What are Liminal Spaces? And why are they so popular?

“Liminal spaces” have become trendy in recent years, especially on TikTok, Tumblr, and YouTube. But what makes a space liminal? And why are they so popular lately?

Liminal spaces are really popular:

• @SpaceLiminalBot on Twitter has over 1.3 million followers.

• "Liminal Space" is one of the most read articles in the Fandom Aesthetics wiki

• Searching for “liminal space” on YouTube brings up dozens of videos with over 1 million views each, the most popular one with almost 5 million views.

• Reddit.com/r/LiminalSpace has over 630,000 members

• Articles on liminal spaces have been published recently in The Atlantic, LitHub, Architectural Digest, and Forbes.

But what exactly are liminal spaces? And why have they become so popular recently? In this post, we’ll attempt to answer both of those questions.

An obvious place to start: what does liminal mean, anyway?

Part 1: Defining Liminality

Something is liminal if it is transitional, in between two or more other things. The key phrase is in between, or on the threshold. This is hinted at by the word’s etymology; liminal comes from līmen, the Latin word for “doorstep, threshold, doorway, entrance, beginning, or commencement.”

Both space and time can be liminal. While a liminal space is an area in which we physically move through, a liminal time is a period of time in which we are in between two or more other times. Liminal times are often called “liminal states” or “liminal moments.”

We don’t occupy liminal spaces or times, we pass through them, which is why lingering there gives us an odd feeling, as if we are outside of the normal order of things. It’s also why non-liminal things seem unique or strange if placed in liminal spaces; e.g., a permanent dwelling on a bridge or a man living in an airport.

Two Kinds of Liminal Spaces

Thinking about it more, I think we can divide liminal spaces into two broad types:

• Architectural liminal spaces, in which we are physically moving from one place to another. They include hallways, airports, roads, and other places we occupy temporarily while we are en route to a more important destination. As such, movement-based liminal spaces are defined primarily by built structures in our environment.

• Time and Status liminal spaces. These can be considered two subcategories of the same general idea: spaces where liminal life moments occur. They are defined less by the physical layout of our environment and more by events in our lives.

  • Time-based liminal spaces, which we occupy for a period of our lives while transitioning to a new stage of life. The transition from childhood is a common example: playgrounds, classrooms, toy stores, and arcades are spaces we occupy during the process of moving from child to adult.

  • Status-based liminal spaces, which we occupy while undergoing a change in social status. For example, a church during a marriage, in which participants enter legally single, perform a ceremony, and leave married. Or, in army boot camp, where participants enter as recruits, undergo intense training, and leave as soldiers.

A few examples of liminal spaces: bridges, hotel rooms, laundromats, parking lots.

Everything is Liminal

The concept of liminality has become a trendy term in academia over the last few decades. A search for the word on PhilPapers.org brings up hundreds of results in philosophy alone, with sociology and literature no doubt having even more. The word has been used to describe airports, prisons, churches, classrooms, refugee camps, hallways, libraries, street gangs, Balinese dances, tourist guides to Rome, Kabbalah, Japanese women on a pilgrimage in Heian-era Japan, Brónte novels, and Hannibal Lecter.

The Origins of the Concept

While I won’t delve into the academic literature too much, it is helpful to understand the origins of liminality as a concept.

Liminality as an anthropological term was first developed in the early 20th century by Arnold van Gennep, an ethnographer and folklorist. Van Gennep’s best-known work, “The Rites of Passage,” was published in 1909. The book (in which the word liminal was coined by the author) details a variety of different rituals that signify a change in social status, age, or other aspect of social identity – hence the name, rites of passage.

Van Gennep struggled to build an academic career in France and his work on rituals was mostly forgotten after his death, partially due to a feud with another (significantly more influential) French social scientist, Émile Durkheim.

Half a century later, British anthropologist Victor Turner “rediscovered” the work of Van Gennep while in a liminal state himself, awaiting a U.S. visa so that he could begin teaching at Cornell University. Turner went on to write a now-famous article, Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage, in which he explores the “liminal period” class of rituals highlighted by Van Gennep.

What Isn’t Liminal?

Defining what isn’t liminal can be a tricky task. After all, what can’t be described as a step in a process or a temporary place?

The thesaurus is a good place to start. Antonyms of liminal include stable, unchangeable, constant, and eternal. We are no longer in a liminal state when we have arrived, when we have stepped through the limen and find ourselves at the destination, permanently. Or, when we never left in the first place.

Non-liminal spaces are thus destinations, places that are not on the way to somewhere else:

• The cozy, personal, and familiar bedroom at home is non-liminal – as opposed to the liminal, cold, impersonal, and unfamiliar hotel room in a far-away country

• The old rural house that has been passed down in the family for generations is non-liminal – as opposed to the liminal, temporary, corporate-owned urban apartment listed on Airbnb

• A decades-old local café run and frequented by long-time local residents is non-liminal – as opposed to the liminal, generically-designed, international coffee chain staffed by interchangeable short-term employees and occupied by anonymous consumers

• A home driveway where the family minivan is parked every night is non-liminal – as opposed to a liminal rental car stopped at a roadside gas station

God isn’t liminal, either. Traditional religious concepts (at least in Western Christian traditions) like God, eternity, or afterlife are typically not liminal, as they deal with final states, unchanging entities, and the “ultimate nature” of reality. More on that below.

Liminal is Not Spooky, Abandoned, or Nostalgic

As liminal spaces have become more popular, the aesthetic has expanded to include a lot of things which aren’t quite liminal. If you browse /r/liminalspace, you’ll see a lot of empty office rooms, abandoned buildings, and various childhood tropes from the 80s and 90s. These cannot be considered liminal spaces in the strict sense of the term.

But if they aren’t liminal spaces, why do so many people think they are? A few guesses:

• liminal is an extremely broad word and can be used to describe just about everything (as I illustrated above)

• the liminal space aesthetic overlaps with some other popular aesthetics like mallwave, back rooms, or dreamcore, and liminality is trendy while the others are becoming blasé

• due to its Latin roots and the plethora of academic papers on the topic, the word liminality carries a sophisticated aura

• on social media sites, the comments saying, “actually, this isn’t liminal” tend to be downvoted, deleted, ignored, or accused of being exclusionary. Over time, this results in the original definition expanding to include whatever is popular with that audience, until the concept bloats to include nearly anything

That said, I do think some otherwise non-liminal spaces can be considered liminal in the Time or Status-based sense that I mentioned above. The difficulty with this classification is that while Architectural liminal spaces are liminal for nearly everyone, we all have different liminal life moments.

Now we know what liminal spaces are. But why are they so popular lately?

Part 2: Why are Liminal Spaces so Popular?

What is the appeal of liminality? Is it just a trendy Internet thing, here today and gone tomorrow? Or is there a deeper cultural pattern at work?

I don’t think it’s just a trend. At its core, I think the modern world is fundamentally a liminal place. Here are some of my scattered observations as to why liminal spaces are so popular.

• We Have No “Coming-of-Age” Rituals

• Millenial Nostalgia

• Our Cities are Transportation Networks

• Modern Political Systems are Extremely Liminal

• The Death of God

• We Lack a Process-Oriented Language

We Have No “Coming-of-Age” Rituals

For most people, the modern Western world lacks clear coming-of-age rituals; the average age of marriage has risen dramatically, marriage rates themselves are down, home ownership is increasingly out-of-reach for the middle class, jobs are becoming more short-term and gig-based, and many activities that were formerly considered to be “just for kids” are now socially acceptable at any age.

The closest universal rituals Americans seem to have are age-based: getting a driver’s license at 16, being able to vote at 18, and being able to buy alcohol at 21. These are not really “rituals” in the ceremonial sense and are more just markers of time passing.

All of this has contributed to a widespread feeling of immaturity in many twenty-and-thirty-somethings; they feel that “they aren’t really adults” or “they still feel like a kid.” The word adulting is a prime example of this phenomenon. Consequently, many younger people feel as if their lives are in an extended liminal moment: no longer a child, but still not quite an adult.

Millennial Nostalgia

Millennials, who grew up in the late 80s, 90s and early 00’s, are the youngest generation to remember the Ancient Times Before Social Media and Smartphones. Like any generation, they are nostalgic about their childhoods, which included a lot of malls, field trips, in-person interactions, and a general sense of optimism about the future. This nostalgia for the pre-smartphone world is often parodied in the Not a Cell Phone in Sight meme.

Place Montréal Trust – Montréal, Canada in the late 80s and early 90s

Now fully “adult” and in their thirties and forties, millennials have begun to grow nostalgic about their childhoods – and the spaces they spent them in, like malls, which are pale imitations of their former selves. This seems to have been the original inspiration for the mallwave/mallsoft genre, parts of which have been absorbed by the liminal space aesthetic.

Our Cities are Transportation Networks

Most cities in the United States are designed around the automobile. There have been a million articles written on this topic and I won’t rehash them. I will, however, point out that streets (and highways, parking lots, etc.) are functionally liminal spaces. While some people may drive purely for the sake of driving, the vast majority of drivers are on the way to somewhere in particular, with the car as a means to get there.

Image of Los Angeles from Unsplash.

If you live in the typical American city, it’s very likely that you spend nearly eleven hours a week in your car, as of 2019 at least.

The COVID-19 pandemic and contemporaneous spread of remote work have thrown a wrench into this statistic, no doubt. Will another side effect of COVID and remote work be a decreased interest in liminality?

Modern Political Systems are Extremely Liminal

In current Western democratic political systems, the individuals in power are never quite decided “for good.” They never quite arrive. The moment an election ends, preparation for the next one begins. Politics is thus a ceaseless, unending attempt to cross the threshold, the limen of power – and to prevent others from doing the same. We, the citizens, can’t know who will be in power in a decade, in a year, or even the night before an election day.

This state of affairs is very unlike other eras. In monarchical or imperial political systems, the average citizen could reasonably expect to live and die under the same ruling family. In many instances, the same individual was the supreme political authority for an entire lifetime. As the exemplar, Louis XIV of France reigned for 72 years and 110 days. Millions of French nationals lived and died knowing a single person as their ruler.

Louis XIV, The Sun King, was in power for over 72 years

Of course, kings get usurped, emperors overthrown, and revolutions staged. But these are unexpected events conducted outside of the system, rogue events that interrupt expectations about the future. Compare this to a modern democratic system, wherein it is expected and predicted that the current Person in Charge will be replaced in 4-8 years.

Again, I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, merely that it leads to a political system which is inherently liminal, at least when it comes to elected representatives.

The Death of God

Whew, that’s a heavy title, but stick with me here. The traditional concept of God in Christianity (and in many other monotheistic religions) is of a being that is eternal, unchanging, limitless, indivisible, omnipotent, and so on. That is to say, according to traditional monotheistic thought, God is not liminal, and the idea that God could be anything other than eternal and unchanging has been a theologically hot topic for millennia.

As traditional religious belief has declined in the Western world, it seems likely that interest in related concepts like eternal and unchanging has also fallen away. If “God is Dead,” as Nietzsche put it – and by this he did not mean that an actual being was alive and died, but rather that the concept of God was losing influence – perhaps interest in discussing His qualities is also dead or dying – at least the qualities that traditional theology has considered Him to have.

At the same time, interest is growing in “liminal” conceptions of the divine,

For both Whitehead and Hartshorne, it is an essential attribute of God to be fully involved in and affected by temporal processes. This idea contrasts neatly with traditional forms of theism that hold God to be or at least conceived as being, in all respects non-temporal (eternal), unchanging (immutable,) and unaffected by the world (impassible).
Process Theism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

If you’re interested in the debates surrounding this topic, I recommend checking out Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

This leads me to my next point: our metaphysical vocabulary is inadequate.

We Lack a Process-Oriented Language

This is, again, a topic far beyond the scope of this article. But it arose from a basic observation about language: English appears (to some people, at least) to be a very noun-oriented language. That is to say, we tend to discuss concepts in terms of static, unchanging entities rather than as steps in a process. I’m not a linguist and I don’t know enough about language to know if this is accurate or not.

But, this New Yorker article does say that, unlike speakers of other languages, English speakers don’t slow down their speech before saying nouns. If I am understanding it correctly, it means that English speakers are more comfortable with using nouns.

The topic of linguistic relativity is a very debatable one, of course, but I think we can interpret this to suggest that liminlity is a popular topic because it is a “unserved need” by our usual ways of communicating.