In Mr. Lonely, directed by Harmony Korine, a young man wanders around Paris, scratching out a living as a Michael Jackson impersonator. The impersonator is an American and speaks no French. Even the crowded street for the impersonator feels empty, lonely. He is both dependent on the citizens about them and isolated from them, able to relate to them only through aether of American popular culture. The man’s impersonation of Michael Jackson is particularly bad, recreating none of Jackson’s artistry, but only the occasional tic and general appearance.
Living where one does not speak the language is an anxious affair. The feeling is one of never quite being sure of the rules. The city is plastered with signs saying how one can and cannot move, but if you cannot read the signs each one is a potential prohibition. You feel like a lost child, not knowing exactly where to grow or who to trust, only there is no parent who might rescue you. Given this problem, the M. J. impersonation is a survival mechanism. This is true not only in the literal sense that it’s a way of earning a living, but in the further sense that the costume is a way for the impersonator to make his presence legible. It gives him a reason to be wandering the streets.
This combination of loneliness and anxiety is the central affect of liminal spaces. Henceforth, I bold liminal space to distinguish the internet aesthetic from the broader anthropological concept. Liminal here means transitional, in-between. As an internet aesthetic, liminal space images depict spaces devoid of people, spaces which therefore are not currently serving their purpose or have no clear purpose. Think large and empty corridors, empty stores, particularly ones which have been cleared of merchandise, e.g. a spot in a mall that has changed hands. The emptiness itself produces a feeling of being out of place. If no one else is here, am I supposed to be here? Is it even safe? This feeling is often reinforced by the pictures being taken at night with poor lighting, so that the location is or appears to be closed. These images often also display a disconcerting combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. The liminal space is both open, its walls recessing into the distance, and closed, the ceiling almost unbearably close.
Van Gennep, in his 1909 Rites of Passage, understands liminal spaces in terms of sacred and secular spaces. For van Gennep, sacrality is best understood as a relation: something is sacred for someone when it lies outside the familiar order, when it is dangerous and strange and wonderful. A liminal place lies between a secular and a sacred place, dividing them. Passage through a liminal space involves a reorientation of the sacred and secular. Within a liminal space, both your origin and your destination are sacred; you are between worlds. Van Gennep gives the example of a Roman general returning from war. This was a protracted and mediated affair; the general and his army did not simply waltz back in, but went through the arch of triumph, a liminal space, and sacrifice to Jupiter Capitoline, a rite of passage. Rites of passage are rituals that order and attend navigation.
Most of the rites of passage van Gennep studies concern not physical movement but social and biological transitions: marriage, pregnancy, maturation, initiation, and so on. The liminal space itself is usually metaphorical. We can draw a further metaphor between the rite of passage and liminal architecture, the architecture of liminal spaces. Just as the rite of passage, liminal architecture both orders liminal space and defines it as liminal. The arch of triumph marks the place for the army’s reentry and marks it as that place. In particular, such architecture distinguishes liminal from normal space, as on an old map monsters guarded the threshold of terra incognita.
What of the people who reside in such places? Victor Turner, building on van Gennep’s work, describes them as threshold people; existing between states, they are both beyond classification and not-yet classified, metaphorically both dead and not yet born. As a result such people are “structurally invisible,” not to be observed or considered.1 Liminal architecture then contains and separates its inhabitants from ordinary society, e.g. as in a prison. Turner further claims that social hierarchies are radically simplified in liminal space; threshold people are equal to one another, though they may also be dominated by the guardians of the threshold, the wardens.
This equality and community may be more illusion than fact; just as liminal persons are structurally invisible, they are correspondingly structurally equivalent. Return to Mister Lonely. Our Michael Jackson impersonator eventually escapes Paris to a community of impersonators in the Scottish Highlands. The impersonators are liminal persons. After all, none of them are ever addressed by their actual names; they have not yet been given a place in society. Their place or at least their situation is transitional: they are trying to integrate into society by starting an impersonation show.
The impersonators’ paradise is troubled by jealousy. Michael Jackson pursues Marilyn Manson, much to the ire of her husband, Charlie Chaplin. His abuse of Manson drives her, in a further unintended act of impersonation, to suicide, in turn leading the Michael Jackson impersonator to leave both the commune and his profession. In this connection, we can see that the homogoneity, the more-or-less equal footing Turner imputes to liminal community, is not necessarily the basis of solidarity. Instead, that equality can be the basis of competition, the liminal space itself a proving ground. After all, freedom from hierarchy is freedom from a kind of order that forestalls competition by deciding outcomes in advance: the serf may hate his lord, but will likely never think to rise up and plunge the duchy into chaotic struggle, as his subordination is already a given.2
We can see this point clearly in the case of internet fora and other social parts of cyberspace. These are liminal spaces, or near enough: they lie between the real words, they hold a community of anonymous or pseudonymous souls, who are in a position of relative equality, and who, because of that anonymity, are more or less freed from enforcement of ordinary norms of communication. As any habitual user of social media can tell you, this combination is not exactly liberating. Such fora strip down the back and forth of social interaction to its competitive core. By stripping out the ambiguities of assessing relative standing — ordinarily, it is hard to tell which of any pair is the more popular, and, if that is clear, which is more popular with the right crowd — in favor of a clear quantitive assessment, who has more likes, these places remove the dodges that allow us to avoid competition. This intensified clarity can lead to spaces that, even while being in some sense liberatory (you can say anything online), feel terribly constraining. Indeed, sociality online can be so denuded that one seems alone, the solitude of being amid a crowd with whom you do not share a language.
While the kind of liminal space Turner was interested in was temporary and bounded — initiation rites transpire in their proscribed periods and then end — cyberspace is unbounded. Consider the most famous liminal space, the Backrooms. “The Backrooms” is a short horror story posted to the anonymous forum 4chan, accompanying an image of a liminal space.
Here cyberspace and the dreamspace meet. We are to imagine that the world has the buggy geometry of LSD: Dream Emulator. To noclip is to pass through an object that is supposed to be solid. The Backrooms thus starts us out in a reality that is already uncanny. In the Backrooms, the liminal person is removed from all protection against the liminal state: the rites that structure his experience, the community of co-liminal persons, and the certainty of an end to liminality.
This uncanniness is more broadly true of liminal spaces, even absent horror trappings. In Turner’s account of the liminal, such states are liberatory and regenerative; the initiate, having for some time exited society, returns changed and reintegrates. But the liminal compresence of death and life can be a form of undeath as easily as rebirth, and certainly with no guide or companion undeath is the more likely. The liminal space is also uncanny in a different way, it is at once familiar and unfamiliar. The Backrooms, for instance, resembles an old office building. But of course it is not a representation of any actual office space. Rather, it is a dreamlike (in this case nightmarish) recollection of an office space. This can provoke a sense of deja vu, the feeling that one has seen this place before, without knowing where, or even while knowing that one has never been there. Such a sense is profoundly discomforting because it threatens our sense of integrity, that we are one and the same person over time and should thereby have a clear sense of where we have or have not been.
Liminal spaces are nearly always outmoded spaces: old offices, empty shops, closed pools. Contributing to this sense, the images are often unusually low quality, as if (and sometimes actually) coming from some time in the past. The outmoded space is one which used to serve some purpose, but remains as fossilized. As Hal Foster (in Compulsive Beauty) points out, the outmoded is uncanny in the sense above, estranged and corpse-like. Liminal spaces rarely though show evidence of being reclaimed, of undergoing active transition. No one seems to be moving in to the old office, the retail space is getting no new occupants. Liminal spaces are places of atrophied, stillborn transitions.
It is not therefore surprising that they have taken a hold of the imaginations of the young adults of today, whose lives themselves are marked by such dashed transitions. As Turner pointed out, rites of passage exist in societies with stable, predictable transitions, where people matured and changed against the background of a fixed social order and into readymade social positions. But American society of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is one in which such stable positions have increasingly collapsed. The markers of having succeeding, of having found some stable place — a certain, decently paying career, a house, a partner — are increasingly unobtainable to the young or even middle-aged. A young person of today is stuck in either ever-longer preparation for a career, seeking a bachelor or graduate degree for a position that a generation ago would not have required it, or some “entry-level,” “temporary” position. They rent rather than own, if they have their own place at all. They date rather than marry, if they have not given up entirely on romance. The liminal space haunts and is haunted by such liminal persons.
Liminal space is the corollary of junkspace, the atrophied dysfunction that junkspace’s hypertrophic function inevitably leaves behind. Recall that junkspace is thoroughly contingent both in parts — a spot in a mall can become unprofitable and be turned over at any time — and as a whole — the mall itself can always become abandoned. The growth of junkspace is viral and predatory: Walmart moves in and overtakes existing retail and, when the tides changes, moves out, leaving little behind. Its movement shrinks the commons on both ends: Walmart contributes much less in taxes, pays much less back to the community, than what was there before, and on the way out leaves decaying, barely usable infrastructure. By being host to Walmart and other big stores, and financing the car-centric infrastructure that requires, towns across America take on massive debts they are unlikely ever to pay. Liminal space is the rancor junkspace leaves behind.
This applies most obviously to retail spaces, a common category of liminal space. We can extend it to functional spaces (roads, hallways, lobbies, etc.) by our prior observation that junkspace cannibalizes infrastructure. There is nothing in itself uncanny about a hallway, it is liminal in only the most pedestrian sense. Once, however, we have the sense that the road leads nowhere or, better, to a non-place, it takes on the unease of liminal space, a transitional ground whose end has been cut off. Junkspace consists exactly of non-places, anesthetized, uniform chambers of commerce.
We can see this in the 2007 Doctor Who episode “Gridlock,” in which, after a disaster, inhabitants of New Earth have been forced into a massive underground motorway under the false promise that they can someday reach an unsoiled part of the planet. Though the motorway contains many lanes of flying cars, it is so jammed that drivers move at the rate of meters a year. These cars are perfectly closed systems, sustaining their inhabitants off reconstituted waste. “Gridlock” then presents an image of the culmination of junkspace, where it has merged with its shadow liminal space. Its inhabitants live in maximally atomized cycles of consumption, waste, and production; though they are technically not alone, they are after all surrounded by other cars, they form no kind of community with others.
As “Gridlock” communicates and as my account of driving in Florida in the last entry also suggests, there is something carceral about liminal spaces. Although there is no one necessarily trapping you in liminal space, one is nevertheless trapped. Indeed, this is worse: if there were someone keeping you there, there would be someone to let you out. A prison, with its guards and other prisoners, is therefore not usually a liminal space, but Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons certainly are. These lithographs depict colossal, classical prisons, arbitrary arrangements of walls, towers, columns, bridges, and arches, which seem neither to be closed nor open-air structures. Though these prisons contain prisoners, cells, torture-devices, these figures are so small relative to the architecture, that it seems entirely inhuman.
Many of the prisoners in Piranesi’s drawings seem able to walk freely. In liminal space, confinement amounts not necessarily to restricted movement but to a want of anywhere to go. Here the spectacle of punishment is ever present, and so the possibility of being punished never far from mind. Here we may return to an early observation that liminal space carry with them the air of transgression, the sense that one has entered somewhere you were not supposed to. This prompts a feeling not merely of danger but of deferred punishment. Piranesi’s torture devices or the Backroom’s vague monsters merely make this element explicit. The danger of miscarriage is of course implicit in all passages, and may be the only thing worse than not making it out at all. If you are thirty-something and stuck in a crappy job and crappier apartment, you have at least the slim consolation that things could be worse.
See Turner’s “Betwixt and Between,” collected in The Forest of Symbols.
Sallnow makes a similar observation about competition among the “liminal community” of Andean pilgrims in “Communitas Reconsidered” (1981:173).