A World Turned Upside Down: Permanent Liminality and the 'Unreal Reality' of Hypermodernity

Modernity generates a condition of radical existential homelessness, a voiding of presence which renders large areas of life meaningless and unreal. Yet, while this is an inescapable part of the lived experience of modernity, explored in countless works of literature and art, mainstream sociology appears singularly ill-equipped to grapple with and understand it. Mired in scientism and progressivism, the dominant quantitative and critical approaches simply cannot recognise this existential condition, let alone understand it. The work of Arpad Szakolczai stands out amid contemporary social theory in addressing this absurd quality of modern life as a central concern, exploring the historical developments which led to it, and providing a series of keys to understanding and perhaps overcoming this condition. For Szakolczai, the contemporary world in which we live is not in a normal, ordinary situation, but is rather the consequence of a series of liminal events. Key terms in political anthropology, such as liminality, trickster logic, and substitution, offer ways of understanding this paradoxical ‘unreal reality’ modernity, and how it has come about through successive cycles of liminal crisis, subversion and transformation; while others, such as gift or charis-logic, offer pointers to thinking beyond it. This paper aims to explore some of the insights into the ‘unreal reality’ of contemporary life offered by this approach.