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

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

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

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

Whitehead and Liminality

Although he did not use the term, A.N. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism provides a way of thinking liminality in an ontological way. In making the case for ontological liminality, the chapter begins by considering Whitehead’s claim that human beings ‘became artists in ritual’ and from there proceeds to unfold the sense in which the philosophy of organism is a philosophy of limitation. For Whitehead, finitude, in its most general sense, is a species of limitation. From its partial perspective, each finite actual occasion of experience implicates the whole of reality within itself such that ‘each event signifies the whole structure’ (Whitehead, 1922, p.26). This means that no event is inherently isolated. The ontological liminality at play in this philosophy of limitation helps to make broader sense of the anthropological account of liminality advanced by Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner and others within the social sciences, where the word 'liminal' refers to the middle, 'transitional' phase of a rite of passage. The aim is to lodge their peculiar type of processual social psychology within a broader process ontology. From this perspective, rites of passage and other rituals show up as particular ways of ‘occasioning’ liminal experiences of becoming

The Risky Truth of Fabulation: Deleuze, Bergson and Durkheim on the becomings of religion and art

Based on a close reading of relevant works of Gilles Deleuze, and informed by Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson's writings on religion, this paper articulates a novel concept of 'fabulation' which has significant implications for psychosocial theory. Beginning with a discussion of Jean Rouch's classic film ‘Les Maîtres Fous’, a distinction is drawn between a Deleuzian vision of fabulation as a profound fiction at the heart of the real, and an objectivising version which always contrasts fabulation with a supposedly external standard of reality. This latter version is clearly expressed in the literature of the psy-disciplines, but is also expressed in cultural forms such as the 'cinema of reality'. After sketching the connections between Deleuze’s more risky yet also profound version of fabulation, Rouche’s ‘cinéma vérité’, and Scholes’ ‘fabulator’ tradition in literature (Vonnegut, Durrell, Navakov etc.), this concept of fabulation is traced back to Bergson's critical encounter with Durkheim over the question of the sacred. With help from the recent work of Ronald Bogue, the paper ends by emphasising the tight connection between fabulation and the dynamics of becoming

On <i>The Magic Mountain</i>: The novel as liminal affective technology

In this paper we build on Szakolczai’s analysis of the sociological relevance of the novel to propose that novels can be regarded as a historically specific instance of what we call ‘liminal affective technologies’. We develop this proposition through a psychosocial reading of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to demonstrate that this novel not only represents – as Szakolczai already argues – the reflexive culmination of a historical movement towards permanent liminality, but also a performative meditation on the role of ‘liminal affective technologies’ in metabolising experience and channelling psychosocial transformations

Social Immune Mechanisms: Luhmann and Potentialization Technologies

Contemporary discourses of management are full of encouragements to ‘expect the unexpected’ and to celebrate ‘the future of the future’. Many new public managerial technologies of change – such as steering Labs, future games, and managerial performance arts - promise the co- creative ‘potentialisation’ of employees, citizens and organisations. This paper approaches such potentialisation technologies as immune mechanisms which serve to protect the social system from itself. From a perspective inspired by autopoietic systems theory, potentialisation technologies provide autoimmunity by problematising institutional structures and providing ‘anti-structural’ space-times to facilitate transformation. There is a price to pay for this immune function, however, since these immune mechanisms cannot discriminate between productive and unproductive structures. By dissolving the certainty of the expectations that underlie the connectivity of diverse organisational operations, they risk harming the welfare systems that host them

The emotional organization and the problem of authenticity: The romantic, the pedagogic, the therapeutic and the ludic as liminal media of transition

Max Weber excluded the phenomenon of emotions from the idea of rational bureaucracy. Modern European organizational theories are on the other hand almost obsessed by emotions and especially affect. Emotion reentered organizational theory around the limited topic of ‘emotional labor’, but today passion is generally praised as a driver in successful organizations. An important element here is the demand upon passionate employees to install the organization as their significant other. To the extent that they rely on this new concept of themselves and their employees, organizations become dependent upon the authenticity of the ‘self-enrolment’ expected of each employee. In the discursive field of organization we therefore see a number of new communicative media which centre upon emotion and upon helping the organization to attribute authenticity and inauthenticity to employees. This paper also makes the case that these media are liminal in nature, and extend beyond the use of discursive symbolism in a Sisyphian effort to reach the authentic emotional ‘heart’ of each employee