Introduction to the Special Issue on Liminal Hotspots

This article introduces a special issue of Theory and Psychology on liminal hotspots. A liminal hotspot is an occasion during which people feel they are caught suspended in the circumstances of a transition that has become permanent. The liminal experiences of ambiguity and uncertainty that are typically at play in transitional circumstances acquire an enduring quality that can be described as a “hotspot”. Liminal hotspots are characterized by dynamics of paradox, paralysis, and polarization, but they also intensify the potential for pattern shift. The origins of the concept are described followed by an overview of the contributions to this special issue

James and Whitehead: Assemblage and Systematization of a Deeply Empiricist Mosaic Philosophy

This paper contributes to a growing body of philosophical and psychological work that draws parallels between the writings of William James and Alfred North Whitehead. In Part One I introduce Whitehead’s distinction between assemblage and systematization (section 1) and suggest that Whitehead’s philosophy was in part a systematization of James’ psychological and philosophical assemblage (section 2). The systematization is based on a rethinking of the entity/function contrast (section 3) by way of Whitehead’s concept of the actual entity/occasion (section 4). This permits a process-oriented ontological extension and James’ notion of pure experience (sections 5 & 6), which yields a deepened version of radical empiricism (section 7). The four sections of Part Two build a more specific argument that James’ often implicit distinctions between energetic, perceptual, conceptual and discursive modes of experience can be systematized by way of Whitehead’s concepts of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference. Following the suggestion of Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une Pipe artwork, this yields an analysis of the sum of human experience into four progressively integrated factors: power, image, proposition and enunciation

Being in the zone and vital subjectivity: On the liminal sources of sport and art

With the aim of re-contextualising the social dimensions of Being in the Zone whilst retaining its psychological resonance, this contribution thinks Bitz alongside van Gennep's notion of liminality and Turner's notion of the liminoid. Bitz research centres around the liminoid spheres of sport and art, and it is in these social contexts that it has its primary meaning. This move enables the articulation of a critical distance from the role the ‘being in the zone’ concept is coming to play in new forms of governance and corporate activity which aim towards a super-productive 'vital subjectivity'. In these contexts, Bitz does not address people as thinking subjects who must self-manage by making decisions, but as unified and (ideally) unconscious mind/bodies seeking experiences composed of an optimal balance of feelings. This optimal balance, at the same time, promises something interesting to the manager: an individual operating at full-capacity and yielding maximum productivity with no need of extrinsic reward. Situating Bitz in relation to liminality contributes to the task of tracing the genealogy of the vital subject back to a set of social practices directly concerned with the incitement and management of affectivity and emotion

Non-foundational criticality? On the need for a process ontology of the psychosocial

The articulation of critical dialects of psychology has typically involved a questioning of the foundational assumptions of the so-called mainstream. This has included critiques in the name of more adequate scientific foundations, but more recently these have been accompanied by critiques in the name of an absence of foundations altogether, and critiques that suggest a rethinking of the concept of foundation. These latter versions are usually influenced by the great 20th Century non-foundational philosophies of figures such as Bergson, Whitehead, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, or by related thinkers such as Deleuze, Serres, Luhmann, Butler and Stengers. In foregrounding themes of process and multiplicity such thinkers provide potent tools for critically rethinking psychological questions. Less positive has been a tendency amongst critical psychologists to polarise natural and social scientific issues and to associate the former with negative images (all that is static, mechanistic, essentialist and conservative). This can lead to a formulaic criticality in which arguments for nature are bad, and those for culture are good. Deconstruction comes to appear simply as an assertion of ‘the discursive construction of’ whatever phenomenon is under scrutiny. To counteract this trend, the proposed paper will discuss a process approach to ontology that welcomes contributions from the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences

On standards and values: Between finite actuality and infinite possibility

This article explores the relation between subjects and standards in a way that is informed by a process orientation to theoretical psychology. Standards are presented as objectifications of values designed to generalize and stabilize experiences of value. Standards are nevertheless prone to becoming “parodic” in the sense that they can become obstacles to the actualization of the values they were designed to incarnate. Furthermore, much critical social science has mishandled the nature of standards by insisting that values are nothing but local and specific constructions in the mundane world of human activity. To rectify this problem, this article reactivates a sense of the difference between the idea of a finite world of activity and a world of value which points beyond and exceeds passing circumstance. Resources for the reactivation of this difference— which is core to a processual grasp of self, memory, and value—are found in the thinking of A. N. Whitehead, Max Weber, Marcel Proust, and Soren Kierkegaard

The Jerry Springer Show as an Emotional Public Sphere

The public sphere debate in social theory has been a topic of considerable interest amongst scholars analysing the talk show genre. Habermas (1989) attached great importance to the potential of rational critical discussion to create consensus and thereby legitimation in democratic society. He was concerned that the media gave a false impression of engagement in a public sphere while managing rights of access and speech in a manner that was inimical to open public discussion. In contrast, cultural commentators on the talk show genre have been impressed by the richness and spontaneity of interactions on the shows, suggesting that they might have a positive role in public participation despite not meeting Habermas’s criteria for a public sphere. In consequence, the literature is moving away from the public sphere debate and focussing on issues of voice and expression in analyses of talk shows. This paper, however, makes the argument that many of Habermas’s concerns are still highly relevant to the genre. This is demonstrated through an analysis of the Jerry Springer Show. On the surface, this show seems to have little to do with rational critical discussion. The analysis reveals a number of parallels between the conception of the rational critical public sphere and the Jerry Springer show, leading to a revision of the received view of Habermas’s work in the analysis of mediated discussion. A range of implications for the mediation of deliberation, participation and expression are explored

Adattamenti biochimici alla speleologia alpina

La speleologia è un esercizio fisico di tipo aerobico anaerobico alternato di lunghissima durata (10-30 ore) con carico motorio molto intenso e vario. Questa attività richiede un’elevata conoscenza degli schemi motori posturali e dinamici, adattabilità delle capacità senso-percettive all’ambiente, sviluppo delle capacità coordinative speciali e condizionali. Scopo della ricerca: indagare quali fossero gli eventuali adattamenti biochimici indotti da questa attività.Caving is a form of physical excise, alternating between aerobic and anaerobic, with a very long duration (10-30 hours) and an extremely intense and varied motor load. The activity requires an in-depth knowledge of postural and dynamic motor patterns, sensory-perceptual skills that can easily adapt to the environment and highly developed specialized and conditional coordination skills. Aim of the study: explore the possible biochemical adaptations induced by this activity

Language Modeling by Clustering with Word Embeddings for Text Readability Assessment

We present a clustering-based language model using word embeddings for text readability prediction. Presumably, an Euclidean semantic space hypothesis holds true for word embeddings whose training is done by observing word co-occurrences. We argue that clustering with word embeddings in the metric space should yield feature representations in a higher semantic space appropriate for text regression. Also, by representing features in terms of histograms, our approach can naturally address documents of varying lengths. An empirical evaluation using the Common Core Standards corpus reveals that the features formed on our clustering-based language model significantly improve the previously known results for the same corpus in readability prediction. We also evaluate the task of sentence matching based on semantic relatedness using the Wiki-SimpleWiki corpus and find that our features lead to superior matching performance

Psychosocial: qu'est-ce que c'est?

My title - which of course is inspired by the Talking Heads and by Asbo Derek – reflects the preoccupation with the nature and limits of psychosocial studies expressed, quite appropriately, at the inaugural APS (Association for Psychosocial Studies) meeting. My unscripted comments at that meeting were intended to encourage an open definition of psychosocial studies as a critical and non-foundational transdiscipline, and, in line with this, to discourage the premature consolidation of a version of psychosocial studies foundationed upon psychoanalysis. Such a foundation risks an unfortunate ‘hardening’ of the categories ‘inner world’ and ‘outer world’ – a hardening which lodges a false sense of disciplinary expertise just where an open channel of constructive interchange is most required

Energy transport faster than light in good conductors and superconductors

People need a model to study tachyons whose prediction can be tested easily. The dispersion relation w^2=k^2C^2-a^2C^2 of a low-frequency electromagnetic field in good conductors is equivalent to the energy-momentum equation E^2=p^2C^2-m^2C^4 of a tachyon where the proportionality coefficient is h^2. An experiment in 1980s to measure the phase velocity Vp [1] can be regarded as an indirect evidence of the superluminal velocity V>>c of those photons just equals the rate of energy flow S/w of the field.Instability of the tachyonic field corresponds to the Joule heat. To detect the speed of energy is difficult and we plan to modulate signals to observe the information velocity (speed of points of non-analyticity)[2].Comment: 16 page