LIMINALITY AND EXPERIENCE

As per its eponymous title, this book by the Professor of Social Psychology at the Open University addresses the concepts of liminality and experience, including the relationship between them. The first of these, 'liminality' (which is probably unknown to most general readers) refers to disruptions to the everyday routines of life for individuals (often described as 'rites of passage'), and/or for societies and cultures, up to and including such macro-historical events as the French Revolution (which is used as an example towards the end of the book. Liminal events can be both spontaneous or the result of 'liminal technologies', such as day-dreaming, poetry, fable and the theatre. The second concept, 'experience' is, within the context of this book, enormously expanded beyond its conventional meaning of individual conscious experience. This is because the book tackles its mission via the particular ontology of Process Philosophy: taking an 'ontological' approach means that the book attempts to access, or (at least) consider the reality of the processes taking place 'behind' or 'beneath' our observation, whether everyday or scientific.

As to what Process Philosophy amounts to, it can perhaps be best summarised as a dismissal of Descartes's split between mind and matter, replacing it with a conception of reality as a succession of temporary 'states of being', plus the transitions between them: as Stenner says; "… the basic 'atomic' units of process are events or actual occasions of experience, and a large number of such 'micro' units … together compose the various macroscopic entities that constitute ourselves, our bodies and our worlds." [p.123] In other words, 'experience', in the sense attributed to it in Process Philosophy, is what constitutes the ultimate fabric of reality and everything that exists ('mental' or 'physical') is ultimately composed of it. In his analysis of liminality and experience, Stenner is using the ontology of Process Philosophy, as developed by philosophers such as Henri Bergson, William James and (especially) Alfred North Whitehead, to pursue a particular intellectual project; namely to breakdown the boundaries erected by academic disciplines between what is defined as 'psychology' and the subject matter of the other social sciences: Stenner says that, since the nineteenth century, 'psychic' and 'social' have been; "… institutionally cleaved apart by being lodged within separate specialisms (sociology, economics, etc. dealing with social relations and structures in abstraction from questions of psychology, and psychology dealing with the 'internal' processes of individuals abstracted from their concrete historical and social milieu.)" [p. 9]

A large part of the responsibility for this mistaken (and damaging) separation of the psychological and the social can, according to Stenner, be attributed to an erroneous (but still popular within Western scientific culture) ontology which he calls 'Shallow Empiricism': essentially, this assumes that only 'primary' qualities, i.e. those that can be mathematically measured, such as speed, size and shape, are truly real. 'Secondary' qualities, i.e. 'qualia' such as taste and colour, are ultimately not real at all. In his effort to refute Shallow Empiricism, Stenner refers to Whitehead's idea that humans have access to two modes of perception, which Whitehead called 'presentational immediacy' and 'causal efficacy', these are; "… different 'ways' available to an actual entity of objectifying other perceived actual entities. Although each mode of objectification is a selective abstraction from formal completeness, each, in its pure form, is nevertheless a mode of direct experience. Neither, therefore, admits of error: what you experienced you have experienced. … error enters only when the two are combined in a synthesis … contributed by the percipient itself to what is perceived." [p. 92]

This (it seems to me) is the key to Stenner's account of liminal events: an example he repeatedly uses is that of the dog in Aesop's fable, who (out of greed) drops the piece of meat in his mouth in an effort to get the addition piece he sees reflected in a pool of water. The dog seeing the reflection is a result of perception via 'presentational immediacy', while his dropping the meat from his mouth is an example of perceiving the real situation via the mode of 'causal efficacy', thus creating what Stenner calls a 'this-is-not' experience. This fable could also be analysed in terms of G.H. Mead's division into 'distance experience' and 'contact experience' (which is also cited by Stenner). Mead's conception of two modes of perception is almost exactly the same as that of the psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey [1992] who calls them 'Sensation' and 'Perception'. Humphrey, in turn, attributes the original conception of this dual-mode theory of perception to the eighteenth-century, Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid. (All of these thinkers employed a much more succinct and less cumbersome terminology than Whitehead, though Stenner refers to neither Humphrey nor Reid.)

Stenner claims that Process Philosophy gives the concept of liminality a key ontological role for four reasons: the first two arise from Process Philosophy's insistence that the essence of all things is both relational and processual. Given this, the 'betwixt and between' of liminal events becomes both salient and relevant. Thirdly, in contrast to the substantialist and representationalist thought of Shallow Empiricism, Process Philosophy emphasises creativity and emergence: process cannot be separated from its 'content'. It's not just meaningless movement, but concerns the emergence of novelty: Stenner quotes Whitehead to the effect that the; "… expansion of the universe with respect to actual things is the first meaning of 'process'". [1929, p. 327] Stenner adds that: "This expansion occurs through the process of concrescence during which a 'particular existent' is constituted in the fluency of an actual occasion. By way of an actual occasion of experience, something new is added to the data that are patterned into a unity, since what is added that was missing before is precisely this element of pattern." (p.264) The fourth reason Stenner gives for linking liminality and Process Philosophy is that the latter, as an ontology, stresses experience and especially; "… experience conceived as a liminal going through." [p.264] (Let me at this point make a comment about the distinctly Post-Modernist 'whiff' emanating, as in these examples, from the language of the book. I am definitely not a fan of Post-Modernist prose. However, given that the book is striving to reach beyond Shallow Empiricism towards a more realistic and fruitful ontology, I'm willing to struggle, often line by line, to interpret the text, especially as I'm convinced that it never falls over into deliberate and self-satisfied obscurantism.)

An additional major theme of the book (chapter six) is Stenner's discussion of what's known as the 'turn to affect' in the social sciences and especially the distinction between affect and emotion. Stenner notes that an insistence that affect is not emotion; "… has become almost synonymous with affect theory." [p.211] He quotes a reader on emotion, which he co-wrote with M. Greco in 2008: "Emotions became the object of a tug-of-war in which social scientists … struggle to drag them across the line separating the psycho-biological from the socio-cultural." [p.206] Prior to this struggle (they claim) it had been assumed that both emotion and affect fell squarely within the territory of natural science. There follows a long and complex discussion of the affect/emotion distinction. My own view regarding this distinction is taken from the neurophysiologist, Jaak Panksepp [2012]. Panksepp makes the (to me) very simple and compelling distinction: 'emotion' refers to the observable, neurophysiological processes which cause our bodily reactions in the major emotions, such as anger, fear, joy, etc. This includes such physiological processes as changes in, for example, blood pressure and hormone secretion. 'Affect', on the other hand, is the subjective aspect of experiencing the emotion, i.e. how anger, fear, joy, etc. feel! However, Panksepp is also clear that this subjective affectivity is the product of neurophysiological and not socio-cultural processes. Panksepp also insists that there are seven universal human emotions hard-wired into our nervous systems and that we are also very much predisposed to share and empathise with each other's affects, via 'mirror' neurones and our general hyper-sociality. Only a Shallow Empiricist perspective would ignore 'affect' and focus on 'emotion' (in Panksepp's terms). Therefore, it seems to me, that Panksepp's affect/emotion distinction is very congruent with Stenner's goal of uniting (or re-uniting) the psychological with the social.