Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality PDF
Preview Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality
Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences Brady Wagoner Tania Zittoun Editors Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences Series Editor Jaan Valsiner Department of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences will fill in the gap in the existing coverage of links between new theoretical advancements in the social and human sciences and their historical roots. Making that linkage is crucial for the interdisciplinary synthesis across the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, semiotics, and the political sciences. In contemporary human sciences of the 21st there exists increasing differentiation between neurosciences and all other sciences that are aimed at making sense of the complex social, psychological, and political processes. Thus new series has the purpose of (1) coordinating such efforts across the borders of existing human and social sciences, (2) providing an arena for possible inter-disciplinary theoretical syntheses, (3) bring into attention of our contemporary scientific community innovative ideas that have been lost in the dustbin of history for no good reasons, and (4) provide an arena for international communication between social and human scientists across the World. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15826 Brady Wagoner • Tania Zittoun Editors Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality Editors Brady Wagoner Tania Zittoun Communication and Psychology FLSH - Psychology & Education Aalborg University University of Neuchatel Aalborg, Denmark Neuchâtel, Switzerland ISSN 2523-8663 ISSN 2523-8671 (electronic) Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences ISBN 978-3-030-83170-7 ISBN 978-3-030-83171-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83171-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Series Editor’s PREFACE to Stenner Volume Liminality Fields as the Arenas for Development This volume brings together three venerable traditions in the social sciences. First, there is the anthropological look at loosely organized social fields in between other structured ones. These have been known as liminal zones. At the same time, it is the systematic look at development—emphasized in developmental science—that focuses on the phenomena in-between the ones that have already emerged and those in the process of emergence. These liminal zones organized in irreversible time are often considered to be zones of proximal development (Valsiner and van der Veer, 2014). In development, liminality is the obligatory part of the basic process— whether we look at human or societal development, the immediate future that looms at the present is not yet structured. It is in-between what is and what is not yet. Finally, from the perspective of dynamic semiosis, the ever-present field of existen- tial liminality is the garden for growing hierarchies of signs that regulate both the present state and feed-forward to the future. On the one hand, there is the experience of always living forward—into the future that rapidly becomes the transitory pres- ent to move into the past. This feature of developmental inevitability—facing the future—guarantees that liminality has the central place in all psychology. All psy- chological phenomena are therefore necessarily developmental in their nature. On the other hand, however, the human psychological organization is set up to elim- inate liminality by way of various order-generating devices—categorization, gestalt formation, and construction of meaning hierarchies that operate on the border of the future and the past. Due to their powerful presence, it is possible for psychology to ontologically assume a non-developmental perspective on the world. So, what really is experience-in-becoming is easily treated as experience-as-is. This has been the neces- sary myopia of psychology as science since its beginning. The explication of liminality in this volume corrects this epistemological error. In this volume, Stenner introduces liminal affective technologies (LAT) that are on the border of liminality fields. Liminality can only be described in field-theoretical terms. Liminality fields have uncertain borders—the end of a liminality field and the beginning of a v vi Series Editor’s PREFACE to Stenner Volume non- liminal object are not well demarcated. This is exemplified by the notion of borders that Alan Rayner (2017) has elaborated. Any state of liminality (being in- between) seen in irreversible time is the arena for development. As such, it is a step towards the anticipated but not yet formed future. This specific feature of liminality sets up specific demands for theoretical con- structions that are needed for arriving at a general understanding of human lives as approximately organized. The phenomena involved are liminality fields—domains extending in the space of life experiences, being bordered by the present that demar- cates future from the past. Field-theoretic applications have entered into psychology from physics over the last century—yet with variable success. The efforts by Kurt Lewin in the 1930s to introduce the field notions together with vector algebra became extinct in a few decades—so by the end of the twentieth century, it had basi- cally vanished. The avalanche of the social normativity of quantification in data derivation and the reliance on averages and prototypes rather than ranges of varia- tion had exiled the thinking in terms of fields, manifolds, and vectors from psycho- logical theorizing. The result is that in 2021 we need to restart the theoretical and methodological constructions that would be adequate to liminality fields. Theorizing liminality fields leads us to rediscovering of the tradition of Ganzheitspsychologie that was developed in Leipzig and other research centers in Germany in the 1910s to around 1950—after which it died out (Diriwächter, 2013). The focus on wholes as organized systems—even if that organization was vague and approx- imate—was novel for psychology of the twentieth century. The original presenters of that tradition—Felix Krueger and his colleagues—had many phenomenological exam- ples of wholes that function only as such—not being reducible to their elements. Yet they did not develop explanatory conceptual systems of sufficiently abstract kind. This became possible within the semiotic turn in cultural psychology in the twenty-first cen- tury. The general principle is that of hierarchical (yet dynamic) organization of sign systems—based on the basic biological notion of the inhibition of the inhibitor that leads to action. This is paired with the notion of signs as extendable (into field-like signs) and constrictable (into point-like signs); the sign regulation of liminality fields takes theo- retical forms that maintain the field nature of the experience and simultaneously struc- ture its functions. This is theoretically impossible if the notion of signs is limited to points (categories). Sign hierarchies are constantly being constructed to make sense (=de-liminalize) different parts of the liminality fields. This semiotic organization of liminality fields leads to the concept of liminal metastability. According to Stenner, this is apparent when a person goes through a spontaneous liminal experience that sets up an affective generalized structure—a melody of ongoing experience. There is stability in affective non-stability that lingers on in irreversible time—creating an illusion of “being”—while it is a meta-level organizer of becoming. This volume is a new form of a continuing effort at making sense of the cultural cen- trality of human living that was rapidly advancing in 2013–2018 in Aalborg at the Niels Bohr Professorship Centre of Cultural Psychology. The series of scholarly volumes that was started then included an internationally representative study of the ideas of comple- mentarity in human psychology (Wagoner et al., 2014; Wagoner and Carriere, 2020) and looking at human bodies in their movement withi n contexts (Wagoner et al., 2015). The topics of imagination (Wagoner et al., 2017), democracy (Wagoner et al., 2018), and Series Editor’s PREFACE to Stenner Volume vii memory (Wagoner et al., 2020) were also of central relevance in the intellectual innova- tion during the 5-year period of the Niels Bohr Centre which was a high time of interna- tionalization of the state of affairs in psychology in Denmark. It fulfilled its goal internationally—with the help of the Danish Basic Science Foundation—a substantive series of workshops in Brazil, India, Estonia, and Germany found themselves supported by the Danish forward-oriented view on international proliferation of knowledge. This volume is the first result of the continuation of the international scholarship led by the Centre of Cultural Psychology in Aalborg since the end of the Niels Bohr Centre in 2018. It continues the international integration of ideas in a new way. I hope that readers will understand the topic of both liminality itself and liminality in new idea generation in the social sciences that are constantly under the influence of various societal expectations. References Diriwächter, R. (2013). Structure and hierarchies in Ganzheitspsychologie. In L. Rudolph (Ed.), Qualitative mathematics for the social sciences (pp. 90–126). Routledge Rayner, A. (2017). The origin of life patterns in the natural inclusion of space in flux. Springer Valsiner, J., & van der Veer, R. (2014). Encountering the border: Vygotsky’s zona blizaishego razvitya and its implications for theory of development. In A. Yasnitsky, R. van der Veer and M. Ferrari (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-H istorical Psychology (pp. 148–173). Cambridge University Press. Wagoner, B., Chaudhary, N., & Hviid, P. (Eds.) (2014). Cultural psychology and its future: Complementarity in a new key. Vol 1 in Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures. Information Age Publishers Wagoner, B., Chaudhary, N., and Hviid, P. (Eds.) (2015). Integrating experiences: Body and mind moving between contexts. Vol 2 in Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures. Information Age Publishers Wagoner, B., Bresco de Luna, I., & Awad, S. (Eds.) (2017). The psychology of imagination. Vol 3 in Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures. Information Age Publishers Wagoner, B., Bresco de Luna, I., & Glaveanu, V. (Eds.) (2018). The Road to actual- ised democracy: A psychological exploration. Vol 4 in Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures. Information Age Publishers Wagoner, B., Bresco, I., & Zadeh, S. (Eds.) (2020). Memory in the wild. Vol 5 in Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures. Information Age Publishers Wagoner, B., & Carriere, K. (Eds.) (2020). Where culture and mind meet: Principles for a dynamic cultural psychology. Vol 6 in Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures. Information Age Publishers Vienna, Austria Jaan Valsiner June 2021 Introduction This book presents an innovative theoretical development of the concept of liminality for psychology by Paul Stenner and extensions of it by others in a variety of contexts. According to Stenner (this volume), ‘A liminal experience, in a nutshell, involves a tempo- rary suspension of limits that permits a transition to a new set of limits. For this reason, liminality concerns the emergence of novelty just at the moment in which “something” is in process of becoming’ (p. xx). He distinguishes between liminal experiences that are ‘spontaneous’ from those that are ‘devised’. In a paradoxical way, devised liminal experi- ences are meant to bring order into the liminality of spontaneous events. In this volume, Stenner more specifically invites us to consider cultural experi- ences as a form of liminality: ‘It is there and then at the point of transition between worlds. This is what I mean by the proposition that cultural experience has its source in liminal passage’ (p. x). Cultural experiences open a ‘world within worlds’ and participate in the transformation required of liminal experiences at large. Stenner builds his argument from a psychosocial perspective that is anchored in a process ontology; his theoretical propositions are built in dialogue with anthropologists (van Gennep, Turner) and psychoanalysts (Winnicott), among others. This original line of reflection intrigues and enriches theorisation in psychology, particularly cultural psychology. It does so, because in its own and original lan- guage, it addresses two core issues: the importance of studying processes over prod- ucts and experience between its personal and social-cultural dimensions. The tendency to turn processes into things has been a major stumbling block for psy- chology since its beginning. It is stimulated by our very use of language, which transforms complex events into circumscribed objects. In contemporary psychology, abstract entities projected into people are used to predict various outcomes, without considering the con- crete process by which they are reached. William James (1890/1950) long diagnosed this problem as ‘the psychologist’s fallacy’ (see also Valsiner, 2017). In contradistinction to this, he aimed to build the discipline on the foundation of the fact that ‘consciousness flows’ and more generally a rigorous description of experience in all its varieties: the immediate fact which psychology … has to study is also the most general fact. It is the fact that in each of us … some kind of consciousness is always going on. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields, … of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, ix x Introduction of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential problem, of our science (James, 1890/1950, p. 15). The concept of liminality is centred on phenomena in movement and change, passing from one relatively stable state to another—using James’ (1890/1950) met- aphor, the emphasis is on the flight of birds between the branches of trees rather than their perching there. However, liminality goes beyond James by articulating how such experiences are situated within social and cultural life and have consequences for both individuals and society. Spaces of liminality are informal sites of play, innovation and creativity that can transform ordered structures and formal hierar- chies. In short, in any society, both structured spaces and liminal spaces (charac- tered by ‘anti-structure’—Turner, 1969) are necessary and complementary. Sociology and anthropology have also traditionally tended to concentrate on how ordered social structures shape or constrain individual behaviour and thought. The founder of the concept of liminality, Arnold van Gennep, was in fact an unwavering critic of Durkheim’s structuralist approach and in particular his understanding of ritual as simply an expression of the social order (Thomassen, 2016). In contrast, van Gennep (1909/2010) and later Victor Turner (1969) emphasised the transforma- tive nature of ritual and its experiential qualities—how it not only integrates but also distinguishes the individual in society. The concept thus provides an avenue for integrating, rather than separating (as Durkheim did), psychology and sociology. This is precisely the analytic focus of cultural psychology: to explore the mutual constitute of persons and social-cultural worlds, treating each as dialectically inter- twined with the other (Shweder, 1991; Valsiner, 2014). …. This volume grew out an event—Innovations in Psychology lecture series (for- merly the ‘Niels Bohr Lectures in Cultural Psychology’)—hosted by the Centre for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. Each year, a rising star in psychology who is developing a genuinely original theoretical approach (in this case, Paul Stenner) is invited to share their perspective with the international audi- ence in attendance. This is followed by a series of commentators, who engage with, probe, test and extend many aspects of keynote’s propositions, both on a theoretical and an empirical plane. At a theoretical level, Stenner’s approach to liminality has invited authors to further explore theoretical issues from a sociocultural psychological perspective (Cabra, this volume), in the social psychological approach of social representations (Schliewe & Tutenges), but also psychoanalysis (Zittoun, this volume) and philoso- phy and semiotics (Innis). Paul Stenner’s proposition has great heuristic power, as it stimulated reflection on people’s transformation in space and time. Some authors have thus examined spatial and geographical mobility, as in tourism (Schliewe & Tutenges) and pilgrim- age (Beckstead). Others have approached transformation in time, as development in the course of life, whether in children (Cabra), adults (Zittoun) or older people at the end of their life (Morgan, Suschinsky and Barclay).
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