A guest blog by Limanalist Ben Hennessy-Garside

“What is a liminalist?” asked Dan Edelstyn in a recent message exchange after I listed it as one of the things I am. Edelstyn, alongside his wife Hilary Powell are overlady and lord of a wonderful artistic / economic / technological / documentary / community building and strengthening project named POWER.

Here’s an attempt at an answer…

The first time I began describing myself as a liminalist came as a result of meeting with three other beautiful humans. One of us was I, from a Northern English town, another was from the USA, a third from Canada and a fourth from Germany. We began meeting regularly after meeting on a facebook forum, set-up for those interested in the attempt to try to work out “what next?” known as “game~b”

(http://gameb.wiki/index.php?title=An_Introduction_to_Game_B).

I found game~b to be a nice way to conceptualise the thing beyond current civilisational problems and the people in and adjacent to the community to be really interesting people. One thing the four of us shared though, was that we felt the game~b community of the day was a bit short of art, a little too academic and wordy, too eager to divide reality into little chunks. We met to see where a focus on art in a game~b context led us and ended up disappearing down our own wonderful rabbit hole.

In his book “The Master and His Emissary”, apparently (I haven’t read it, I really should…) Iain McGilchrist describes the two hemispheres of the brain. One is meant to be holistic, open; the other focused on specifics, rational. Apparently in the book, he also mentions that all forms of learning, come to us as metaphore. Whether it did say that or not (as I say, I didn’t read it), this is of course true. We can’t learn anything new, without first mapping it to what we already know; our brains use previous building blocks of understanding to fashion new mental models or maps of reality. In response to one of us reading the book, we thought we’d start playing with metaphore.

Without much planning, we began building a collectively constructed metaphorical world to help flesh out a vision for what we might do together. The result seemed to be really interesting and compelling, involving emergent and freely associated imagery, often dream-like and yet full of meaning. A cultural construction which led us to a shared imaginal world. Things started to get a bit freaky, when some of this work with metaphore and symbol began leaking into our “real” lives. I remember discovering a deep wish to pick-up and drop off my children from / to school more often as a result of the emergent imagery which came up during a session of “symbolic thinking” (we came up with names to describe slightly different practices emerging from the group, symbolic thinking was one of them). I started doing just that and it made me very happy to do so. I knew it wasn’t a chore, the act feeling less plain and more meaningful, when motivated by both my artistic / spiritual self AND my planning / dry data “leave house at this time, follow this routine” self (for more on what we did and if you’re happy listening to lengthy, meandering content, you could start here: https://youtu.be/6WPHLUqYdSQ).

It was in this context that we began noticing that these practices were liminal practices. We were engaging in explorations of the border between two or more (sometimes paradoxical constructs): the imaginal / the concrete, the unconscious / the conscious, the emergent / the known, the left brain / the right brain, yin / yang, question / answer etc.

That we met in a Facebook group aimed at trying to move us from one epoch (Game A) to another (Game B) was not a coincidence. After we named ourselves and our field “Liminology”, one of the folks hanging around the scene from whence we came (I believe independently, but a scene is only that if those in it talk to each other, so maybe not?), Joe Lightfoot, wrote an article, declaring the name of the scene “The Liminal Web” (https://www.joelightfoot.org/post/the-liminal-web-mapping-an-emergent-subculture-of-sensemakers-meta-theorists-systems-poets).

Due to all this, I refer to myself as a Liminalist sometimes.

The Power project, alluded to in the introduction, is certainly a Liminal project. It asks challenging questions about the distinctions between Art, Economics, Technology, Community, Energy Supply, Media etc. It’s a Liminal solution, in a liminal time. A time between worlds, where many of the old assumptions (about say, how we provide energy for ourselves, how we work together to meet our needs etc.) are falling away. Democratic structures seem to be failing, economic systems too, communication and media systems are shifting (broadcast modalities such as film and this very article are on the out, dialogical modalities in which content is co-created with audience are on the in), the need to hold both “the global” and “the local” in our minds simultaneously and looking at how we navigate the boundary between them and / or hold both simultaneously is becoming more and more important. We need more people like Dan and Hilary and projects like Power, willing to enter and learn to deal with, the liminal gap between whatever is and whatever might be.

WHAT IS A LIMINALIST?

ENERGY CRISIS ADVICE AND LISTENING EVENING

PLAYING FANTASY PRIME MINISTER

POWER