My friends, I love the concept of liminal space. To me, it has a lot to say about digitization.
The concept of liminal space is an architectural one, and probably has a lot in tandem with phenomenology in that it’s all about the spaces within which we experience things. I should say at this juncture I’m not an architect or a geographer, so if I’m off with my associations please shout out in the comments or via my Twitter.
What it is right to say is that whether it’s reviewing a manuscript within an archive, walking through a town centre square or watching a horror movie in a darkened room at night, we have set ideas as to what these places look like, and how they operate, when we’re in them.
Liminal spaces are, essentially, waiting areas: passages from one physical place to the next. So, think corridors, side streets, featureless waiting rooms. Places within which we’re not really expected to stay for any significant length of time. From an etymological perspective, the meaning of the word (from the Latin, limen, meaning threshold) we understand that within the liminal space we exist with an expectation that something will happen. That may simply be passing from one place to the next. Or it may be more. But the expectation is the thrill.
Liminal spaces give me the fucking super creeps on a very deep level. I’ve actually moved house because of how scared I became of the staircase. And I ran through the English Department building at Aberystwyth University one evening when I found myself there after hours, the timed lighting in one long corridor snuffing out behind me, one bulb after another, until I burst, practically screaming, through the front double doors and out into the night.
For movie afficionados, David Lynch is probably the master of the liminal space, in part because he fucks with our notion of time and how long we’ve spent somewhere (think Twin Peaks in particular, with its circular timescale through which there is no ending, but the beginning again) and because within Lynchian liminal space, concepts such as morality, and evil, are destabilised. Within this space, we perhaps find that the old rules don’t apply.
Lynch exists as much in the tiny, forgotten spaces around us as he does in the liminal…inaccessible spaces – just because we can’t see them, doesn’t mean they don’t hold life, and power. In ‘Lynch on Lynch’, he speaks of his fascination with the tiny half-inch space between a door and the carpet – what might happen there? There’s power and mystery in invisible, yet ever-present spaces.
Mark Lewis, co-host, Jack of All Graves podcast.
Liminal space when considered through the lens of a medieval manuscript can be something altogether different again. In Stabibliothek, Nuremberg, Cent. VII, 88, for example, the insertion of a woodcut showing the crucifixion performs a far more meaningful task than mere ornament.
The insertion not only fostered the…user’s meditations upon Christ’s Passion, but also offered them a participatory experience of lifting and lowering the image: a performative gesture that activated the nuns’ bodies, engaging them somatically…the placement of the woodcut [also] fulfilled a distinct mnemonic task by reminding the reader/user about the role of the crucifix in medieval funerary rituals…the Crucifixion insertion is staged, therefore, as a threshold of sorts: an unfixed boundary between physical, devotional, and temporal loci; a liminal space between the material and the imaginary…
Gertsman & Stevenson, Limning the Field, in Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces, 2012 pp.1-2
Liminal spaces in the medieval world, then, are not simply to be found at the doors of churches, shaded wooded glades, or the grave, but within the folio of medieval manuscripts; text, imagery, illuminated borders, framed miniatures, golden bejewelled covers, can all be seen as liminal spaces, through which the reader negotiates to attain meaning; the manuscript as a whole could even be said to be the liminal space between the allegorical and the truth of a thing.
Liminality is at the root of the Holy Trinity, as well: God the Father, the Son AND the Holy Spirit? Seemingly all things, and none, but also individual entities who exist simultaneously and separately from one another. So is a manuscript reflecting medieval theology the ultimate liminal space? Perhaps this is reflected somewhat in the marginalia we see in some medieval manuscripts. They almost feel like acts of rebellion, outside of the rules and strictures of the main body of the text – further evidence yet of the physical manuscript being a bridge between thought and thing.
Now to the digital. I can’t help but feel like the digital is a liminal space itself, of sorts; a threshold between our current understanding of materiality, and the new materiality of a digitised artefact (because it does have materiality – see the work of Kirschenbaum and Endres, together with some seriously great thinking from academics like Johanna Green, Dot Porter and Bridget Whearty).
But whilst I can perhaps argue the case for the digital as a liminal space, I don’t find digital manuscripts creepy in the same way as, say, a long darkened corridor with a well-lit doorway at one end, or an empty bathroom filled with unoccupied stalls. Is it the physicality, the materiality, of a real-world liminal space that I find so daunting? Does a digital liminal space provide me with the illusion of control, in a way that the physical world does not?
I have also, in the past, argued that the digital is perhaps our ultimate destination (see ‘From the Divine to the Digital: digitization as resurrection & reconstruction‘ in Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age), and that it provides us with the sort of bodily resurrection envisaged by medieval scribes. So in that analogy the digital is the ultimate destination – not a liminal space at all.
But there’s something so, well, wooooo about the digital. Something so seemingly transitory, which plays by different rules and messes with our understanding of what is real.
So, what’s a theorist to do?
Luckily I’m not supposed to have all the answers, and certainly not in the first blog post I’ve managed to rattle out since February this year (2021, am I right?) but I’m creeping tentatively towards something. I just need to reach out into the cold dark beyond and pull it back in with me, into this warm room with the soft furnishings and the ambient lighting.
As a final observation, I’d posit that many of us have existed in the last two years within a liminal space, between pre-COVID and post-COVID worlds, wherein a Lynchian expansion and retraction of time has occurred, and when many of us have felt that we are in suspended animation, waiting for life to begin again. The fact that so many of us have relied on the digital, a potential liminal space within a liminal experience, is pretty fascinating to me.
Picture yourself, in the dark hours of a late night, looking up to see the outline of a well-lit doorway reflected in your computer screen.
Is there something coming through it?
Dr Keri Thomas 
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