Liminal Spaces - The Land of the In-between

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About Liminal Spaces - The Land of the In-between

liminal |ˈlimənl|
adjective, technical

1. of or relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

from The Work of Emotion: Ballard and the Death of Affect, Part IV:
This obsession with strange, liminal zones of possibility is explored often in Ballard’s short fiction, notably ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1963), The Terminal Beach (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974). These beach fictions, in which the beach is figured as a marginal zone: ‘I think the psychological role of the beach is more interesting. The tide-line is a particularly significant area, a penumbral zone that is both of the sea and above it, forever half-immersed in the great time-womb. If you accept the sea as an image of the unconscious, then this beachward urge might be seen as an attempt from the existential role of ordinary life and return to the universal time-sea’ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ p. 111. There is an almost Camusian existentialism at work in these stories with the beach as the desert of the mind where one must face the absurd. See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin 1975)
[ www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgb_death_of_affect4.html ]

DERIVATIVES
liminality |ˌliməˈnalətē| noun
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Latin limen, limin- ‘threshold’ + -al .

from The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War by Pippa Tandy:
These figures, actual and imagined, have entered social and individual consciousness as recognizable and meaningful entities. The abandoned motels, rusting rocket gantries, drained swimming pools and deserted bars of Ballard’s fiction are ’spinal landscapes’, the settings which arouse liminal memories of ‘the formation of the brain’s visual centres’ (’The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970), revealing the evolutionary development of vision and consciousness and the informing power of technology over this development.
[ www.ballardian.com/the-dna-of-the-present-jg-ballards-col... ]


A term favoured particularly by post-colonial critics, and which refers to the thresholds, boundaries and borderlines of binary constructions (black/white, masculine/feminine, Englishness/Irishness). These oppositions are often false, producing blurring and gaps which might be exploited in order to deconstruct these oppositions.