The task has been set by a turn that happened in philosophy long before it properly arrived in culture. When Kant put knowledge on a new footing he moved the center of the world: objects no longer set the terms for our knowing, our knowing sets the terms under which objects can appear at all.1 The subject stopped being a thing among things and became the condition under which there are things for us. That was meant as a rescue, a way of securing knowledge against skepticism. What it also did was inadvertently hand subjects a bill roughly two centuries later. If the world as it is given runs through me, then the question of where I stand in it runs through me too, and there is no longer an outside from which the answer could be delivered. What was an investigation comes back as a Zumutung, an imposition, addressed to every subject in modern Western societies, whether they chose it or not.

I use the German word because its etymology carries some weight for my argument. The word’s modern root, Mut, means courage. The word stems from the late Middle High German muot, which did not originally mean courage. Its original meaning was a person’s inner disposition, sense and soul, the force of willing and feeling, and zumuten meant to direct one’s own will or claim onto someone else and ask them to strive toward it with all of that.2 The meaning of the word transformed and narrowed over time. Mut contracted into courage. Zumutung contracted into what is hard to bear, at the edge of what may reasonably be asked of a person. Both are losses of the same thing. What was once addressed to a whole disposition now arrives as a demand one barely carries and the courage that used to belong to that disposition has become a word of its own, similar in sound, yet unrelated in meaning. Knowing yourself, your spirit, however, still takes courage and comes at a cost, the way courageous acts tend to. Which is why Zumutung reflects this point on another level than its English counterpart, imposition.

Some of the difficulty reaches further down than modernity. We came up in groups. Whatever holds us to one another is older than any form we have given it, older than the village, the confession, the party or the platform. The demand to orient alone therefore lands on a creature that has practiced something else for a very long time. However, turning ancestry into destiny would mean forgetting that the conditions under which we observe ourselves are themselves alterable and that we are not simply the sum of the pressures that shaped us. Our origin explains why being alone is hard. It does not say how much of it has to remain.

Between there and here sits a distinction language rarely bothers to make and most of the argument about individualism is between people using this word differently. Belonging can mean that a group defines me, that I dissolve into it and its boundary becomes mine. That is the belonging modernity set out against, with reason. The tie you did not choose, the village that registers every deviation and the family as fate can all be stifling as much as reassuring. Belonging can also mean standing in a relation that answers, where something of me arrives somewhere and something comes back, without my disappearing into it. Hartmut Rosa calls this resonance, and the term earns its keep here precisely because it does not describe fusion.3 Resonance requires two that remain different. A tone that dissolves into the other one does not sound. It phases out, it goes quiet.

So what we are short of is not precisely the tribe but more so the ability to have belonging without surrendering to it and to be a single person without being lonely. Observed cybernetically, this is a coupling problem, which is distinctly non-moral. It makes both failures visible at once. A system too tightly coupled to its environment loses its own dynamics and becomes an organ of execution, running someone else’s program with great sincerity. A system too loosely coupled circles in its own state space and gets nothing back, no correction, no friction, no news. Both states look like freedom from the inside. One feels like shelter and the other feels like sovereignty. In both the system has stopped learning and adapting.

Our present falls toward the second. Never have more belongings been available and seldom have fewer of them been binding. You choose your milieus, you leave them when the costs rise, you wear their signs for as long as they fit. What this produces is the form of belonging without its Zumutung and therefore without its yield, because what makes a tie load-bearing is exactly that it cannot be canceled without consequence. There is a whole economy resting on this arrangement. Ties that can be exited at no cost are also ties that can be sold to you again next quarter.

Which raises the question I actually want to put on the table.

If part of the difficulty is ancestral, if the trouble with orienting alone is a matter of what we were built by and for, then the thought that suggests itself is to change what we were built by. This is a transhumanist proposal that treats the substrate as a variable rather than as fate. Further evolution, or trajectories we would design ourselves, might carry us past the group pressures and the lineage pressures toward something that judges its own possibilities more autonomously. Everything I have argued so far says I have to take this seriously. I insisted the conditions of observation are alterable.

Taken seriously, the proposition starts to bend and the first bend is not an objection to the project but a question about its lineage. Transhumanism advertises itself as a break with what we have been, fundamentally. It looks to me more like an inheritance arriving at its last object. Instrumental reason worked outward for three centuries, taking nature apart and making it available, converting whatever it touched into something to be optimized and the enhanced human is what happens when that reason runs out of exterior. Transhumanism is not a departure from the Enlightenment. It is its most literal fulfillment and the subject that Kant installed as the condition of the world arrives at the far end of the story as the last remaining object of instrumental reason.4 A fulfillment can be an achievement. What it cannot be is the exit from a history it is itself completing. Such is the contradiction.

Which puts the second bend at the assumption underneath the whole proposal, that subjectivity is a faculty for orientation at all, a capacity that can do real work in locating a person. Read the record differently and another version is available. Subjectivity may be less a faculty than an address, the place where the task was finally set down. God went, then the class, then the nation and finally, the task of orientation ended up on the threshold of the individual. Put the two readings together and the enhancement project takes on a strange shape. Instrumental reason, having run out of things to work on, arrives where the task of orientation was already put in place and offers to optimize the recipient subject for that task.

The third bend is the notion of potentiality in the transhumanist picture. We speak of possibility as though it lay open in front of us, the horizon of what could be. But what we are able to entertain as possible is formed by what has been. Our imagination of the future runs on inherited machinery, on the categories evolution left us with and the paradigms our history taught us to think in, which is why so many visions of the enhanced human return a familiar liberal subject with better hardware, still competing, still accumulating, still lonely and now efficiently so.5 The past is not only behind us as a set of constraints to be engineered away. It is inside the instrument we would use to do the engineering. Whoever wants to design past our lineage pressures has to design with a mind those pressures assembled, which is the situation von Foerster spent his life describing: an observer attempting to redesign itself, with no vantage outside itself from which to check the work. Second-order observation is the whole of the difficulty.

If transhumanism is offered as an exit from the threshold, as the far side we have been looking for, then it has quietly become another liminal destination lacking orientation, only living off of its symbolic order, a simulacrum of possible far sides.6 Every eschatology I have written against, secular or otherwise, works in a similar way: the present is a corridor, the meaning lies at its end, and the corridor is therefore something to be endured rather than inhabited. A named exit would take the weight off, which is exactly why I distrust it. What I have been arguing all along is that we need directions rather than destinations. A direction stays honest by remaining revisable.

That leaves the transhumanist question in a shape I can live with. Not as the far side of liminality but as one of the directions in which the far side might be found. It is worth pursuing and testing whether it increases the number of choices available to us or reduces them.7 Some of the transhumanist proposition seems to plainly increase our choices. I would argue, however, that it increases options and ability but not necessarily the ability to choose between those options. A body less determined by lineage is a body with more room and I would rather argue about what to do with that room than pretend the question is trivial and self-evident. Some of the proposition plainly reduces our choices and the reduction of the critical questions usually hides in who is doing the choosing in this fantasy. Because the difficulty here was never evenly distributed to begin with. David McKerracher draws a distinction I keep coming back to, between the uprooted and the unrooted, between the one who had roots and lost them and the one who never had any.8 To the second, the news that there is no origin to return to is not a liberation. It is a description of their situation handed back to them as an intellectualist argument. Whoever stands in dense relations can afford transformation, whoever stands in none experiences indefinite exposure to liminality. Any enhancement of the autonomous subject enters that same asymmetry and it will find it there whether or not its designers intended to.

Whether something can be built from this that resembles neither the commune nor the marketplace, I do not know. Before the political question there is the one underneath it, the one I would want answered first and cannot answer yet: whether subjectivity is fit for orientation at all, whether it is a capacity that can carry the task or the place where the task was put down for instrumental reasons. On the answer hangs what our present loneliness even is. Either it is an ability we have not yet grown into, in which case the work is to do so rather than heal it by reverting back to tribal structures. Or it is a demand that was addressed to the wrong recipient and every attempt to meet it individually, by therapy, by discipline or by enhancement, is futile and far too costly.

Our old assumptions don’t work anymore, but we don’t yet see a far side. New assumptions haven’t crystallized. So we sit in a pretense stage: a sort of denial, an overplaying of old roles, shot through with nihilistic counter-tendencies that don’t yet form viable new structures. Antonio Gramsci put the mood better than anyone: the old world is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Or, in the line’s more familiar rendering: now is the time of monsters.1 That sentence is usually read as a description of villain populists and business moguls trying to bleed systems dry to hold onto power. I read it differently. The monsters are a larger, more implicit sense of ambivalence and fear of the unknown, of which the demagogues are merely a symptom.

The disorientation people feel is not an accident of bad politics or bad media. It is the texture of a threshold. Western society is increasingly locked in a battle to validate or negate its histories and to either valorize or zealously deconstruct categories of meaning. At a deeper level, social systems always have a structure standing to contend with the deconstruction. What remains is the threshold itself, stretched out larger than our epistemic horizon, with no doorway in sight.

Liminality, from the Latin limen, a threshold, is the state of transitory in-betweenness that gives rise to an eerie quality of ambiguity and disorientation. The anthropologist Victor Turner described it watching Ndembu boys in Zambia pass from childhood to adulthood.2 During the ritual process the initiates are betwixt and between: no longer children, not yet adults; no longer merely attending the procedure, not yet a full part of it. That fluidity produces confusion, strangeness and fear, and at the same time pride, exhilaration and belonging. What Turner saw is that ritual is the central human mechanism for overcoming structure with anti-structure in order to generate new structure out of it.

Anti-structure is not the absence of structure. It is communitas: the charged, role-dissolving solidarity of those who pass through the threshold together. It only means anything against a structure. The Bar Mitzvah, the first communion, the peaceful transfer of power a democracy stages as a ritual to shore up its own legitimacy, the war that ends in a treaty out of which a new order is born. Each marks time with an occasion, and the real work happens in the transition between the temporally clear states. The ritual punctuates the flux with events so that the threshold can end and a new state can be declared.

That is the state society seems to be in. Liminality without punctuation.

The striking thing about present-day liminality is that we don’t feel as though we’re between an old system and a new one. We feel as though we’re between an old system and the end. It is mirrored in our cultural obsession with the apocalypse. We feel that the old system has made impossible the renewal that ought to spawn out of the structure itself, as if it had integrated all of its critique into a suspension sustained indefinitely, until it has run the entire earth and all its beings out of steam.

First-order liminality is the ordinary threshold: a role, a life, an institution in transition between two reasonably clear states. It is passed through, and whoever is passing through is too busy being disoriented to describe the disorientation. The second order begins when the subjects of the threshold start observing themselves in it. A culture names its own in-betweenness, curates it, gives it an aesthetic and a soundtrack, and folds that observation back into how it operates. What was meant to be a passage becomes a sustained condition. The individual, in relationship with a world in constant transition, then has no development toward any temporarily clear state to orient by, and the constant disorientation eventually produces the impression that things must be coming to an end. That is an understandable response. It is easier to wish for an ending than to bear an eternal suspension.

At the end of the Cold War in 1989, Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history”, the optimistic doctrine that peace and prosperity had been sealed forever by liberal democracy and capitalism, the spirit of history fulfilled.3 Jean Baudrillard answered in 1992 with L’Illusion de la fin that the illusion of an end of history is better understood as the absence of events as classical markers of transition.4 The clarity of historical events is to the social threshold what the closing rite is to the ritual: it tells us the in-between is over and a new state has begun. Take away the events and you don’t get the end of history. You get history that can no longer transition: a threshold with no far side.

The internet exposes the fragmentation already latent in the culture and amplifies it in the same gesture, and observation tends to stabilize what it observes. Naming the limbo furnishes the limbo. The mirror does not show us the way out. It shows us looking.

The deeper mechanism is a kind of homeostasis. A living structure ought, after a liminal phase, to give birth to the anti-structure that overcomes it. Ours does not, because the present order has learned to digest its own overcoming. Capital behaves like a homeostat that metabolizes every perturbation thrown at it: each critique, each counter-cultural anti-structure, each gesture of refusal is absorbed as content, priced, and fed back as fuel.5 What looks like self-surpassing is just the system eating its own surplus. Novelty is licensed only inside the axioms of the market, and “the future” contracts to a single variable, the convergence of exponential technologies. The whole process of the future, mentally, culturally, socially, politically, hardens into a teleological technocratic fate that feels inescapable and linear even as it accelerates. That is why so many feel trapped and impotent, suspended in a tug of war between total annihilation and technological salvation.

Deleuze and Guattari taught us that capital advances by deterritorialization, dissolving inherited codes, identities and attachments faster than any force in history.6 The temptation is to turn that solvent against capital itself. But the solvent is the system’s own bloodstream; capital reterritorializes as fast as it dissolves, swallowing the energy of any attack the way a shock-mount absorbs a blow. There is still a genuine opening here, precisely because the dissolving is immanent to capital rather than imposed from outside. It is just narrow, and it is nowhere near where the doom-trollers are aiming their fire. The solvent works on codes, identities and attachments, on everything that can be dissolved and resold. What it cannot dissolve is a commitment that has already closed. This homeostasis depends on keeping every state revisable, every attachment liquid, every position re-priceable, which is why it metabolizes refusal so easily: refusal is just another position on the same market. It has no procedure for something that ends. That is the fault line. The capacity to declare a state and stand on it.

Underneath all of it runs what I think of as a time-void. A liminal phase held open too long drains the past of its lived texture until all that remains are quotations of it, references and artifacts, endlessly recirculated, pointing at no possible elsewhere. Culture remasters, re-releases and resurrects: That ‘70s Show returns as That ‘90s Show, the games of the early 2000s come back as “definitive editions”, the Matrix is reanimated under the literal title Resurrections. Mark Fisher called this hauntology and named what it costs us: the slow cancellation of the future, and with it the capacity to register loss as loss.7 A culture in this state has a sort of anterograde amnesia, unable to make genuinely new memories. The one frontier still producing novelty is information technology itself, which is exactly what deepens the disorientation and fragmentation, because it keeps making it less clear where we are, who is with us, and who is against us.

This is why the internet’s fascination with liminal spaces is more than an aesthetic tic. Such a space is what happens when a place loses its function and nothing arrives to take the function’s place; the vacancy itself, soaked in a vague temporal longing, becomes the new content. These are not romantic ruins and not merely abandoned buildings. They hang in an interval between the purpose they used to carry and the purpose that never came to replace it: the depopulated mall, the carpeted corridor that promises no door, the office under fluorescent light at an hour when no one works. The deserted mall is not nostalgic for its own crowds. It exhibits the shell that is left once a social space stops paying and capital simply walks out, leaving the architecture standing like a cast skin.

The condition even has a sound. The genre that has grown up around these images, call it liminal ambient, works through low frequencies that seem to inhale rather than pulse, textures stacked into a kind of depth, melodies that loop without resolving, and voices smeared past the point of language into something that merely hovers. It is less a soundtrack for nostalgia than a habitat: a built acoustic interior you can occupy while you are stranded between worlds.

Hartmut Rosa calls it social acceleration and he pairs it with its shadow: alienation, the breakdown of our relationship to the world, to time, to one another, to ourselves.8 The rise of complexity and the speed of our sociotechnical systems leave many people behind and turn the most ordinary decisions, what to consume, what to trust, what is even happening at all, into a permanent vigilance and mistrust. The largest economic growth of the last fifty years sits in the information technologies that increasingly use human attention itself as their business model.

Rosa’s word for the opposite of alienation is Resonanz, a responsive, mutually transforming relationship with the world. We are not only confused about which structure comes next. We are alienated from the process itself: the more estranged we become from the experience of transition, the more disoriented and ambiguous we feel about our environment, and therefore about ourselves. The acceleration is real, but speed without resonance is just a faster way of standing still.

Which brings me to the subjective mood that saturates all of it. There is a colloquial saying that “nothing quite tastes the way it used to”. Whole internet folklores have grown up around this feeling, even going as far as spinning the idea that we died at some point and are running on as ghosts, or that we slipstreamed into a timeline almost, but not quite, like our own. Implausible, obviously, and yet seductive for a reason: they put a story to the genuine sense of being estranged from a world we are nonetheless still living in.

Another version of this experience is anemoia: nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.9 We are nostalgic for futures that never materialized and for pasts we never lived, a longing aimed at a metamemory, a past that is only ever “better” because it was never actually inhabited. This is the danger zone, because longing this unmoored is exactly what reactionary politics feeds on. It promises to restore what never really existed in the first place.

Mark Feldon, in »Von der Sehnsucht zur Simulation«, puts to work a distinction between two nostalgias that he takes from Svetlana Boym.10 Restorative nostalgia fixes on the nostos, the return home; it sets out to reconstruct the lost home, and it does not experience itself as nostalgia at all but as truth and tradition. This is the romantic return: the glorious yesteryear, the identitarian reversal, the rebuilding of a house that was always partly a myth. Reflective nostalgia dwells instead in the algia, the longing itself; it lingers among fragments and ruins, stays ironic and unfinished, and does not pretend it can rebuild the mythical place. And Feldon’s title names the trap lurking inside the first mode: a Sehnsucht that can no longer reach its object curdles into simulation, a frictionless, commodified replica of a past that never was.

The liminal threshold offers another map to the question of home altogether. Beyond the dead ends of obsessively going back to a romanticized past, conserving a way of life from a yesteryear that never was, or the ideological dissolution of everything that once was, the aimless deconstruction, the doom-trolling, the deterritorialization for its own sake that throws out every load-bearing structure. Beyond trying to refuse the threshold by fleeing backward. Beyond trying to refuse it by burning down the room.

Beyond those two stances lies the reflective position, turned toward the future. It is not about restoring the home. It is about keeping certain shattered fragments of structure alive, so that there is something for a genuine anti-structure to push against. Anti-structure without any structure is not communitas. It is psychosis, or it is recapture. Hannah Arendt made the comparative case: the American revolution lasted because it conserved the forms it already had, while the French revolution produced terror and then another threshold, because freedom, once the tyrants were beheaded, had nothing to stand on and turned the liberators into tyrants.11 The American case also shows what conserving load-bearing forms costs, since the forms conserved included slavery, and the threshold that question opened stayed open for another century and arguably has not closed since. Conservation is not innocent. Without immanent critique, the critique a movement is willing to turn back upon itself, even the most righteous revolt only repaints domination and calls it liberation. The question then becomes: what parts of structures are load-bearing, and how do we keep correcting for these judgments throughout our trajectory?

The far side is not a utopia and not an ending. It is viability, the cybernetic word for a system that can persist while continuing to generate its own possibilities. Heinz von Foerster gave second-order cybernetics its one ethical imperative: act always so as to increase the number of choices.12 That is the measure I would apply to our moment, and it is my indictment of boundless deconstruction. Doom-trolling and ideological dissolution drive the number of viable choices toward zero. They collapse the space of imaginable futures into the single binary of annihilation or salvation. They are, in the strict sense, anti-viable.

Choices are not the same as options. Capital supplies options without limit and forecloses choices, because an option is a position you can always sell and a choice is one you have to live inside. To increase the number of choices is to increase the futures we could actually inhabit, and that sometimes requires closing something rather than keeping it open.

Real change at scale therefore has to pass through a narrow gate, with nostalgic restoration on one side and total dissolution on the other. The future we need is discontinuous enough with the present to open new conditions for flourishing, but not so discontinuous that it becomes unrecognizable, or uninhabitable. That is the difference between the two liminalities: the pathological one is disorientation with no edges, while the ritual one is bounded. It has a duration and an aim. It is the difference between the productive confusion of a rite designed to reorganize what you can perceive and imagine, and the endless suspended animation of a mall that never closes.

None of this is pessimism, though it does require separating two things that travel under one name. The nihilism of the morbid symptoms is the passive kind: meaning has collapsed, therefore nothing is worth building. Active nihilism is its inverse.13 It refuses to accept any structure of meaning that survives only on dogma, and it refuses precisely because it has not given up on one that could survive without. The first is a way of staying in the threshold. The second is a way of working through it. A diagnosis, however grim, brings a certain relief: to name what is happening is already the first move of treatment. Even inside the man-made dark of commodification, war and ecological ruin, things still grow. Work gets made, people still reach one another, concepts still get developed. The capacity I am unwilling to surrender is the ability to picture a future genuinely other than the present, if nothing else then as whatever the present is not.

That is the task on this side of the threshold: to become conscious of the process again, to refuse both the romantic return and the zealous burning, to keep enough structure alive that a viable anti-structure can be born, and then to end it again. A threshold closes by being declared closed. Someone marks the occasion, states what has changed, and the new state begins because it was announced and stood behind, not because history delivered it. We have no shortage of critique and no shortage of dissolution. What we lack is the closing rite. The far side is not promised. But a threshold, by definition, has another side. We are only responsible not to mistake it for the end.

Liminal spaces are an inversion of territorialization where the space itself loses its purpose without a substitute. Instead, a notion of time and nostalgia reterritorializes the space in an eerie manner that exerts its emotional impact precisely by combining the territorialization of often commercial spaces with a superimposition of its emptiness as a deterritorialized corpse. Liminal spaces may resonate with us so much because they are spatio-temporal actualities as virtual representations of the body without organs.

The schizophrenic dimension characterizes a condition of no longer inhabiting the old but not yet inhabiting or not quite being able to grasp the new. The specters of liminality are at the same time familiar and unsettling. The schizophrenic liminal captures the specific disorientation of existing between collapsed categories and emergent possibilities that remain just out of reach.

This is not simply about nostalgia or missing the past. The schizophrenic liminal operates through a more complex mechanism: it presents us with spaces that have undergone territorial inversion. These are not ruins in the romantic sense, nor are they simply abandoned places. They are spaces caught in a suspended animation between their former territorialized function and an absent reterritorialization.

Capital breaks symbolic orders and identities because they are rooted in qualitative systems of values, and capital only cares about quantities that eventually supersede them: economic processes of profit, growth, efficiency lead to the deterritorialization of local identities and value systems. This creates what appears to be an emancipation of matter over identity. However, the dialectical view reveals that this apparent liberation contains its own trap. The dialectical overcoming of the main historical structural modes, war and commerce, lies in capital's unbounded deterritorialization. It does so by commodifying their very essence, therefore leaving them in place like an empty shell.

While for Deleuze and Guattari the schizophrenic figure represents radical deterritorialization, one who has escaped traditional structures of meaning and finds themselves adrift in pure flow1, some clinical and critical dimension of schizophrenia remains in this disorientation. Capital's capacity to integrate new forms of old functions and to reterritorialize these flows means that what appears as liberation often becomes a more sophisticated form of capture. This is highly symptomatic of the digital virtual, where apparent freedom masks deeper forms of control.

Using capital's deterritorializing potential against its structure resembles trying to aim a projectile at the small shaft opening of the death star. The blast will most likely miss because capital's capacity for reterritorialization acts as a kind of energy absorber for incoming artillery. But this presents us with a crucial insight: the shaft exists precisely because deterritorialization is systemically immanent to capital itself.

Capital's power lies in its ability to break down traditional structures, yet this same power contains the potential for genuine liberation. Liminal spaces reveal this contradiction with uncanny clarity. They show us empty projection fields where the old territorial meanings have been evacuated but new ones haven't taken hold. This creates a peculiar anxiety: we recognize that we need some meaning to replace the old categories, no matter how stifling those categories were.

The liminal space becomes a kind of laboratory where we can observe capital's contradictions in suspended animation. These spaces show us what deterritorialization looks like when it's not immediately followed by reterritorialization, and the result is both terrifying and full of potential. The empty mall or abandoned office building becomes a projection screen for our collective unconscious, revealing both what we've lost and what might be possible.

This is why the shaft we can shoot through is so small. True large-scale structural change requires threading the needle between nostalgic reterritorialization and complete deterritorialized chaos. We need to imagine futures that are different enough from our present moment to create new conditions for human flourishing, but not so radically discontinuous that they become unrecognizable or uninhabitable.

This threading of the needle can be achieved within art as alternative experiential spaces where liminality can be explored as a tool for transformation rather than just anxiety. Art provides what Victor Turner called "anti-structure"2, a ritualized space where individual roles can change within a larger structure that feels both phenomenologically visceral and yet malleable enough not to become the next dogmatic ideology.

In these spaces, liminality becomes temporary confusion that serves transformation rather than permanent disorientation. The key difference is ritual containment: the liminal experience has boundaries, duration, and purpose. It's not the endless suspended animation of the shopping mall, but the productive disorientation of entering a gallery, theater, or other space explicitly designed to reorganize perception and possibility.

Our prolonged liminal state places us in a sort of "time-void" in which all notion of the past has been stripped of lived-in qualities and are simply commodified references and artifacts which are being recycled in pop-culture with no indication as to something other, something that might not yet be. We're so consumed with the end of the world that the recontextualization and recombination of past elements doesn't yield these possible futures.

The structures that be don't give birth to the anti-structures that overcome them because the structure itself feeds a capital dynamo that integrates its own self-surpassing. A suffocating state of limbo where innovation is only defined within the boundaries of market axioms and the timeline of "the future" is only measured relative to the convergence of exponential technologies.

This temporal dimension explains why liminal spaces feel so uncanny. They exist in a suspended now that references a commodified past while pointing toward no viable future. The empty mall doesn't just remind us of when it was full. It shows us the hollowed-out shell of what capital does to social spaces once they've outlived their profit-generating function.

Not all liminal spaces are abandoned commercial spaces. Some are spaces, such as hotels or even homes, that display a combination of design monoculture and a view angle that shows seemingly endless hallways with no entry or exits in sight. The eeriness here comes from more overt disorientation and a sort of vertigo, rather than palpable emptiness and loss. Both induce a hypnagogia by depicting forms of social psychosis. Doors may be open but we cannot see what is beyond.

Populism and Fascism exploit the paranoia present in neurotic desire, leading people to fear a lack or a loss of something important. The schizophrenic liminal becomes a site of particular vulnerability here because it represents both the spatial reality of abandoned places and the metaphorical condition of social existence under postmodernity.

The liminality that fascism exploits is precisely the loss of traditional categories: nation, family, community, work without a proper reterritorialization into new coherent forms. Instead, we get the hollow shells of these categories, maintained as aesthetic or ideological references while their substantive organizing power has been evacuated. This is why liminal spaces function as both literal architectural phenomena and virtual actualities of our broader social condition.

The anxiety produced by these deterritorialized spaces, both physical and social, creates the sense that something essential has been lost. This provides fertile ground for reactionary politics that promise to restore what never actually existed in the first place. The false dichotomies proliferate precisely in this space, where the absence of genuine reterritorialization leaves people grasping for any organizing principle that might reduce the disorientation.

The cultural zeitgeist of "liminal spaces" emerging online represents a self-referential mirroring that is a consequence of the internet increasingly showing signs of the fragmentation and ambiguity present in the culture, while simultaneously amplifying it. This is not accidental. The internet itself operates as a vast schizophrenic liminal space, deterritorializing traditional forms of communication, community, knowledge, and identity while reterritorializing them as data, content, and user engagement.

This phenomenon manifests in the emergence of liminal ambient music3 which is made with soundscapes designed to accompany images of empty spaces, featuring bass with hovering, suction-like properties, deep layered textures, and eery, repetitive melodies. Often voices are processed beyond recognition to sound ethereal and otherworldly. These sonic environments don't simply soundtrack nostalgia; they create affective spaces that resonate with our collective sense of being suspended between worlds. The music becomes a technology for inhabiting the schizophrenic liminal, providing a soundtrack for the experience.

We experience this in our rehashing of old ideas in music, movies, and video games. A lot of them are being remade outright and many familiar concepts are being recycled. This is not simply nostalgia but anterograde amnesia, the inability to make new memories. Mark Fisher observed that “we have lost loss itself.”4 This creates an eerie cultural state of eating itself and redoing everything, modifying the initial innocence without adding anything new to the cultural zeitgeist. The only place with real novelty is the world of bits and information themselves. Ironically, this is the world intensifying liminality, because it makes more ambiguous where we are, who we are with, and who is against us.

Do we need reterritorialization? This question points toward the far side of liminality. Do we need new roles within new symbolic orders, or should we strive for sustained deterritorialization, what could be called "bodies without organs" in the social sense, never taking on too much meaning, identity and self-hood, just enough to remain healthy?

Sustained or total deterritorialization remains a theoretical possibility, but the question is whether human consciousness can sustain such a state without falling into either psychosis or being recaptured by capital's reterritorializing mechanisms. The schizophrenic liminal suggests that we're already partially there, trapped in a space that is neither fully territorialized nor genuinely deterritorialized.

There are these prevalent feelings that nothing quite "tastes" like it used to. Something haunts us. Some pop-theories even go as far as suggesting that we died a while ago and still persist as ghosts. However, there's something to the sentiment behind these fringe theories. The sentiment that we're stuck in a world we feel estranged from. In the man-made darkness of cultural commodification, war, ecological devastation, lies a bloom of creation, of love, of beauty. We can retain the possibility of imagining the future as something different than the present, at least as something that the present isn't.

If we could break down local squabbles in a properly dialectical manner, we could perhaps recover a vision of a global people who may not be divided by religion or self-contradictory social beings. It is not a ridiculous statement to say that most of human suffering is imaginary in the sense that ideologies are totalizing assumptions that have formed convincing systems and make groups of people incompatible both in the content and the existential fervor of their ideology.

The schizophrenic liminal thus becomes both symptom and potential cure. As symptom, it represents capital's commodification of even our spaces of transition and transformation. As potential cure, it points toward the possibility of genuine anti-structure. Spaces and practices that cannot be immediately recuperated by capital's logic.

The task is learning to inhabit these spaces without being captured by the nostalgic reterritorialization that turns them into aesthetic commodities or the reactionary politics that promises to restore what was never really there. This requires what I would call critical navigation: the ability to move through liminal spaces while maintaining awareness of their contradictory nature.

The schizophrenic liminal is not a place but a process, one that reveals both the exhaustion of current forms and the embryonic possibilities of what might emerge beyond them. Understanding this process is crucial for any genuine politics of transformation, because it's precisely in these spaces where the future gets decided: either through reactionary capture or through the difficult work of building new forms of collective life that don't immediately collapse back into capital's gravitational pull.