept in a parsimonious and elegant and, some might even say, sublime, way.