(deep)Time and (liminal)Space
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term liminality, you’re no doubt familiar with the experience. French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep’s concept of liminality is an experience of existing simultaneously on both sides of a boundary–existing inside of a transition.
On a small scale, liminal spaces are uncomfortable and frustrating. Spaces like waiting rooms, ill-suited host stands, customer service holds, traffic, and those weird moments before a zoom meeting are some of the boundaries we regularly straddle without too much thought or attention (depending on where we live on the neurodivergence spectrum).
But larger liminal spaces can cause existential angst and trauma: middle school, divorce, prolonged illness, a pandemic, losing a loved one, war.
I think we are currently experiencing a biosphere-wide liminal space that is too large to comprehend. Like all hyperobjects, it’s hard to get far enough outside of this liminal space to see it, let alone make any sense of it. It is a liminality that defies our understanding of time and space, a transition so big–physically and temporally–that it’s unlikely anyone alive today will be around to see it through.
Right now, we are likely living in the space between two geological times. And this is a very uncomfortable place to be.
First, let’s do a quick refresher on how most of us experienced geological time. We probably conceptualized it through a colorful table in our Earth Science books or a laminated poster on a teacher’s wall. It probably looked something like this.
If there was a “You are here” arrow, it would be at the tippy-top of that chart. We are currently living in the epoch called the Holocene. It’s characterized by roughly 12,000 years of climate stability; that same stability is what allowed us humans to grow exponentially.
Many scientists are wondering if the Holocene might already be over. But earlier this year, the International Union of Geological Sciences decided not to call an official end to the Holocene. They said it isn’t yet time to begin our next geological age.
I’ve tried to imagine how people would’ve reacted if the vote went the other way. What does one do with the information that they’ve crossed into a new geological age. The geologist that wanted to end the Holocene were likely hoping to ramp up our urgency and strengthen our commitment to phasing out fossil fuel consumption and production. And while I understand the power of heightened urgency, the decisions and policies made under duress are rarely our species’ best work. Maybe endcapping the Holocene would usher in doomsday panic followed by waves of ecofascism.
Most likely though, Science Twitter would yell at regular Twitter. The Internet would respond with a new generation of self-soothing memes. There would be t’shirts and theme parties and people would move on.
Considering the way human temporality works–and the amount of time most people spend not thinking about geological epochs–drawing the line on a geological time chart is probably not the important part. In my mind, the transitions between geological times were always clear and solid. They are singular and explosive moments that instantly rerouted the physicality of earth. But the spaces between time on these tables aren’t just fast moving meteors or volcanic eruptions that usher in mass extinctions. Time also unfolds through periods of destabilization, intervals of accelerated melting, freezing, decaying, acidifying, warming, burning, flooding, etc.
Since our current world-wide experiences with climatic destabilization don’t resemble a singular destructive moment or a solid line on a geological chart, it’s easy to pretend that we aren’t living within one of these huge transitions.
More important than drawing these lines is realizing that we’re living through a geological transition that will eventually become one of those lines.
Self-awareness doesn’t make a liminal space go away, but it does allow us to make the time we spend in those spaces more meaningful. Liminal spaces are teeming with imagination, emergence, possibility. Liminal spaces are full of maybes.
Even if geologists can’t agree that the Holocene is over, they have agreed on what to call the next geological age: the Anthropocene, an age named after the species that made it happen.
Maybe when future geologists look back with the clarity of hindsight, they’ll decide that we were never actually in the Holocene. Maybe it was over with Oppenheimer and Einstein, Ford and Tesla, Eli Whitney and James Watt. Maybe they will draw those lines with the Cartesian split or go all the way back to Aristotle, whose thinking inspired Descartes to separate the entire Western world from the earth beneath its feet.
Maybe we are all children of the Anthropocene, and maybe we will never know it.
These and all the infinite maybes in between.
