As someone with a keen interest in counterculture, I frequently encounter panegyrics to liminality. Simply put, liminality is where you agree to exist on the margins of mainstream society - or at least to retreat from it from time to time or in certain ways - in return for a quiet life or because you believe that it is only in this way that certain communal attributes that you seek to cultivate can flourish.
This idea has a long history and many forms. To illustrate its antiquity, one can think of the Essenes - the Jewish sect behind the Dead Sea scrolls - living in caves awaiting what they took to be an imminent worldly apocalypse. The Cathars withdrew from society in order to practise their religious rites without interference. Tragically, the King of France had no desire to leave them alone. In another form, secret societies often limit to the maximum what any member knows about any other member or about the doctrines of the society, in order, ostensibly, to avoid these doctrines being revealed to potentially hostile forces (though they may also have a public face - civic duty was very much stressed in Theosophy even whilst they (duh) “kept out of politics”). Even if I don’t know what I don’t know, history seems to teach that leaks anyway occur. Situationism contributed to anchoring the idea of liminality in the theory of urban spaces, discovering what was there, but simultaneously wasn’t. More recently we also have Hakim Bey’s notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone - what we would now call a “pop up” version of community that is nimble enough to pack up and move on before being suppressed and outlawed. This is the idea that lies at the root of the Burning Man festival. Graham St John makes a big deal of this concept in his study of the Goa Movement Global Tribe. Boom Festival has its Liminal Village. And the list goes on.
At the same time, we have numerous communities which seek to live in an autonomous way, off-the-grid, using techniques of permaculture and imagining themselves (presumably) as able to evade the grand forces of history much as did the inhabitants of Huxley’s ill-fated Island. This idea has a long history (consider the Amish), but also appears to be a recent trend. And of course there are many people who have little choice than to eke out a living on the margins of society, a phenomenon described (but inexplicably romanticized) in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World.
The liminal has something mystical about it. It is often linked to altered states of consciousness, which are liminal not in a cultural or geographic sense, but in a psychological or even metaphysical one. The euphony with “luminal” and with Otto’s and Jung’s theorizing of the “numinous” further contributes to this assimilation.
All of this is perfectly understandable, but its shadow side is rarely evoked. On the contrary, it seems that for many, being liminal is accompanied by a considerable sentiment of superiority. It is much more than a regrettable apparent necessity but a ritual purification and consecration, with shades of escape, Buddhist style, from the cycle of earthly suffering. The consequence of this in the aggregate is that there is a massive amount of knowledge derived from communal experiences which is unknown to the mainstream, which meanwhile continues on its uneventful meandering route to oblivion. We should at least question what this achieves - whether we have not spent enough time incubating things and it is not now more opportune to disseminate those things more widely and to convince those who need convincing.
Hiding in the shadows may be a necessity, but often it is a sign of temerity. This is then rationalized as deriving from the nature of things or from an objective need for discretion. It is literally making a virtue of a necessity that may no longer be, or may even never have been, necessary. Politely put, this is a cop-out and an illusion. It exposes those few who are nevertheless courageous enough to articulate a public message, and it’s frankly self-indulgent. The solutions we need have mostly been incubated for centuries; we are running out of time to apply them.
The most recent and most egregiously absurd manifestation of this tendency (though also this is not really recent) is “prepping”. Here is a typical nonsensical example. At time of writing, one of the headlines is “11 plants you can use as soap”. Believe me, if you can’t get hold of soap you won’t be surfing the internet on your smartphone to read that article. Things will have gotten so bad that I am not sure I even care to survive in the world which is being contemplated.
Embracing impotence and irrelevance is, surely, what the architects of that putative coming catastrophe want you to do. But shouldn’t we be more concerned with averting it in the first place? Isn’t that where our ethical obligation lies? Instead of throwing our toys out of the cot in a fit of anger?
As I say, I am not sure who needs to hear this, but I think there is material here for significant self-examination. The ethics of coming out has rightly been problematized in the gay community. The principle applies to everyone. Whether you will ultimately be unable to hide, out of a sense of solidarity, or because you have something to share with the world that needs to be shared, retreat is a tempting option but one which may be immoral, futile or dangerous. We shouldn’t be celebrating our ability to survive in the wreckage of late capitalist culture - we should be engaging in public life in order to ensure that all of us have a future.
I'm teetering. It's less about whether I want to use leaves as soap as it is being around likeminded people that don't make me feel like shaking my head all day long. I prefer being around likeminded people, pets, or no one versus the alternative. Nothing wrong with that.