Liminality - this word I remembered from some module...
Last semester I studied a module that had this cute little term called 'liminality'. Not entirely sure what the term meant, but the term seemed to have this meaning of 'here, not-here' kind of meaning. How strange - that a single word could be used to refer to a condition of contradiction! Being a social scientist/philosopher/thinker, I can't help but be amazed by the human mind to come up with a word, that in itself, is a contradiction. The only fall-back I can hold on to, is the probability function of quantum mechanics, the equations that say that an electron has a x% chance of being here, and a y% chance of being 'there'...
So what does that mean? A very simple application has simply been that the word nicely describes life - the personal lives that we live. Our experiences are experiences of transition; we are constantly in the in-between, not entirely in the present, but never stepping entirely into the future. Hence 'liminal' - we are never quite in the here-and-now, but neither are we in the 'there-and-then'.
Emotional, and intellectual, and the other things we experiences - they are all Janus-faced. The experiences are syntheses of our past and historical experiences, but they also project forward into our own futures.
The lives lived illustrate that we are never quite one thing at a time, but at any given moment, we are multiple things all at once. For some of us, the situation could be us being students but also lover, researchers, thinkers, community-leaders, and all of that, rolled into the same 24hrs that everyone lives through. Here I am, working and studying at the same time, constantly trying to move out of the present, and wanting to leap right in the future, which, as we all know, becomes always, the present.
How weird, to deny the present that always fades away, to want to enter into the future that always fades away too.
An ANT (some fancy sociologically-minded theory) would want to trace the geographical, sociological relationships between people and objects - how the electrons from my batery in my laptop are fluttering away to servers in America and fluttering back to my screen becoming photons that enter my eyes, and back to electrons in the neurotransmitters in my mind. Yet there is also that movement in time - that none of this happens simultaneously, of the onrushing future that fades away immediately into the past. I want to trace too, the movements in time that always accompanies the movements in space. I am in the present, dripping into the future; the flow of time that would be, had just flowed. I trace those associations into the past as soon as the future happens...
Oh well...
The lives lived illustrate that we are never quite one thing at a time, but at any given moment, we are multiple things all at once. For some of us, the situation could be us being students but also lover, researchers, thinkers, community-leaders, and all of that, rolled into the same 24hrs that everyone lives through. Here I am, working and studying at the same time, constantly trying to move out of the present, and wanting to leap right in the future, which, as we all know, becomes always, the present.
How weird, to deny the present that always fades away, to want to enter into the future that always fades away too.
An ANT (some fancy sociologically-minded theory) would want to trace the geographical, sociological relationships between people and objects - how the electrons from my batery in my laptop are fluttering away to servers in America and fluttering back to my screen becoming photons that enter my eyes, and back to electrons in the neurotransmitters in my mind. Yet there is also that movement in time - that none of this happens simultaneously, of the onrushing future that fades away immediately into the past. I want to trace too, the movements in time that always accompanies the movements in space. I am in the present, dripping into the future; the flow of time that would be, had just flowed. I trace those associations into the past as soon as the future happens...
Oh well...
Posts
