The Schizophrenic Liminal

Navigating the eerie voids between worlds

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 what I call 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—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 what I call 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.

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’ anti-Œdipe, Capitalisme et schizophrénie / Gilles Deleuze; Félix Guattari 1 (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 2012).

2. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Routledge, 2017).

3. Liminal Ambient: Gen Z's Answer to LoFi – a video essay by Venus Theory.

4. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero books, 2022).