The Far Side of Liminality
On the ritualization of structure and the cybernetics of suspended futures
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.
Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks), Notebook 3, §34. Gramsci’s own words run: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The widely quoted “now is the time of monsters” is a later, looser rendering (popularized in English largely through Slavoj Žižek), not a literal translation.
Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969; repr. London: Routledge, 2017), drawn from his fieldwork among the Ndembu of north-western Zambia. The threshold framing of rites de passage originates with Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage (1909).
Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?", The National Interest 16 (1989); expanded as The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
Jean Baudrillard, L'Illusion de la fin: ou la grève des événements (Paris: Galilée, 1992); English: The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
The mechanism has been described from several directions: as récupération by the Situationists, as repressive tolerance by Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" (1965), and most systematically by Luc Boltanski & Ève Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999) / The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005), which traces how the artistic critique of the 1960s was absorbed as management doctrine.
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, L'Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1972); and Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), on deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014). See also Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016) / Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity, 2019); and Beschleunigung (2005) / Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
"Anemoia": nostalgia for a time one has never known, was coined by John Koenig on his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows around 2012, collected in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021).
Mark Feldon, »Von der Sehnsucht zur Simulation«, in: casablanca – Texte zur falschen Zeit, N° 1/2026. The reflective/restorative vocabulary derives from Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), chapters 1–2 and 6.
Heinz von Foerster, "Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics" (1992), reprinted in Understanding Understanding (New York: Springer, 2003). The imperative: "Act always so as to increase the number of choices."
The distinction is Nietzsche’s, from the notebooks of autumn 1887: “Der Nihilism. Er ist zweideutig.” Active nihilism as a sign of the increased power of the spirit, passive nihilism as its decline (Nachgelassene Fragmente, Herbst 1887 bis März 1888).