06.12.23Liminality and the Modern + Critique of Everyday Life

From the intro of Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between by Bjørn Thomassen:

• Liminality refers to moments or periods of transition during which the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction and destruction
  …
  liminality also involves a peculiar kind of unsettling situation in which nothing really matters… freedom and anxiety (they do belong together) are condensed into liminal moments. Nothing really matters, and yet, deeply paradoxically, meaning often becomes over-determined
  …
  Liminality reminds us of the moment we left our parents’ home, that mixture of joy and anxiety, that strange combination of freedom and homelessness; that pleasant but unsettling sensation of infinity and openness of possibilities which — at some moment, sooner or later — will start searching for a new frame to settle within. And if it does not, the void will perpetuate, and anxiety with it.

concepts are good to think with, but they do not bear their meaning within themselves

• Liminality explains nothing. Liminality is. It happens. It takes place.
  …
  the centralization and permanance of liminality has established fear, anxiety, scepticism and doubt as anthropological foundations

As Thomassen argues, modernity is an everchanging, infinite horizon of indeterminate endings. Infinity appears when structure is absent. The present is the vantage point, but it is not the future.

From Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre:

Will there ever be anything great which is not dehumanized — or a form of happiness which is not tinged with mediocrity?

(foreword, section 5)

• People who gather flowers and nothing but flowers tend to look upon soil as something dirty

  (foreword, section 8)

—

• genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order to the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. To this deep and joyful curiosity must be attributed to that stare, animal-like in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new.

  — Charles Baudelaire (chapter 1)

I lack the awe of a child nowadays, but find solace and humor in the bizarre of the everyday, seeing things as they are, not glazing over them as untextured public occurrences. Not talking about intentional spectacles (e.g. tiktok dumbassery), but bizarre realities so common and embedded they go unacknowledged — novel vs. authentic — only observable, not preemptively thought. Spontaneous. Emergent rather than produced. Non-performative. This is why I love my cat and John Wilson. And to a degree, formerly working at a grocery store and witnessing everyday passersby.

• ‘What is faith? A rope from which we dangle, unless we use it to hang ourselves with’
  …
  any positive attempts to be free become nothing more than the skillful exploitation of chance in relations founded on money (markets, sales, inheritance, etc.) and the skillful use of money according to the whim of the ‘free’ individual

  (chapter 3)

—

• ‘irrationality’ was the human, the entire living being. We know that, philosophically and humanly speaking, the irrational has rebelled, that because it was considered ‘absurd’, it has deliberately made its rebellion an absurd one, and that it has raised the flag of the absurd as a challenge to reason. And this is one aspect of the crisis of modern man and modern culture: they are split between abstract reason on the one hand and an absurdity which wants and believes itself to be ‘vital’ on the other, torn between two opposites which seem locked forever in a painful and apparently unresolvable confrontation.

  For dialectical thought, it is not and never can be a question of some self-sufficient ‘irrationality’ doomed to eternal rejection by an equally changeless Rationality. The irrational can only be relative, momentary: it is whatever has not been subsumed, organized and categorized by active Reason.
  …
  How does such an obvious contrast between a science proud of its triumphs and the humiliation and uncertainty of human lives come about?
  …
  nowadays, we do not know how we live. And at the end of our lives, we scarcely know how we lived them.

  (chapter 4)

It is humiliating to be alive :,) I want to lean into that.