LIMINALITY AND

EXPERIENCE
A TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH
TO THE PSYCHOSOCIAL

STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL

PAUL STENNER
 Studies in the Psychosocial

Series editors
Stephen Frosh
Dept of Psychosocial Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
London, UK

Peter Redman
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

Wendy Hollway
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
Studies in the Psychosocial seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic
and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in
each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of
a single dialectical process. As such it can be understood as an interdisci-
plinary field in search of transdisciplinary objects of knowledge. Studies
in the Psychosocial is also distinguished by its emphasis on affect, the
irrational and unconscious processes, often, but not necessarily, under-
stood psychoanalytically. Studies in the Psychosocial aims to foster the
development of this field by publishing high quality and innovative
monographs and edited collections. The series welcomes submissions
from a range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary orientations,
including sociology, social and critical psychology, political science, post-
colonial studies, feminist studies, queer studies, management and organi-
zation studies, cultural and media studies and psychoanalysis. However,
in keeping with the inter- or transdisciplinary character of psychosocial
analysis, books in the series will generally pass beyond their points of
origin to generate concepts, understandings and forms of investigation
that are distinctively psychosocial in character.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14464
 Paul Stenner

Liminality and
Experience
A Transdisciplinary Approach to the
Psychosocial
Paul Stenner
School of Psychology
The Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

Studies in the Psychosocial

ISBN 978-1-137-27210-2    ISBN 978-1-137-27211-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930131

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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 trans-
mission 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, express 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.

Cover illustration: EyeEm / Alamy Stock

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
 Acknowledgements

Liminality and Experience has been long in the making. Many people,
from close to home to far afield, have helped me to write it, though the
failings are mine alone. Foremost, I wish to thank my immediate family
and especially Monica Greco. She has been a constant source of insight
and has patiently guided me from proposal to completion, editing my
worst excesses and encouraging clarity. Ezra and Anna Greco Stenner
have shown me dreams, dramas and gloves full of bullet-ants. Both grew
into teenagers and young adults while I was busy writing. I thank Grace
Jackson and Joanna O’Neill and the rest of the team at Palgrave Macmillan
for having the confidence to be patient as the years ticked by. I thank
Rose Capdevila for her support and for lending me the solitude of her flat
in Pineda, and Martin Capdevila for interrupting that solitude with fried
fish, fine company and talk of fables. I thank Joan Pujol, Marisela
Montenegro and Emeri Reig Bolaño for an unforgettable evening/morn-
ing in Barcelona which gave the main thesis of the book a new vitality.
This is not to neglect Jasper Chalcraft and Monica Sassatelli for many
evenings of intellectual free-association that fuelled the enthusiasm with-
out which this project might have stalled. I thank the European Science
Foundation for funding Monica Greco, Johanna Motzkau, Megan Clinch
and myself to assemble a fantastic network of people from all over Europe
to study the affective dimensions of liminal experience. Each contributor
to this liminal hotspots network has a share in the ideas presented here.
v
vi  Acknowledgements

I have had the pleasure of presenting versions of this work in various

places, and have benefited enormously from intense discussions with col-
leagues and students, notably in Puebla (special thanks to Ali Lara and
Eduardo Rodriguez Villegas), Bratislava (special thanks to Gabriel
Bianchi and Miro Popper), Bochum (special thanks to Estrid Sørensen
and Jürgen Straub), Vienna (special thanks to Elisabeth Mixa), Lausanne
(special thanks to Marie Santiago-Delefosse, Agnieszka Soltysik and
Nancy Armstrong), Copenhagen (special thanks to Morten Nissen, Jette
Kofoed, Hanne Knudsen and Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen), Medellin (spe-
cial thanks to Juan Carlos Arboleda Ariza and Milton Danilo Morales
Herrera), Belfast (special thanks to Eugene MacNamee), Edinburgh (spe-
cial thanks to Graeme Laurie) and London (special thanks to Kath
Woodward and Jef Huysmans). Those who adventure into transdisci-
plinary territory need support from experts in many fields. The scope and
potential of liminality as a core concept became clear to me thanks to
Árpád Szakolczai, Agnes Horvath and Bjørn Thomassen. Polina Batanova
has given wise council on my forays into the sacred. My grasp of process
thought has been enhanced by discussions through day and night with
philosophers and neuroscientists in Fontarèches, and at meetings of the
International Process Network and the Association for Process Thought.
I have been greatly enriched by my involvement with the International
Society for Theoretical Psychology, which contains more than its fair
share of transdisciplinarians, and I have particular debts to Steve Brown,
Paula Reavey, John Cromby, Thomas Slunecko and Tania Zittoun. Closer
to home, I thank my colleagues at the Open University, particularly the
Social Psychology Research Group, and my past students, especially
Eduardo Moreno, who shared my reading experience of Victor Turner
(gently supported by Katherine Johnson and Matt Adams) and Simon
Watts (who knows the liminality of love). Even closer, thanks to Derek
and Ann Stenner for their art of life.

October 2017 Paul Stenner

Hove
 Contents

1 Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at

the Deep End   1

2 This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation  37

3 This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought  71

4 This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience 111

5 This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple

Worlds 151

6 This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology

and Anthropology 197

vii
viii  Contents

7 Conclusion 253

Author Index 287

Subject Index 291
 List of Figures

Image 4.1 Magritte’s famous painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe,

also called The treachery of images112
Fig. 5.1 The form of Schutz’s distinction between daily
life and several other ‘worlds’ 153

ix
 1
Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial
Studies in at the Deep End

Transdisciplinarity
The word ‘psychosocial’ marks a concern with the interface between the
psychological and sociological. Interest in the relation between societal
processes and subjective experience has blossomed in recent years, no
doubt partly in response to the increasingly explicit relevance of the psy-
chological dimension within contemporary societies and within specific
fields such as health, welfare, law, politics, the media and so on. Such
interest is also animated by the recognition on the part of many social
scientists that the psychological dimension (often discussed in terms such
as ‘subjectivity’, ‘affect’, ‘experience’ and ‘desire’) suffers profound distor-
tion when studied in abstraction from its social, cultural and historical
context. Such abstraction is arguably endemic in the circumstances of the
received disciplinary organization of research into departments of psy-
chology, sociology, history, politics and so forth, and this is also a charge
regularly levelled against mainstream social psychology. Those who have
responded to these structural and intellectual challenges have often
adopted a critical and challenging orientation to existing disciplines and
an eagerness to develop modes of thought and practice that can move

© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_1
2  P. Stenner

across and between disciplinary boundaries and that can ‘think’ so called
psychic and social dimensions ‘together’.
Three notable responses have gathered force in the last decade or so.
These include:

(a) the striking rise—particularly in the health sphere—of technical

interventions, and scientific approaches/methodologies self-­
identifying as psychosocial or even bio-psychosocial (Keene 2001;
Stephens 2008; Gonzalez et al. 2014);
(b) the continued development of critical psychology, particularly

amongst theoretically informed social psychologists (Cromby et al.
2013; Slaney et al. 2015; Parker 2015); and
(c) the emergence of the field of research and teaching known as psycho-
social studies (Frosh 2015; Hollway 2015; Woodward 2015; Adams
2016).

Each of these developments has been amply discussed elsewhere, and

so I will not repeat those discussions here. Also, each of these responses
makes an important contribution that should be continued. The purpose
of this book, however, is different. The main business of the book will be
to contribute to the development of a transdisciplinary way of thinking
about, and working on, psychosocial phenomena as processes. This is
because, in my view, the existing responses have not gone far enough in
moving across and beyond existing disciplinary modes of practice. In
these days of widespread university restructuring, however, transdiscipli-
narity risks becoming a mere slogan and this must be avoided.
The concept of transdisciplinarity is actually part of a theoretical and
practical effort to move beyond the limitations of disciplines. For this
reason it is typically contrasted with disciplinarity (Pohl and Hirsch
Hadorn 2007). Disciplines are cultural formations that function as agen-
cies for the production, dissemination and application of specialist knowl-
edge. I have defined transdisciplinarity as ‘a concept that has been used in
efforts to describe integrative activity, reflection and practice that
addresses, crosses and goes through and beyond the limits of established
disciplinary borders, in order to address complex problems that escape
conventional definition and intervention’ (Stenner 2014, p. 1989). The
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    3

concept emerged in the 1970s as part of the global ambitions of general

structuralism and general systems theory. The term transdisciplinarity
was first used by Piaget (1972) as part of structuralism, and by Jantsch
(1972) as part of systems theory.
It seems to me that the word system says in Greek pretty much what
the word structure says in Latin: both say something like a patterned
arrangement of elements. Both movements stressed the centrality of rela-
tions (as opposed to distinct entities), not just to the specific systems
dealt with by specific disciplines, but generally to the universe as such
conceived qua structured system of structured systems. Hence what made
general structuralism and general systems theory ‘transdisciplinary’ was
this ontological recognition given to relationality (it is the patterned
arrangement of elements that is decisive). Structuralism and systems the-
ory fell out of favour from the 1980s onwards as post-structural argu-
ments gathered force to challenge their static tendencies and to rethink
patterned arrangements as temporal flows in the flux of constant change.
This development can now be understood as an ontological recognition
given, not just to relationality, but to process. Process here does not just
mean regular change through time. Process is not to be understood as the
antithesis of content, for instance, but as the emergence of novelty: the
transformation of patterned arrangements and, we might say, the emer-
gence of new patterned arrangements. Not just change by adding new
elements to an existing pattern, but a change of pattern or ‘pattern shift’
(Greco and Stenner 2017). Now, the growing consensus (amongst those
few who do not simply ignore theory) is of some form of relational pro-
cess ontology (Brown and Stenner 2009). This book develops and illus-
trates this relational process ontology of the psychosocial, drawing
inspiration from a range of process thinkers including Bergson,
Whitehead, Mead, Harrison, Langer, Schutz and Deleuze.
In the early 1990s, interest in transdisciplinarity was re-ignited along
‘relational process’ lines in a broadly post-structuralist form by Funtowicz
and Ravetz (1993), Mittelstrass (1993), Curt (1994) and Gibbons et al.
(1994) and since then it has been fruitfully developed by a range of think-
ers, but notably Klein et al. (2001), Moran (2002), Nicolescu (2002), Barry
et al. (2008), Motzkau (2009) and Stenner (2015). Between the hypotheti-
cal extremes of disciplinarity (with its well organized and recognized
4  P. Stenner

‘patterned arrangement’) and transdisciplinarity (with its patterned arrange-

ment in process of liminal transformation), further distinctions are typi-
cally made between multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity (cf. Nicolescu
2002). Following this tradition, Stenner and Taylor (2008) define multidis-
ciplinarity as approaching a problem in a coordinated fashion from various
discipline-based vantage points, reserving the term interdisciplinarity for
collaborations involving the transfer of concepts and/or methods from one
discipline to another. An example of multidisciplinarity would be a team of
experts who divide their labour into the sociological, psychological and
biological aspects of drug addiction. An example of interdisciplinarity
(which involves changes induced by transactions at the borders between
disciplines) would be the budding of cognitive neuroscience when new
medical brain-imaging methods were incorporated into psychology from
medicine (Stenner 2014, p. 1998).
Paradoxically enough, there is now enough literature on transdiscipli-
narity for a new disciplinary field of transdisciplinarity studies. This
book, however, is not a discussion about what transdisciplinarity is, but
an effort to show what it does: to show transdisciplinary thought in pro-
cess, as it were. Having provided this essential background, I will there-
fore keep discussion of transdisciplinarity to a bare minimum. It is worth
observing, however, that the three responses with which this chapter
began are, for the most part, not transdisciplinary in the sense I have
articulated. The first (and in terms of outputs, the largest) of the three
responses to the ‘psycho/social’ division noted above operates in a mul-
tidisciplinary manner. For the most part, this huge and growing body of
research remains within the sphere of mainstream scientific and social
scientific research practice in so far as it aims to deliver facts using scien-
tific methods. We might call it the ‘psychosocial factors and variables
approach’ because it tends to continue the practice of seeking causal
variables explanatory of health (and other) outcomes, or, when formal
experiment is not possible, correlating factors. The psychological and
the social are construed as variables that can be operationalized and put
to use in more or less standard scientific designs to address well-defined
practice and policy relevant questions. The novelty is the effort to bring
sociological and psychological variables into play with other predomi-
nantly biological variables that are relevant to health and wellbeing
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    5

(although this approach extends to other fields like welfare, education

and justice). This research can yield interesting and also practically rele-
vant findings. It is well-suited to the current evidence-based policy
machinery and to the current organization of university research around
publicly accountable research outputs with quantifiable impact and
demonstrable cash-value. It is less well equipped, however, to grasp the
socially constructed aspects of its variables, the subjective dimensions of
the experiences involved or the political dimensions of power/knowl-
edge that are becoming so obvious today. Each of these pressing issues is
a blind spot for this research tradition, which is unable to reflexively
observe the ways in which its own practice is part of the empirical field
it studies.1 The approach I pursue in this book is not psychosocial in this
multidisciplinary sense.
The second development is the consolidation and elaboration of a crit-
ical and discursive psychology which presents itself as an alternative to
mainstream experimental social psychology. It has been much more effec-
tive at grappling with the issues of power/knowledge and reflexivity that
escape the ‘factors and variables’ approach. Critical and discursive psy-
chology is important because it maintains engagement with the long tra-
dition of thinking about the relation between society, culture and
psychology within social psychology. The weakness of critical psychology
is that it is recurrently either pulled back in centripetal fashion towards
the disciplinary mainstream (where discourse analysis has become estab-
lished as simply one more method in the arsenal of social psychological
research methods) or otherwise is centrifugally expelled from psychology,
where it risks floundering in a post-disciplinary no-man’s land. Although
my own background is within critical psychology, the approach I pursue
in this book is not psychosocial in this predominantly discursive sense. I
suggest (in Chap. 6) that the transdisciplinary ambitions of critical
­discursive social psychology fall short to the extent that they remain
caught up within the purely social and cultural sciences and studies
(Maiers 2001; Brown 1995).
The third development, psychosocial studies, has for the most part
(but not exclusively) operated in an interdisciplinary manner. It has taken
existing concepts from psychoanalysis and psychodynamic theory, and
has applied them to questions of a broadly sociological nature. Again, this
6  P. Stenner

has yielded fruitful and fascinating results, but the results are limited by
the reach enabled by concepts and techniques drawn from the discipline
(or disciplines) of psychoanalysis. This raises the problem of the disciplin-
ary status of psychoanalysis as a science on its own terms, let alone as a
body of knowledge that can be applied to social science subject matter for
which it was neither designed nor intended. Often this issue is over-
played, but it continues to haunt even those who see the profound value
of psychoanalysis. In calling psychoanalytic psychosocial studies ‘inter-
disciplinary’ I am not ignoring the fact that the concept of transdiscipli-
narity is sometimes used by psychosocial scholars. In a recent volume
containing the work of psychoanalytically inspired social theorists, for
instance, Stephen Frosh (2015, p. 1) writes that the book is about ‘bring-
ing together issues that might appear in other disciplinary sites (for
instance sociology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, political theory,
postcolonial theory, queer theory, literary theory) and rethinking them
from the perspective of a psychosocial approach that subverts the distinc-
tion between them’. He mentions three reasons for describing the book
as transdisciplinary: first that it is a ‘meeting ground for other disciplines’;
second that it is ‘anti-disciplinary’ in that it seeks to ‘provoke or under-
mine’ these other disciplines; and third that it is nomadic in the sense of
‘searching for a systematically critical approach towards the psychosocial
subject who belongs everywhere but also, in relation to existing disci-
plines, can be found nowhere at all’. These certainly are moves in a trans-
disciplinary direction. But this is rare, and even here more detailed work
needs to be done if we are to avoid the romanticism of mere freedom
from discipline. Transdisciplinarity means more than merely being ‘free
to roam’, as if our preferred theories were like some rogue male elephant
‘inserting itself like a foreign entity within an otherwise homogenous
field’ (Baraitser 2015, quoted by Frosh 2015, p. 3).

The Paradox of the Psychosocial

Any ‘thinking together’ of the psychological and the social must confront
a paradox which Johanna Motzkau (2009) has called the paradox of the
psychosocial. In her research on the history of the concept of suggestibility
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    7

within psychology she found a paradoxical tension. On the one hand,

suggestibility was viewed by early psychologists like William McDougal
as an irrational expression of manipulability. Suggestible minds accept
propositions from others as true despite lack of evidence. Instead of living
in the real world, suggestible people ‘fabulate’ things that do not exist,
and what they tell us cannot be trusted. They get lost in their own imag-
inings, and are too influenced by what other people say, do and want. But
on the other hand, these same psychologists could see that a capacity for
suggestibility was something to be celebrated as the fundamental charac-
teristic of human mentality and human nature. Our suggestibility is what
makes learning, affection, socialization and social cohesion possible at all.
As with the comparable theme of imitation (see Blackman 2008), the
suggestible self is inherently a social self that takes its cue from another,
and yet it is only through such socialization that something like an ‘indi-
vidual’, capable of rationally checking the evidence supporting the prop-
ositions she/he entertains, can ever emerge. The paradox is expressed in
the fact that a child, for example, might be praised for being sensitively
open to learning, for identifying with a teacher, for modelling herself on
a parent, and yet, in another context (a court of law, perhaps), their testi-
mony might be condemned as a function of this very impressionability.
Brian, whose life is charted by Monty Python (1979), grapples with the
paradox when he shouts to the gathering crowd ‘you’re all individuals!’,
‘you’re all different!’, to which the crowd respond in unison: ‘yes, we’re all
individuals, we’re all different’, except for one voice which alone pipes up:
‘I’m not’.
Motzkau found that the paradox of the psychosocial extends to the
knowledge practices of those same psychologists, infecting their own
truth claims with unreliability (see also Brown et al. 2005). For Charcot
(1887), suggestibility was a symptom of hysteria which he used in his
practice of hypnosis to treat patients, but this methodology was n ­ otoriously
difficult to control. Freud abandoned suggestion as a therapeutic tech-
nique just one year after celebrating it in the publication of Aetiology of
hysteria (1896). He now deemed it impure and this was associated with
his renunciation of his previous seduction theory (see Chertok and
Stengers 1992). In effect, Freud no longer felt that his theory was factual,
but that it was the result of his own suggestibility to the suggestions his
8  P. Stenner

patients had made about their own childhood sexual victimization. He

now felt that these experiences of his patients in turn may not have been
real, but may have been the fabulated product of suggestibility. In this
way, suggestibility acts like an infection which unravels any claims to
truthful description as it spreads. Freud, under the influence of what
turned out to be mere suggestions from Charcot, allowed the suggestions
of his allegedly suggestible patients to disarm his rational faculties and
render him suggestible. Things were not improved when psychologists
responded by insisting upon the use of rigorous objective scientific experi-
mentation to study suggestibility. Clark Hull (1933, p. 403), for example,
abandoned his research programme into suggestibility after a careful and
subtle analysis of its limits, and issued the warning that: ‘to enter seriously
on a program of investigation in this field is a little like tempting fate; it
is almost to court scientific disaster. Small wonder that orthodox scientists
have usually avoided the subject!’ Those who ignored this warning have
fared no better. The following example from Motzkau (2009, p. 11) is
worth quoting in full:

A study by Erdmann (2001) provides a good example for the ambiguity

emerging around suggestibility. Taking its cue directly from the high pro-
file miscarriages of justice, this study aimed to examine whether it was
possible to implant entirely fictitious memories, ‘false events’, into children
by repeatedly interviewing them about such false events in a suggestive
manner. 67 primary school children were submitted to 4 interviews, each
time prompting them to report four specific events from their past. Two of
the prompts referred to true events, but the other two prompts hinted at
‘false events’ that had been invented specifically by researchers and parents
for each child. While successfully demonstrating that in a final fifth inter-
view an impressive 58% of the children delivered detailed accounts of false
events, the experiment also produced a peculiar side effect: With some
children the narratives of false events had grown so detailed, that the
researchers suspected the ‘false memory’ cues might have elicited true
memories of real events. To clarify the researchers sought confirmation
from the parents. Remarkably, even though parents had initially assisted
inventing these ‘false events’, when confronted with their children’s narra-
tives some parents now said they also remembered the events, and others
were unable to disconfirm, leaving the matter unresolved. Either these nar-
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    9

ratives did refer to true memories (possibly ‘recovered’), or the accounts of

‘false memories’ had been enriched with an unknown amount of details
from real events, or, after all, parents and researchers had fallen suggestible
to the result of their own suggestions, now believing that the ‘false events’,
they had implanted, truly were memories of real events.

Motzkau (2009, p. 173) elegantly sums up the paradox of the psycho-

social in its two aspects:

The first is expressed in the question: ‘how do we “know”, how can we trust
our knowledge, or indeed memory, while continuously having to express
and perform this knowing and thus re-assessing its origin and value in rela-
tion to ourselves and others?’

The second is expressed in the question: ‘how can we relate while also being
separate?’

In articulating this account Motzkau draws upon my own studies of the

paradoxical emergence and nature of psychology, both as a subject matter
(Stenner 2004) and as a discipline (Stenner and Taylor 2008; Brown and
Stenner 2009). Stenner and Taylor (2008, p.  418) described the emer-
gence of psychology alongside the social sciences in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and pointed out how ‘psychic’ and ‘social’ came to be institutionally
cleaved apart by being lodged within separate specialisms (sociology, eco-
nomics, 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). Each thus deals with a fiction, but any awareness of this hole-in-
the-heart of each discipline can be made good by pointing to the other
discipline whose role it is to supply the missing piece (the folie à deux of
sociology and psychology). This cleavage is paradoxical since the social
issues that these disciplines were largely designed to address centred around
the problem of securing the viability of the social order through the regulation
of the wellbeing of welfare subjects. Within this nexus of social problems the
‘psychological’ and the ‘social’ are evidently inextricably mixed. The
‘grounding paradox’ is thus that these disciplines ‘came into being as a
result of this relation between “society” and “subject”, but in functionally
10  P. Stenner

specializing each on just one side of this relation, they served to obscure
the very relation that called them into being’. Disciplines, in short,
emerged as distinct in order to manage problems which arose from their
inseparability.
Dealing with the ‘how do we “know” aspect, Brown and Stenner
(2009, p. 18) described the foundational paradox of psychology in terms
of the fact that psychology’s subject matter (the psychological) is precisely
the ‘lack’ whose ‘exclusion constitutes the unity of scientific truth’. If the
power of modern natural science lay in its ability to exclude the ‘inner’ or
mentality from consideration, and to observe things purely from the out-
side, then a paradox is confronted by those who wish to study subjectivity
objectively. This paradox was managed (and in fact mismanaged) by prac-
tically excluding questions of subjectivity and experience from the remit
of psychology (much as Hull discarded suggestibility). Early in the twen-
tieth century, the concern with experience that had been central to found-
ers like Dilthey, Brentano, Fechner and William James was chased out in
favour of a fully objective subject matter (behaviour) to be studied only
with experimental techniques modelled on natural science. This was
superseded after the Second World War by a cognitivism—modelled on
the newly viable digital computer with its data and programmes—that
was no less objectivist and experimental. This in turn was challenged at
the end of the twentieth century as a result of technologies that gave new
life to neuroscience, no less objective.
These points are not just entertaining intellectual mind games. The
point in both cases is that real phenomena—in this case real institution-
ally located, materially organized, tangibly describable academic disci-
plines—emerge into concreteness in response to, and in the face of, their
paradoxes. As suggested above, the various ‘paradigm shifts’ through
which psychology as a discipline has mutated, for instance, are real emer-
gent responses to its foundational paradox. As I am using it (inspired by
the ‘pragmatic paradoxes’ of Watzlawick et  al. 1967), paradox is not a
mere logical conundrum but a practical circumstance in which it becomes
impossible to ‘go on’ because one is faced with (at least) two internally
coherent and yet mutually contradictory alternatives, each presenting
itself as an injunction. Paradox thus poses a challenge concerning ‘how to
go on’, and for this reason it is associated with the paralysis of process:
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    11

with processes getting ‘stuck’ and grinding to a halt. But life, as they say,
‘must go on’. This means that, precisely because of the obstacle it presents
to ‘going on’, paradox is also associated with a theme at the core of this
book, namely, emergence: the creative invention of new ways of going on
(see Greco and Stenner 2017; Motzkau and Clinch 2017). Could it be
that the emergence of novelty or ‘pattern shift’ is always associated with
some form of de-paradoxification?
The examples of the paradox of the psychosocial described above con-
cern the socio-cultural question of the emergence and the mutations of
psychology considered as a discipline, but I stated that the same princi-
ples might also apply to its subject matter (and to much more since the
principles are, indeed, ‘transdisciplinary’). Take the evolutionary emer-
gence of basic forms of consciousness, for example. To understand this,
I suggest that it is equally necessary to attend to spaces of transformation
in which ‘de-paradoxifying’ solutions are invented to negotiate ‘evolu-
tionary problems of system perpetuation that can be grasped as para-
doxes’ (Stenner 2005). From this perspective, the paradox that
consciousness resolved might be summed up by the question: how can
an organism know what is unknowable? Up to a point in their evolu-
tionary history, organisms could function adequately (survive and thrive)
purely on the basis of ‘knowledge’ that had been encoded in advance
into their genome. Problems of reproduction, of nutrition and of other
vital issues for maintaining equilibrium could be solved automatically, as
it were. Since the blood ‘knows’ how to clot and the digestive system
‘knows’ how to process food, the organism does not require a conscious
‘report’ which reflects this ‘knowledge’ back to itself. But:

a conscious report like an experience of pain or hunger is precisely required

when such genetically wired-in information is unable to solve a vital prob-
lem. … This situation occurs whenever the ‘knowledge’ requirements of
the organism cannot be preempted. Where is the food? Where and when
will I be hurt? In such cases a paradox ensues. It can be expressed as follows:
information must be wired-in that cannot be wired-in. I must know what I
cannot know. (Stenner 2005, p. 67)

Organisms that have faced this kind of paradox have ‘deparadoxified’

it through the evolution of the amazing capacity of sending themselves a
12  P. Stenner

conscious ‘report’. The report is sent in the form of what Tomkins (1962)
called a drive signal which is consciously ‘received’—as a feeling of pain,
hunger, thirst and so on—by that same organism (thanks to the recruit-
ment of suitably developed brain processes). This signal, as it were, ‘beats
on the door’ of the emergent system of consciousness until the organism
‘is goaded into some activity which will meet the body’s needs’ (Tomkins
1962, p. 31). Such a paradox becomes actual (and presses its demand)
only when an organism becomes sufficiently complex and mobile that
the old (‘hard-wired’) method will no longer suffice. A second example is
the emergence of symbolic communication, whose grounding paradox is
the necessity to ‘share what cannot be shared’ (Stenner 2005, p.  70).
Communication, following insights from Luhmann (1995), is a solution
to the paradox of the impossibility of individual consciousnesses ever
directly experiencing one another. Despite the fundamental isomorphism
of the brains of different human beings, we can never directly feel one
another’s pain or experience one another’s joy. The operations of my sub-
jective life, being dependent upon neural processes, have no way of con-
necting directly with the operations of other conscious beings.
Consciousness is first of all and last of all mine. Symbolic expression
allows us to share what cannot be shared (once what is ‘mine’ is trans-
formed into shared symbols). In proposing that consciousness de-­
paradoxifies organic life and that communication in turn de-paradoxifies
consciousness, I am pointing to real forms of process which, although we
take them for granted, at a certain point emerged as novelties through a
paradoxical space of transformation.
Returning to Motzkau’s paradox of the psychosocial, from my perspec-
tive, its second aspect can be expressed in the following generic way: we
both must and cannot separate the psychological from the social because
they both are and are not separable. On the one side, it is clear that our
psychological functioning—our experience, our subjectivity—is social.
This has been practically axiomatic for most social psychologists since
G. H. Mead’s (1932/1980) demonstration of the social origins of the self
based on Cooley’s arguments for the ‘looking glass self ’. Think of Freud’s
(1922) powerful statement at the beginning of Group Psychology. All psy-
chology, he asserts, is social to the extent that in ‘the individual’s mental
life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    13

helper, as an opponent’. For Freud, this makes any distinction between

Individual Psychology and Social Psychology rather arbitrary and prob-
lematic. The psychological and the social are part of a seamless and imma-
nent unity. We are born into a pre-existing social world as social beings
and that is how we die. We cannot be separate from others, especially
when alone.
And yet—to turn to the other side—between ourselves and others lies
a gulf we can never quite bridge. If I am to feel your pain, the pain of my
intimate partner—let alone the suffering of the tens of thousands of peo-
ple living right now in war-torn disaster zones throughout the world—I
must empathize, or make an imaginative leap. This leap is the source of
illusion, but it is also the means by which we expand our powers to affect
and be affected by the world. Since our nervous systems are not con-
nected, it is the easiest thing in the world for me to fail to even notice
your pain, and even if I do notice, plenty of people are capable of extract-
ing great enjoyment from the pain of others. Faced with suffering from
global inequalities to local traumas, we prefer to get on with the much
more personally important task of watching the latest episode from our
favourite TV series. In this sense—which William James (1900/2009)
referred to as a ‘certain blindness in human beings’—we cannot but be
separate from others. No matter how much I experience the other out
there as my model, my helper, my opponent, that other remains a part of
my mental life. From this side of the paradox, the problem is that I am
stuck with and within the limits of my own experience, limited to what-
ever I can grasp from my own perspective. My friends and rivals are a
figment of my lack of imagination (Greco 2017). So, our psychological
experience is social, and yet, at the same time, and despite the impossibil-
ity of not communicating, we can never quite communicate. We must
always struggle to get beyond ourselves, as it were, and to experience
ourselves as a genuine part of the bigger picture to which we already, in a
certain sense, belong (if only we knew it).
We both must and do separate the psychic from the social, but also we
cannot and ought not to separate them. Thinkers within psychosocial
studies have had a lengthy and heated debate over the seemingly minor
and insoluble question of whether or not there should be a hyphen in the
word psychosocial. For some, the hyphen expresses the difference at play
14  P. Stenner

between the two terms, whilst others argue that removing the hyphen
better expresses the unity. For me, this debate is symptomatic of the para-
dox of the psychosocial. If we fail to recognize this paradox, we are para-
lysed by it. It sweeps us up and we end up going round in circles, as if we
were swimming in a whirlpool, always being drawn back to this unan-
swerable question. But in the approach I am proposing, we don’t need to
think of the paradox of the psychosocial as a purely logical conundrum of
dry theoretical interest, or as a reason for despairing of the very possibility
of psychosocial studies and social psychology. We can approach it more
empirically and ask more concretely: where and when do we encounter
something like the paradox of the psychosocial? That is to say, where are
when do we encounter something like a paradoxical and volatile space/
time in which the distinction between psychic and social or inner and
outer dissolves and transforms from the clarity of an either/or into the
indistinction of a both/and combined with a neither/nor? And further,
how do we either resolve it, or fail to resolve it and remain paralysed?

The Liminal
The answer this book offers to my question about where and when we
encounter, and where and when we resolve, the paradox of the psychoso-
cial is that we encounter it in liminal experiences, or to put it slightly
differently, experiences of liminality. Liminal experiences are experiences
that happen during occasions of significant transition, passage or
­disruption. These are experiences that Deleuze and Guattari (1980)
might refer to as becomings. This book aims to put such experiences
squarely on the agenda of psychosocial studies, social psychology and any
other field which deals with the psycho/social interface. We experience
liminality when the forms of process (socio-psycho-organico-physical)
that usually sustain, enable and compose our lives are, for some reason,
disrupted, interrupted, transformed or suspended. Although the distinc-
tion is never so clear in reality, an analytic distinction is here being drawn
between experience during stable, predictable and normative times, on
the one hand, and liminal occasions, on the other (Turner 1967 calls the
stabile side of the distinction ‘structure’, and the liminal side ‘anti-struc-
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    15

ture’). To bring out the processual aspect of Turner’s concept of ‘structure’

(which can easily be misunderstood as ‘structuralist’), the ‘stable’ side of
this distinction is pursued at length in Chap. 5 using Schutz’s concept of
‘everyday life’ with its emphasis on predictable practices and pragmatic
routines. A structure will thus be redefined as a form of process. The ‘lim-
inal’ side of the distinction I divide into spontaneous liminal experiences
(which are events that befall us or that happen to us) and devised or fabu-
lated liminal experiences (which are performative events which we ‘do to
ourselves’ in the sense that we artfully contrive the liminal experience).
This latter distinction builds upon and modifies Turner’s (1982) distinc-
tion between ‘staged’ and ‘unstaged’ liminality (see especially Szakolczai
2009). I will return to this second distinction in the following section.
The best-known examples of liminal experiences of transition or pas-
sage are the rites de passage first identified by van Gennep (1909/1960) in
his classic anthropological text (discussed in Chap. 2 and then in further
detail in Chap. 5). Most people are familiar with the idea of rites of pas-
sage, such as those from childhood to adulthood, from pregnancy to
childbirth, from single status to married status and so on. Van Gennep
showed that these tend to begin with rites of separation and end with
rites of incorporation whereby a new status is ritualistically adopted. But
between these two phases we find a liminal phase concerned purely with
transition or passage. If the occasion is an initiation into adulthood, in
the liminal phase the passengers are neither adults nor children but are
immersed in a paradoxical logic that is both ‘both/and’ and ‘neither/nor’
(Kofoed and Stenner 2017)—a logic of the ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner
1967). In addition to this both ‘both/and’ / and ‘neither/nor’ logic, lim-
inal occasions tend to be highly affective in nature because they are for-
mative moments of great significance: leaps into the unknown. However,
if we are likely to encounter the paradox of the psychosocial during lim-
inal experiences, then this is also because these occasions have a double
function. On the one hand, they are precisely about undoing the ties that
bind a given person into a given social position and form of social process
(during the ‘preliminal’ rites of separation) and, on the other hand, they
are about binding new connections between that person and the social
position and form of social process they are in process of joining (during
the ‘postliminal’ rites of incorporation). The liminal phase of this process
16  P. Stenner

is an occasion during which the expectations and rules which normally

lend structure and predictability to the practices of daily social life are
temporarily suspended. This suspension of social order is usually tempo-
rary in that it facilitates the possibility of transition to a different form of
order. Liminal occasions are thus a little like those railway rotunda where
trains can be redirected into new directions, or perhaps, to use a biologi-
cal metaphor, a little like stem cells that have the potential to become any
sort of cell, but are—for a moment—existing in a state of as-yet-­
unactualized potentiality. For those who like games, liminal occasions are
like the joker in a pack of cards or like a blank domino: they have the
potential to take on any value depending upon circumstances. To use one
more metaphor, liminal occasions are moments during which solid psy-
chosocial structures melt down into liquids, the better to be reformed
into a new pattern.
Although rites of passage are, as it were, the home territory of liminal
experience (this is where the concept of the liminal originated), this book
explores the idea that liminal experiences go far beyond ritual contexts,
and have much broader, transdisciplinary, applicability (Stenner and
Moreno 2013; Stenner 2015, 2016, 2017; Stenner et al. 2017). In fact,
most scholars and scientists who are sensitive to experience and who
think in a processual manner will have crafted a concept that is in some
ways functionally equivalent to liminality. Examples are given through-
out the book, including Deleuze (Chap. 2), Langer (Chap. 3), James
(Chap. 4), Schutz (Chap. 5) and Whitehead (Chap. 6). Here I will pro-
vide two further examples of comparable concepts and modes of thought,
one from Winnicott and one from Mead. These are designed to illustrate
the point that liminality (or its equivalent) is not simply about experience
which is somehow marginal, but, crucially, about emergence in the sense
of the becoming of new processes, forms, structures, patterns, experiences
and entities that were previously not present.

D. W. Winnicott: Liminal Transition to Selfhood

I discuss Winnicott here because he deals with the becoming of the very
distinction between self and world and self and other. This forces us to
confront the crucial fact that we cannot start with ‘the self ’ but must
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    17

explain its emergence. The ‘self ’ is not first of all the subject of experience
but the effect or result of experience. It is what the process philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead (1929/1985) calls a ‘superject’. This of course
raises one of our paradoxes. How can what is not yet a self become a self?
And yet, paradoxical though it seems, this miracle of the emergence of a
self is something each of us had to go through and something that is gone
through every day by millions of infants. It is also not a once-and-for-all
event, but a process, and it is a process that some of us may revisit (in a
new way of course) even as adults. Winnicott shows us, or at least gives
us profound insights into, how the self emerges from a liminal zone of
indistinction.
First, in his famous article on transitional phenomena and objects,
Winnicott (1953) argues that our usual statement of human nature is
inadequate. This usual statement is based on an outer and an inner per-
spective. The first, and most obvious, statement is in terms of interper-
sonal relationships. These relationships can be observed from the outside:
this person, for example, is born into this family in this town in this
country, they have these friends, these colleagues and they engage in these
activities and so on. This observation is from the perspective of a fully
formed, clear and rational external observer. But also, a statement can be
made from, as it were, the internal perspective of this person themselves.
Winnicott emphasizes that this ‘internal’ statement can only be made to
the extent that the person has ‘reached the stage of being a unit with a
limiting membrane and an outside and an inside, it can be said that there
is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world that can be rich or
poor and that can be at peace or in a state of war’ (Winnicott 1953, p. 3).
It is important to Winnicott that the ‘inside’ perspective (the experience
from the point of view of the one having it) is understood to be an
achievement and not a given. You might observe that these two state-
ments (the outer and the inner) are at play in the paradox of the psycho-
social. This is because the objective statement in terms of interpersonal
relationships can at times be contrasted with the internal statement from
the perspective of a given person (recall the idea that there is ‘a certain
blindness’ whereby we can easily fail to appreciate factors in our life that
are perfectly evident to an external observer). I may, for example, fail to
grasp, from my internal perspective the social relations I am actually
18  P. Stenner

part of when judged from an external perspective. In fact, during liminal

circumstances, that inner/outer distinction is quite likely to falter and
break down.
Because Winnicott finds this double statement (outer and inner per-
spectives) inadequate, however, he adds a third perspective, and this is the
crucial one: ‘the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we
cannot ignore’ (p. 3). This third part he describes as an ‘intermediate area
of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute’.
He describes it as a resting-place. It is both inner and outer, and yet it is
also neither inner nor outer. It is a zone in which the usual requirements
and demands for a clear separation of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ are temporarily
suspended: ‘It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made
on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual
engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality
separate yet interrelated’ (Winnicott 1953, p. 3). It is an ‘intermediate
area between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived’ (p. 4).
This, it seems to me, is a classic description of liminality.
Of course Winnicott articulated this theory for a specific purpose. He
wanted to understand the role of what he called ‘transitional objects’ in
infant development. Like many before him, Winnicott had observed that
very often in the life of an infant (usually between 4 and 12 months old),
some entity—perhaps a bundle of wool, the corner of a blanket or even a
word or a mannerism—becomes vitally important to them, such that
they become anxious, or cannot sleep, without this ‘transitional object’.
For Winnicott the interesting question here is the process through which
an infant comes to grasp that an object can exist ‘outside’ herself, as it
were. He posits a transition from thumb-sucking fist-in-mouth, breast-­
in-­mouth activities, on the one hand, to an attachment to a teddy or
some other object recognized to be ‘outside’, on the other (note that the
teddy is not the transition object, as is commonly [mis]understood, but
the terminus of a transition that begins with the thumb). Winnicott spec-
ulates that at first, for example, the infant does not experience itself as
separate from its caregiver, but will come to do so through a transitional
process. The transitional object facilitates and enables this passage through
which the infant comes to distinguish itself as ‘me’ from an object which
is ‘not-me’.
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    19

Understood in this way, the significance of the object being the corner
of the blanket or the bundle of wool (or some such) is that it is indetermi-
nate as to being internal to the infant or an external object. It is neither
thumb nor teddy bear. From the perspective of the infant it is familiar
and handy like a thumb (the blanket might find its way into the mouth
along with the thumb), and yet holds the potential to be uncannily alien.
It is betwixt and between the thumb (internal) and the teddy bear (exter-
nal): neither and both self and other. Because of these features, the tran-
sitional object serves to occasion the infant’s very first ‘not-me’ experience:
it ushers into being the first possession. This, for Winnicott, explains the
enduring affection the child will feel for it: it ‘goes on being important’
(Winnicott 1953, p. 5). The tiny infant may even invent a basic word for
it. The transitional object is a basic symbol, but it would be wrong to say
that it symbolizes, let’s say, the breast. Equally important to its symbolism
(for the infant) is that it is not the breast. For the infant, the transitional
object is a symbol for itself as an external actuality no longer confusable
with the breast-in-mouth indiscriminate unity (Chap. 3 develops the
important topic of symbolism in more detail). It is obviously not the
object itself (the bit of wool for instance) that is a transitional object. For
us adults—who, to the extent that we are not ourselves in a liminal situ-
ation, see all this from an outside perspective—it is a bit of wool. It is a
transitional object only if it functions as such for that infant at that time.
It is a transitional object, in short, only when assembled as part of
Winnicott’s third, intermediate zone of experience. This third zone is not
just evidently liminal, it even has the quality of a proto-rite of passage,
supervened by the caregiver who (it is hoped) does not challenge but lov-
ingly facilitates and mediates the transition like a master or mistress of
ceremonies. Winnicott invokes initiation himself when he writes that in
infancy ‘this intermediate area is necessary for the initiation of a relation-
ship between the child and the world’ (Winnicott 1953, p. 7). We might
think of this as a proto-rite-of-passage: the first of many transformations
that presuppose and build upon its success, or at least its adequacy.
Furthermore, Winnicott (1953, p. 4) describes this third, intermediate
zone with its suspension of the usual demands as ‘the substance of illu-
sion’. To understand why we must recognize that Winnicott’s ‘third area’
is not simply created by the infant, although the infant contributes a great
20  P. Stenner

deal. We might just as well say that it is a social space/time created for the
infant by the caregiver, and in this sense it is a mixture of a spontaneous
experience and a devised experience. But it is created in such a way that
the infant is given what Winnicott calls ‘the illusion’ that they are in con-
trol of the business of satisfying their own desires: ‘The mother’s [sic]
adaptation to the infant’s needs, when good enough, gives the infant the
illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant’s
own capacity to create’. This is what he means by describing it as a ‘rest-
ing place’ and ‘an area that is not challenged’. The paradox of the psycho-
social is maximally alive here since it is genuinely unclear (and made
unclear) whether self comes from other or other from self. The ‘unchal-
lenging’ nature of the zone is the product of a tacit agreement that this
kind of question will not be asked and hence this kind of problem will be
suspended:

The transitional object and the transitional phenomena start each human
being off with what will always be important for them. i.e. a neutral area of
experience which will not be challenged. Of the transitional object it can be
said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never
ask the question: ‘Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from with-
out?’ The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The
question is not to be formulated. (Winnicott 1953, p.  17, emphasis in
original)

Hence although the third zone is the substance of illusion, far from
dismissing illusion, Winnicott sees in it something fundamental to
human subjectivity and, importantly, to human culture. First, it is funda-
mental to social being. Winnicott hints, not just that it is possible to
share with others a certain ‘respect’ for this illusory experience, but, more
emphatically, that collecting together as a group around such experience
is the ‘natural root of grouping among human beings’ (Winnicott 1953,
p. 4). As we shall see in Chap. 2 and pursue in greater depth in Chap. 5,
a certain liminal process of fabulation is indeed core to the religious expe-
riences and expressions that have served—for better or worse—through-
out history as a principle for the collection of human collectives (and
hence concern the emergence of new principles of collectivity). Second,
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    21

Winnicott’s liminal zone is fundamental to the creativity at play in the

arts and the work of the creative intellect. The intermediate zone does not
just constitute ‘the greater part of the infant’s experience’, but is retained
throughout life ‘in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and
to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work’
(Winnicott 1953, p.  19). This book will pursue the liminal origins of
these spheres of art, religion, imagination and creative thought, and make
the case that they should not just be core to psychosocial research, but
should be given more value and care within our societies.

G. H. Mead: Sociality as Liminal Passage

The second thinker to consider in this light is G. H. Mead (1932/1980),

whose work I discuss in more detail in Chap. 3. Mead is well known for
his social theory of self, but his process philosophy of emergence remains
almost unnoticed, despite underpinning his social psychology. As part of
that process theory he defines sociality in a distinctively original way as the
capacity of being several things at once. This definition is directly tied to
his concept of emergence, or what he calls the emergent event. An emer-
gent event, at the moment of its emergence, is inherently unpredictable: it
is that which is qualitatively different from its past. Life, for example, is
qualitatively distinct from physical processes, and yet it emerged from
them. Consciousness is qualitatively distinct from the organic p ­ rocesses of
life from which it in turn emerges. But more mundanely, when a new idea
arises for a person, this may qualitatively change the pattern and manner
of their thinking and give them a whole new perspective of life. Or when
a new cultural form emerges (as when writing was invented, or when
something like a theatre was conceived and enacted), this has transforma-
tive effects throughout the society, and within the psychology of each of
its members. The emergent, for Mead, is not just ontologically real, it is
the very seat of reality, since the emergent defines the locus of present
existence. Any past, and any future, can only be the past and future of
an emergent present. Building on these components, it is Mead’s con-
cept of sociality that can be considered a functional equivalent to lim-
inality. Decades before Victor Turner (1967) famously used the phrase
22  P. Stenner

‘betwixt and between’ to characterize liminality, Mead emphatically

defines sociality as a phase betwixt and between a reality (an ‘ordered uni-
verse’) that is ‘no longer’, and a new reality in process of emergence that is
‘not yet’:

The social nature of the present arises out of its emergence. I am referring
to the process of adjustment that emergence involves. … The world has
become a different world because of the advent, but to identify sociality
with this result is to identify it with system merely. It is rather the stage
betwixt and between the old system and the new that I am referring to. If
emergence is a feature of reality this phase of adjustment, which comes
between the ordered universe before the emergent event has arisen and that
after it has come to terms with the newcomer, must be a feature also of
reality. (Mead 1932/1980, p. 47)

Here, Mead identifies sociality itself with a phase of adjustment during

a passage from a system that is now in the past, to a system in process of
formation. The passage is instigated by the advent of an emergent event.
Mead stresses the ‘reality’ both of the ‘emergent event’ and of the subse-
quent ‘phase of adjustment’ betwixt and between the old system and the
new. In emphasizing sociality-as-passage, he draws our attention precisely
to the event of transformation as it is happening and that means before the
new order has settled. When the phase of adjustment is completed, and the
new system has ‘come to terms’ with the emergent event, then we are no
longer dealing with sociality as Mead here defines it. We are dealing
instead with a much more familiar definition of sociality that we might
call sociality-as-system as distinct from sociality-as-passage. Sociality-as-­
system is basically the idea that the nature of a given entity is determined
by the nature of other entities belonging within the same system. It is
limited to just one level of reality. It necessarily ignores the process of
emergence itself. Mead’s statement that ‘sociality is the capacity of being
several things at once’ (Mead 1932/1980, p. 49) thus relates to the situa-
tion in which a novel event must exist for a time in a liminal condition
when it is simultaneously part of the old order from which it emerged,
and the new order heralded by its advent. The key to this dimension of
sociality is temporal, because an entity can be in two divergent systems
only in passage.
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    23

It is on this basis Mead builds his famous account of the social emer-
gence of self as the distinctive characteristic of human sociality. As he puts
it: ‘The self by its reflexive form announces itself as a conscious organism
which is what it is only so far as it can pass from its own system into those
of others, and can thus, in passing, occupy both its own system and that
into which it is passing’ (Mead 1932/1980, p.  83). This ‘betwixt and
between’ status of passage makes the self inherently paradoxical. It means,
to quote Mead again, that we ‘must be others if we are to be ourselves’
(p. 194). By definition, then, the human self cannot be shut up in its own
world or isolated within an instant of time. It must belong, not just to a
systemic sociality, but to a liminal sociality-of-passage between at least
two different social systems. Here we can recognize Mead’s (1932/1980,
p. 83) famous discovery that the self emerges only when an ‘individual
finds itself taking the attitude of another while still occupying its own’. It
is precisely this capacity for role-taking that allows individuals to partici-
pate in the social process common to the collective. The ongoing reality
and form of social worlds depends upon the perspective taking of social
actors. The finely differentiated social structure of a society can ‘get into’
each individual only ‘in so far as he can take the parts of others while he
is taking his own part’ (p.  87). Self and society thus presuppose each
other because the meaningful social acts that compose the activities of a
complex human collective could not be coordinated but for the emer-
gence of human selves.

Liminal Affective Technologies

I have sketched the paradox of the psychosocial and related it to liminal
experience, and I have introduced a broadened concept of the liminal
that places emphasis on questions of transformation and emergence. I
can now return to the two forms of liminal experience distinguished
above (spontaneous and devised), and summarize how they are put to
work in this book. First, spontaneous liminal experience is basically expe-
rience in the face of transformations that happen to us and that throw us,
as it were, into an unpredictable, ambivalent and volatile situation and
condition. I have stressed that this is an analytical distinction and recog-
24  P. Stenner

nize that, in practice, things never quite just ‘happen’, and psychosocial
order perhaps never completely collapses. What is profoundly transfor-
mative for one person might be the routine daily life of another. But the
point remains that individuals and whole communities can find them-
selves thrust into the chaos of circumstances in which the usual order of
things is disturbed, ruptured, shocked or destroyed, and these events can
vary from collectively experienced floods, earthquakes and riots to more
local phenomena like divorces, job-losses and significant deaths. Such are
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. These are experiences in the
true sense of the word: they are things we must go through. They are also
things that mark and transform us: we are different when we come out
the ‘other side’.
The rituals of rites de passage provide a good example of experiences of
liminality that are devised or artfully created. We might say that these
rituals ceremonialize important events of passage in the life of a commu-
nity and the individuals that compose it. But their function is not just
decorative, because the various activities that compose a ritual serve also
to generate emotional experience conducive to passage. The activities
composing a ritual can vary enormously, but obvious examples include
dressing up, wearing masks, dancing, consuming alcohol (and other
drugs), playing and listening to music, public speaking, practices designed
to humiliate or exalt, physical tests, sexual practices and so on. These
activities share the common aim of stimulating those participating into
experiences that are somewhat out-of-the-ordinary. The rituals are thus
also something we go through, and the idea is that rites of passage prepare
us for the new phase in our life about to arrive. Rituals can thus be
thought of as a kind of technology for producing moving experiences that
are conducive of psychosocial transformation. I call them ‘liminal affec-
tive technologies’. But rites of passage are just one amongst many liminal
affective technologies. The thesis I develop in this book is that, at core,
the various art forms (including theatre, painting, poetry, music and so
forth) can also be considered as liminal affective technologies, and that
they share important features with ritual (as do the sports and games,
although this side of the argument remains to be fully developed). Ritual
can be considered as the primordial liminal affective technology in the
sense that it forms an original matrix from which the others eventually
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    25

split off and individuate. From the perspective I articulate, each of these
cultural forms is core to human psychology, since they are about its
transformation.
The true value of this distinction between spontaneous and devised
liminal occasions, however, is the productivity of the contrast it permits:
the betwixt and between. The thesis thus extends to the proposition that
the devised liminal experience engendered through liminal affective tech-
nologies helps us to navigate and manage spontaneous liminality (and
perhaps to bring a little of its spontaneity into our daily lives). The spon-
taneous liminal experiences cry out, as it were, for symbolic expression,
precisely because they challenge and transform the taken-for-granted
order of daily life, with its exquisitely synchronized but barely noticed
network of mutual perspective taking. Spontaneous liminal experiences
are de facto important and hence significant, but they shatter the existing
forms of symbolism which were adequate for the past but fail in the face
of the newly emergent. New symbolism must be invented where old sym-
bolism fails, and it is my thesis that the liminal affective technologies help
us to create that symbolism and to drag it into emergence from the very
edge of semantic availability.
Finally, it is important to recognize the relationship between, on the
one hand, the liminal experiences that we gather from these portals that
puncture and punctuate the cultural crust and, on the other, the world of
daily life itself. For every position there is a transition and for every sta-
tion a relation. To be concerned with process and liminality is to insist
that the transitions, borders, gaps, voids, fissures and movements between
states, positions, systems and disciplines are not nothing but are crucial
zones or space/times in which new forms are created and experimented
with: the quick of culture. Between the liminal and the ordinary there is
an incessant weaving of the fabric of a living, psychosocial culture. If the
reader will permit the distinction, perhaps the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ of
the psychosocial are like the pulse of a heart which combines a diastolic
expansion with a systolic contraction. The diastolic expansion is the
moment of experience, through which the gift of the past flows in, and
the systolic contraction is the moment of expression, in which—trans-
formed and objectified in the crucible of subjective aim—that gift is
26  P. Stenner

transmitted to future experience. We are connected one to another, and

each to the universe, through this pulse of experience.

Process Thought
Since process thought is key to the transdisciplinary approach of this
book, a brief introduction to it is required (see also Riffert and Weber
2003). Its premise is that psychosocial existence is not made of ‘stuff’ like
building blocks, but of happenings and events in which the many ele-
ments that compose our lives are temporarily drawn together. Process
thought may well have long roots dating back to Heraclitus, but it
acquired new significance during the nineteenth century. Thinkers like
Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, despite lapses into materialism, intro-
duced an inherent temporal dimension to our understanding of natural
and socio-cultural processes when they showed how species and societies
alike evolve and transform as part of a dynamic nexus of relational forces.
At the turn of the twentieth century, their insights and style of thought
directly influenced Peirce, James, Bergson and Nietzsche to ‘take time
seriously’, to borrow a phrase from G. H. Mead (1932/1980). Each of
these figures felt themselves to be on the edge of a conceptual revolution
which profoundly challenged the old settlements of Descartes, Locke and
Kant, and which re-ignited non-dualistic systems that had been long sup-
pressed (like that of Spinoza). These old settlements had presupposed a
Newtonian ontology of irreducible mass particles arranged mechanisti-
cally in an essentially unchanging absolute space.
Whitehead’s magnum opus Process and Reality (1929/1985) constitutes
a key event in the history of process thought because he synthesized and
systematized the emergent developments summarized above into a coher-
ent philosophy consistent with new developments in quantum and relativ-
ity physics. This gives his thought a rare breadth and potency, and explains
his influence across practically all disciplines. But, although his ideas are
core to this book, process thought does not begin or end with Whitehead,
who was modestly aware of the limitations of his own work as a perspective
in the making. Process and Reality is an unwieldy mixture of the arcane and
the ultra-modern (its old-style metaphysics bristles with neologisms and
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    27

mathematicisms), and it is, above all, difficult to read. After an initial flow-
ering of success, the decades after Whitehead’s death in 1947 saw a decisive
turn against his grand speculative style in preference for a combination of
analytical philosophy and techno-scientific positivism. The generalist
baton previously associated with metaphysics was taken up instead by sci-
ence in the form of general systems theory and structuralism, as briefly
discussed above with respect to transdisciplinarity.

The Structure of the Book

Following this first chapter which has introduced the main themes of the
book, Chap. 2 examines a phenomenon that is largely ignored in con-
temporary literature: fabulation. Fabulation is closely related to imagina-
tion, which in turn is classically distinguished from perception (where we
are assumed to perceive a reality that is co-present) and memory (where a
reality which did exist has now passed). In contrast to memory and per-
ception, imagination conjures a ‘fabulous’ reality which need neither
exist nor have existed. Fabulation is the name given to this process of
invention that is implied within imagination. This chapter makes the case
that fabulation involves far more than presenting an inadequate or dis-
torted representation of reality. It re-thinks fabulation as a symbolic
means through which human beings gain imaginative access to a world
in process of constant construction and reconstruction. Understood as a
means of conveying insight into unspoken depths of changing social
experience, fabulation is revealed to be crucial to human creativity and
hence to the actual emergence of novelty. The first section indicates a
number of epoch-making historical transformations based on newly
developed symbolic resources for, and of, fabulation. Taking us deep into
history, it offers a new psychosocial understanding of the transformative
significance of ritual, myth, religion and philosophy. A second section
traces the roots of this concept with a critical discussion of Bergson’s
philosophical construction of fabulation as a ‘faculty’ which is distinct
from intuition and which underpins and gives rise to ‘static’ morality and
religion. A third section—influenced by the work of Ronald Bogue—
deals with Deleuze’s reformulation of Bergson’s static versus dynamic
28  P. Stenner

dichotomy, and extracts from this a concept of event which is compatible

with liminality theory. The final section shows how a new psychosocial
concept of fabulation emerges when these resources are rethought using
liminality theory.
Chapter 3 builds directly upon the concept of fabulation crafted in
Chap. 2. Its strange title is a reference to one of Aesop’s fables known as
The dog and His Reflection. The dog in the fable loses its food, but this loss
gives it food for thought. A fable, as the word implies, is quite literally the
product of fabulation. The chapter uses Aesop’s fable as the basis from
which to unfold a theoretical account of transformative experience as the
crucible for the emergence of novelty. The shocked uh oh! that accompa-
nies the loss of the dog’s food is the basis for a creative ah ha! as the dog
enjoys a novel flash of insight by way of this experience of micro-­liminality.
The chapter grasps this process through a notion of deep symbolism
whereby insight is granted into previously unthought depths of felt expe-
rience. Resources for this account are found in the work of Susanne
Langer (especially her definition of the art object as a perceptible form
expressive of feeling, and her distinction between discursive and presen-
tational symbolism), combined with A. N. Whitehead’s theory of sym-
bolic reference. From the perspective developed, the fable-qua-art-object
can itself be construed as a presentational symbol expressing the feeling
of this insight. The fable (which can thereby be construed as a liminal
affective technology) affords its readers a devised liminal experience. But
that fabulated experience is ‘doubled’ by the spontaneous liminal experi-
ence which haunts it: a this is not experience.
Chapter 4 follows Chap. 3 in being structured around the contempla-
tion of an art object from which a number of theoretical distinctions, and
indeed the makings of an ontology, are unfurled. In this case the art
object is René Magritte’s well-known painting called Ceci n’est pas une
pipe. The stable visible form of the painting captures felt insights for a
theory of experience richer than that typically considered by social scien-
tists. Usually (outside of psychology and neuroscience) experience is
treated in a rather one-dimensional way that is informed by a long-­
standing bifurcation of nature into a physical world of pure meaningless
matter and a mental world of pure matterless meaning. On this assump-
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    29

tion, experience is falsely equated with the conscious experience of adult

humans, and the more primordial modes of experience at large through-
out nature are ignored. This black and white picture in which object and
subject of experience are cleaved apart gives rise to a shallow empiricism
which grossly distorts our knowledge. The chapter starts with Foucault’s
discussion of Magritte’s work, from which he extracts his famous distinc-
tion between the seeable and the sayable. Building on this, Magritte’s
painting is approached as if it were a prism through which the white light
of experience can be artificially dispersed into a colour spectrum. Drawing
upon the process philosophies of William James and A. N. Whitehead,
the spectrum of experience shows up through this prism as four emergent
and self-organizing layers or dimensions, each in turn abstracted from the
process of its more concrete predecessor. Just as the colour spectrum is
mixed in ordinary vision, so in actual experience these layers or dimen-
sions form an inseparable unity. Analytically, however, we can distinguish
the dimensions of Power (affect), Image (percept), Proposition (concept)
and Enunciation (discourse). The onto-epistemology which follows is
called deep empiricism.
Chapter 5 examines Alfred Schutz’s thought-provoking concept of
‘shock experiences’. Schutz is famous as a phenomenological social sci-
entist, but his direct engagement with process thought is less well-
known. Drawing upon William James, Schutz distinguishes a number
of ‘worlds’ (including the worlds of dream, play, theatre, painting,
humour, religion, etc.) from the world of ‘everyday life’. He considers
the transition from daily life to each of these worlds to be a shocking
experience and in so doing he strangely exaggerates the shock whilst
ignoring actual experiences of shock. The main point of the chapter is
that Schutz’s multiple worlds can be illuminated by liminality theory. To
this end, I provide a detailed analysis of Arnold van Gennep’s concept of
the liminal. The liminal is tightly connected to the sacred, but to grasp
this it is necessary to deconstruct the purified concept of the sacred pro-
posed in the influential tradition of Robertson Smith, and to grasp the
sacred experientially as an inherently ambiguous and ambivalent waver-
ing between worlds, that is as a way of making sense of experiences of
liminality. This volatile ‘double-­worldedness’ in turn sheds new light on
30  P. Stenner

the nature of dream, play, theatre, painting, religion and so on as liminal

worlds-between-worlds, and it draws attention to ritual and the arts as
liminal affective technologies for fabulating and navigating liminal expe-
rience ‘betwixt and between’ worlds. This allows us to understand cul-
ture as a dynamic mixture between the devised liminal experiences
typical of Schutz’s ‘worlds’ and spontaneous liminal experiences, includ-
ing actual shocks. Together these contribute a sense of importance (the
extra-ordinary) to be woven into the matter of fact of ordinary practice.
Chapter 6 constitutes an intervention into the so-called affective turn
that has influenced many within the humanities, the social sciences and
beyond. It centres upon a critique of the affect/emotion distinction upon
which this turn ‘turns’. The argument is not that one should not draw
such a distinction, but that it has been drawn in so many divergent ways
that confusion reigns. The chapter begins with a discussion of Raymond
Williams’s concept of ‘structure of feeling’, which is used to explicate one
key inspiration for a turn to affect: a distinction between ineffable
moments and movements, and clearly distinct structures and institutions
(‘event’ and ‘structure’). Through his ‘structures of feeling’ concept, I pro-
pose that Williams was feeling for a way to theorize the emergence of
novel cultural forms when they are on the liminal brink of discursive
symbolism, and hence before they have become fully explicit and con-
sciously articulable. The affective turn is itself understandable in this way
as a cultural emergence at the edge of semantic availability. In part, the
affect/emotion distinction expresses this difference between forming
(affect) and formed (emotion) forms. But the affect/emotion distinction
also plays out in terms of a difference between an ontological account of
feeling (applicable, via Spinoza and Whitehead, to the entirety of nature)
and an anthropological account (in which ontological ‘affect’ takes the
distinctively anthropological form of ‘emotion’ with its penumbra of
vaguely felt atmospheres). In fact, the chapter notes six other comparable
distinctions at play in the literature, and urges caution. Through these
arguments, the turn to affect is re-construed as the cultural emergence—
still in process—of a coherent species of transdisciplinary process thought.
This mode of thought and feeling will be inspired by an ontological con-
cept of affect/feeling as vector of transition, and yet it will be capable of
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    31

acknowledging both the continuity of ontological affect and the differ-

ences specific to human emotions. In this spirit, the last section deals
with a neglected but crucial aspect of human affectivity: liminal affectiv-
ity, with its combination of devised and spontaneous aspects.
Chapter 7 concludes the book in 6 main sections. The first section
provides a summary of the transdisciplinary approach provided by the
book and discusses how it relates to the contemporary situation of knowl-
edge fragmentation, particularly within the ‘anthropological’ domain
(understood broadly, in Max Scheler’s sense). The second section articu-
lates how the approach offers a view of human life as liminal in the sense
of being constituted by boundaries which are then transcended (this is
related to Simmel’s notion of life as transcendence). The third section
makes explicit the paradoxical nature of this viewpoint, but summarizes
the generative aspects of paradox. The fourth and largest section makes
explicit a concept of ontological liminality which has informed the
approach, and sketches how Whitehead, Mead and Simmel each contrib-
ute to this through their rethinking of time. Drawing on the work of
William Sewell, the fifth section illustrates how ontological liminality
plays out in the anthropological example of the French Revolution. A
final section draws together the threads by clarifying the ethos of transdis-
ciplinary theorization informing the book.

Notes
1. Such reflexive self-observation is core to any transdisciplinary practice. As
systems theory began to grapple with emergence/process issues, for
instance, it developed a ‘second order’ approach modelled on second order
cybernetics (a cybernetics of cybernetics which recognizes that the objects
observed as systems are themselves observers). The concern with ‘reflexiv-
ity’ was a similar development amidst social science during the same
period. Brown and Stenner (2009), to give a third example, refer to their
approach as a psychology of the second order, and one aspect of this is that
it is a psychology that seeks also to observe the influence psychological
knowledge has upon psychological experience (viewed as an inextricable
part of culture).
32  P. Stenner

References
Adams, M. (2016). Ecological crisis, sustainability and the psychosocial subject.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barry, A., Born, G., & Weszkalnys, G. (2008). Logics of Interdisciplinarity.
Economy and Society, 37(1), 20–49.
Blackman, L. (2008). Affect, relationality and the problem of personality. Theory,
Culture and Society, 25(1), 23–47.
Brown, S. D. (1995). What is transdisciplinarity? Manifold, 2(1), 57–62.
Brown, S., & Stenner, P. (2009). Psychology without foundations: History, philoso-
phy and psychosocial theory. London: Sage.
Brown, S. D., Ashmore, M., & MacMillan, K. (2005). Lost in the mall with
Mesmer and Wundt: Demarcation and demonstration in the psychologies.
Science, Technology & Human Values, 30(1), 76–110.
Charcot, J.-M. (1887). Lecons sur les maladies du systeme nerveux (Vol. 3). Paris:
Delahaye.
Chertok, L., & Stengers, I. (1992). A critique of psychoanalytic reason. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Cromby, J., Harper, D., & Reavey, P. (2013). Psychology, mental health and dis-
tress. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Curt, B. (1994). Textuality and tectonics: Troubling social and psychological science.
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). Thousand plateaus. London: Continuum.
Freud, S. (1896/1982). Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie (Freud Studienausgabe Band
VI). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
Freud, S. (1922). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. New York: Boni
and Liveright.
Frosh, S. (2015). Psychosocial imaginaries: Perspectives on temporality, subjectivity
and activism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Funtowicz, S.  O., & Ravetz, J.  R. (1993). Science for the post-normal age.
Futures, 25, 739–755.
Gibbons, M., Limoge, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, P.
(1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research
in contemporary societies. London: Sage Publications.
Gonzalez, B., Baptista, T. M., Branco, J. C., & Novo, R. F. (2014). Fibromyalgia
characterization in a psychosocial approach. Psychology, Health & Medicine,
20(3), 363–368.
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    33

Greco, M. (2017). Thinking with outrageous propositions. In A.  Wilkie,

M. Savransky, & M. Rosengarten (Eds.), Speculative research: The lure of pos-
sible futures (pp. 218–227). London: Routledge.
Greco, M., & Stenner, P. (2017). From paradox to pattern shift: Conceptualising
liminal hotspots and their affective dynamics. Theory and Psychology, 27(2),
147–166.
Hollway, W. (2015). Knowing mothers: Researching material identity change.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hull, C.  L. (1933). Hypnosis and Suggestibility: An experimental Approach.
New York: Appleton-Century.
James, W. (1900/2009). On a certain blindness in human beings. London:
Penguin.
Jantsch, E. (1972). Towards interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in educa-
tion and innovation. In L.  Apostel et  al. (Eds.), Problems of teaching and
research in universities (pp.  97–121). Paris: Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) and Center for Educational
Research and Innovation (CERI).
Keene, J. (2001). Clients with complex needs: Interprofessional practice. Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Klein, J. T., Grossenbacher-Mansuy, W., Häberli, R., Bill, A., Scholz, R. W., &
Welti, M. (2001). Transdisciplinarity: Joint problem solving among science, an
effective way for managing complexity. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag.
Kofoed, J., & Stenner, P. (2017). Suspended liminality: Vacillating affects in
cyberbullying/research. Theory and Psychology, 27(2), 167–182.
Luhmann, N. (1995). Social systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Maiers, W. (2001). Psychological theorizing in transdisciplinary perspective. In
J. Morss, N. Stephenson, & H. van Rappard (Eds.), Theoretical issues in psy-
chology (pp. 275–288). Toronto: Captus Press.
Mead, G. H. (1932/1980). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Mittelstrass, J.  (1993). Unity and transdisciplinarity. Inter-disciplinary Science
Review, 18(2), 153–157.
Moran, J. (2002). Interdisciplinarity. London: Routledge.
Motzkau, J. F. (2009). Exploring the transdisciplinary trajectory of suggestibil-
ity. Subjectivity, 27, 172–194.
Motzkau, J. F., & Clinch, M. (2017). Managing suspended transition in medi-
cine and law. Theory and Psychology, 27(2), 270–289.
Nicolescu, B. (2002). Manifesto of transdisciplinarity. New York: SUNY.
34  P. Stenner

Parker, I. (2015). Handbook of critical psychology. London: Routledge.

Piaget, J.  (1972). The epistemology of interdisciplinary relationships. In
L.  Apostel et  al. (Eds.), Problems of teaching and research in universities
(pp.  127–139). Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD) and Center for Educational Research and Innovation
(CERI).
Pohl, C., & Hirsch Hadorn, G. (2007). Principles for designing transdisciplinary
research. Proposed by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. München:
Oekom Verlag.
Python, M. (1979). Life of Brian. Python (Monty) Pictures.
Riffert, F., & Weber, M. (Eds.). (2003). Searching for new contrasts: Whiteheadian
contributions to contemporary challenges in neurophysiology, psychology, psycho-
therapy and the philosophy of mind. Franfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Slaney, K., Martin, J., & Sugarman, J. (2015). The Wiley handbook of theoretical
and philosophical psychology: Methods, approaches and new directions for social
science. New York: Wiley.
Stenner, P. (2004). Is autopoietic systems theory alexithymic? Luhmann and the
socio-psychology of emotions. Soziale Systeme, 10(1), 159–185.
Stenner, P. (2005). An outline of an autopoietic systems approach to emotion.
Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 12(4), 8–22.
Stenner, P. (2014). Transdisciplinarity. In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of critical
psychology (pp. 1987–1993). New York: Springer.
Stenner, P. (2015). A transdisciplinary psychosocial approach. In K.  Slaney,
J. Martin, & J. Sugarman (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of theoretical and philo-
sophical psychology: Methods, approaches and new directions for social science.
New York: Wiley.
Stenner, P. (2016). Liminalität, Un-Wohl-Gefühle und die affektive Wende. In
E.  Mixa, S.  M. Pritz, M.  Tumeltshammer, & M.  Greco (Eds.), Un-Wohl-­
Gefühle: Eine Kultureanalyse Gegenwärtiger Befindichkeiten. Bielefeld:
Transcript-Verlag.
Stenner, P. (2017). Being in the zone and vital subjectivity: On the liminal
sources of sport and art. In T. Jordan, K. Woodward, & B. McClure (Eds)
Culture, identity and intense performativity: Being in the Zone (Antinomies).
London: Routledge.
Stenner, P., & Moreno, E. (2013). Liminality and affectivity: The case of
deceased organ donation. Subjectivity, 6(3), 229–253.
Stenner, P., & Taylor, D. (2008). Psychosocial welfare: Reflections on an emerg-
ing field. Critical Social Policy, 28(4), 415–437.
   Introduction: Throwing Psychosocial Studies in at the Deep End    35

Stenner, P., Greco, M., & Motzkau, J. (2017). Introduction to the special issue
on liminal hotspots. Theory and Psychology, 27(2), 141–146.
Stephens, C. (2008). Health promotion: A psychosocial approach. Maidenhead:
Open University Press.
Szakolczai, A. (2009). Liminality and experience: Structuring transitory situa-
tions and transformative events. International Political Anthropology, 2(1),
141–172.
Tomkins, S. (1962). Affect, imagery, consciousness (Vol. 1). New York: Springer.
Turner, V. (1967). Betwixt and between: The liminal period in rites de passage.
In The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. London: Cornell University
Press.
Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. New York:
PAJ.
Van Gennep, A. (1909/1961). The rites of passage. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Watzlawick, P., Beavin Bavelas, J., & Jackson, D.  D. (1967). Pragmatics of
human communication: Patterns, pathologies and paradoxes. New York: W. W.
Norton & Co.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929/1985). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.
Winnicott, D.  W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34, 89–97.
Woodward, K. (2015). Psychosocial studies: An introduction. Abingdon:
Routledge.
 2
This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation

Introduction
To fabulate, in the ordinary English use of the term, is to invent fables or
to talk in fables. A fable is a more or less fabulous fabrication, often
involving fantastic animals. Fabulation extends to the process of myth-­
making and legend-making, and to the creation of parables, aphorisms
and much more besides. It is a concept that allows us to make dangerous
and yet important observations about the fine line between truth and fic-
tion, what is and what might be. This ‘fine line’ has been given a new
prominence recently through the issue of ‘fake news’ and the associated
idea that we now live in an era of ‘post-truth’ (an adjective awarded the
dubious prize of word of the year by the Oxford Dictionaries in 2016).
Donald Trump used the expression ‘fake news’ during one of his early
press conferences as president-elect in 2016. He pointed at a CNN jour-
nalist and hissed ‘you are fake news’ instead of answering the journalist’s
question, thus showing his expertise at manipulating the media. Despite
this recent vogue, it is wise to take a longer-term view of the bigger pic-
ture at stake in these flourishing concepts. This chapter braves a big-­
picture perspective by arguing that fabulation is not simply an inadequate
or distorted representation of reality; on the contrary, it is a symbolic

© The Author(s) 2017 37

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_2
38  P. Stenner

means through which human beings gain imaginative access to the world.
As such, it is a core ingredient in the emergence of novel forms of indi-
viduality and collectivity.
The argument proceeds by critically revisiting Henri Bergson’s concept
of fabulation (see also Bogue 20061) and by integrating it within an
account of liminal experience. I will show that Bergson (1932/1986)
hoped to understand religion itself as the product of fabulation, but he
didn’t stop there, because he also saw it as core to the writing of poetry
and prose and to artistic activity more generally: ‘How is it’, he asks, ‘that
psychologists have not been struck by the mysterious element in a faculty
such as this?’ (Bergson 1932/1986, p.  196). In my view psychologists
were indeed struck by this ‘faculty’, since it haunts the entire discipline.
The problem is that the blow practically knocked modern psychology
unconscious, and one of my aims—perhaps doomed to failure—is to
help it recover its senses.

 poch-Making Symbolic Transformations:

E
From Ritual to Myth, from Myth to Philosophy
My talk of a ‘big picture’ is no exaggeration. Fabulation takes us deep into
human history, and in fact—if we follow the convention of defining his-
tory in terms of the availability of written documents—well into pre-­
historic times too. Indeed, at the dawn of history, the famous ‘Muses’
from Greek mythology were self-conscious purveyors of ‘fake news’ long
before the internet and Donald Trump. The Muses were first named by
Hesiod around 700 BC. They featured as part of his epic song/poem the
Theogony whose topic is a genealogy of the Gods and the universe (Hesiod
and Caldwell  1987). The song/poem tells of the emergence of Gaia
(earth), Eros (desire), Tartarus (the underworld), Erebus (darkness) and
Nyx (night) from out of the primal Chaos of nothingness, and of how
their various matings gave rise, first to the Titans and giants, and then to
the Olympian Gods led by Zeus. How, we might ask, did Hesiod learn of
these things? Was he just making it up? What were his sources? Since
these kinds of fantastic events are not typically accessible to ordinary
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    39

mortals, Hesiod begins his poem by explaining the sources of his inspira-
tion. Let us begin our song, he says, with the Muses of the great and holy
Mount Helicon. These Muses, he continues, dance on their dainty feet
around a violet-like spring which serves as an altar in the rituals of ‘exceed-
ingly strong Kronios’. After bathing their soft skin in the spring they
arouse desire by dancing erotically on the peak of the holy mountain as
they sing enchanting hymns to the ‘sacred clan of the deathless ones who
are for always’. It was these Muses, Hesiod tells us at the beginning of his
poem, that taught him—the great purveyor of myth—to sing his song.
He met them, allegedly, whilst shepherding sheep at the foot of Mount
Helicon. But the first words they spoke to him, it seems, were a warning
about fake news: ‘Rustic shepherds, worthless reproaches, mere stom-
achs, we know how to say many lies like the truth, and, whenever we
wish, we know how to tell the truth’ (Hesiod and Caldwell 1987, p. 27).
The truth of the Muses—springing from its source in the rituals of
Kronos (or Kronios) and flowing into the pool of myth created by
Hesiod—is never more than a hair’s breadth away from lies. In modern
psychology, the notion of fabulation has lost this risky relation to truth.
Where the concept is discussed (as with the psychiatric notion of ‘con-
fabulation’) it has a quite limited application, and is associated for the
most part with deviations from accurate cognition, as measured by some
external standard. It was used in the context of child development by Jean
Piaget (1972, p. 202) to indicate a phase—ending at around 7 or 8 years
of age—when children find it difficult to ‘distinguish between fabulation
and truth’. In a similar vein, it also has an important place in psychologi-
cal debates about the influence of suggestibility in creating false memo-
ries and the role of children as witnesses (see Motzkau 2007; Brown and
Stenner 2009; Brown and Reavey 2015 for critical accounts).
Much more is at stake in fabulation than a mere name for an incapac-
ity to speak the truth, or an over-active imagination. I suggest that the
close connection between truth and fabulation first indicated by the
Muses stems from the fact that before we can accurately describe the
world, we must imaginatively construct it, and become an active part of
it. The world may be ‘out there’, but it does not come to us without
imaginative effort on our behalf, and that imaginative effort is supported
by its own media, such as ritual, myth and the music of poetic song.
40  P. Stenner

Fabulation points to this affectively charged process of construction that

necessarily precedes the more abstract and intellectual business of con-
cept formation and abstract thought. Fabulation, from this perspective, is
less a question of misrepresenting a pre-existent world of facts, and more
a question of gaining imaginative access to a world that ever exceeds us,
but that we are already in some sense a part of. Rational thought based on
concepts is itself, I shall argue, a precious and precarious achievement
that builds upon modes of fabulation that it is never far from plunging
back into, or soaring back out of. But fabulation is equally tied to mysti-
cism, if by mysticism we mean ‘insight into depths as yet unspoken’
(Whitehead 1938/1966, p. 237); the importance of these insights is that
they necessarily precede more rational modes of thought, providing them
with their material. The use of ‘us’ and ‘we’ above is deliberate, since it is
also important to recognize that fabulation is not limited to an individual
perspective. Fabulation, in this sense, is tied to a necessary project of cre-
ating ourselves, both individually and collectively: a project of self-­
formation through culture. Any human collective necessarily involves a
fabulation of sorts. It is this creative and collective aspect of fabulation
that captured the attention of Giles Deleuze:

When a people is created [se crée: literally, ‘creates itself ’], it does so through
its own means, but in a way that rejoins something in art … or in such a
way that art rejoins that which it lacks. Utopia is not a good concept:
rather, there is a ‘fabulation’ common to the people and to art. We should
take up again the Bergsonian notion of fabulation and give it a political
sense. (Deleuze 1990, cited in Bogue 2006, p. 202)

Deleuze died too soon after writing these words, and never got a
chance to return to the concept of fabulation and give it his political
sense.

When Socrates Began to Fabulate

New concepts can be deeply political, and surely nobody knew that bet-
ter than Socrates as he awaited execution for his philosophical crimes
against the Athenian state. In the Phaedo, Plato tells the story of Socrates
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    41

in the last hours of his life (Plato and Grube 1977). His crime: refusing
to recognize the Gods of the State and leading Athenians astray with his
philosophy. His punishment: to poison himself with hemlock. Knowing
his strong antagonism to poetry, his friends and admirers were shocked to
learn that Socrates had spent many of his last hours composing a hymn
to Apollo and putting the fables of Aesop into verse. When questioned
about this, Socrates explains that he had experienced a series of dreams
advising him to practice the arts. Up until this late point in his life, he
had interpreted these dreams as encouragement—like the cheers of sup-
port given to runners in a race—to continue with what he took to be the
highest form of art, namely philosophy. But after his trial, he had experi-
enced some doubts, especially after the rituals of the Athenian festival to
Apollo had delayed the day of his execution. During this liminal moment
of hesitation in facing his death, Socrates began to wonder if the dreams
were not instead telling him to practice and cultivate the more popular
art of poetry. He explains that he thought it safer, while he still had a
chance, to obey the dream more literally, and so he composed the hymn
to Apollo, leader of the Muses. Writing the hymn made it clear to Socrates
that if he was to properly satisfy the demands of the dreams, he must turn
to fables: he must fabulate. As he puts it, on his last earthly day, ‘a poet,
if he is to be a poet, must compose fables, not arguments. Being no teller
of fables myself, I took the stories I know and had at hand, the fables of
Aesop, and I versified the first ones I came across. Tell this to Evenus,
Cebes, wish him well and bid him farewell, and tell him, if he is wise, to
follow me as soon as possible. I am leaving today, it seems, as the Athenians
so order it.’
This scene is striking because both Socrates and Plato, up until this
point, had been relentlessly critical of the mode of fabulation at play in
poetry and rhetoric. Plato’s corpus of work—despite being composed in
the rather poetic style of dramatic dialogue—is set against the power of
the foolish and empty eloquence of the sophists, and in this battle Socrates
is his hero. Plato, to put it in today’s context, would be horrified by the
domination of sophistry within our contemporary media of spin and
rhetoric. In the Republic (607b5-6), it is very clear on which side Plato
stands in the ‘old quarrel between philosophy and poetry’, since the final
book of the Republic is perhaps the world’s most famous attack on poetry.
42  P. Stenner

It is as if something of vital importance to both society and the individual

were at stake in this epoch-making confrontation of Socrates/Plato (with
their medium of philosophy/mathematics) versus Homer/Hesiod (with
their medium of poetry/music).
We get an indication of the scale of the stakes at play when we realize
that it was thanks to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod (and less known
figures equally inspired by Calliope and her son Orpheus) that the
Athenians even had State Gods that could be recognized or misrecog-
nized. Since the groundbreaking work of Jane Harrison (1908), we now
take very seriously Herodotus’ statement that it was the epic poets who
gave the Greek Gods their names, their roles and even their shapes.
Homer, thought to have been illiterate and blind, was a folk-singer
who—like Hesiod—composed fragments of existing mythical tales into
lengthy songs. The word epic is related to the Ancient Greek word for
song, Epos. They were part of an oral culture, but it seems that the written
alphabet was invented not long before the time that Homer was compos-
ing and singing his epic songs about Achilles, Odysseus and co. sometime
between 700 and 800 BC. This fusion of a long-standing oral tradition
with writing was a potent mix. It is expressed by the fact that the chief
Muse of the epic poets—Calliope—is conventionally symbolized by a
writing tablet. So, although Homer may have considered this new-­fangled
technology of writing to be a dangerous drug of forgetfulness, his songs
were destined to be written down and to acquire the extra aura of truth
that comes with any remarkable technological innovation. Although the
facts are unavailable, it is possible that Homer performed his songs in
front of an amanuensis, and some say that Hesiod may already have com-
posed using writing2.
Once fabulated through the medium of mythical song, the luminous
figures cut by the Olympian Gods often mentioned in these dazzling
tales would obscure from view the nature of Greek religion prior to the
epoch of epic poetry. Through careful historical attention to cult prac-
tices, Jane Harrison and her colleagues revealed that the Olympians
played practically no role in the older Greek festivals and rites. With
time, it seems, the Olympian Gods—once fabulated—were superim-
posed upon an older ritual tradition involving much stranger figures,
often animals and powerful forces. During this transition, where the
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    43

Olympians come to feature, they tend to bear an alias such as ‘Zeus

Meilichios’, where Meilichios—or ‘He of appeasement’—takes the form
(on certain carved reliefs) of a giant bearded snake. As Susanne Langer
(1978, p. 169) eloquently argues, the creations at play in ritual (with its
emphasis on cult practice rather than mythical or theological theory) typi-
cally come before those articulated in the form of myth, and supply the
latter with its material for elaboration. Myth re-interprets the truths of
ritual. Or rather, the fabulations of myth re-work those that had been
formed by the older means of ritual, ritual being a medium that is prob-
ably as old as humanity itself (although, naturally, rituals continue to
develop after the fabulation of myths, and in this sense the direction of
influence may be, or will be, circular and reciprocal). For Langer, the
legend of the Olympian Gods could not be formulated in the medium of
ritual alone, but ‘it is in the great realm of myth that human conceptions
of divinity really become articulated… Divinities are born of ritual, but
theologies spring from myth’ (Langer 1978, p. 169).
To return to Socrates and Plato, it seems that when they took issue
with poetry/music, they were challenging a Homeric/Hesiodic mode and
medium of fabulation that had—by that point—given rise to an estab-
lished world-view. That challenge can be thought of as a new claim: that
it is philosophy, and not poetry, that is capable of deciphering, rendering
comprehensible and legitimating what had been given and safeguarded
by ritual. During his trial, Plato expressed disappointment with the poets
he had talked to. Given their contact with the Muses, he had expected
deep insight and prophetic wisdom, but he found just flimsy rhetoric. It
is as if the poet were merely intoxicated by the Muse and, like a drunk the
morning after a binge, remembers almost nothing of their profound
encounter. As Plato makes clear, it is the philosopher, not the poet, who
is the true prophet of the Muses, since it is down to the philosopher to
approach these matters more lucidly. This was a new departure in human
history, and it is perhaps the origin of Whitehead’s (1938/1966, p. 237)
notion that ‘the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism’.
In sum I propose that ritual, poetry and philosophy are each modes of
fabulation, and each a core ingredient in the becoming of human society,
culture and individuality. Susan Langer (1978, p. 200) nails this point
about becoming with characteristic precision, and indicates that each
44  P. Stenner

epoch-making advance springs from a newly invented form of symbolism

or, in the terms I have been using, a new mode of fabulation:

It is a peculiar fact that every major advance in thinking, every epoch-­

making new insight, springs from a new type of symbolic transformation.
A higher level of thought is primarily a new activity: its course is opened by
a new departure in semantic.

Epic poetry, in the story I am telling, was a new departure from the
more basic semantic or type of symbolic transformation supplied by rit-
ual, and philosophy was a new departure from that of poetry. Each trans-
formation involved a new type of symbolic medium which permitted the
expression of a different mode of subjectivity and of collectivity. The ‘old’
semantic does not disappear in this process of transformation, but is
eclipsed and transformed, and perhaps continues in different locations or
in residual forms. Furthermore, it seems to me that each new departure
in ‘semantic’ tends to be ritualistically marked as a sacred event, often by
a certain sacrificial trial. If the world became a different place after the
songs of epic poetry were written down, then it was also never the same
after the event of the emergence of philosophy (sealed by the trial and
death of Socrates), or—for that matter—after the subsequent emergence
of a major ‘modern’ religion like Christianity (sealed by the trial and
death of Christ) or after the emergence of modern science (sealed by the
trial of Galileo). The stakes at play in the concept of fabulation, in short,
are not just about the fanciful description of an already existing world,
but about the creation or emergence of new worlds.

Fabulation as a Psychosocial Concept: Bergson

The distinctive psychosocial relevance of the concept of fabulation has
been recognized at least since the word was used—in French of course—
by Henri Bergson in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932/1986,
hereafter 1986). Deleuze took the term ‘fabulation’ from Bergson (see
Bogue 2010), although in my copy of the English translation of The Two
Sources, the English phrase ‘myth-making faculty’ is usually used in place
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    45

of fabulation. Fabulation is used sparingly indeed and doesn’t warrant an

index entry. This book, written late in Bergson’s career, is a thoroughly
psychosocial application of his philosophy. It is a response to Durkheim’s
(1912) famous sociological thesis about religion, and the best way of
understanding it is thus to begin by recalling Durkheim’s account, which
was based on a desk-top study of Aboriginal totemism.
Generally seen as the most ‘primitive’ of religions, totemism involves
identification, on the part of small clans of people, with a totemic crea-
ture or object, images of which become the ‘banner’ of the clan. Durkheim
noted that the images of totem creatures are usually more sacred to the
clan than the actual animal itself. He argued that this is because the real
nature of the totem has little to do with the creature or plant, but serves
merely to provide a ‘material form by which human minds can picture
that immaterial substance, that energy diffused throughout all sorts of
heterogeneous things, that power which alone is the true object of the
cult’. The true reality, in other words, is this energy or power of the clan
itself, but the only way that this can be grasped as a social object is through
objectification into the form of the totem: ‘Since the religious Power is
nothing else than the collective and nameless Power of the clan, and since
this is not capable of representation except through the totem, the totemic
emblem is like the visible body of the god’ (Durkheim 1912, p. 270).
Durkheim generalizes this idea to all religion: in worshipping its gods
or god, a society is in reality worshipping itself. The primordial task of
religion is to supply a system of ideas ‘by means of which individuals can
envisage the society of which they are members, and the relations, obscure
yet intimate, which they bear to it’ (Durkheim, quoted by Langer 1978,
p. 165). In proposing his new discipline of sociology, Durkheim is pro-
posing that we worship the real God: ‘The believer is not deceiving him-
self when he puts his faith in the existence of a moral potency, on which
he is dependent, and to which he owes his better part: this Power exists,
it is society’ (Durkheim, quoted by Langer 1978, p. 165). We err when
our fabulations lead us to believe that our powers are determined by a
crocodile or a koala bear, but the fabulation contains—when sociologi-
cally decoded—the ‘truth’ that those powers are socially derived.
It is as if Durkheim reverses the old Buddhist notion of the Veil of
Maya in which what we usually take to be the real world is re-cast as a
46  P. Stenner

world of illusion that is in fact secondary to a more primordial and tran-

scendent spiritual world, invisible to most. For Durkheim the totem-­
creature is a symbol whose true meaning is ‘society’, and so the illusion is
that there is anything ‘transcendent’ beyond that society. The error, in
short, is to mistake the symbol for what it symbolizes. This inverts the
message of the Veil of Maya, for which it is precisely the mundane world
of daily life (society) that is the illusory ‘veil’ that we must learn to see
through. The strength of Durkheim’s thesis is that it acknowledges the
sense in which our own societies are a mystery to us, and hence hard to
grasp. He effectively re-works the Catholic notion of a sacrament (a visi-
ble manifestation of an invisible truth). The weakness is that the sole
concern with the human social world closes the door on the world beyond
human society. Wherever he looks, Durkheim sees always and every-
where the reflection of society, like Narcissus who cannot escape the
beauty of his own image. Durkheim gives us a fable that pretends to be
nothing but fact: the myth of a myth-free positive science.
Bergson takes issue with Durkheim’s overly sclerotic distinction
between individual and collective minds, and his purely sociological ten-
dency to ‘regard the individual as an abstraction, and the social body as
the one reality’ (1932/1986, p. 105). Bergson is directly concerned with
re-thinking the problem of the integration of individuals into collectives,
and he addresses psychology directly. Perhaps the clearest statement of
Bergson’s social psychology is his statement that ‘the individual and soci-
ety are implied in each other: individuals make up society by their
­grouping together; society shapes an entire side of individuals by being
prefigured in each one of them. The individual and society thus condi-
tion each other, circle-wise’ (p. 199). For Bergson, as we shall see, religion
becomes necessary once that circle is broken by the development of cre-
ative intelligence. Fabulation (or the ‘myth-making faculty’) is decisively
important in his account since it is essentially one of his two proposed
psychological sources of the social forms we know as morality and
religion.
Bergson’s philosophy is always thoroughly dualistic, but—as with
Spinoza’s reformulation of Cartesianism discussed in Chap. 6—the dual-
ism he proposes is expressly designed to counter the standard bifurcations
between mind and body where the subject is cleaved apart from the
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    47

object as the animating force of a natural world conceived as thoroughly

mechanical. Hence when Bergson (p. 105) announces that the phenom-
ena he is addressing ‘would well deserve to have a separate account opened
for them in the books of psychology’, he nevertheless insists that the
future of psychology ‘depends on the way it first dissects its object’. By
dissection he means the conceptual distinctions that are used to cut the
phenomena. Those cuts should follow the natural joints. The ‘two sources’
of Bergson’s title are hence designed to illuminate his preferred way of
cutting, not between mentality and materiality, but between a fixed and
static nature oriented towards its own conservation (and associated with
abstraction, habit and all things mechanical), and a dynamic and creative
nature expressing an ever-emerging vitality (and associated with
intuition).

 ergson’s Distinction: The Static/Closed (Infra-­

B
intellectual) Versus the Dynamic/Open
(Supra-intellectual)

At the risk of exaggeration, it seems that Bergson’s entire philosophy

springs from this distinction, which recurs in numerous forms (matter
and memory, for example, or closed and open types of society). He invari-
ably celebrates the open side associated with creation, invention and
intuition, and he recurrently laments that psychology is fixated only on
the closed side. In discussing intelligence, for instance, he celebrates the
‘intelligence which invents’ over and above that which merely ‘under-
stands, discusses, accepts or rejects – which in a word limits itself to criti-
cism’ (p. 45). And when discussing emotion as distinct from sensation he
insists on distinguishing ‘two kinds of emotion, two varieties of feeling,
two manifestations of sensibility’. I will dwell a little on Bergson’s two
kinds of emotion because emotion—and affectivity more generally—is
core to his account, and the limitations of this account clarify and lead us
to the relevance of the concept of ‘liminality’.
The first kind of emotion, with which the ‘psychologist is generally
concerned’ (p. 44) Bergson calls ‘infra-intellectual’. It is a mere surface
agitation which arises as a consequence of an ‘idea’, ‘mental picture’ or
48  P. Stenner

‘intellectual state’, as if an already existent ‘representation’ had merely

dropped into a pool of sensibility, stirring up ripples. This is the concept
of emotion-as-vague-reflection-of-cognition typically at play when affec-
tivity or sensitivity is contrasted with intelligence or reason. It is the con-
cept most often at play amongst contemporary cognitive psychological
theories of emotion. The mental representation is self-sufficient, and far
from owing anything to the emotion, it ‘loses more than it gains’ (p. 43).
The type of emotion Bergson celebrates, by contrast, he calls ‘supra-­
intellectual’. It alone is ‘productive of ideas’ and not reflective. It does not
follow from a representation that is clearly distinct from it, but rather it
generates ideas and is ‘pregnant with representations’ in process of forma-
tion, which it ‘draws or might draw from its own substance by an organic
development’ (p. 44). This second type is not a surface agitation but an
‘upheaval of the depths’. It brings an ‘affective stirring of the soul’ (p. 43).
Such supra-intellectual emotion, for Bergson, ‘is the source of the great
creations of art, of science and of civilization in general’ (p. 43).
This distinction is rich and important, but problems emerge when the
cut is made in too absolute a manner. Bergson, as we shall see, proceeds
as if there were two completely independent sources giving rise to each
side of his preferred dichotomy, each a distinct ‘faculty’. It is my view that
the source of Bergson’s difference (which is real and important) does not
lie in some absolute difference between affect and emotion, or between
an infra-intellectual and a supra-intellectual faculty of feeling. Rather, the
difference between an infra-intellectual emotion and a supra-intellectual
experience is better understood as equivalent to the distinction that
Dilthey (1989) draws between mere experience and an experience. The for-
mer involves little more than a superficial registration of familiar events,
whilst the latter involves an awareness of change and the feeling of going
through something (Throop 2002). If the former is business as usual, then
the latter is part of an event. Going through an experience is a matter of
passage or of transformative becoming, and as such the experience can be
characterized as ‘liminal’. An experience is an experience of becoming: an
experience occasioned by liminal, transformative circumstances. To give
an obvious example, we can easily imagine that Socrates ‘went through’
something when he was building up to enacting his death penalty.
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    49

It is precisely in liminal experience that new ‘representations’ are

formed, and with them new ways of proceeding. The reason for this is on
one level quite simple: during liminal experiences our usual ‘representa-
tions’ fail us, and new ways of going on are required. That is why we need
to become something different. Once upon a time, in ripe circumstances,
an epic poem was part of a transformative event, as was its conversion
into written form, as was its re-visioning as philosophy and so on. It is in
liminal experience that the depths are disturbed and the soul is stirred,
and it is for this reason that liminal experience is associated with forms of
creativity that are never more than a hair’s breadth away from destructive
chaos. Bergson’s distinction is thus crucial, but must not be hypostasized:
we are dealing with the same soul or psyche, even as it becomes some-
thing new. The source of the difference is not in some distinct faculty, but
in the quality of the real occasion at play, and the multiple ingredients
that are brought together in the confluence of its actual occurrence. It is
not, in other words, a matter of two distinct faculties serving as sources,
but of what the same ‘faculty’ can become under the influence of differ-
ent conditions. This psychosocial reformulation (which stresses the rele-
vance of concrete circumstances to psychological functioning) is central
to the perspective I am here unfolding.

 he Faculty of Fabulation as the Source of Static

T
Morality and Religion in Bergson

Nevertheless, Bergson does thoroughly hypostasize, and hence misrecog-

nize, his dichotomy into two different sources. This reification is effected
in three simple steps.
First he begins this process by calling into question the unitary nature
of the faculty proposed to underpin religion and morality by the psychol-
ogy of his day: imagination. Imagination, as classically understood, is
distinct from both perception and memory. These latter terms presup-
pose a connection with an existing reality—either a reality that is co-­
present (as with perception) or a reality that has now passed, but did exist
(as with memory). Imagination, by contrast, conjures a reality which
need not exist, and need never have existed (a unicorn, for example, or a
50  P. Stenner

fantasy of world domination). But why, Bergson asks, should we lump

together under the single category of imagination both the phantasmic
representations that produce superstitions and other falsehoods and the
source that gives rise to the inventive achievements of art and science?
The first seem static and negative whilst the second seem dynamic and
creative. And so, to tidy things up, and to butcher nature at the joints in
the right way, Bergson proposes calling the act which supposedly pro-
duces the first grouping by the different name of fabulation or, in the
translation of my volume, ‘“myth-making,” or “fiction”’ (p. 108). ‘How
is it’, he asks, ‘that psychologists have not been struck by the mysterious
element in a faculty such as this?’ (p. 196). As we shall see, this move on
Bergson’s part is deeply problematic, and distorts his entire concept of
fabulation.
Bergson’s second step is to further accentuate the difference by propos-
ing an evolutionary function that would explain the emergence of a dis-
tinct psychological faculty3 of fabulation. The natural need that gave rise
to the faculty of fabulation, he proposes, is to guard against certain dan-
gers which allegedly followed from our ancestor’s having developed the
intellectual faculties of judgement and reason. The danger of intelligence
is that it can push too far the conclusions it deduces from experience.
Following its own train of logic, intelligence inevitably becomes corrosive
of those forms of social order that had previously been held together by
biological instinct. Inventive thought generates initiative, for example,
and this inevitably carries the risk of endangering forms of social disci-
pline based on authority, custom and convention. In the same way, the
beast that is capable of reason is more likely to pursue its own self-­interest,
arguing against what are often essentially irrational demands for obedi-
ence and for obligation to the collective. Intelligent reason, like an acid,
dissolves the orderly social forms that spring from animal instinct and
habit. Specifically, it weakens people’s psychosocial commitments by
undermining the points of attachment between concrete individuals and
society. For continued survival it was necessary to counteract these cor-
rosive effects, and this, in Bergson’s story, was the function of the faculty
of fabulation. Where the intellect produces a deficiency of attachment to
life and society, it becomes necessary to fabulate new attachments.
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    51

This would mean that, evolutionarily speaking, fabulation emerged

along with judgement and reasoning, since without the faculty of intel-
ligence, there is no need for the faculty of fabulation. Fabulation func-
tions as if it were an auto-immune mechanism, immunizing the individual
and society against the unexpected side-effects of its own powers.
Fabulation achieves this by—just at the right moment—causing phantas-
mic images to arise in the mind which intercept and counteract the direc-
tion in which an intellectual train of thought would otherwise take the
thinker. This is why, in its basic form, he suggests, fabulation resembles
an incipient hallucination. Bergson calls these hallucinations ‘virtual
instincts’ because, although they are not instincts (arising as they do
alongside the high-level faculty of thought) they emerge spontaneously as
instincts of the second-order, designed to immunize first-order instincts
from the dangers of reason. Since intelligence pursues only facts, fabula-
tion responds by generating counterfeit facts of experience. These fabrica-
tions keep us from sliding down the dangerous slope carved out by reason
because a ‘fiction, if its image is vivid and insistent, may indeed masquer-
ade as perception and in that way prevent or modify action… a system-
atically false experience, confronting the intelligence, may indeed stop it
pushing too far the conclusions it deduces from a true experience’ (109).
This is why, in Bergson’s fable about fabulation, intelligence was pervaded
from the beginning by superstition and why the animals that alone show
reason are also the only superstitious creatures.
Bergson’s third step is to illustrate the functions of his newly conjured
faculty with examples. His main example is an anecdote of a lady on the
upper floor of a hotel. Wishing to descend to the lower level, she noticed
that the gate of the hotel lift was open and so hurried to enter it. As typi-
cal of old-style elevators, the gate should only open when the lift has
safely arrived at the appropriate floor, but in this case an error occurred,
and the gate was open despite the fact that the lift was still in the depths
of the hotel building. As the lady rushed forward:

she felt herself flung backwards, the man entrusted with the working of the
lift had just appeared and was pushing her back onto the landing. At this
point she emerged from her fit of abstraction. She was amazed to see that
neither man nor lift was there… She had been about to fling herself into
52  P. Stenner

the gaping void; a miraculous hallucination had saved her life. (Bergson
1932/1986, p. 12)

In Bergson’s terms, the lady in the lift fabulated. It is clear from the
example that fabulation is not just ‘making things up’ but, more specifi-
cally, inventing or hallucinating images as a defensive reaction, in this
case in an emergency situation. Fabulation is not any old fable or drama,
but one which appears unconsciously and automatically in the face of a
perilous void. It is a self-generated drama which provides—just at the
right moment—a way out of a crisis. Something within her (a ‘somnam-
bulistic self, which underlies the reasoning personality’ [p. 120]) sprang
into action and, in a flash, threw her backwards and induced a hallucina-
tion ‘best fitted to evoke and explain the apparently unjustified move-
ment’ (p. 121). Through this hallucination, the perilous event is given a
human form, complete with agency and will (in this case, the form of the
fabulated lift attendant). Thanks to fabulation, in the face of sudden peril
the ‘disturbances with which we have to deal, each of them entirely
mechanical, combine into an Event, which resembles a human being’
(p. 157). Fabulation thus ‘evokes the reassuring image’ which ‘lends to
the Event a unity and an individuality which make of it a mischievous,
maybe a malignant, being, but still one of ourselves, with something
sociable and human about it’ (p. 158).
We are invited by Bergson to conclude that the fabulation immunizes
the lady against a danger that arose as a function of her reasoning, and
that reason would be too slow to respond to. There are clearly problems
with this account. There is nothing in the example that suggests the cor-
rosive influence of reason on social order, and this was his main argument
for the function of fabulation. Also, previously Bergson had argued that
fabulations function to re-route reason by fabricating facts of experience
that change reason’s direction and conduct. This account gave the fabu-
lated image a primary function. In this example, it seems clear that the
fabulated image is a secondary feature, perhaps a post-hoc rationalization
‘explaining’ to the slow-moving conscious mind what has already hap-
pened thanks to a much faster affective response (as indicated by the
neuroscientific experiments of Le Doux 1995). The vision is less the thing
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    53

that saved her than the effect of her mind making sense of a reaction that
had already saved her.
The essence of fabulation, for Bergson, is the fortuitous generation of
false images, and it is this feature that makes it the source of static moral-
ity and religion. Nevertheless there are clearly traces in Bergson’s account
of what I summarized above as the liminal occasioning of fabulation.
Bergson (e.g. p. 131) recognizes, for example, that the rituals and beliefs
of static morality and religion cluster around voids or scenes of rupture
(deaths, for instance) in which the establishment of shared habits, cus-
toms and conventions becomes decisively important to the maintenance
of social order. Nature is, as it were, ‘on the watch’ at these risky voids and
portals. Bergson capitalizes the word Event to stress the importance of
these occasions. Through fabulation, Bergson suggests, nature provides
us with the basic ingredients for forms of morality and religion that func-
tion to immunize society against threats to stability that may enter at
these voids and portals. Bergson is thus inviting us to view the lady’s
imaginary lift-attendant as no different in principle to an angel, a Muse,
a tree-spirit or a god: ‘Just now, before the open gate a guardian appeared,
to bar the way and drive back the trespasser’ (p. 122).
For Bergson, however, this faculty is the source, not just of static
morality and religion, but of multiple forms of fabulation: ‘To this fac-
ulty are due the novel, the drama, mythology together with all that pre-
ceded it’ (p. 108). This seems to contradict his first step in creating the
fabulation concept, namely his distinction between phantasmic halluci-
nations and the inventive achievements of art and science. In fact, in this
context Bergson simply invents another way of distinguishing them, sug-
gesting that poetry, novels and dramas are relatively recent forms com-
pared to religion, and thus likely appeared as extras or unexpected
by-products of the fundamental myth-making faculty, whose home ter-
ritory is religion. The activities of novelists and dramatists spring from
the faculty of fabulation, but unlike religion, they are merely for amuse-
ment, being derivative forms. Nevertheless, they can be traced to the
more essential forms of religion, which show the original function of
protection against reason: ‘we pass quite easily from the novel of to-day
to more or less ancient tales, to legends, to folklore, and from folklore to
mythology… mythology, in its turn, merely develops the personalities of
54  P. Stenner

the gods into a story, and this last creation is but the extension of another
and simpler one, that of the “semi-personal powers” or “efficient pres-
ences” which are, we believe, at the origin of religion’ (p. 196). Bergson’s
main target is thus to use fabulation to explain static religion, which he
proceeds to define rather emphatically as ‘a defensive reaction of nature
against the dissolvent power of intelligence’ (p. 131).
For Bergson, then, static morality and religion serve the psychosocial
purpose of attaching the concrete individual to the life of their society in
the face of the deficiencies to that bond that are wrought by reason. Static
religion, with its source in the faculty of fabulation, tells humanity ‘tales
on a par with those with which we lull children to sleep’ (p. 211). The
stories and dramas of writers, in this account, are secondary and not pri-
mary products of fabulation, because their process of production is more
deliberate and their process of consumption is primarily for pleasure. The
fabulations of myth and/or religion, by contrast, are not just nice ideas,
but ‘ideo-motory’ constructions which demand our practical compli-
ance, no matter how phantasmic they might seem to rational intelligence.
We do not just enjoy them, we believe them as we enact them. Static
morality and religion are called static because the return to social ­solidarity
that they enable is based on this benign trickery, and so is ultimately
backwards looking and closed. The problems with Bergson’s account
grow, however, when we examine his account of the source of the positive
side of his distinction: dynamic religion and morality.

The Mystical Source of Dynamic Morality and Religion

As noted earlier, the great strength of Bergson’s ontology is that he refuses

the usual distinction between meaningful thought and meaningless sub-
stance that leads to a conception of nature as an inherently inert and
meaningless externality governed deterministically by causal law. Its great
weakness is the equally absolute nature of his preferred grounding dis-
tinction, and it is this that leads astray his concept of fabulation. We saw
earlier how Durkheim ‘inverted’ the image of the Veil of Maya. For
Durkheim, the real reality behind the veil is society itself. Bergson, by
contrast, gives us a new variation on this old theme in which the material
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    55

world (the static) is merely a curtain between mundane humanity and a

higher truth of transcendent purity (the dynamic). The basis of this, as we
shall see, is Bergson’s idea that the ordinary world of matter that we rou-
tinely experience is actually a reality in which time has been spatialized
due to the limited abstractions of human symbolic thought. Beyond the
veil of our ordinary experience, true reality is revealed, not as space, but
as the pure time of endlessly unfolding dynamic duration. Furthermore,
the curtain or Maya’s Veil effectively serves as a symbol for symbolization
itself, since for Bergson it is a feature of static religion that the ‘thing itself
is… confused with its expression or symbol’ (p.  269). We need to rid
ourselves of the symbol if we are to grasp the ‘thing itself ’. Any form
based on fabulation will thus miss the ‘thing itself ’ by mistaking it for the
symbol through which it is expressed (much as Durkheim saw the risk of
mistaking the totem-creature for a transcendent power). Bergson differs
from Durkheim, however, in that he maintains the idea of a transcendent
reality of the dynamic which exists beyond our usual static understanding
lodged in human thought and society. There is a dynamic reality of con-
stant flow which lies behind our limited spatialized grasp of it, and the
reality of this vital creative process of the universe is, for Bergson, ­knowable
only through intuition. So long as we mistake the veil (the static) for the
reality it obscures (the dynamic), we remain ignorant of the higher truth
beyond the veil. As Langer (1978, p. 98) suggests, it is on this basis that
Bergson extols intuition ‘above all rational knowledge because it is sup-
posedly not mediated by any formulating (and hence deforming) sym-
bol’. Intuition, for Bergson, is supposedly direct, cutting out the
requirement for symbolization and its dangers.
In The Two Sources Bergson’s favoured distinction plays itself out in the
form of an absolute dichotomy between what he calls the ‘active, moving
principle’ of a ‘freely creative energy’ and the ‘matter’ which is merely the
more or less refractory vehicle for this moving energy. He relates the two
(energy and matter) by talking of creative energy as if it were an electric
current running through matter. What we think of as different animal spe-
cies are, from the perspective of creative evolution, merely resting points at
which this ‘great current of creative energy… came to a stop’ (p. 209). An
organism is thus like a ‘footprint, which instantly causes a myriad grains of
sand to cohere and form a pattern’ (p. 209). One footprint is, of course,
56  P. Stenner

just a step towards the next. If human beings are more advanced than ants
then, for Bergson, this is because the matter out of which we are composed
permits a higher quantity and quality of ‘creative energy’ to exist and to
flow.
It is in this concept of vital energy that Bergson finds the source of
dynamic morality and religion. This account also expresses the basis of
Bergson’s own religious beliefs which supply him with an origin myth
and a purpose for life: ‘if this principle produces all species in their
entirety, as a tree thrusts out on every side branches which end in buds, it
is the act of placing in matter a freely creative energy, it is man, or some
other being of like significance – we do not say of like form – which is the
purpose of the entire process of evolution’ (p. 211). On this basis, Bergson
is able to flesh out the other side of the static/dynamic distinction he used
to create the faculty of fabulation (consigned, as we saw, to the static
side). The source of dynamic religion arises from those people who have
the confidence to respond to their direct intuition of this dynamic energy
which throbs on the other side of the veil. This effort requires a soul that
is sufficiently strong and noble to ‘feel itself pervaded, though retaining
its own personality, by a being immeasurably mightier than itself, just as
an iron is pervaded by the fire which makes it glow’ (p. 212). This person
is the mystic. With its mystic source, a dynamic religion would transfigure
static religion. The mystic would serve to re-energize the bond between
individual and life, and between individual and society, and would do so
on the basis of a positive joy that comes from the affirmation of participa-
tion in the wider creative process that is nature. Nature, for Bergson,
would be nature as a whole and not just ‘human society’, à la Durkheim.
Dynamic religion would detach people from the mere materiality of par-
ticular things, and attach them to life-as-such. Furthermore, it would
detach them from the partisan commitments to local groups that are
typical of static religion, and attach them to humanity as a whole, newly
conceived as the ‘open society’ (p. 268). In lifting the soul to a higher
plane, it would rival static religion in providing serenity and security, but
without the distortions of fabulation… Bergson himself is the mystic,
and The Two Sources is his dream of a humanity to come.
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    57

Between Fabulation and Intuition

Bergson appears not to have seen that he too was fabulating when he
drew his distinction between fabulation and intuition as a way of split-
ting the old psychological concept of imagination down the middle. This
was surely because he had created an all too pristine concept of fabulation
(with its static religion), and contrasted it all too sharply with intuition
(with its dynamic religion). We are effectively caught between the two
extremes of an unconscious and automatic psychological faculty of fabu-
lation, on the one side, and a mystic truth about vital energy grounded in
pure intuition on the other. I have already shown that Bergson equivo-
cates concerning what is and what is not included within both sides of
the distinction he drew within imagination. Furthermore, in the same
passage of text during which he asserts that ‘the dynamic religion which
thus springs into being is the very opposite of the static religion born of
the myth-making function’, he continues to state that, nevertheless,
‘dynamic religion is propagated only through images and symbols sup-
plied by the myth-making function’ (p. 268). Hence, it seems, the images
and symbols of fabulation can in fact bear the stamp of truth, and
­intuition can in fact never be rid of images and symbols. The whole issue
of the difference between fabulation and intuition for Bergson hinges, in
fact, on a question of passage. As he puts it: ‘the mistake is to believe that
it is possible to pass, by a mere process of enlargement or improvement,
from the static to the dynamic, from… fabulation… to intuition’
(p. 269).
To recapitulate, I am not disputing that an important qualitative dis-
tinction must be drawn between creative and static modes of morality
and religion, or between infra-intellectual and supra-intellectual emo-
tions, but questioning the idea that their difference is to be traced to two
essentially distinct psychological faculties called ‘fabulation’ and ‘intu-
ition’. As I suggested earlier, the difference is attributable, not to their
source in different reified faculties, but to the quality and nature of the
concrete circumstances that actually occasion the experiences at issue.
The same Muse can lie one moment, and speak the truth the next. The
difference between invention and conservation is crucial, but we do
58  P. Stenner

invention an injustice if we try to strip it of the fabulation which feeds it.

We therefore need to turn our attention to the zone betwixt and between
Bergson’s extremes of fabulation and intuition. It is precisely this zone
that attracted the attention of Giles Deleuze.

Deleuzian Fabulation
Ronald Bogue has done much of the important work of reconstructing
Deleuze’s thought around fabulation and of ‘developing it into a proper
literary theoretical concept’ (Bogue 2010, p.  5). Through assembling
Deleuze’s scattered remarks on fabulation, Bogue shows that he associates
the word with five inter-related Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts including
‘becoming-other’, ‘experimenting on the real’, ‘legending’, ‘inventing a
people to come’ and ‘deterritorializing language’, none of which I intend
to deal with here. Bogue points out that fabulation only becomes a part
of Deleuze’s analysis of art in his late work on cinema (Deleuze 1986).
There Deleuze adapts the film-maker Pierre Perrault’s idea of using film
to capture communities in flagrante delicto ‘in a state of legending’, that
is, fabulating their own myths. Ultimately, Bogue’s fivefold concept of
fabulation is his own creation and, for all its merits, it is best suited for
the critical analysis of works of literature. Nevertheless, his work is also
useful for critical psychosocial work since he emphasizes Deleuze’s
Nietzschean notion of the true artist/writer as a sort of cultural physician
who explores symptoms to diagnose cultural illnesses and who uses writ-
ing to cure those ills. This brings literature and psychology into close
proximity. The ways of living depicted in literature are taken as symptoms
of how vital life might gush forth or get blocked-up or drain away. As
Deleuze (1995, pp. 142–3), put it, the act of writing is ‘an attempt to
make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons
it’.
Now in many ways, this perspective is a continuation of Bergson’s
mystic vision of the universe—seen beyond the Veil—as a surging tide of
freely creative vital energy that shows up as an array of actual contempo-
rary objects and subjects only when it comes to a momentary halt in
some transient form or other. For Deleuze, the personal is thus never life
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    59

itself, but always a temporary imprisonment of life, and it is the job of the
artist to open up life to the possibilities that exceed its capture into the
form of a discrete person. Likewise, social power and authority operate to
force life into the form of functional organs serving only the future of the
organism of the social system. The death mask of the personal, from this
perspective, is one aspect of the illness that literature aims to diagnose
and cure. Literature, in delivering its cure, blasts the supposedly self-­
contained monad into a permanently liminal nomad. That is why, for
Deleuze, literature is not to be understood as an effort to impose form on
lived experience. It is the opposite: it ‘escapes its own formalization’, cre-
ating a line of flight which ‘moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the
incomplete’ (Deleuze 1998, p. 1). That is why Deleuze insists that litera-
ture has nothing to do with recounting ‘one’s memories and travels, one’s
loves and griefs, one’s dreams and fantasies’ (p. 2). These are the travels,
griefs and fantasies of the very person that literature aims to dissolve into
a becoming-other. For Deleuze—ever influenced by Antonin Artaud—
only an infantile and neurotic notion of art revolves around the personal,
forever seeking a reassuring daddy-mommy to fix one’s form and to blot
out the call of the wild, vital energy of active metaphysics.
Writing, in short, ‘is a question of becoming, always incomplete,
always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any
livable or lived experience’ (Deleuze 1998, p. 1). Literature begins, not
with the personal ‘I’, but only when we are stripped ‘of the power to say
“I”’ (1998, p. 3). In my view, it is in this context that Deleuze lends his
own distinctive meaning to Bergson’s notion of fabulation. In a sense,
Deleuze inverts Bergson’s valuation. This should not surprise us since,
according to the editor’s introduction to Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p.
ix), Deleuze once described his relationship to other philosophers in
terms of imagining himself ‘approaching an author from behind and giv-
ing him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be mon-
strous’. As we have seen, for Bergson it is precisely the phantasmic aspects
of fabulation that lead him to distinguish it from mystical intuition and
hence to relegate it to that part of the imagination that is the source of
static morality and religion. Deleuze, by contrast, precisely values the
disconcerting visions produced by fabulation, since, for him, these are
the basis of any genuine becoming-other. Deleuze does not follow
60  P. Stenner

Bergson in separating fabulation from mystical intuition, then, but sug-

gests that it is precisely thanks to fabulation that the limitations of the
ego can be dissolved and the writer can experience becomings that exceed
the tame universe of the ‘I’. The visionaries (or voyeurs) amongst us can
perhaps see Deleuze (1998, p. 3) taking Bergson’s concept of fabulation
‘from behind’ in the following passage: ‘There is no literature without
fabulation, but as Bergson was able to see, fabulation  – the fabulating
function – does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego. Rather, it
attains these visions, it raises itself to these becomings and powers.’
For Bergson, on the contrary, fabulation can never raise itself to the
mystic vision, since it is always a matter of conjuring an opportune false-
hood to avert some crisis. As we have seen, Bergson insists that ‘the mis-
take is to believe that it is possible to pass… from fabulation… to
intuition’ (p.  269). In gently unblocking Bergson’s passage, Deleuze
relieves Bergsonism of the need to fabulate two phantom faculties, and
points to a new way of understanding the crucial passage between fabula-
tion and intuition. Consistent with my proposal about liminality, Deleuze
replaces empty talk of faculties with his concept of the event—itself partly
Bergsonian. An event, in Deleuze’s sense, is a rupture or deviation from
prior causality and chronology which opens reality up to a new set of pos-
sibilities. Since it diverges from prior causality and chronology (which
Deleuze associates with the Titan Kronos), an event is always ‘untimely’
(associated with the God Aion). An event conjures the collective desire
for a new time populated by a new people, as yet only in process of being
imagined (see Bogue 2006, p. 209). If the untimely and liminal time of
Aion is always transhistorical, then this is precisely because it disrupts the
conformities of historical time. Aion, to continue our theme, always takes
Kronos by surprise and liberates him from his linear, predictable, chrono-
logical ways. Aion puts the time of Kronos out of joint. The time of Aion
thus symbolizes the eruption of the new, or creative becoming:

There is no act of creation that is not transhistorical and does not come up
from behind or proceed by way of a liberated line. Nietzsche opposes his-
tory, not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or superhistorical: the
Untimely, which is another name for… the innocence of becoming.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 296)
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    61

The event is pure actuality, where actuality—following Whitehead

(1938/1966)—is not what we are (which is always a limitation) but what
we are becoming: the process of becoming itself. The event is pure liminal-
ity, but only if we grasp liminality as any betwixt and between phase
engendered by a breach or suspension of whatever limits were previously at
play in the organization of a given reality, and hence not merely as the
liminal phase of transition in a rite of passage (see below). This liminal
process of becoming is, by definition, inherently unstable, ambiguous,
volatile and unfinished. It has the potential to veer towards static conserva-
tivisms and fascisms, or towards a progressive dynamism, but in itself it is
neither and both. There is hence no need to ground these two possibilities
each in their own faculty. They are equi-possible states of the same system
operating under far-from-equilibrium conditions which de-­systematize it.
As Deleuze (1998, p. 4) puts it, literature ‘is delirium, and as such its des-
tiny is played out between the two poles of delirium. Delirium is a disease,
the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and
dominant. But it is the measure of health when it evokes this oppressed
bastard race that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations.’

Fabulation and the Experience of Liminality

If fabulation is not to be thought of as an imaginative faculty distinct
from intuition, then what concept of fabulation can we extract from
Bergson and Deleuze? It is better grasped as the passage from disturbing
event to creative intuition. This passage need not lead to a creative
advancement, but might get blocked in a purely destructive phase, in
conservativism, or in an unproductive paralysis. This emphasis on pas-
sage makes the concept of liminality directly relevant, and this concept
will be elaborated in several parts of this book. As noted in Chap. 1, the
concept of liminality has roots in the work of Arnold van Gennep
(1909/1961) who introduced the notion of rites of passage into anthro-
pology. Gennep identified—across a vast amount of anthropological
data—three phases within ceremonies of passage during which people
and other phenomena become something different (girls become women,
princes become kings, spring becomes summer, the living become dead,
62  P. Stenner

etc.). The first phase involves rituals in which the previous state or social
position is, as it were, broken down (rites of separation). The last phase
involves rituals for establishing and recognizing the new status, position
or identity (rites of incorporation). The liminal phase is the middle phase,
and the rituals here often involve trials or tests or other highly unusual
experiences. Liminality, from this perspective, is thus the ‘betwixt and
between’ condition of being in the process of crossing a threshold (i.e. of
becoming).
Gennep’s concept of liminality was developed to understand the rituals
of the small-scale societies traditionally studied by anthropologists, but
Victor Turner (1969), Arpad Szakolczai (2009) and others have extended
its use to modern societies and also to the kinds of spontaneous (as dis-
tinct from ritualized) liminal experiences that concerned Bergson. Any
situation involving the removal or erasure of the usual limits that orga-
nize life (providing recognizable social identities and positions with allo-
cated rights and responsibilities, etc.) can be considered liminal (see
Thomassen 2014). This would include everything from highly ‘staged’
events like rites of passage, through to spontaneous events like earth-
quakes, as well as complex mixtures like unnatural disasters and political
revolutions. The suspension of the usual limits either forces people into
new becomings, or facilitates their ‘passing-through’ a transition to a new
set of limits. These, I am suggesting, are the events that change us and that
strip us of our ‘I’. These are Dilthey’s experiences that we must go through.
These are the events from which we can return from what we ‘have seen
and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums’ (Deleuze 1998,
p. 3).
If fabulation involves the liminal passage from disturbing event to cre-
ative intuition, then we should expect this process to involve more or less
distinguishable phases that correspond, however loosely, to separation,
transition and re-incorporation. We should expect, for instance, an initial
shocked or unsettled phase accompanying a disturbance to any familiar
forms of process. The aspects of fabulation found here would loosely cor-
respond to a ‘separation’ since the disturbance unsettles any taken for
granted realm of clear identities and entities. But there should also be
aspects of fabulation which concern the invention of new forms that
make possible a ‘new normal’ as part of a re-formed collective. These
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    63

aspects would correspond to ‘re-incorporation’. But we should not assume

that all liminal experience merely leads us out of an old normal and into
a new normal, and here we see the profound relevance of the transitional
phase of becoming which, in a sense, is always an incompletion in
process.
Let us first briefly deal with ‘separation’, albeit abstractly. Here, the
concept of liminality helps us to grasp more concretely the relevance of
the disturbing event that prompts fabulation. The experience of Bergson’s
lady of the lift was, in this sense, a small liminal event: a near death expe-
rience that prompted a ‘fabulation’. Likewise, Bergson’s other examples
involving earthquakes, death and so on, all involve voids or portals which
stand as symbols for circumstances that are liminal in the sense that they
disrupt the ‘normal’ of a prior form of process. Separation, as I am here
using it, denotes an existential departure from what a person was before
the event. These can be scary moments that feel purely destructive,
although the freedom experienced can also be exhilarating. In traditional
rites of passage, the ‘passengers’ are guided through by an experienced
master of ceremonies or Shaman for whom liminal experience is the
norm rather than the exception. In spontaneous liminal events, such
guidance is typically lacking, and there are no guarantees about what will
be made of the situation. The seed of fabulation that arises through ‘sepa-
ration’ is delicate and vulnerable. It is easily dismissed as a mere
hallucination.
Let us now deal, equally schematically, with ‘re-incorporation’. Once
we have understood the centrality of the disturbing liminal event to the
initial phase of fabulation (separation), the concept of liminality can help
us to better understand its role in the subsequent passage from event to
intuition, or from destructive disturbance to creative insight and produc-
tion, which is by no means guaranteed. If there is to be a passage from
disturbing event to creative intuition, there must be some positive con-
tent in fabulation, which cannot be reduced to a phantasmic hallucina-
tion. A phantasmic hallucination is by definition false and falsifying, but
the experience also contains possibilities for positive and genuine new
ideas. There is a world of difference between a vision which is pure illu-
sion, and a vision which is visionary—which sees the world differently,
with new possibilities. Deleuze is quite clear that the positive value of
64  P. Stenner

fabulation lies in the ideas it introduces. In this, his concept of fabulation

is very different from that of Bergson: ‘These visions are not fantasies, but
veritable Ideas that the writer sees and hears in the interstices of language,
in its intervals… like an eternity that can only be revealed in a becoming,
or a landscape that only appears in movement. They are not outside lan-
guage, but the outside of language. The writer as seer or hearer, the aim
of literature: it is the passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas’
(p. 5).
It would be wrong to think of this notion of the ‘idea’ as a purely intel-
lectual thing. On the contrary, the idea is better understood as an experi-
ential flash of insight than a fully formed concept. We need to get away
from what Bergson called the ‘infra-intellectual’ picture in which an idea
already exists. Rather, we are here dealing with ‘supra-intellectual’ cir-
cumstances in which ideas emerge from pre-intellectual and emotional
experience. We are not dealing with a surface ripple, but with an ‘upheaval
of the depths’ which brings an ‘affective stirring of the soul’. Romanticism
notwithstanding, Bergson (p.  43) was stalking something important
when he recognized that it is these experiences that are at the source of
the ‘great creations of art, of science and of civilization in general’.
It is in the context of this phase of the liminal process that we can
begin to grasp the relationship between these liminal events and an artis-
tic form or medium such as literature. Literature provides what Langer
(1978, p. 200) called a ‘new type of symbolic transformation’ capable of
transforming the vulnerable seed of fabulation that arises in the separa-
tion phase proper to the liminal event into a fully expressive intuition. To
properly grasp this relationship, however, it is important not to limit the
medium of fabulation to literature, and to see its broader psychosocial
significance. Even if most of Deleuze’s examples are literary, I propose
that writing is just one amongst many liminal affective media. These are
devices which serve to symbolize the liminal affectivity of transformative
events (Stenner and Moreno 2013). Myth, for example, is a symbolic
medium for expressing and generating liminal experience that existed
before writing, and ritual is a medium that is likely to have long preceded
myth. In this sense, the rituals that compose rites of passage can be con-
sidered the basic and original medium of fabulation from which the oth-
ers derive.
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    65

I emphasized that Homer’s poetry was not possible without ritual and
it would not be too much of an exaggeration to suggest that Homer was
a Shaman of sorts who developed the possibilities that song and poetry
make available to the old ritual figure of the master or mistress of ceremo-
nies. Dating long into pre-history, ritual has deployed techniques of
dance, song, rhythm, music, mask-wearing, drug-taking and so forth to
express, facilitate and engender profound transformational experiences.
Each of these alone is a medium for the fabulation of becoming, but they
acquire a particular potency when deployed together in ritual or, later, in
theatre and film. Ritual, in this sense, provides a potent and communal
multi-sensorial matrix, but each of these other more specialized tech-
niques would come, in time, to acquire a separate existence from ritual
and to individuate as their own autonomous art form (music, dance,
theatre, painting, etc.).
Fabulation is thus by no means limited to literature. On the contrary,
if writing is about becoming, and warrants a concept of fabulation, then
this is a function of the extent to which it approximates these other lim-
inal media (especially ritual, with its capacity for inducing delirium), and
loses its purely discursive form. This why Deleuze insists that the closer
writing comes to becoming, the more it destroys itself as writing, and the
more it approximates a vision. In the work of a great writer, language is
‘toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of
Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language’ (p. 5). The
language of the writer thus ‘seems to be seized by a delirium, which forces
it out of its usual furrows’. Fabulation, in this sense, entails the becoming
liminal of language. But the same could be said of each medium of fabula-
tion. Artaud (1964/1974, p. 32), for example, railed against the Modern
Western theatre of his day, which he described as a ‘mad, crazy, perverted,
rhetorical, philistine, antipoetic and Positivistic’ degradation which has
lost its metaphysical and mystical vocation in preference for a facile
‘human, psychological meaning’. The crux of his attack is that theatre
should not be based on scripted speech, but should ‘make language con-
vey what it does not normally convey… to use it in a new, exceptional or
unusual way, to give it its full physical shock potential… really to mani-
fest something’ (p. 32). Theatre, for Artaud is not needed if we already
know what is to be said and how to say it, since theatre ‘is to be found
66  P. Stenner

precisely at the point where the mind needs a language to bring about its
manifestations’ (p. 5). That ‘language’ beyond language is Langer’s ‘new
type of symbolic transformation’, and each different liminal affective
medium entails its own type of symbolic transformation for yielding
insight into the unspoken depths. If Artaud’s rejection of the ‘human,
psychological meaning’ of theatre is practically identical to Deleuze’s
rejection of the ‘personal’ in literature, then this is not just because
Deleuze was influenced by Artaud, but also because each of them recog-
nizes a certain becoming ritual in their preferred liminal affective media
(literature for Deleuze, theatre for Artaud).

Conclusion
Fabulation, as presented in this chapter, is not about failing to produce
an accurate representation of a pre-existent reality, but about the cre-
ative process through which a new reality comes into existence. If
Homer and Hesiod commanded such lasting interest, it is not just
because of their pretty words and poetic structure—it is because of the
new ideas that they were able to form and express. These were new ideas
about the nature of the universe, of the gods, and of the place and pur-
pose of human beings. At first those fabulous ideas would have appeared
strangely fantastic, but they came to play a decisive role in the collecting
of a new collective4. It is in this sense that a collective or a people is
fabulated, and it is this that gives the concept what Deleuze called its
‘political sense’. To end this chapter, then, we come to this fully social
nature of fabulation, hinted at by Deleuze. It was deemed necessary to
execute Socrates because he proposed new ideas that challenged the
basis of the existing collective. These new ideas called into being the
possibility of a future collective based on different insights about them-
selves and their universe (mediated by new technologies such as the
theatre, philosophy and democracy). To fabulate a collective is not
merely to imagine a people, but to invent an idea powerful enough to
collect one. This always also means: powerful enough to undo the prin-
ciple that had collected them to date. This is why, for Deleuze, a great
artist may well be a solitary individual working alone, but what they
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    67

create is created for a collectivity yet to come. The ‘idea’ is not necessar-
ily an intellectual thing. It may be the insight that inspires the art work.
It may be a musical idea, but it will always relate to a Muse situated in
a liminal zone beyond the ordinary plane of existence. When Bergson
discusses Beethoven, he captures this precisely when he suggests that, in
creating his work: ‘the composer was ascending back to a point situated
outside the [intellectual] plane, there to seek acceptance or refusal,
direction, inspiration: in this point resided an indivisible emotion that
no doubt aided intelligence in unfolding itself in the music, but which
was itself more than music and more than intelligence.’ Bergson knew
this point well. His own work was, after all, an effort to introduce a new
idea of the universe, of the gods, and of humanity’s place and purpose,
that might newly collect our sagging collective, and so help to fabulate
a new sense of humanity:

Mankind lies groaning, half crushed beneath the weight of its own prog-
ress. Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands.
Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on
living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want
merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling,
even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which
is a machine for the making of gods. (Bergson 1932/1986, p. 317)

Notes
1. I thank Maria Nichterlein for suggesting the importance of the concept of
fabulation to me and for drawing my attention to the work of Bogue
(2006).
2. It is interesting that the theme of speech versus writing is still alive in the
double act of Socrates and Plato, where the authority of Socrates is partly
vested in the fact that he spoke but did not write, and the authority of
Plato is vested in the fact that he wrote down what Socrates spoke out.
3. The notion of a ‘faculty’ is now old-fashioned, although the concept car-
ries on under different guises. Kaag (2009, p. 183) offers a useful sum-
mary of the neuroscience of imagination in which he states that: ‘the
68  P. Stenner

imagination is not a “special or self-contained faculty.” Indeed it is not a

faculty at all… it is rather an aspect of the very organization and emer-
gence of conscious, organic life.’
4. When dealing with ritual, rites of re-incorporation and not just about giv-
ing the individual a new status, but also about generating and recognizing
a new collective.

References
Artaud, A. (1964/1974). The theatre and its double. Collected works: Volume 4.
London: John Calder.
Bergson, H. (1932/1986). The two sources of morality and religion (R.  Ashley
Audra & C. Brereton, Trans.). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Bogue, R. (2006). Fabulation narration and the people to come. In C.  V.
Boundas (Ed.), Deleuze and philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Bogue, R. (2010). Deleuzian fabulation and the scars of history. Brown and
Reavey, memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Brown, S. D., & Reavey, P. (2015). Vital memory and affect: Living with a diffi-
cult past. London: Routledge.
Brown, S. D., & Stenner, P. (2009). Psychology without foundations: History, phi-
losophy and psychosocial theory. London: Sage.
Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The movement-image. London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1998). Essays critical and clinical (D. W. Smith & M. A. Greco,
Trans.). London: Verso.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizo-
phrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: The Athlone Press.
Dilthey, W. (1883/1989). Introduction to the human sciences. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. DiMaggio, Paul.
Durkheim, E. (1912/1995). In K. Fields (Ed.), The elementary forms of religious
life. London: Allen.
Harrison, J.  (1908). Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion (2nd ed.).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hesiod, & Caldwell, R.  S. (1987). Hesiod’s theogony. Cambridge, MA: Focus
Information Group.
   This Is Not … The Truth: On Fabulation    69

Kaag, J. (2009). The neurological dynamics of the imagination. Phenomenology

and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, 183.
Langer, S. (1978). Philosophy in a new key: A study in the symbolism of reason, rite,
and art (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
LeDoux, J. E. (1995). In search of an emotion system in the brain: Leaping from
fear to emotion and consciousness. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The cognitive
neurosciences (pp. 1049–1061). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Motzkau, J. F. (2007). Matters of suggestibility, memory and time: Child wit-
nesses in Court and what really happened. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/
Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 8(1), Art. 14. Available
at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/1-07/07-1-14-e.htm. Last
Accessed 2 Aug 2017.
Piaget, J. (1928/1972). Judgement and reasoning in the child (M. Warden, Trans.).
Littlefield: Adams.
Plato, & Grube, G. M. A. (1977). Plato’s Phaedo. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett
Publishing Company.
Stenner, P., & Moreno, E. (2013). Liminality and affectivity: The case of
deceased organ donation. Subjectivity, 6(3), 229–253.
Szakolczai, Á. (2009). Liminality and experience: Structuring transitory situa-
tions and transformative events. International Political Anthropology, 2(1),
141–172.
Thomassen, B. (2014). Liminality and the modern. Farnham/Burlington:
Ashgate.
Throop, C. J. (2002). Experience, coherence, and culture: The significance of
Dilthey’s ‘descriptive psychology’ for the anthropology of consciousness.
Anthropology of Consciousness, 13(1), 2–26.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine
Publishing Co.
Van Gennep, A. (1961 [1909]). The rites of passage. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1938/1966). Modes of thought. New York: The Free Press.
 3
This Is Not … Food:
On Food for Thought

Introduction
This chapter uses one of Aesop’s fables to introduce a type of experience
called a this is not experience. It is suggested that these are liminal experi-
ences that can be construed as events that begin with an uh oh! (express-
ing negation) and end with an ah ha! (expressing affirmation). A
distinction is drawn between spontaneous (unstaged or wild) and fabu-
lated (devised, composed or staged) liminal experience in order that the
relations between these can be explored. Staged or composed liminal
experiences include experiences occasioned by the arts, but artistic cre-
ation also has a relation to spontaneous liminal experiences, in so far as
the process of creation can involve a becoming-active in the face of the
shock of negation. This account requires the articulation of a form of
deep symbolism that is more basic than, and presupposed by, representa-
tional thought and discursive symbolism. This is articulated through
Langer’s notion of presentational symbolism and Whitehead’s notion of
unconscious symbolic reference. The creative process triggered by a ‘this
is not’ experience might then be thought of as an awakening of con-
sciousness (a ha!) through the disruption of deep symbolic reference pre-
served in newly fabulated presentational symbols.

© The Author(s) 2017 71

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_3
72  P. Stenner

Aesop the fable-teller is thought to have lived some time between

about 620 and 560 BC, most likely in Greece. A fable attributed to Aesop
stars an unfortunate dog who dropped his piece of meat to grasp at its
reflection in the still water of a pool. The dog took the reflection of the
meat to be real and so lunged for it. Perhaps he also mistook his own
image for that of another dog, and so was competitive to boot. Either
way, the real piece of meat sank and he lost his meal as he gained a soak-
ing. In some versions the meat is a bone, the reflection is a shadow and
the pool is sometimes a river, but let’s not get distracted by minor varia-
tions. It doesn’t matter if the dog is sometimes a fox, or if he turns out
occasionally to be a she. It doesn’t matter, for now, if she was swimming
or crossing a bridge. Such fables at first belonged to an oral tradition, and
variations like this are par for the course. Indeed, the whole point of a
fable is that everyone knows that it is not ‘true’ in the sense that animals
don’t really act that way. If the teller of fables is able to express and com-
municate something true, then this is precisely because they are free from
the demand to faithfully relate actual events in their material unfolding.
The distance afforded by fabulous animals pulls the object of the fable
into closer proximity, as it were. The spontaneous life event at issue in the
fable is something different, something beyond the figurative empirical
particulars, and yet expressed by way of them.
Using the example of this fable, this chapter picks up the threads of
fabulation provided by the previous chapter and weaves them into an
account of transformative experience. It starts from the idea that we can
take this fable seriously as something we can learn important truth from.
But this ‘truth’ is not the ‘correctness’ usually implied when people think
of a representation which accurately matches its object. We might even call
it ‘psychosocial truth’. More specifically, this chapter will argue that the
fable can alert us to a very important type of experience that I will call a
this is not experience. We have already encountered a this is not experience
in the form of Bergson’s example of the lady and the lift that turned out
not to be there, and that prompted her fabulation. In Chap. 2 I critiqued
Bergson’s negative concept of fabulation and suggested that fabulation can
actually involve a more complex passage from ‘disturbing event’ to com-
municable ‘creative intuition’. This chapter focuses on that passage in more
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    73

theoretical detail, and particularly on the central role played by symboliza-

tion. In a nut-shell, I suggest that this is not experiences can shed light on
the nature, emergence and function of symbolism. Symbolic culture is
what differentiates human beings from other creatures and enables the
cultivation of our societies. A reflection on this is not experiences can thus
open up new ways of thinking about the symbol-­mongering nature of the
social mind.

F abulous Knowledge: The Fable as a Perceptible Form

Expressive of Feeling

We are going to explore the realms of symbolism and art and their psy-
chosocial relevance. This is complex territory.1 We have already encoun-
tered, in Chap. 2, Susan Langer’s proposition that every new epoch-making
insight springs from the emergence of a new type of symbolism. Following
Susan Langer (1942/1978) and Ernst Cassirer (1944), the idea that art
(understood broadly to include fables, songs, paintings and all sorts of
other forms) expresses ‘feeling’2 into an external form via symbolism
should not be taken as implying that an art object is equivalent to a cry
of distress or an outburst of fury. Art is not merely what Langer calls ‘self
expression’. This misreading lures us into the problematic but classical
distinction between ‘reason and emotion’ (see Chap. 6). The hardened
contrast between high-grade symbolism (often associated with mathe-
matics) and brute irrational affectivity is disastrous. It is the product of a
form of top-down master-thought expressed by Carnap (1935, p.  28)
when he identifies lyrical verse and, indeed, metaphysics, with ‘cries like
“Oh, Oh”’ which are nothing but the expression and excitement of feel-
ings. The same master-thought is differently expressed by Wittgenstein
when he insists that everything that can be thought and said can be
thought and said clearly (Langer 1978, p. 85). From the perspective of
this master-thought, what matters are brute material things and the rest
is dismissed as fluffy ‘feeling stuff’. As James D. Watson said (according
to Rose 2003, p. 8), ‘there is only one science, physics: everything else is
social work’. Bertrand Russell observed in a reflective moment that per-
74  P. Stenner

haps ‘that is why we know so much physics and so little of anything else’
(1927, p. 265). The symbolism of the masters is oriented only and always
to the representational denotation of material objects, with the rest con-
signed to the dustbin of ‘feeling’, ‘sentiment’, ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’: good
only for entertainment and light relief. Langer pinpoints the two false
assumptions that inform this limited mode of thought: first, that lan-
guage is ‘the only means of articulating thought’ and, second, that ‘every-
thing which is not speakable thought, is feeling’ (p.  87). This chapter
follows Langer in rejecting both of these assumptions.
Art is not a self-expression in the sense of a symptom which ‘shows’
feeling like a clenched fist or a cry of distress. It is better understood (a)
as a conceptual expression of feeling in the form of a symbol, that (b) is
there for feeling. It is a fabulated fact for feeling in the sense of being
conceptually formulated feeling, or feeling that has been symbolically
transformed. The making of an artwork is neither an outpouring of
internal emotion nor an effort to forge accurate imitations of external
things, although both of these ideas are sadly very widespread. Rather,
in giving perceptible form to feeling, the artist—using the preferred
medium of their craft—expresses something felt to be important, and
objectifies if for future feeling. Art, in short, is neither mere (subjective)
emoting nor mere (objective) imitation, but a crafting of something the
artist knows or has intuited about—and through—feeling. The mix of
feeling and thought involved here is well expressed by Bergson’s con-
cept of ‘supra-­intellectual’ emotion that was discussed in Chap. 2,
where the emotion does not follow from an idea, but rather gives birth
to it. It is an ‘idea-­feeling’, or the feeling of a concept, but—during the
process of fabulation—this feeling is always achieved through engage-
ment with a material form (paint, stone, words, sound, gesture). Art,
from this perspective, is one of the ways in which experienced feeling is
formulated into symbolized feeling, and thereby objectified as a percep-
tible work. Thanks to this objectification, the sensitive reader or listener
or viewer can feel that feeling in turn. It is then possible for a recipient
to unravel its meaning into something like discursive thought, should
they choose to.
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    75

Distinguishing Representations and Presentations

I have defined our fable as a perceptible form expressive of feeling. As an

artwork, it gives us something like an image of thought.3 It is an ‘image’ in
that—despite being composed of words—it does not take a purely or
primarily discursive form, but ‘shows’ (presents to our imagination) as it
were, a scene: a dog with a bone encountering its reflection and so on. It
is figurative. Its meaning is not at the discursive level of propositional
statements, but is implicit. To evaluate it as a true or false statement of
events or a true representation is to miss the point.
I am trying to tease apart a distinction between presentation and rep-
resentation. What is ostensibly the same experience can always be taken
in at least two very different ways (see Whitehead 1927, p. 84). A sound,
for example, can be taken as an indication of some other thing or event.
We hear the sound of a car horn, for example, and we quickly get out of
the road, because we take the sound of the horn as an indication of the
oncoming car, and we do not want to be run-over. This is ‘representation’
in so far as we take the sound to represent or ‘signal’ the car. Through
sound, in other words, we are rapidly able to situate local relations in the
world around us, and to act accordingly. Representation requires that we
experience the sound as something that is, as it were, transparent: we hear
through it, and what we hear is the oncoming car. For convenience, we
can refer to this representational mode as experience of practical reality.
To this first ‘representational’ mode we must add a second expressive
mode of ‘aesthetic enjoyment’. In this second mode we can enjoy the
sound as such. We can linger on its timbre and tone, for example, and on
the emotions it evokes. Of course it would be unwise to waste time enjoy-
ing the sound in our hypothetical situation, first because we are facing the
jaws of death, and second because there is not much musicality in a car
horn. But a trumpet, on the other hand, is precisely designed to afford
the production of extremely interesting sounds that can precisely be
enjoyed for their own sake, in less urgent circumstances. When we listen
to the trumpeter of a jazz band we are not approaching the sound ‘practi-
cally’ to determine the location of the trumpeter the better to approach
or avoid, but taking ‘aesthetic enjoyment’ in the sound. The sound is not
76  P. Stenner

a transparent means of representation but an iridescent and expressive

presentation to be lingered on for its own sake. What is medium in the
first case has become the message in the second. The same applies to the
shapes and colours of visual sensation, or indeed to any sense data. Aesop’s
dog used these in the mode of practical reality to locate what it thought
was a meal, but Narcissus lingered on his reflection and was so captured
by its aesthetic beauty that nothing else in the actual world could lure
him away. He was not hit by a car (Narcissus, like Aesop’s dog, was from
the pre-automobile age of ancient Greece), but—so we are told—he died
through deprivation of the will to live.
It is important to recognize that not all such presentations are deliber-
ate artistic creations just as not all representations are crafted using the
representational symbols of language (the sound of the car horn can rep-
resent the car without the need for a word). For example, a beautiful
sunset, a field of flowers or the song of a lark can transfix us aesthetically
even if (or especially if ) they spring upon us in a completely spontaneous
way. Early artists surely took maximal advantage of such natural beauty,
choosing stunning landscapes for their ritual activities, and gradually
modifying them. But artists like Aesop specialize in these experiences,
and produce works which do not leave such presentations to natural
chance. As a fabulation expressing feeling to be felt and—perhaps—to be
thoughtfully unravelled, Aesop’s fable is designed as a presentational sym-
bol to be lingered upon and enjoyed for its own sake. As discussed below
using Langer’s work, the relation of a presentational symbol to spontane-
ous aesthetic experience is directly comparable to the relation of a discur-
sive symbol to ‘spontaneous’ representational experience.

 istinguishing Discursive and Presentational

D
Symbolism

First, there are the familiar symbols of discursive thought: words like ‘dog’,
‘water’, ‘bone’, ‘drop’ and so on can function as symbols for us, each con-
veying its meaning. Langer (1978, p. 45) calls these ‘discursive symbols’.
They are part of the ‘discursive thought’ enabled by language. Language
is the paradigm of symbolism (its dominant symbol), and most theories
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    77

of the symbol take the discursive symbol as the standard, along with its
two key features of reference (that a symbol signifies something else, or
functions to denote) and convention (the notion that a symbols reference
is established only by convention). These two features are typically
summed up as representational. Hence the word ‘dog’ is an arbitrary sym-
bol whose meaning to the subject capable of using it (i.e. a subject who
has learned the relevant concept) denotes that general category of animal
that is our familiar furry four legged friend. The things that are used as
symbols in discursive symbolism tend to be: (a) easily manipulable/pro-
ducible (the sound of the word ‘dog’, or the three little letters, can, once
language has been learned, easily produced); (b) innocuous (there is very
little that is interesting about the word ‘dog’ beyond its denotative use, so
the symbol itself does not risk distracting us); and (c) arbitrary (in prin-
ciple, any sound could be used instead of ‘dog’ and those who speak dif-
ferent languages do indeed use different words).
The concept of ‘discursiveness’ is derived from the philosophy of sym-
bolic logic. It refers to the linear, sequential form of language which
requires us to successively order discrete words (­‘the-deceived-dog-sank-
into-­the-bog’) and hence ‘to string out our ideas even though their objects
rest one within the other; as pieces of clothing that are actually worn one
over the other have to be strung side by side on the clothesline’ (Langer
1978, p. 81). Of discursive thought, Langer (1978, p. 45) notes that we are
‘apt to be so impressed with its symbolistic mission that we regard it as the
only important expressive act, and assume that all other activity must be
practical in some animalian way, or else irrational’. In other words, once
we have grasped the significance of discursive symbolism to human life, we
tend to mistake it is as the fundamental and most important symbolic
form.
Discursive symbolism is in fact just one kind of symbolic form. Art
forms like painting, music, dance and sculpture are no less articulated
products than language, and—as with our fable—language itself can be
used as an artistic medium, with its own form of symbolism. Indeed, for
discursive symbolism to function in its ‘representational’ mode at all it
must presuppose the presentations provided by the symbolization of feel-
ing whereby experience is wrought into the form of an expressive image.
Langer calls this second form ‘presentational symbolism’ because its
78  P. Stenner

process yields presentational, not representational, symbols. Percepts

(like images and sounds) are no less capable than words of articulation
into complex forms. A visual image (e.g. a painting) may be a complex
composition of colours and forms, but the principle of the articulation
of its form is not discursive. A painting does not project whatever it
expresses into a successive string of discrete symbols (each definable
alone—using a dictionary perhaps), but presents the elements it articu-
lates simultaneously: all together and all at once. Although there may be
conventions, a painting has no syntax and there is no vocabulary of
words which hold their meaning as discrete units (and hence no dic-
tionary). It is composed of many different elements (e.g. areas of colour),
but any given element has no independent significance in isolation from
the others. The ‘meaning’ of one part of a painting is completely tied to
its place in the ‘bigger picture’, so to speak. The mereological (part/
whole) relation of presentational symbolism is thus distinct from that of
discursive symbolism, where meanings are successively understood and
then gathered up into a unity through the discursive process.
Each word of discursive symbolism is an atomic symbol represent-
ing—via its concept—a general kind of thing or event. When words are
strung together discursively, the utterance functions as a wider symbolic
unity that is specialized in depicting states of affairs that unfold in the
world. With presentational symbolism, by contrast, the elements that are
gathered into a unified composition function as a symbol only as part of
their integration into the wider whole in which they are ‘presented’
(hence ‘presentational’ symbolism). Unlike discursive symbolism whose
connotations are always general (to assign specific denotations it is neces-
sary to indicate or draw attention—perhaps by pointing or glancing—to
what is given by sense data), presentational symbols are concrete and
singular: they speak directly to sense and convey meaning by presenting
singular ‘expressions’.4 These symbols are neither innocuous nor arbitrary,
but intense and singular (a rising sun, a skull), and they are not designed
for ease of manipulation.
Discursive symbolism is parasitical upon what is given by presenta-
tional symbolism: the former abstracts its generalities from the singu-
lar meanings presented by the latter. However, because it is hidden
from view by the discursive symbolism erected upon it, presentational
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    79

symbolism is routinely neglected, despite its huge psychosocial rele-

vance. It deals with the symbolization of that which defies and escapes
discursive symbolism. Discursive symbolism might adequately convey
the obvious things, relations and events of the practical, physical world
observed by a third person from a safe distance (meat-sinks-in-water),
but, to invoke Bertram Russell again, it conveys ‘little of anything else’.
The intricate and ever-moving flows and patterns of our emotional
lives, for example, or of our actual perceptual experience, are pro-
foundly distorted when laid out sequentially like a string of rosary
beads, as required by discursive thought. A form like music is far more
suited to symbolizing such feelings, but in so doing, it does not denote
them in a representational fashion, even if a flute is used to invoke
birdsong. Music is not given in a simultaneous whole like a painting,
but in its flowing passage it presents to us rises and falls, tones and tim-
bres, rhythms and refrains which symbolizes our feelings, articulating
them into an expressive form. This, to quote Langer (1978, p. 101), is
a ‘symbolism peculiarly adapted to the explication of “unspeakable”
things’. It is a symbolism capable of grasping and articulating experi-
ence ‘at the very edge of semantic availability’ (Williams 1977, p. 134).
Like painting, music lacks denotation, and the dominance of discur-
sive symbolism means that this feature makes it hard for many to recog-
nize that they are symbolic forms at all. The semantic of presentational
symbolism is pure connotation, but far from preventing its symbolic sig-
nificance, this feature is what allows so many people to obtain a profound
meaning from music, including enduring insights into humanity which
can be carried throughout people’s lives. As we shall see at various points
in this book, the same point applies to the forms of presentational sym-
bolism at play in other liminal affective technologies, such as ritual and
myth, which provide an important matrix from which specialized art
forms emerge and individuate. We will return later to this distinction,
but for now it is sufficient to note that the symbolism of discursive
thought presupposes that of the image (or sense-presentation more
broadly). Bringing the two into contact is always a matter of translation
and, indeed, further symbolism. Despite its use of words, for example,
Aesop’s fable is a presentational symbolic ‘image’ dense with conceived
80  P. Stenner

feeling. As stated earlier, it both gives us to think and it gives us an image

of what thought is. It is now time to further unpack the fable.

Feeling the Fable: From Uh oh! to Ah ha!

The fable gives us to think, first, because we ponder its moral. It leads us
to think about what we might lose if we are too greedy, for example. If the
dog had been content with the meat it already had, it would not have lost
its meal. The warning is clear: be content with what you have and be care-
ful with what you desire. Do not overstep your bounds: stay within your
limits. This ethical reading is important, and it is usual for fables to con-
tain a ‘moral’ which allows them to be related to practical conduct. But
this moral is only the most superficial layer of meaning. At a deeper level,
it could be said that the content of the fable also gives us an image of
what thought is. That is to say, in the fable the dog is first of all moved or
provoked into something like ‘thought’ by virtue of the double shock it
feels, first on having mistaken a reflection for meat it could eat, and sec-
ond on having lost the meat it already had. The dog encounters the sur-
prise of what we might call an uh oh! experience. This is the ‘disturbing
event’ discussed in Chap. 2 as a separation. Uh oh! is the kind of emo-
tional exclamation an English speaker might make when confronted by a
surprising problem which matters to them, not simply because of what it
is, but by virtue of what it is not. We might further say that the dog has a
this is not experience that, given the right conditions, provokes an emo-
tional flash of consciousness. If the flash of insight can be retained through
a process of symbolism, it might come to provide important material for
the kind of conceptual analysis we call ‘thought’ (the ‘intuitive vision’
discussed in Chap. 2). If the moral message reinforces the notion of lim-
its, this deeper meaning opens up the question of moving beyond those
limits. It is only by overstepping its bounds that the dog reaches the pos-
sibility of experiencing and knowing those limits.
Thought here is not a simple matter of representing a reality. It is not
the re-presentation of a positive content. Rather, it is something that is
provoked by the shock of a ‘this is not’ experience. Indeed, we might say
that ‘reality’—in this image—is precisely the shock of the disconfirmation
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    81

of a this is not experience. It is the disappointment of expectations. This

way of thinking foregrounds ‘process’: a taken for granted flow of con-
duct and experience—of seemingly direct perception and immediate
action—is interrupted or ruptured. Karl Jaspers (1971) would call this a
Grenzsituation, and since ‘Grenz’ is the German word for boundary or
limit we might translate this as a limit or liminal situation or occasion (see
Chap. 5). The fable captures the dog as it encounters the limits of its pre-
vious unthinking way of going about its business. The fable renders and
presents the emotion (surprise, shock) associated with the liminal occa-
sion into the tangible and enduring symbolic form of an image. A com-
parable image, drawn from popular culture, is the moment during the
1998 movie The Truman Show when the boat of Jim Carrey’s character
Truman Burbank hits the edge of the enormous transparent dome that
covers the world he previously thought was natural, but now discovers is
a giant artificial film set. The examples could easily be multiplied.
Our fable, in sum, provides an image of thought in that it shows us
how we, like the dog, are provoked into thought when our expectations
are disappointed or violated. Indeed, it is only thanks to the provocation
that we—including the dog—become aware that we even had expecta-
tions that could be disappointed. The image therefore serves the preserva-
tive function usually associated with memory (Mnemosyne, Goddess of
memory, was the mother of the Muses). The fable captures, holds still and
memorializes as an image, an event that disturbs our sense of what is real
(the object/world), and of who we are (the subject/self ), because it con-
fronts us with our limits or boundaries. But this process is not simply
backward looking. It is not simply Bergson’s illusory ‘phantasm’. The
encounter with limits obliges creation. The interruption of old ways pro-
vokes the invention of new ways of going on and new forms of connectiv-
ity, installing new limits around a new ‘world’. The passive negation
involved in the Uh oh! event, in other words, provides the occasion for a
creative phase that, as we shall see, might culminate in the active affirma-
tion of an Ah ha! It is this process of becoming active (an increase or up-­
swerve in the power of understanding), and not just the negation, that is
‘preserved’ in the fabulation. Indeed, the art form is the objectified out-
come of this process of creation provoked by the liminal encounter.
82  P. Stenner

Three Events

The Uh oh! experience marks the beginning of an event. This is an impor-

tant concept that I will merely sketch at this point, though it will recur in
this book. An event is something that occurs rather than something that
endures. It is not something that just ‘is’ but something that happens.
But it is not something that can be understood from the outside as if by
an objective description. Rather, it is a concept which demands that we
think the subjects and the objects of an experience together as a thor-
oughly affective constellation which forms the subject and their world.
The ‘event’ is a concept that has been used in many different ways. Three
different usages include:

1. an event as any mundane thing that happens: ‘business as usual’ (a new

event in my diary could be anything from buying bread to attending
a meeting or going to the dentist);
2. an event as something exceptional that happens spontaneously and
unpredictably and therefore without planning and prior arrangement,
like the crisis caused by an earthquake or a flood or a car accident or
the dropping of a cherished bone, and;
3. an event as something that has been carefully arranged to be quite
exceptional, like the ‘drama’ of a theatre performance, a football
match, a political rally or a live musical performance.

As used in this book, an event is not a mundane recurring occurrence

as in sense 1, although these remain important. It is precisely about the
suspension or interruption of recurrent events in sense 1 and the subse-
quent relationship between events in senses 2 and 3. An event—as I am
using it—is thus something that happens that changes things. The event
marks a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ because a boundary is crossed and some-
thing new enters the world. Mead (1932/1980)—whose definition of
event I am here drawing upon—would call it an emergent event.
Something that happens doesn’t change things all by itself, ‘externally’ as
it were, but is inherently relational, and calls upon the resources of all the
entities affected. The event is always a confluence of different ingredients
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    83

or flows of components that come together in a particular way that rear-

ranges the manner or pattern of their togetherness. There is something
inherently experiential about the event. An event is something that is gone
through and is thus something radically singular. Going back to the fic-
tional content of our fable, it is an event for this dog by this pond at this
moment, in this setting and if this transformative confluence is experi-
enced as such, it is an event.
Aesop’s event does not end with the flash of consciousness provoked by
the splash of the meat in the pond. Rather we can imagine that the Uh
oh! moment throws the dog into a phase of perplexity (of temporary
‘separation’), and we might say that the event ends when this liminal
phase is complete (‘reincorporation’). It might end, for example, with an
Ah ha! experience of new insight or intuition, permitting the drawing of
a new boundary (around a newly composed world). I have stressed that
this new insight might be called an idea-feeling or a proto-concept, and
that it is inseparable from the real emergence of a novel form or composi-
tion. The passage from Uh oh! to Ah ha! is something that is gone through
and in that precise sense it is what Dilthey described as ‘an experience’ as
distinct from ‘mere experience’ (see Turner 1986). Going through ‘an
experience’ changes things for the subject of that experience, because that
subject is formed by way of the experience. The Uh oh! expresses an
unknowing overstepping of bounds that can become known (Ah ha!)
only through this experience of overstepping (Simmel 1918/2015, p. 9).
In our Ah ha! moment we might come to feel, for instance, a difference
between appearance and ‘reality’: that appearance is not necessarily what
we took it to be, but is something more. The emergence of a new ‘world’
thus becomes a possibility, but that possibility must first be grasped in the
imagistic form of presentational symbolism before it can be discursively
articulated using the symbols of language. Discursive symbolism presup-
poses precisely those presentational symbols that are de-railed during the
liminal experience, and the affirmative phase that follows concerns the
initial creation of new presentational rails for any ‘representational’
thought that might follow.
I have used the word ‘might’ several times in the paragraph above
because the Ah ha! outcome depends upon the capacity of the subject to,
as it were, bear the event, and be transformed by it. A creature like a dog
84  P. Stenner

might well simply shake itself dry and carry on with business as usual.
Certainly dogs cannot put things in the terms of discursive symbolism
(using words like ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’), and nor can they create art
works using presentational symbolism, but a dog can certainly be con-
fronted with the shock of a powerful ‘this is not’ experience. The question
is whether such an experience—inevitably affectively charged—is imme-
diately closed down and moved away from, or whether it is lingered on
by a subject that opens itself up to what has emerged. The creative process
is the process of creating new means for carrying on in the face of ‘this is
not’ experiences. Presentational symbolism permits the subject to bear
the event and to go through its transformation. Beyond its mere moral
lesson, Aesop’s fable captures this event of transformation.

Caught in the Act

The fable catches the ‘dog’ in the act of the emergent event, and therefore
preserves—in the form of an image—precisely the liminal situation of
passage or ‘going through’. This liminal situation might otherwise pass
without comment, as if nothing that matters really happened. But some-
thing did happen, and the artwork captures and preserves this ‘conceived’
feeling of importance—of mattering—for our thought. Here, at the risk
of overloading the example, it is interesting to compare our fable with
Masaccio’s rendering in fresco of the biblical scene of the expulsion of
Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Again, this scene has a superfi-
cial moral/religious message that should not distract us from the deeper
psychosocial truth. Masaccio’s famous fresco captures Adam and Eve at
the liminal moment of expulsion from the Garden of Eden. What hap-
pened at the garden’s threshold at the moment of expulsion—according
to the mythology—is that humanity acquired the curse/blessing of some-
thing new: something like ‘self-consciousness’. Life in the garden was
unconscious life in which, according to the myth, people were at one
with the rest of nature’s creatures, naked and unashamed. The taste of the
tempting fruit of knowledge was the original sin/symbol that inaugu-
rated a passage—via the Uh oh! experience of expulsion—to self-­conscious
humanity. An event of emergence, then. Or more specifically, a cultural
form or narrative which captures, displays and ‘stages’ this event of emer-
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    85

gence. This scene is not about the representation of some existing state-­
of-­affairs but a form of creativity at the heart of the becoming of a new
religious collective self-consciousness. The world became a different place
before and after the bearing—and the subsequent sharing—of this
insight.
The myth of the birth of Aphrodite from a sea-shell—as painted in the
famous fresco by Botticelli—captures and expresses in a symbolic image
another such event of emergence. Here it is the water of the foaming
ocean that symbolizes the sea of unconscious experience from which the
conscious appreciation of beauty first emerges. Carl Jung (1979, p. 81)
describes another example (this time expressed in the symbolic form of
ritual) when he recounts a morning he spent with the people of Mount
Elgon on the border of Kenya and Uganda. Each dawn, his hosts spat and
breathed on their hands, and faced the rising sun with hands raised. They
laughed when Jung asked them why they did it, reporting that they had
always done so. But when Jung suggested that the sun is mungu (Swahili
for an extraordinary power related to the Polynesian mana), they laughed
again: mungu is not the sun as such, but the actual moment of the sun-
rise. The sun is not mungu when it has risen. The ritual, like our fable,
captures and displays the emotional value (or the idea-feeling) of going
through an event of emergence. In each of these cases, a psychosocial
truth is preserved in a fabulous form whose evident distance from literal
truth (talking animals, grown women emerging from sea-shells, etc.)
pulls the true but unnerving object of the fable into closer proximity.

 he Experience of Liminality: Devised

T
and Spontaneous, Fabulated and Found, Tame
and Wild, Staged and Unstaged5
Taken a little further than its usual ‘moral’ meaning, then, Aesop’s
fable provides us with an image of thought of enormous value to psy-
chosocial thinking. As an art form, the fable objectifies a dense experi-
ential seed of conceptual feeling into a presentational symbol, an
image. The feeling thus objectified can in turn be felt by its recipients,
and can—if desired—be subsequently unfurled into the more linear
86  P. Stenner

and abstract form of discursive thought. By dwelling upon the fable in

this spirit, it gives us to think in a concrete way about the nature of a
core aspect of our subject matter: ‘self-consciousness’ and its relation to
experience (and hence mind or ‘the psyche’ more broadly understood).
The dog—who is of course a character in the fable, and hence part of its
virtual reality—is unable to recognize its own reflection because it lacks
self-consciousness. But the fable zooms in on precisely the kind of occa-
sion that might provoke self-consciousness in one that hitherto lacked it.
Before elaborating on this point, it is necessary to briefly return to the
contrast between sense 2 and sense 3 of ‘event’, as described above, a
contrast we can all too crudely identify with ‘staged/devised/fabulated/
tame’ liminal experience and ‘unstaged/spontaneous/found/wild’ liminal
experience. At times, I have been talking above as if the dog in the fable
were real and had really gone through the this is not experience that is
described. If that were the case, then this experience would be an event in
the second sense of something exceptional that happens spontaneously
and unpredictably: a spontaneous, real-life Uh oh! experience. At the
same time, I have stressed that the liminal experience of Aesop’s dog is
written in a fable and is therefore the fictional, fabulated product of art-
istry. It is something that has been composed. No less than a Fresco or a
sculpture, it is a self-created, painstakingly fabricated reality.
As an external object, the fable as artwork provides the occasion for an
event understood in the third sense given above: something that has been
carefully arranged to be quite exceptional, like a theatre performance, a
football match, a ritual, the sharing of a mythical narrative, or a live
musical performance. Here the ‘event’ is no less a relation and no less
actual than in sense 2, but the relation is between recipient and artwork,
reader and fable, viewer and fresco, listener and musical piece, audience
and theatre performance and so on. Performative events involving self-­
created, fabulated forms can be moving experiences because these com-
positions are precisely designed to promote distinctive experiences on the
part of their recipients. The fable is there not just by feeling6 but also for
feeling. It is part of the expressive mode of aesthetic enjoyment discussed
earlier. If it is made out of the spontaneous liminality of our second type
of event (via the transformative process of symbolization), then, once cre-
ated, it is made for this third kind of staged or composed liminal event.
This is the two-sided passage of fabulation introduced in Chap. 2.7
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    87

From Art to Life

In considering any spontaneous liminal experience at play, we need not,

in fact, discard the possibility that even a dog might have a comparable
experience, although I feel confident in asserting that a dog could never
compose a fable. When I was a child, for example, my family had a dog
called Badger who once had an experience that is comparable to Aesop’s
virtual dog. One day, when I was perhaps 10 years old, we took her for a
walk across some fields that contained reans. Reans are large furrows dug
out to channel drainage water from a field. The water in the rean was
covered in a layer of green algae and Badger mistook the green for firm
grassy ground. She tried to run across the rean and there was a look of
terrified astonishment in her eyes when she was unexpectedly plunged
into cold water. If we unfold what is shared by Badger and Aesop’s dog,
we quickly run up against the idea that both experienced an encounter
with at least the vestiges of the contrast sketched above between appear-
ance and reality: something that we might be tempted to call illusion. An
illusion is an error or a mistake. Logically, however, one must first risk a
‘take’ before one can make a mis-take. The ‘take’ involved in this situation
is a basic, deep and minimal form of symbolism because it implies a pro-
cess by which someone takes one thing for something else. A symbol, in
a basic sense, is something that is taken (by someone) for something else.
I suggest that even dogs are capable of this deep form of symbolism, but
are perhaps not capable of lingering with what emerges during events
which disrupt it. They are capable of the Uh oh!, but not the Ah ha!. It
took a different mammal to bear this event, and to be (trans)formed
through it.

Deep Symbolism
Whitehead describes a form of symbolism that is more basic than Langer’s
presentational symbolism,8 and that he calls symbolic reference. Together
with presentational symbolism, this gives us a deep symbolism which can
further clarify Badger’s experience and that of Aesop’s dog. Whitehead
begins by distinguishing three kinds of symbolism, each more
fundamental:
88  P. Stenner

First, at the most superficial level are the forms of symbolism that vary
from human culture to human culture across place and time. The archi-
tecture, ceremonies and heraldry of Medieval Europe, for example, was
full of symbolism of the kind that was rejected by the protestant reform-
ers. These symbolisms come and go.
Second, written and spoken language are deeper modes of symbolism
in the sense that, although in a sense ‘artificial’, human beings would
struggle to live together without them. Some would even say language is
constitutive of our humanity, as when Whitehead (1938/1966, p.  41)
states that the ‘mentality of mankind and the language of mankind cre-
ated each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact,
then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from
language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He
gave them speech, and they became souls’.
Third, and more fundamental still, is what he calls the symbolism from
sense-presentation to physical bodies. This mode of symbolism is wide-
spread and practically unavoidable, and extends to at least some non-­
human animals. This last mode, which I will call ‘deep symbolism’ will be
unpacked in the paragraphs below.
Whitehead (1927/1985, p. 8) asserts that a ‘mind is functioning sym-
bolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness,
beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experi-
ence. The former set of components are the ‘symbols’, and the latter set
constitute the ‘meaning’ of the symbols’. What is crucial here is that both
‘symbol’ and ‘meaning’ are components of experience. No component of
experience is inherently a ‘symbol’ or a ‘meaning’, and in fact any compo-
nent can be both, depending upon experiential circumstance. When
dealing with ordinary language, we usually think of the word ‘dog’ as the
symbol and the animal itself as the meaning, but Whitehead correctly
insists that both the word itself and the dog itself enter our experience on
equal terms. Both are components of our experience, and—although nor-
mally the word will take the role of the symbol—it is quite possible for
the dog itself to be the symbol and for some other component of experi-
ence to be its meaning. For instance, for Aesop, the dog itself is a symbol
of a more generic type of agent. In fact, for poets who take inspiration
from nature it can often be that experiences of natural things serve as
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    89

symbols, and words are the meaning. The words for a poem are thus
inspired by the stroll around the lake. If it more often works the other
way round, then this is because it is much easier to manipulate words to
evoke meanings than to manipulate actual dogs or lakes, but the princi-
ple is the same, once we realize that written words, spoken words, lakes,
dogs and bones are all factors in the broader fact of experience. Likewise,
a person speaking might put the things of their experience into words
whilst the listener moves from those words back to things. Or sometimes
a written word can serve as a symbol whose meaning is the spoken word,
and vice versa. The permutations are endless, and all are likely to be
exemplified under some experiential circumstances.
As an example of the most basic mode of symbolism, Whitehead sug-
gests that ‘we look up and see a coloured shape in front of us, and we
say,—there is a chair’ (1927/1985, p. 3). Although this example uses the
linguistic expression ‘there is a chair’, for Whitehead, this deeper form of
symbolism also operates prior to the specialized symbols provided by lan-
guage. We take some visual components of our experience (the coloured
shape) for another element of our experience (a chair). This symbolism
from our senses to the physical bodies symbolized is basic and widespread
because it usually happens automatically, and in fact it takes some effort
not to pass directly from ‘perception of the coloured shape to the enjoy-
ment of the chair’. Even dogs do it, although obviously a dog cannot say
‘there is a chair’ or ‘there is some firm grassy ground’, as it lacks the capac-
ity to use its own artificial symbolism obtained by concentrating only on
a narrow selection of sense-perceptions called ‘words’. But, as our fable
illustrates, this deep symbolism can be mistaken.
The important point is that without such symbolism—without some
sort of ‘take’ or abstraction—there is no possibility of error, and hence no
such thing as illusion, because experiences just are what they are. If per-
ceptions are not ‘taken’ (by someone) to be something other, or to mean
something else (i.e. some other components in their experience) then
they cannot be de-railed. Although it is hard to do, we can imagine sim-
ply describing—in purely phenomenological terms—the details of our
sensory experience without resorting to any claims about other aspects of
experience. This is exactly what Husserl was aiming at with his phenom-
enological ‘epoch’: a suspension of judgement with respect to ‘reality’ that
90  P. Stenner

allows attention to what is actually given to our consciousness at any

given moment. Not grassland, a bone, a chair or some other thing, but an
expanse of green with a given texture: a play of colours and shapes that
change with time. An artist may well also approach things this way, and
linger to contemplate shape and colour as such: to ‘see’ things in a way
ordinary people in daily life rarely can. If no claim or ‘take’ with respect
to meaning is made, then no error or ‘mis-take’ is possible. If the light
changes and the green turns dark, then this does not falsify the fact that
it was green: the green has merely turned dark. Perceptions change as
experience arises, perishes and is replaced by ever-new experience, but
what is experienced, is experienced. No one would talk of mistakes at this
level because the experience is not ‘mediately determined’, as Peirce put
it, but direct: not a sign of something else, but merely what it is in itself.
The sense data, in other words, are not being used as a symbol with a
meaning. In our fable, however, Aesop’s dog took the perceptual sense-­
presentation that he saw in the water for the kind of real meat he could
chew up and eat. Badger took the perceptual image of green she saw for
the kind of grassy ground she could happily run on. These ‘takes’ imply
symbolism in Whitehead’s basic sense, and hence they are fallible: they
can be de-railed.

 wo Types of Experience Given by Two Modes

T
of Perception

In the case of both dogs, therefore, we have the experiential feeling of a

contrast. The contrast is within experience and implies the difference
between (at least) two components of experience. Instead of silently
mediating a wider experience, the sense data, when de-railed, came to
contrast with that wider experience in a ‘this is not’ experience. Once this
contrast has been experientially encountered, it might, in principle, be
thought and put into words as part of a new experience that ‘feels’ the
others. I am stressing the importance of not rushing to the insight that we
are here dealing with a contrast between a perceptual experience (appear-
ance) and simple external reality, as if reality were the rails and perception
were a train that had simply ‘gone off the rails’. After all, I earlier gave the
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    91

name ‘reality’ to the result of the encounter with the disappointment of

expectations. Rather, following Whitehead’s definition, the contrast is
better formulated as a contrast between two different modes of percep-
tion that had been symbolically related and fused, albeit unconsciously. It
is the complex contrast between two different modes of perception that
is decisive here and not a simple distinction between subjective appear-
ance and objective reality: both the trains and the rails are components of
experience.9 This relational mode of thought—grounded in a
­pan-­experientialist ‘deep empiricism’—is more fully described in Chap.
4. The active relation, juxtaposition, tension and contrast between at least
two components of experience (from which a third can emerge) is the
basis for the emergence of novelty of any kind, although different think-
ers grasp this insight through different vocabularies.10 I will here briefly
discuss two such theoretical formulations relevant to our fable, that of
Mead (1932/1980)11 and that of Whitehead himself. Both imply ‘deep
symbolism’.
Using Mead’s terminology, this contrast of perceptual modes involves
a distinction between distance experience and contact experience. The per-
ceptual images provided by vision supplied the dogs with a ‘presentation’
of an environment extending well beyond their physical bodies (hence
‘distance’ experience). Despite their obvious differences, vision, hearing
and smell all share this feature of extending our experience into the dis-
tance beyond our bodies. The activities of more advanced organisms with
well-developed distance receptors can be steered on the basis of the
‘abstractions’ that are ‘taken’ by these organs. Contact experience, by con-
trast, involves physical contact with our bodies, as when we take a piece
of food in our hand, put it into our mouths and eat it. Because we can see
what we take to be a raspberry on a bush in the near distance (a distance
experience), we can pick it and eat it (a contact experience). Mead thus
points to the value-added power of combining these two modes of per-
ception: ‘The “reality” of a visual object is what one can see himself han-
dling’ (Mead 1932/1980, p. 106). This statement is the heart of Mead’s
revolutionary rethinking of behaviourism, which always situates experi-
ence within streams of conduct (his theory of the ‘act’ would emphasize
Badger’s act of running and the other dog’s act of lunging, as crucial).
Watson’s behaviourism denied experience, concerning itself only with
92  P. Stenner

those aspects of behaviour that can be objectified by the observer. Far

from denying experience, Mead’s behaviourism is based on the fact that
it ‘recognizes the parts of the act which do not come to external observa-
tion’ (Mead 1934/2015, p. 8).
Using different terminology for similar (but by no means identical)
concepts, Whitehead proposes ‘presentational immediacy’ and ‘causal
efficacy’ as two distinct modes of perception. It is important to tread care-
fully here. In Whitehead’s philosophy, each mode of perception is a dis-
tinctive way in which the contemporary things which exist alongside us
(i.e. in, or as, our environment) are ‘objectified’ in our experience. This
notion that things are ‘objectively’ in our experience is based on a philo-
sophical distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘formal’ existence, which
Whitehead adapts. In his use, actual things exist ‘formally’ in their own
completeness, but they are ‘objectively’ in our experience. The totality of
experience of any actual entity is its ‘formal’ constitution. What it experi-
ences are other actual entities as ‘objectified’ for/by it, but each of those
actual entities has its own formal completeness. ‘Objectification’ is thus
always an abstraction from the ‘formal’ completeness of an actual entity
considered in its own right: it is always a partial selection which, by neces-
sity, reduces the complexity of ‘formal’ existence. Presentational imme-
diacy and causal efficacy 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.
As we shall see, error enters only when the two are combined in a synthe-
sis (symbolic reference) contributed by the percipient itself to what is
perceived (i.e. fabulated, to use the terminology from Chap. 2).
Presentational immediacy objectifies by way of the data from sense-­
perception. Entities are introduced into our experience by colours and
shapes (in the case of vision), sounds with pitch, tone and timbre (in the
case of hearing), smells, bodily feelings and so forth. These sense data fill
out what Whitehead (1927/1985, p. 23) calls a scheme of spatial related-
ness which provides—for the high-grade of animal capable of such per-
ception—an appearance of a contemporary world of entities: ‘Thus the
disclosure of a contemporary world by presentational immediacy is
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    93

bound up with the disclosure of the solidarity of actual things by reason

of their participation in an impartial system of spatial extension’.
Whitehead describes the knowledge thus provided as vivid, precise and
barren. It is barren because it gives a mere appearance and is unable—on
its own—to connect with any intrinsic characteristics of the things dis-
played in their presentational immediacy. We can presume that a dog like
Aesop’s experienced a vivid and precise image of a coloured bone present-
ing to it in the space beneath the water’s surface. This image—in fact
reflected by the water—is just as much an ‘immediate presentation of
colour qualifying the world at a distance’ (1927/1985, p. 24) as would be
its direct vision of a bone actually in the water. The presentational imme-
diacy in both cases is equally real and directly recognized. Neither, how-
ever, is able alone to inform about the intrinsic characteristics of the bone
beyond its appearance. Likewise, we can presume that Badger experi-
enced a vivid image of a green expanse. This image was real and directly
recognized by Badger regardless of whether it was taken to be grass or
not. But this real experience of presentational immediacy conveyed only
a hollow appearance, and it failed to inform her about any intrinsic char-
acteristics of the surface she was about to land upon. Presentational
immediacy thus has the ‘empty’ feel of a pure present. Whitehead likens
it to a decorative show. It is precise and immediate—since it demarcates
regions of space, texture and colour relatively clearly and distinctly—but
it is ultimately shallow. Through presentational immediacy the world
comes to our experience dressed in sensational clothing, but the catwalk
remains trivial. The colours and shapes disappear as soon as the eyes are
closed, and the sounds cease if we block our ears. Try it! Close your eyes
and then open them again and concentrate on what you actually
experience.
The other mode of perception objectifies actual entities under the guise
of their causal efficacy as distinct from their immediate appearance. In
proposing its very existence, Whitehead knowingly contravenes some
cherished assumptions of modern philosophy. The decisive characteristic
of Hume’s empiricism and of Kant’s transcendentalism alike is that they
assume presentational immediacy to be the only mode of perception.
They take causal efficacy to be an entirely secondary import of thought
based on the results of conscious observation. Whitehead differs. Part of
94  P. Stenner

this is that Whitehead assumes that the bulk of our perception (which he
sometimes, and more generically, calls ‘prehension’)—and certainly most
of the experience of causal efficacy—is unconscious. As he puts it in
Process and Reality (1929/1985, p. 162), in higher organisms ‘conscious-
ness only dimly illuminates the prehensions in the mode of causal effi-
cacy, because these prehensions are primitive elements in our experience.
But prehensions in the mode of presentational immediacy are among
those prehensions which we enjoy with the most vivid consciousness’.
This notion of unconscious experience should not be overlooked.
Whitehead takes it as obvious that conscious experience is a late and rare
arrival in nature, and occurs only amongst highly sophisticated organ-
isms, and then only in flashes. If and when consciousness emerges as a
feature of experience, it always builds upon complex layers of experience
that are not conscious, but that nevertheless entail multiple mental oper-
ations (i.e. operations of seizing or ‘prehending’ or ‘feeling’ available data
into internal unities or ‘actual occasions’). As Whitehead puts it: ‘con-
sciousness presupposes experience, not experience consciousness. It is a
special element in the subjective forms of some feelings. Thus an actual
entity may, or may not, be conscious of some part of its experience. Its
experience is its complete formal constitution, including its conscious-
ness, if any’ (1929/1985, p. 53). Consciousness is not the base, but the
crown of experience: it belongs only to the higher phases of experience
which integrate more basic experiences, including contrasts between
them (1929/1985, p.  267). What is illuminated by this ‘crown’ of the
conscious phase of experience tends to be the late and derivative elements
of experience, and not the elements that form its base. The general neglect
of the perceptual mode of causal efficacy is thus explained by the law that
‘the late derivative elements are more clearly illuminated by conscious-
ness than the primitive elements’ (1929/1985, p. 162).
We are apt to be so impressed with the mode of presentational imme-
diacy that we regard it as the only important perceptual mode. In fact—
evolutionarily speaking—the sensational deliverances of sense-perception
are a late arrival on the scene, and an arrival that presupposes the more
primordial mode. As with presentational immediacy, through the percep-
tual mode of causal efficacy, actual entities in the external world of the
experiencing actual entity are directly, but selectively, prehended. The real
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    95

diversity of the information the two modes provide is crucial to their later
combination through symbolism. Where presentational immediacy is
precise and trivial, causal efficacy is vague but important or ‘vital’. Also,
where the former presents the immediacy of a ‘here-and-now’, the latter
is laden with passage from the past. Causal efficacy is the perception of
‘conformation’ to realities in the environment. A flower turns towards
light and a dog anticipates that the immediate future will conform to or
be conditioned by the present. Such perception is a comparatively vague
but insistent experience which is ‘heavy with the contact of things gone
by, which lay their grip on our immediate selves’ (1927/1985, p. 44) and
hence thick with the sense of derivation from the past, and the fate of the
future. It is a dim and primal perception of ‘the hand of the settled past
in the formation of the present’ (1927/1985, p. 50). Perception in the
mode of causal efficacy is conformation of the present to what is given. It
is ‘affect’ in the sense of experience affected by the immediate past, and,
in turn, affecting an immediate future.
Unlike presentational immediacy, causal efficacy does not halt at the
present, but advances and retreats, approaches and withdraws, consumes
and expels. Abstracting from the sense of taste, eating food is a causally
efficacious act of organic consummation in which one occasion of experi-
ence gives rise to the next. The texture of the flesh resists and gives way to
the biting of the teeth, the chewing and swallowing of a bolus, and so on.
In the same way, a paw on a grassy surface involves a causally efficacious
relation between animal limb and physical terrain that entails the con-
summation of an act of locomotion (which gives rise to the next act in
dialogue with the things, events and other organisms efficacious and at
large in the environment). In each of these cases there is a direct p
­ erception
of what is already made becoming a determinant of what is now being
made, and this fact of the ‘conformation of present to immediate past’ is
a real part of the texture of all experience. Perhaps a prime case of direct
perception of ‘conformation’ to realities in the immediate past is the fact
that—at each moment of our experience—what enters our present expe-
rience is not just sense data, but also our past experience: the experience
of a fraction of a second ago enters into, and is conformed to by, the pres-
ent experience. This conformation is an instance of causal efficacy where
the prior occasion is prehended by the new one through an unconscious
96  P. Stenner

act of feeling. This refutes shallow empiricism, which asserts that experi-
ence is built solely from sense data. Whitehead (1927/1985, p.  46)
expresses the real relevance of causal efficacy as follows:

In practice we never doubt the fact of the conformation of the present to

the immediate past. It belongs to the ultimate texture of experience, with
the same evidence as does presentational immediacy. The present fact is
luminously the outcome from its predecessors, one quarter of a second ago.
Unsuspected factors may have intervened; dynamite may have exploded.
But, however that may be, the present event issues subject to the limita-
tions laid upon it by the actual nature of the immediate past. If dynamite
explodes, then present fact is that issue from the past which is consistent
with dynamite exploding.

As noted, these experiences of causal efficacy are much more basic than
those of presentational immediacy. The highly influential but shallow
empiricism12 of Hume was based on the misplaced foundation that any
and all knowledge comes only and always from immediate sense-­
presentation, principally vision. He famously argued that what we call
‘causality’ is basically nothing but an idea, and hence not something we
can have any direct experience of. Kant accepted Hume’s position that
sense-presentation is primary, and causality a higher, secondary addition
of thought. Causal efficacy, for both Humean empiricists and transcen-
dental idealists, is thus a secondary importation on the part of ‘thought’
into the primary data from sense-presentation. For Hume it is called a
‘habit of thought’ and for Kant a constitutive ‘category of thought’. But
Whitehead points out the opposite: it is presentational immediacy that is
relatively trivial and causal efficacy that is the aboriginal experience (and
the sole experience of ‘lower’ organisms).
Whitehead points out a self-undermining paradox in Hume’s argu-
ment for the imported and secondary nature of causality. I will summa-
rize it because it further clarifies his difficult concept of causal efficacy.
Senses, Hume argues, can only give us sense data, and can never inform
us about substances or causality: ‘If it be conveyed to us by our senses, I
ask, which of them, and after what manner? If it be perceived by the eyes,
it must be a colour; if by the ears, a sound; if by the palate, a taste; and so
of the other senses. … We have, therefore, no idea of substance, distinct
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    97

from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor have we any other

meaning when we either talk or reason concerning it’ (Hume, cited in
Whitehead 1927/1985, p. 33/34). Hume is here asserting the lack of any
perception of causal efficacy, and yet his examples, Whitehead points out,
implicitly presuppose it. He says himself that we perceive colour by the
eyes, sound by the ears, taste by the palate and this presupposes that

sense data, functioning in presentational immediacy, are “given” by reason

of “eyes”, “ears”, “palate”, functioning in causal efficacy … the sense-data
must therefore play a double role in perception. In the mode of presenta-
tional immediacy they are projected to exhibit the contemporary world in
its spatial relations. In the mode of causal efficacy they exhibit the almost
instantaneously precedent bodily organs as imposing their characters on
the experience in question. We see the picture, and we see it with our eyes;
… we smell the rose and we smell it with our nose (pp. 50–51).

The sense data, in other words, have what Whitehead calls a double
reference: a reference to presentational immediacy (which ‘objectifies’
things as a presentational ‘show’) and a reference to causal efficacy (with
its causal mode of ‘objectification’). Shallow empiricists cannot help but
refute their own position with their own examples. A deep empiricism is
needed which—in concerning itself with the deep complexities within
experience—recognizes the fundamental nature of causal efficacy, and
hence includes a concept of affect as basic to experience (see Chap. 6).

Combining the Two Modes by Symbolic Reference

I have presented two ways of contrasting different components of experi-

ence. It is interesting that Mead’s distinction stresses space (distance/con-
tact) whilst Whitehead’s stresses time (presentational immediacy is
immediate and in the now where causal efficacy gives a sense of determi-
nation of the present by the past). Distance experience lacks the direct
temporal sense of causal efficacy and it takes the form instead of immedi-
ately present ‘sensations’. The key point, however, is that both distinc-
tions contrast two different modes of perception within experience and
hence allow us to conceive of a basic form of symbolism. This form of
98  P. Stenner

symbolism involves taking one type of perceptual experience for the

other. In symbolism in general, it tends to be the more superficial and
indeed ‘portable’, manageable or ‘handy’ mode that serves as the symbol
for more fundamental (for obvious reasons). The dogs, for example, took
the ‘presentational immediacy’ of their distance experiences (the experi-
ence of a green expanse, in Badger’s case) for something that can be ‘con-
summated’ in a contact experience which is ‘causally efficacious’. Badger
took the green expanse that was presented in her perceptual experience
for grassland that would support her running body.
Whitehead calls this relationship between the two modes symbolic ref-
erence because the data of presentational immediacy ‘symbolizes’ that of
causal efficacy, bringing the two into relationship as part of a process of
synthesis. Symbolic reference, in other words, occurs betwixt and between
the two modes, and it can only occur because there is some intersec-
tion—some elements of structure in common—between them. As
Whitehead (1927/1985, p. 30) puts it, ‘the two schemes of presentation
have structural elements in common, which identify them as schemes of
presentation of the same world’. They share locality, for instance, and also
the ‘double reference’ described above. Symbolic reference is essentially a
synthetic activity whereby presentational immediacy and causal efficacy
are fused by the percipient (although not necessarily consciously) into one
new, more complex, experience. That new experience—the symbolic ref-
erence—is ‘what the actual world is for us’ (p. 18). When we say ‘there is
a chair’ or ‘here is a nice juicy bone’ we are talking about what the actual
world is for us. The symbolic reference is what we act on and what we
think about when we think. It is the basis on which we conduct our lives.
Mead (1932/1980, p. 107) has a similar insight when he writes that ‘all
distant visual experience is symbolic’ and hence that ‘the contact experi-
ences are the reality of the distance experiences’ (p. 143). What distant
experience symbolizes for Mead is not ‘pure contact dimensions’ but
‘those exact dimensions which are ordered in the visual space of the radius
of manipulation’ (p. 107), that is he points to locality as an element of
structure in common between the two modes of experience. Whitehead
(1927/1985, p. 3) explains the process of symbolic reference in compa-
rable terms as follows: ‘Thus coloured shapes seem to be symbols for
some other elements in our experience, and when we see the coloured
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    99

shapes we adjust our actions towards those other elements. This symbol-
ism from our senses to the bodies symbolized is often mistaken … [but]
it is the most natural and widespread of all symbolic modes.’
We can therefore see that both Aesop’s dog and my dog Badger—in
unconsciously using symbolic reference—made ‘takes’ that turned out to
be mistakes. The imagery that was taken for meat beneath the water (i.e.
the symbolic reference) turned out in fact (i.e. in the causally efficacious
encounter between canine body and water that soon followed) only to be
a reflection in the water of the meat in its mouth. The imagery which was
taken for grass was actually what we humans would call a thin layer of
green algae. In both cases, we might say, the dogs were confronted with
an event that ruptured something of their worlds, and forced attention to
their limits, generating the affectivity we know of as surprise: Uh oh!

Conclusion
The surprising event of a this is not experience carries both negative and
positive potentials. Taking our example, on the negative side, the dogs
lost their meat and their footing, but in their evident perplexity they each
found themselves in a uniquely liminal position associated with a new
emergent event of experience. Informed by Whitehead’s notion of sym-
bolic reference, we can see that this event of experience involves the con-
fusion of two modes of perception that had been symbolically fused,
albeit unconsciously. In dislocating this fusion, the event opens up the
potential for an awareness of the implicit contrast at stake. This type of
feeling of a feeling (i.e. a prehension of what is given by a disjunctive
contrast of different components of experience) is, however, a potential
that not all actual entities are capable of bearing and actualizing. We
might say that experience prior to the point of the event was not yet dif-
ferentiated or doubled into an ‘inner’ experience of appearance and an
‘outer’ experience of ‘reality’, but took the undifferentiated form that
William James (1912/2003) called pure experience (see Chap. 4). A ‘this is
not’ experience affords to the one that can bear it, the possibility of a
‘higher-order’ experience of an ‘inner world’ of subjective appearance in
a relationship of disjunction to, and hence peeled away from, as it were,
100  P. Stenner

an ‘outer world’ that exists in spite of expectations. This experience is

grounded in the disjunctive relation of the two modes of perception: it is
a feeling of those feelings. So long as the symbolic reference ‘works’, there
is no value in experiencing such a differentiation, and no basis for its
conscious awareness.
The value arises only when such pure experience is punctured by a this
is not experience. Only under these circumstances does a higher-order
experience of precisely that difference come to matter. As Whitehead
(1938/1966, p. 159) put it, our ‘enjoyment of actuality is a realization of
worth, good or bad. It is a value experience. It’s basic expression is—Have
a care, here is something that matters! Yes—that is the best phrase—the
primary glimmerings of consciousness reveals—Something that matters’.
It is thus possible that these ‘primary glimmerings of consciousness’
emerge precisely in the liminal event of a this is not experience. Such an
experience makes the fact of symbolic reference matter in a new way to
the creature capable of realizing it or feeling it. The positive potential, in
short, is that consciousness first arises as a phase in this kind of experience
of a subject emergent from a contrast between what she unconsciously
expects to experience (thanks to ‘successful’ symbolic reference) and what
she actually experiences (thanks to ‘failed’ symbolic reference). Put differ-
ently, consciousness first arises from an experienced contrast between an
unconscious affirmation (a this is that comes from fusing presentational
immediacy with causal efficacy) and an initially unconscious negation (a
this is not which comes from their sundering). Without a ‘this is not’
experience, there is no contrast to be (potentially) felt or experienced. In
Whitehead’s terms, conscious phases of experience arise only on the basis
of a complex prehension of a ‘contrast between “in fact” and “might be”’
(1929/1985, p. 267).
The liminal position made possible by a this is not experience is a spon-
taneous or unstaged liminal experience. It is this spontaneous experience
which is then artfully staged by Aesop in the new symbolic form of his
fable. This fabulation of the experience serves to hold it still so that it
might be lingered upon and learned from. The spontaneous experience
(of the shattering of deep symbolic reference), in short, is externally and
materially objectified as a presentational symbol. The fabulation that is
provoked by the spontaneous experience (which disturbs and separates),
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    101

in other words, is carried through to a phase of creative fabulation that

transforms the negation (‘this is not’) into the affirmation of insight, at a
higher level of operation (perhaps a conscious level). Here we can grasp
the contrast between a representational symbolism which operates with
symbols whose meaning is already fixed, and the process of arriving at
and fixing meaning through the fabulation of presentational symbols.
Through its transformation into a (presentational) symbol, the experi-
ence is given a new importance. A symbol always functions to lend
importance to its meaning. It is this process—this art, in a basic form—
that makes the difference between those creatures capable of bearing a
this is not event from Uh oh! to Ah ha!, and of transforming itself into a
self-conscious being through the portal of the liminal encounter. Put dif-
ferently, the first glimmerings of consciousness must initially be articu-
lated and expressed by way of an imagistic, figurative, presentational
mode of thought/symbolism. This fabulation of symbols serves to
enhance the importance of what is symbolized, and thus to sharpen the
feelings involved by ‘staging’ the contrast (the fable ‘stages’ the difference
between appearance/reality) for contemplative experience/enjoyment.
The seed of a ‘this is not’ experience can—when sheltered and watered in
the milieu of artistic creativity—in this way grow into an objective/exter-
nalized image, much as a grain of sand grows into a pearl in the rarefied
milieu of a living oyster shell. And just as the beautiful allure of the pearl
does not gainsay the grain of truth at its centre, so the fictions staged by
the Muses do not contradict, but rather protect, the truth at play in their
artworks.
But if something like the illusion/disillusionment of a this is not experi-
ence is indeed constitutive of the very formation of our inner selves as
distinct from an outer world, this is certainly not to say that illusion
defines those inner worlds. Most ‘takes’ of the kind that Aesop’s dog made
when lunging for the meat, or that Badger made when leaping into the
green, are not in fact mistakes. Indeed the mistake is the exception that
proves the rule that usually solid looking green stuff is grass that can be
happily walked on and usually something that looks like a juicy piece of
meat is, for all intents and purposes, just that. Error and illusion are not
intrinsic to self and world, but an emergent reality—the reality of fabula-
tion—made possible by symbolism. They are the price we pay for having
102  P. Stenner

rather sophisticated psyches that can reach beyond the here-and-now and
conjure experience which is both spatially and temporally distant. This is
why, when it comes to fabulation and its Muses, there is never more than
a hair’s breadth between truth and lies, insight and error. The possibility
of error is the price of the extended, expanded subjectivity—and the con-
sequent extended, expanded world—that is afforded by symbolism. The
value of those appointments with the future which do not disappoint
surely outweighs the costs of the occasional disappointments, and of the
fact that the world thus ‘known’ has forever lost its innocence. Beyond
any inane religious moralizing, we grasp all this in an intuitive conceptual
feeling through an image of two humble humans who left the animals
behind in their earthly garden after eating fruit whose taste acquainted
them with the original sin of error.

Notes
1. There are numerous definitions of, and fine distinctions between, symbols,
signs, signals, icons, indices, signifiers, signifieds, significations and so forth.
Peirce’s semiotics, for instance, is based on a triadic concept of the ‘sign’
which he defines as ‘anything which is so determined by something else,
called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I
call its interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the
former’ (Peirce 1998, p. 478). Peirce differentiates three classes of signs:

• icons (which are signs that relate to their object through some resem-
blance, such as a map and its territory),
• indices (which are signs that relate to their object through an actual
or imagined causal connection, such as a weathervane pointing out
wind direction) and
• symbols (which are signs that relate to their object through mere
social convention, like the word ‘symbol’).

In Peirce’s system, then, a symbol is a sub-class of the more basic cate-

gory of ‘sign’, characterized by its arbitrariness. Peirce’s semiotics has the
advantage of great generality. It includes natural language but is not reduc-
ible to it. Barthes (1967, p. 11) construed semiology, by contrast as ‘a part
of linguistics’ and not the other way around. Peirce’s system is preferable
because it does not reduce the study of signs to linguistics, but includes
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    103

linguistics within the broader categories of semiotics. For present pur-

poses, however, I discuss Whitehead’s (1927/1985) lesser-known concept
of symbolism which is broader than Peirce’s, and in some ways equivalent
to the latter’s notion of sign (i.e. it is broadly inclusive, as defined below).
Whitehead uses the word ‘symbol’ to name a different concept than that
named by most semioticians, including Peirce, Morris and, in parts,
Langer.
2. Following Langer (1978) I intend ‘feeling’ in a broad sense inclusive of
sensation, emotion, recollection, imagination and even reasoning.
3. The notion of an image of thought is from Deleuze (1994), but it also
resonates with Cassirer’s (1946/1974, p.  43) idea that the symbolic
‘expression of a feeling is not the feeling itself—it is emotion turned into
an image’ (emphasis mine). The Russian psychologist Vygotsky
(1925/1971) likewise understood art as a social technique of emotion
which provides a means of bringing intimate feelings into the social
domain. Art objectifies feelings into a material form.
4. Connotation is usually distinguished from denotation. Discursive sym-
bolism involves both. The connotation of a symbol is the concept it con-
veys. The concept is always a generality (the concept of dog can ‘fit’ or be
applied to any particular dog). Once connotation is established, the pro-
cess of fitting a concept to an actual specific exemplar is called denotation.
A symbol like the word dog denotes a specific dog when the user of that
word has a concept which satisfactorily ‘fits’ that dog. This kind of sym-
bolism, which requires the confluence of four terms (subject, symbol,
concept and object) can be called ‘representational’. It is re-presentational
because the symbol (the word ‘dog’) can refer to a specific actual dog
(object). But in doing so the symbol must go by way of a generality (the
concept). Following application under the right perceptual circumstances,
any actual dogs can be displayed as exemplars of the pre-given general
characterization (the concept, linked to the symbol by connotation).
Presentational symbolism need have no denotation. It ‘presents us’ with
concrete and singular things. Even a painting that is a portrait of some
person gives us that singular portrait: it is not a mere exemplar of a gener-
ality, and it does not go by way of generality. Its process of symbolization
does not ‘refer’ symbol to object, but rather conceptualizes the buzzing
flux of feeling to yield and ‘present’ concrete things. As Langer (p.  96)
puts it, in the ‘non-discursive mode that speaks directly to sense … there
is no intrinsic generality. It is first and foremost a direct presentation of an
individual object.’
104  P. Stenner

5. At various points I have noted a problem with referring to ‘staged’ lim-

inal experiences. The encounter between art object and those that experi-
ence it can—in the sense outlined above—be thought of as an artfully
engendered liminal experience. I  hesitate to  use the  terms ‘staged’
and  ‘fictional’ here simply because these concepts are limited to  their
quite specific genres or modes, and tend to emphasize the created prod-
uct rather than its role in an actual experience. The notion of a ‘fictional’
liminal experience, for example, is limited to the literary mode of fiction
(with its readers), and the notion of a ‘staged’ liminal experience is lim-
ited to theatre, with its differentiation of a stage for the actors and a ‘the-
atron’ for the audience. Fiction and theatre are distinct symbolic forms
with their own ways of composing objects for experience. Further limits
become apparent if we consider that the liminal experiences engendered
by way of a ritual may be no less artfully engendered and self-created,
but would be  poorly described as  ‘fictional’ or as  ‘staged’. A  ritual,
for example, might involve music, dancing, mask wearing and intoxi-
cants, but the  participants need not consider themselves actors (this
might be considered offensive to the true believer) and there may be no
audience (many rituals require all to participate) and no script. Likewise,
the  expressive content of  the  ritual is rarely taken as  ‘fiction’ by those
who enact it, but as  a  deep sacred truth whose denial might be  met
with  sanctions. If I  use the  expressions ‘staged’ and  ‘unstaged’ liminal
experience, these limitations should be borne in mind. The more valu-
able distinction for  present purposes is that between an  experiential
event that simply or spontaneously happens (what Szakolczai [2000] dis-
armingly calls a real-world liminal experience) and one that is self-cre-
ated through the  mediation of  an  objectified liminal medium such
as a fable, a novel, a painting, a song, a myth, a ritual, a game or some
such composition. As we shall see, this distinction is valuable, not despite,
but because of the fact that reality always presents mixtures of both poles
of the contrast. The art of life is always to mix art and life, and they are
always already mixed. But this does not negate the value of the contrast,
which is decisively important.
6. As an object providing its reader with the occasion for an ‘artificial’ or
‘staged’ liminal experience, it is interesting to consider if the fable also
entertains a relation—doubtless highly complex—to spontaneous lim-
inal experience: perhaps an experience lived by Aesop himself, and for-
mative of Aesop himself. We do not know exactly what Aesop’s experience
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    105

was, since all we have is the fable. It might be anything from a lengthy
ordeal to a momentary flash of insight, or it might be entirely bound up
with the very material process of writing. It is, however, doubtful that
Aesop could produce such a fable without first-hand knowledge of ‘this
is not’ experience. This does not mean that for every fable he wrote, there
was some real experience that he was ‘working through’. The very process
of composing fables, however, might sensitize the composer to layers of
experience usually ignored and inert. More generally, any composing or
staging or fictionalizing or painting brings—through a quite material
and painstaking process—an external form to feelings that would other-
wise remain spontaneous. Through writing the fable, Aesop gave his
experience objective form as an image/symbol. This form in turn pro-
vides a vehicle that can resonate with the feelings of its recipients and can
lend the form of its composition to their feelings in turn. In short, if the
fable is there for feeling, then this is because it is first there by feeling, as
an objectification of feeling.
7. By invoking a relation between this staging or composing or crafting,
and an ‘unstaged’ experience, I am not suggesting a simplistic ‘represen-
tational’ or even ‘traumatic’ basis to art, myth, ritual and so on. This was
stressed in the section above distinguishing presentational and represen-
tational symbolism. Art—even when it contains ‘representational’ ele-
ments—is precisely the kind of symbol that does not immediately point
beyond itself to something else in the manner of a weathervane or,
indeed, in the manner of the word ‘weathervane’. Rather, it invites the
observer to linger on the artwork itself. The purpose of any mimetic or
representational elements involved (the dog, water, meat etc. in the fable,
etc.) is not simply to represent external realities, but to express the con-
ceived feeling of importance that structures the constructed image. But
equally, neither does the fable point directly to its maker, Aesop. It is not
the symptomatic or cathartic ‘self-expression’ of brute feeling. This point
is subtle but important, and dogmatism is to be avoided. A both/and
logic is required. Langer skillfully navigates this both/and logic. On the
one hand, as C. Ph. E. Bach (cited in Langer 1978, p. 214) put it with
respect to music, ‘since a musician cannot otherwise move people, but he
be moved himself, so he must necessarily be able to induce in himself all
those affects which he would arouse in his auditors; he conveys his feel-
ings to them, and thus most readily moves them to sympathetic emo-
tions’. On the other hand, Busoni is equally correct to assert (in sexist
106  P. Stenner

language typical of his time) that ‘an artist, if he is to move his audience,
must never be moved himself—lest he lose, at that moment, his mastery
over the material’ (Langer 1978, p. 223). From this perspective, art is
degraded when reduced to mere emotional sympathy, and some sort of
‘psychical distance’ is fundamental to artistic experience. A blues singer
may appear to be expressing her emotions like so many symptoms, but
she is performing according to more-or-less well-honed forms of expres-
sion and has a control over her song that does not depend—directly at
least—upon her ability to enter a specific affective state during the per-
formance. And yet both propositions contain part of the truth: a blues
singer with no real-life experience lacks a vital ingredient for which no
technical prowess can fully compensate. Part of this ‘psychical distance’
arises from the fact that aesthetic experience, as described earlier, is an
‘expressive’ mode that is differentiated from the mode of ‘practical real-
ity’ that we adopt when we hear a car horn and get out of the road. But
there is more to it than this. Whilst it is true that Aesop must have had
access to a ‘this is not’ experience, his formulation of this into (presenta-
tional) symbolic form crystallizes the feeling into a concept that tran-
scends the experience of any concrete and particular subject, but without
losing the singularity of the event. By means of the artistic medium,
mere emotional self-expression is transformed into presentational sym-
bolisms with their own conventions and inventions. This is why Wagner
could state (also with some exaggeration, but in the opposite direction to
Bach), that what music expresses ‘is eternal, infinite and ideal: it does not
express the passion, love or longing of such-and-such an individual on
such-and-such an occasion, but passion, love or longing in itself ’ (Langer
1978, p. 222). Of course the passion-in-itself expressed by music is not
the passion-in-itself expressed by painting or by theatre or in a fable,
since each symbolic form has its distinct features, yet each ‘removes’, as
it were, the concrete subjectivity of the creator and makes it stand in the
form of a singular ‘asubjective’ creation. The fabulous dog is a vehicle
used to symbolize a ‘this is not’ experience as, or in the form of, an
‘image’. Such experience resists being put directly into the discursive
symbolism of words: it must take a condensed imagistic form before it
can be further abstracted into thought.
8. Langer acknowledges that mental imagery probably catalysed the evolu-
tionary development of speech and she states something very similar to
Whitehead’s position (as outlined above) in the following: ‘This recogni-
tion of images as representations of visible things is the basis on which
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    107

the whole public importance of symbols is built: their use for reference’
(45–46). In the following she describes the image as a symbol: ‘With its
liberation from perception the image becomes general; and as soon as it
can represent something else than its own original stimulus, it becomes
a symbol’ (46–54). This is very close to Whitehead’s original formulation
of symbolic reference. Given that she was a student of Whitehead’s, it
seems quite remarkable that Langer does not explicitly use his theory of
symbolism, but instead appears to have forgotten it. It is possible that his
ideas were criticized within the emerging disciplines of semiotics and
semiology for overextending the use of the word ‘symbol’ (as described
above, others preferred to use the word ‘sign’ as a generic and to specify
‘symbols’ as being high-level, representational signs) and it seems clear
that Langer followed this trend. Nevertheless she retained something like
Whitehead’s deep symbolism, and stated in a late essay that ‘what I did
not see, twenty years ago—was how conceptual meaning accrued to any
vocal products at all. I certainly never realized what part the private men-
tal image played in preparing the way for symbolic language—that the
whole mechanism of symbolization was probably worked out in the
visual system before its power could be transferred to the vocal-auditory
realm’ (p. 48). This idea of a deep symbolism proper to sense-perception
is, as discussed below, Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference between
‘presentational immediacy’ (as symbol) and ‘causal efficacy’ (as its
meaning).
9. This issue sheds light on Whitehead’s choice to refer to the process of
synthesis as symbolism and not merely sign use. Langer (1978, p. 29)
urges the importance of this distinction when she writes of ‘a profound
difference between using symbols and merely using signs. The use of
signs is the very first manifestation of mind. It arises early in biological
history as the famous “conditioned reflex”. … As soon as sensations
function as signs of conditions in the surrounding world, the animal
receiving them is moved to exploit or avoid those conditions’. Note that
here Langer’s distinction is between ‘sensations’ and ‘world’, and hence
she misses Whitehead’s point that the contrast is not between subjective
appearance and objective reality, but between two distinguishable modes
of perceptual experience. Whitehead is thus not suggesting that the data
from presentational immediacy (e.g. sensation) serve as a sign for condi-
tions in the external world. He is suggesting that they act as a symbol for
data experienced in the mode of causal efficacy. This satisfies what I call
his ‘deep empiricist’ definition of symbolism as occurring when certain
108  P. Stenner

components of an organism’s experience elicit feelings and usages with

respect to other components, all occurring ‘within experience’, as it were.
10. In his monumental work The Act of Creation (1964, p. 35), for example,
Koestler names this principle bisociation. He suggests that creativity
always entails ‘the perceiving of a situation or idea … in two self-consis-
tent but habitually incompatible frames of reference’. Bateson (1980,
p. 77) grasped something very similar in his definition of information as
‘a difference which makes a difference’ and in his methodological prin-
ciple that ‘Two descriptions are better than one’.
11. Mead (1932/1980), it should be noted, develops his own theory of sym-
bols—including his core concept of a ‘significant symbol’, and he works
with a distinction between sign and symbol that is comparable to that of
Peirce.
12. Shallow empiricism (Stenner 2008), discussed further in Chap. 4,
broadly corresponds to what we typically associate with the word empiri-
cism, namely, a philosophical doctrine holding that clear and distinct
sense experience is the origin of all knowledge. The concept of experi-
ence implied by shallow empiricism limits how we think of ‘experience’
to the observations of an objective spectator who perceives (ideally under
experimental conditions) and theorizes (using concepts and hypotheses
derived from data) an external nature. No other modes of experience are
recognized. In shallow empiricism we find a potent combination: the
evacuation of subjectivity from nature and its concentration into the figure of
the human knower. Shallow empiricism thus assumes a splitting between
a knower (who knows on the basis of sensory experiences disciplined by
rational logic) and a known (an objective and external terminus for such
experiences). For shallow empiricism, ‘the subject’ and ‘subjectivity’ are
terms that pertain to the knower (and not the known) and the ‘object’ is
that which is known (preferably ‘objectively’). The subject is thus associ-
ated with adult human beings undertaking difficult tasks of knowledge
(and, as a corollary, with ‘less than adult’ human beings who fall short of
the desired objectivity when undertaking such tasks because they are
unable to control their affectivity), whilst the object is associated with
the externality of brute material thinghood. Shallow empiricism thus
leaves us with a highly distorted and limited conception of subjectivity,
coupled with a rather partial and superficial account of nature. That is to
say, subjectivity is separated from objective nature, and nature is con-
strued as an objective externality with no subjective depths (the bifurca-
tion of nature).
   This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought    109

References
Barthes, R. (1967). Elements of semiology. London: Jonathan Cape.
Bateson, G. (1980). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. Glasgow: Fontana
paperbacks.
Carnap, R. (1935). The logical syntax of language. London: H.  Paul, trench,
Trubner & Co.
Cassirer, E. (1944). An essay on man: An introduction to a philosophy of human
culture. New Haven: Yale.
Cassirer, E. (1946/1974). The myth of the state. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans). London: The
Athlone Press.
James, W. (1912/2003: 7). Essays in radical empiricism. New York: Dover.
Jaspers, K. (1971). Philosophy of existence (R. F. Grabau, Trans.). Pennsylvania:
University of Pennsylvania press.
Jung, C. G. (1979). Man and his symbols. London: Jupiter Books.
Koestler, A. (1964). The act of creation. London: Hutchinson.
Langer, S. K. (1942/1978). Philosophy in a new key: A study in the symbolism of
reason, rite, and art (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mead, G. H. (1932/1980). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
Mead, G. H. (1934/2015). Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1998). In Peirce edition Project (Ed.), The essential peirce (Vol. 2).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rose, S. (2003). Lifelines: Life beyond the gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Russell, B. (1927). Philosophy. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Simmel, G. (1918/2015). The view of life. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Stenner, P. (2008). A.N. Whitehead and subjectivity. Subjectivity, 22(1), 90–109.
Turner, V. W. (1986). Dewey, Dilthey, and drama: An essay in the anthropology
of experience. In V. W. Turner & E. M. Bruner (Eds.), The anthropology of
experience. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1925/1971). The psychology of art. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Whitehead, A.  N. (1927/1985). Symbolism: Its meaning and effect. Virginia:
University of Virginia Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929/1985). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1938/1966). Modes of thought. New York: The Free Press.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 4
This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity
of Experience

Introduction
This chapter will use one of Magritte’s most famous paintings as a way of
shedding light onto the nature of experience. The aim is to introduce deep
empiricism as an onto-epistemology that avoids bifurcating the world all
too cleanly into subjective ‘minds’ and objective ‘bodies’. Deep empiri-
cism integrates the philosophies of William James and Alfred North
Whitehead for the purpose of articulating the psycho-social as a contin-
uum of emergent and ever-expanding relationships.
The Belgian artist René Magritte painted lots of versions of his famous
‘this is not a pipe’ picture, but the best known is the first version from
1926. This version is a realistic painting of a pipe under which Magritte
painted the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Image 4.1). Much has been
written about this painting, not least a little book called Ceci n’est pas une
pipe by the French social theorist Michel Foucault (1983), who was par-
ticularly interested in the history and politics involved in the relationship
between ‘words’ and ‘things’.

© The Author(s) 2017 111

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_4
112  P. Stenner

Image 4.1  Magritte’s famous painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe, also called The
treachery of images

F oucault on Magritte: The Seeable

and the Sayable
Foucault’s work is part of a well-established critical tradition of thought
which takes issue with what is sometimes called representational theory. In
simplified terms, this critical tradition rejects the idea that words are best
understood as simple representations of things. In painting the words
‘this is not a pipe’ underneath a picture of what is quite obviously an
image of a pipe, Magritte is doing something that is relevant to this criti-
cal tradition. He is, it seems, making a problem of the relationship
between the word ‘pipe’ and the pipe as a thing. He is challenging repre-
sentational thinking, or at least pointing to a zone in which it is undone,
and loses its power and meaning. He is, I suggest, drawing representa-
tional thought—which for a long time had dominated the painting tradi-
tion of the west—into a liminal zone where its conventional rules are
suspended and even reversed. In doing so, he wants to confront the
viewer with the ‘uh oh!’ phase of a ‘this is not’ experience.
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    113

Magritte says as much himself when discussing his practice of giving

his paintings unexpected and disorienting titles. The aim is to ‘keep any-
one from assigning my paintings to the familiar region that habitual
thought appeals to in order to escape perplexity’ (Magritte, cited in
Foucault 1983, p. 36). In short, Magritte aims to lure us out of familiar,
habitual thought and into a liminal zone of perplexity in which the rep-
resentational mode comes undone, and no longer applies. It is as if what
we habitually regard as reality were like one of those old-fashioned toy-­
ships-­in-a-bottle, and that Magritte wants to draw our attention to the
painstaking and perplexing process by which such a large and intricate
model ship could have entered through the small space of the bottle’s
opening and neck.
In fact this theme of not adopting a representational theory unites crit-
ical thinkers with various theoretical backgrounds. For example, it unites
those post-structuralists who follow the tradition of Foucault and
Deleuze, and those ordinary language philosophers who follow in the
tradition of Austin and Wittgenstein, and those existential phenomenol-
ogists who follow Heidegger and Merleu-Ponty, not to mention those
discourse and conversation analysts who follow Garfinkel and Sacks, and
those feminist theorists of performativity who follow Judith Butler and
Donna Haraway. All agree on a rejection of representational theory to the
extent that the theme of representation ignores the fact that the words of
language do things. Language, they insist, is performative; speech accom-
plishes acts; discourse constructs reality; and statements order the world.
Nigel Thrift gave the title Non-representational theory to his 2008 book,
and in that title we can surely hear the echo of Magritte’s famous paint-
ing. We hear the echo: this is not a representational theory.
Foucault’s argument about Magritte’s work centres on the difference
between text and image or what he also calls the sayable and the seeable
or the articulable and the visible. ‘This is not a pipe’ can thus mean that
this—the visible image of a pipe—is not the same as the sayable words ‘a
pipe’. Or, taken another way, it can mean that ‘this’—which is after all a
word and hence part of the sayable—is not the same as the visible pipe.
Although Foucault distinguishes the seeable from the sayable, his point is
that the two typically function together—like our ship in its bottle—to
form a construction that usually passes as brute reality. Foucault finds in
114  P. Stenner

Magritte a soul mate who shares his project of cracking open this sem-
blance of brute reality and showing it to be a construction, a perfor-
mance, a complex accomplishment that in fact lends order to the world
that it claims merely to ‘represent’.

An Unravelled Calligram

To illustrate this conjoint functioning or mutual inter-weaving of text

and image, Foucault invokes the idea of a calligram. A calligram is the
name for words that are arranged into some recognizable shape. The
words of a poem about a flower, for example, can be arranged into a pat-
tern that evokes the shape of a flower. In fact, in 1916 Guillaume
Apollinaire wrote a poem about smoking in which he arranged the words
into the shape of a pipe. It is easy to make such a calligram—albeit a
rough one—using Magritte’s title:

This
i
s
not
a pi PE

A calligram thus fuses the seeable and the sayable into a unity. In a
well-made calligram, the words reinforce the meaning of the image which
in turn reinforces the words, each mode lending its power to the other.
The difference between the two modes continues to exist, however,
because it is hard to read the words of the calligram when looking at its
shape or image, and hard to see its shape when reading the words. In this
respect the calligram is a little like one of those ambiguous figures beloved
of gestalt psychologists, which show up one moment as a vase, and the
next as a face. In this case, however, we are not dealing with a tension
between two different seeables, but with a seeable and a sayable. The
point, however, is that a calligram gives us an interesting illustration of
how text and image work together to enhance one another’s reality-­
constructing power.
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    115

Magritte’s painting is clearly not a calligram, but Foucault makes the

interesting point that it can be thought of as an unravelled calligram. In
making this suggestion, Foucault credits Magritte with the creation of an
artwork which deconstructs representational thought. Essentially,
Foucault is suggesting that representational thought is—to coin a new
term—calligramic. Obviously this is not to suggest in a literal fashion
that representational thought takes the form of a calligram. The point,
rather, is that, as in a calligram, image and text are both recognized as
separate (as when looking at the visible form makes it harder to read the
text, and vice versa) and yet also brought together in a union or assem-
blage that enhances both. Representational thought thus distinguishes
between the seeable and the sayable, only to bring them together so that
what is said affirms what is seen, and what is seen affirms what is said.

The Principle of Resemblance

The key to this double gesture of differentiation and unification is the

concept of resemblance. It is on the basis of resemblance that we can bet-
ter separate the seeable from the sayable. Consider, for example, an objec-
tion to Foucault’s distinction between the seeable and the sayable. The
problem with categorizing painted words into a set called ‘the sayable’
and painted forms like the pipe into a set called ‘the seeable’, is that writ-
ten words are no less seeable than the other forms that appear on a can-
vas. Of course we know that things would be different if the words were
spoken. Then they would appear in the medium of sound, or the h ­ earable.
But as writing they necessarily take a visible form. As language, however,
they could take either form, and we are aware that for this reason the
concrete form the words do actually take (seeable or hearable) is, for most
purposes, irrelevant. Language requires some sensory medium or other if
it is to show up for us, but it can also, as it were, free itself from any given
medium, and leap from one medium to another. Its domain is abstract
from any concrete material it happens to put to use.
The painted form of the pipe, by contrast, is more firmly grounded in
the visible domain. Consider, for example, that the visible shape of the
painted pipe must—if it is to evoke the concept of a pipe for the viewer
116  P. Stenner

of the painting—resemble what we know to be a pipe. This resemblance

might be minimal (as in Matisse’s highly abstract depiction of a snail by
use of cut out coloured card shapes), or it might be maximal (as in photo-­
realism). Also, the resemblance might be ambiguous. In a later work on
the same theme, for example, Magritte composed a painting that looked
a bit like a pipe and a bit like a penis. This ambiguity does not call into
question the concept of resemblance because it is obvious that to evoke
the ambiguity the painting needed to resemble a pipe and a penis. What
we call ‘representational’ art functions by resemblance. This simply means
that a painted image represents something if it—in some minimal fash-
ion—resembles it.
Although it is certainly a visible form, this principle of resemblance
does not apply to the written word ‘pipe’. The word pipe—whether in
written or spoken form—in no way resembles the visible or material
form of a pipe. The signifier, as linguists like to say, is arbitrary, and dif-
ferent languages can use different words for the same thing, depending
upon internal conventions (including differences from other words in the
lexicon). To use Peirce’s (1998) semiotic vocabulary, resemblance plays a
diminishing role as we move from iconic to indexical to symbolic sign
types.

1. An icon resembles what it stands for (maximum resemblance—like

the painted image of a pipe)

2. An index correlates in some physical way with it (residual resem-

blance—as a dark cloud correlates with rain or a weathervane points
out wind direction)

3. A symbolic sign, like the word ‘pipe’, emerges through pure conven-
tion (minimum resemblance—involving ‘difference’ from the numer-
ous other words in a language).
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    117

Of course in principle anything (even a picture of a pipe—as in a

hieroglyph) can be used as a symbol, if it is assigned that role by conven-
tion and taken up by symbol users. But in this case it ceases to function
purely iconically by way of resemblance and functions symbolically
instead. In this way, icons and indices can be disconnected from the
physical circumstances that constitute them and sucked-up, as it were,
into the more abstract realm of symbolic language, where they become
one more means with which to articulate something sayable.
Symmetrically, the words of language can be dragged back into the realm
of pure visible resemblance, as when Magritte paints shapes which resem-
ble words onto his canvas, inviting us to look at them as pure visible
forms. In this case, the claim is not that these words resemble a pipe, but
that these painted lines resemble words. As Magritte puts it in his own
words: ‘In painting, words are of the same cloth as images. Rather, one
sees images and words differently in a painting’ (cited in Foucault 1983,
p. 39).
It is the principle of resemblance that informs Foucault’s distinction
between the seeable and the sayable. Or rather, it is resemblance that
allows one to ‘speak across’ the difference between two ‘systems’ which
can otherwise ‘neither merge nor intersect’ (Foucault 1983, p.  32).
Foucault states—perhaps rather too emphatically—that Western paint-
ing from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries was ruled by two prin-
ciples. The first is the separation between plastic representation (the
seeable) and linguistic reference (the sayable). The second is the principle
that visible resemblance affirms a representational bond. This affirmation
means that whenever a painted figure resembles something, there is at
play a hidden assumption that ‘what you see is that’ (Foucault 1983,
p. 34).
For Foucault, twentieth-century artists had moved beyond both prin-
ciples. Paul Klee, in Foucault’s view, abolishes the first principle by mix-
ing figure and discourse so that painted boats, houses, persons and so on
‘are at the same time recognizable figures and elements of writing’
(Foucault 1983, p. 33). For Foucault, this means that in Klee’s paintings
there is no longer a separation between the two orders in which either
visible form is made subordinate to language, or vice versa. Another
major twentieth-century artist, Wassily Kandinsky, ruptured the second
118  P. Stenner

principle that resemblance must also affirm a ‘what you see is that’ state-
ment of representation. In Kandinsky’s art, lines and colours are affirmed
as ‘things’ in themselves and in this respect his paintings imply a ‘naked
affirmation clutching at no resemblance’ (p. 34). Both Klee and Kandinsky
thus break free of representational art. Magritte’s work is superficially
very different from that of both of these artists, since his painted forms
are usually very realistic and hence tightly wedded to resemblance. On a
deeper level, however, his work furthers this subversion of the theme of
resemblance that links the seeable and the sayable into a taken-for-granted
unity of representation. In Magritte’s work, words and images are set
against one another such that in place of the affirmation ‘what you see is
that’ we get the negation ‘this is not a that’.

Freeing Similitude from the Servitude of Resemblance

We can now return to the proposition that representational thought is

calligramic and that ‘this is not a pipe’ might be considered an unravelled
calligram. In a calligram, text and image work together as if bonded by
the attraction of the magnetic force of representation. For Foucault, that
force is power and a calligram is more than a pretty poem: it stands as an
image for a societal device of power or dispositif. Representational
thought, for Foucault, is more than a couple of principles that have
informed Western painting: it is a means of social order. The prison sys-
tem (see Foucault 1977), for example, is calligramic in that it mixes a
regime of the sayable (the new discourse of delinquency that emerged in
the nineteenth century) with a regime of the seeable (the control of visi-
bility through the architecture of the Panopticon, for instance). What
Foucault calls ‘resemblance’ is core to the maintenance of that order to
the extent that it allows a top-down hierarchization and classification of
things.
It is here that Foucault draws an important distinction between resem-
blance and similitude. Both are about physical similarity (which cannot
be denied), but similitude—unlike resemblance—does not imply a
‘model’ which acts as an original standard that lends order from the top
down to the ‘increasingly less faithful copies that can be struck from it’
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    119

(Foucault 1983, p. 44). In making use of visible similarities, resemblance,

in short, serves the rule of representation. Resemblance prescribes the
rule of representation to classify and lend order to the things it makes
subject to itself. Hence for Foucault, the order implicit in a calligram
implies the order of a representational regime. Magritte, from this per-
spective, is in the business of liberating similitude from the ‘as if ’ of
resemblance and hence from the rule of representation. Instead of using
the theme of representation to bond text and image into a calligramic
unity, Magritte sets up a situation in which they repel one another, break-
ing the unity into paradoxes. Magritte, we might say, cracks the calligram
open, or unravels it, exposing its tacit operations. In this way, multiple
similitudes are released from the bonds of resemblance. Free from the
representational rule of a model serving to standardize the copies, simili-
tude ‘develops in series that have neither beginning nor end, that can be
followed in one direction as easily as in another, that obey no hierarchy
but propagate themselves from small differences among small differences’
(Foucault 1983, p. 44). For Foucault, Magritte uses words to ‘burrow’
beneath the foundations of the old calligramic order and to ‘excavate it
with words’ until it caves in. The aim is nothing less than to ‘demolish the
fortress where similitude was held prisoner to the assertion of resem-
blance’ (p. 49).

Deep Empiricism
Although Foucault addresses art in his book on Magritte, he is fully aware
that a comparable form of representationalism obtains also in the fields of
philosophy and science. As will become apparent as we progress, in these
fields, representationalism does not take the form of the relationship between
a caption and an image, but an analogous relationship between the subject of
knowledge and consciousness, who speaks and represents, and the object ‘out
there’ whose fate it is to be represented. In contemporary psychology, neuro-
science and philosophy of mind, this version of subject/object or mind/body
representationalism has recently given rise to an alleged ‘explanatory gap’
between the material brain (e.g. activation of C-fibres) and the so-called qua-
lia of consciousness (e.g. the experience of pain on the part of an experiencer).
120  P. Stenner

Over the years, attempts to overcome the gap have oscillated between those
who advocate a purely reductionist materialism (they try to explain mind
purely in terms of the objective physical or bio-chemical operations of the
brain), and those who affirm that consciousness is more than a mere epiphe-
nomenon of brain states (see Levine 1983; Araújo 2014).
The remainder of this chapter will extend Foucault’s meditation on
Magritte to incorporate a range of components of experience that includes,
but goes beyond, the pair seeable/sayable. Although it is itself necessarily
a simplification, I will propose a four-fold spectrum of experience that
includes Power (the affective), Image (the seeable), Proposition (the con-
ceptual) and Enunciation (the sayable)—or PIPE. This extension takes
inspiration from the process philosophies of people like William James,
Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. Earlier versions of this argu-
ment were developed by Brown and Stenner (2009) and Stenner (2011).
Here, however, I develop those arguments in a specific direction. Namely,
the identification of this four-fold experiential spectrum will provide a
means of crossing the ‘explanatory gap’ between mind and matter, not in
fact by crossing it, but by showing that there never was such a gap.

 ind and Matter as a Useful but Distorting

M
Simplification

In what follows I begin by providing a summary sketch of the conceptual

framework that underpins the PIPE spectrum. This summary is rather
abstract, and some readers might prefer to move directly to my discussion
of PIPE and return to it afterwards. It starts with the consideration that
the mind/body distinction does not pertain to reality, but is an intellec-
tual abstraction (an idea) that helps us to simplify a considerably more
complex process. Actually what we call ‘mind’, when we simplify in this
way, is not some power of representation that transcends nature, but a
real process that exists and unfolds within nature. But when we affirm
mind as natural in this way, we must be consistent and make the sym-
metrical affirmation that nature is not just alive but also contains at least
the germs of mentality. This opens the question of how that germ devel-
ops and complexifies, giving rise, amongst human beings, to the kinds of
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    121

high-grade mentality that we routinely experience and take entirely for

granted. In other words, we can no longer entertain the materialist idea
that nature is purely an objective externality, to be controlled by subjects
who know its laws, nor the idealism whereby mind is conceived as some
transcendental principle of order or, to use a phrase from William James
(1912/2003, p. 23), some ‘trans-experiential agent of unification’.
In that region of nature we crudely call ‘mind’, creativity and self-­
generation are at maximum, and spatial extension is at a minimum, and
in that region we call ‘body’, creativity and self-generation are at a mini-
mum and spatial extension at a maximum. For this reason, it is easy and
convenient for all kinds of purposes to simplify them into a dualism, and
to neglect the complex continuities that exist between these extremes. It
is easy and convenient, for instance, to distinguish a thought about our
arm from our arm itself. It is easy, in other words, to adopt a ‘shallow
empiricism’ that allocates all subjectivity to a high-grade mind, and all
objectivity to low grade matter. This simplification gives us a world that
is, metaphorically speaking, black and white: the term ‘subject’ then
applies to minds (‘white’ and divested of spatial extension) and the term
‘object’ applies to bodies (‘black’ and divested of living subjectivity).
Drawing on conceptual resources from process philosophy, we can
sublate shallow empiricism in favour of a deep empiricism (see Stenner
2011). Deep empiricism does not do away with the useful distinction
between subject and object, but views them as (a) inherently relational (a
subject is that which experiences objects, an object is the product of a
process involving subjective experience), (b) inherently processual
(objects and subjects do not pre-exist experience but come into being
through the process of experience as nested in wider processes) and (c)
proper to a type of relational process that is found throughout nature,
and hence relevant to all the sciences (transdisciplinary). In short, if the
mind/body dualism of shallow empiricism gives us a black and white
picture, then the spectrum ‘power/image/proposition/enunciation’ of
deep empiricism gives us, metaphorically speaking, something more like
colour vision.1 Magritte’s pipe will serve as the prism through which I
distinguish the colours of the experiential spectrum. However, just as a
prism serves to artificially separate-out colours which are inevitably
blended in ordinary experience, so nothing like my experiential spectrum
122  P. Stenner

is likely to be encountered in ordinary experience, which is equally a

blended mixture.

Pure Experience

This shift to the deep empiricism of process thought, however, entails a

concept of experience that is radically expanded with respect to what psy-
chologists and social scientists typically understand as ‘experience’. This
expanded concept of experience has important sources in James’s notion
of pure experience (informing his radical empiricism) and Whitehead’s
notion of the actual occasion of experience, which developed James’s notion
(informing his speculative philosophy of organism). These influences will
be unpacked in more detail below. The concepts of pure experience (James)
and actual occasion of experience (Whitehead) extend far beyond the
usual limited use of the word ‘experience’ to describe conscious human
experience alone. First, conscious experience is not essential to experience
but a high-grade and rare modification of more fundamental experience:
it is the crown and not the base of experience. Second, experience is more
like a going through which patterns the world. For both James and
Whitehead, the universe is no longer conceived in terms of basic building
blocks of enduring matter (pure physical atoms), but as being composed
out of activity that is ultimately analysable only into interconnected and
concatenated streams of events (occurrences, happenings, occasions during
which something is ‘gone through’). An event construed as an ‘actual occa-
sion of experience’ is an occasion involving composition of some kind, or
the arrangement of ‘the many’ (all kinds of ‘data’) into a unity (for a rapid
summary of Whitehead’s philosophy in this respect, see Stenner 2008). The
experient is never an isolated individual but a relational occasion.

Experience as the Subjective Becoming of Objectivity

This is not a stupid matter of denying the existence of a material world

and construing it as the dream of each individual or of some omnipotent
creator. Rather, what we think of as the material world is, from this per-
spective, a composition which is neither simply objective nor subjective,
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    123

but always both, since ‘experience’ is conceived as a process of lending

form or pattern to its objects. The objective world, in turn, is part of a
process of composition involving the pair experience/expression and,
ultimately, is not just datum for experience, but also the expression—or
objectification—of experience. That process of composition involves
some degree (more or less) of novelty or creativity, and it lends a certain
form to the activities in which it participates. When that creativity is at a
maximum we speak of ‘mind’. More than any other animal, the environ-
ments of mindful human beings, for this reason, are not just externalities
that are passively received, but active creations of coordinated (and usu-
ally also conflicting) collectives of people in material settings.

 ccasions of Experience as Embedded in Flows

O
of Process: Rethinking Continuity and Discontinuity

Each actual occasion of experience, no matter how complex and creative,

and whether physical, organic, conscious or social, is constituted as the
event it is by virtue of the fact that it can form a process by way of con-
nection with comparable events that precede it (in its immediate past)
and follow it (in its immediate future). An actual occasion of experience
is thus a minimal unit of process (the actualization of an object in process
of becoming) which provides the ‘present’ for what is always a broader
manifold of past process giving rise to future process. In short, the basic
‘atomic’ units of process are events or actual occasions of experience, and
a large number of such ‘micro’ units (whether tightly organized into a
society2 or more loosely organized into a nexus) together compose the
various macroscopic entities that constitute ourselves, our bodies and our
worlds. Enduring entities or systems, whether viewed as minds or bodies,
are therefore processual compositions nested within broader processes,
and their recurrent patterns are attributable to the form taken (or given)
by each ‘atomic’ event whose form is in turn shaped by its contiguous and
contemporary society. The event or actual occasion thus supplies a dis-
continuous/atomic factor in any fact, whilst continuity and extension (in
time and space) is addressed in terms of the assemblage of many such
units into a broader and manifold unity of composition (stretching out
124  P. Stenner

in space and time). A rock, for example, appears stable and extended in
time and space but is in fact composed of a mass of billions of tiny recur-
rent and contemporary events. Any system is thus abstractly conceivable
as a form of process. We can address a form of process either from the
external perspective of an observer (in which case the form exists ‘objec-
tively’ as a factor selectively objectified in the experience of the observer),
or, in principle, from the internal perspective of the form itself (its ‘for-
mal’ existence, i.e. the totality of its own experience).

 ultiple Streams of Process Which Are Mutually

M
Presupposing

The sayable of enunciation, for example, is part of a stream of communica-

tive events |in which each event or operation is a composition involving an
utterance that is understood by an interpretant, taking a wider pool of
information about other events into account. This stream of communica-
tive events is a manifold that constitutes a socio-cultural system or form of
process, but it clearly presupposes the existence of a sentient and more or
less conscious organism. It is nested, we might say, within more basic pro-
cesses that take the form of an organized stream of psychological events,
some of which involve conscious experience, but each of which is no less a
manifold composition involving previous psychological experience mixed
with new sensory (and not just visual) and causal information. Any stream
of consciousness is thus nested within unconscious processes which them-
selves presuppose a biological infrastructure and the causal efficacy of so-
called physical processes. The turtles continue all the way down, since
physical processes are no less manifolds composed of streams and oceans
of events—in this case energetic events—involving some minimal degree
of composition (even atomic and sub-atomic ‘particles’ are  an arrange-
ment of many ‘data’ into a non-arbitrary unity with powers to affect and
be affected by other comparable arrangements or actual occasions). Any
act or event of human experience will, from this perspective, be a massively
complex composition that presupposes and involves each one of these
streams of distinct event types, since our experience is shaped by the lan-
guage we use, our perceptions, emotions and memories, and by the causal
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    125

efficacy of the organic and physical environments of the body we take to

be our own, and those which surround and impinge upon it. It is no exag-
geration to say that, in some minimal and highly selective form or other,
each of our experiences—as we move through our day—involves every
possible thing, but we are conscious of just that tiny fragment of the uni-
verse that is currently exciting the attention of those parts of us that are
composed by the ‘higher’ streams of process relevant to our immediate
practical concerns.

 he Emergent Self-Organization of Multiple Streams

T
of Process Construed as a ‘Parasitical Cascade’

In using the term ‘nested’ I mean that one stream or manifold of events
provides the environment necessary for the other, hence communicative
events normally require a psychic environment of conscious experience
which in turn requires a biological environment of organic events which
require an environment of physical processes. In fact the word ‘environ-
ment’, if taken as an external objectivity, is too passive, and it is better to
imagine a parasite/host relationship. The term parasite derives from the
Greek para (alongside) and sitos (food) and it designates an asymmetrical
relationship between parasite and host whereby the parasite sits alongside
the host, eating the food provided by the latter. The parasite presupposes
the host and, as it were, takes her for granted (Serres 1982). The notion
of parasitism gives us a means of bridging the differences in event-type
that define the different types of system I have been describing (Stenner
2005). The various streams of manifold events might then be imagined as
a parasitical cascade of communicative systems parasiting conscious sys-
tems parasiting organic systems parasiting physical systems. In calling
this a parasitical cascade I am emphasizing how each emergent system
presupposes the form of process from which it abstracts itself, or to which
it relates as a parasite to its host. Existence would then be a temporary
symbiotic composition of a rag-bag of parasites, each hanging from a host
which is in turn the parasite of the host above it, creating the effect of a
‘cascade’. The limitation of this metaphor, however, is that from another
perspective each emergent form of process is a formation that rises above
126  P. Stenner

the form it parasites, reaching greater heights of abstraction rather than

cascading ever lower. William James (1890/1950, pp.  288–289) pre-­
empts this idea in the Principles of Psychology:

The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data
chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty
below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet
simpler material, and so […]. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind
things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving
clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all
the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and
we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this.

Shallow Empiricism and the Bifurcation of Nature

A brief historical aside is required to grasp the distinction between the

deep empiricism and its shallow predecessor. It is important to note that
Whitehead traces an important root of the narrowly representational
mode of thinking described above to the natural philosophy of the seven-
teenth century when people like Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Locke
newly grasped the power of mathematics in understanding the physical
world. Inspired by potent discoveries of mathematical regularities within
the physical world, these thinkers came to believe that only mathemati-
cally measurable and demonstrable phenomena like speed, size and shape
can be considered truly real. ‘Qualitative’ experiential phenomena like
the sense of taste or colour (the ‘seeable’ above serves, for better or worse,
as a place holder for all forms of sense experience or ‘qualia’) were there-
fore described as ‘secondary’ qualities that, unlike quantifiable ‘primary’
properties, are not in fact real at all. Galileo (quoted in Manzotti 2006,
p. 10) put this quite clearly in the year 1623:

these tastes, smells, colors, etc., with regard to the object in which they
appear to reside, are nothing more than mere names, and exist only in the
sensitive body; insomuch that when the living creature is removed all these
qualities are carried off and annihilated; although we have imposed par-
ticular names upon them … and would happily persuade ourselves that
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    127

they truly and in fact exist. But I do not believe that there exists anything
in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, but size, shape,
quantity, and motion, swift or slow; and if ears, tongues, and noses were
removed, I am of the opinion that shape, quantity, and motion would
remain, but there would be an end of smells, tastes, and sounds, which,
abstractedly from the living creature, I take to be mere words.

Here, we see how Galileo slips from an epistemological point about

knowledge to an ontological point about existence or reality (Manzotti
2006). The epistemological point is that tastes, smells, colours and so
on—unlike shape, quantity and motion—cannot be successfully
described in terms of mathematical quantities and hence cannot form the
basis of a scientific knowledge defined in Galileo’s terms. On the con-
trary, these qualities are to be explained only by the quantities which
alone excite them. The ontological point, on the other hand, is that they
therefore do not exist, other than being ‘mere words’. The seeable is
assimilated to the sayable, and both are rejected as illusions with no real
existence. It is this latter assumption that has proved endlessly trouble-
some and that results in a repeated tendency to bifurcate the world into
‘subjects’ irreconcilable with ‘objects’. This slippage is subtle, and strictly
speaking Galileo affirms that the ‘living creature’—for whom the tastes
and other qualities do exist—is real, because were it not real its ears,
tongue and nose could not be ‘removed’. The qualities are only mere say-
able words when they are considered ‘abstractedly from the living crea-
ture’. In this sense Galileo clearly recognizes that if we do not remove the
living creature and its relations, then they are real. It should be clear how
this point relates to our parasitical cascade: the events of natural language
(mere words) clearly presuppose the existence of an organic creature
whose biological processes are capable of sense-perception and of sustain-
ing more complexly conceptual conscious processes.
The point here, therefore is not that Galileo is wrong and that colour,
taste and other ‘qualities’ do in fact have independent existence in material
objects considered in abstraction from living creatures (experience of
colour is indeed related to the encounter of an animal with an appropri-
ate visual system with light waves of a particular frequency). The point is
that Galileo inaugurates a vision of science based on what he describes as
128  P. Stenner

the annihilation of the living, experiencing creature, and of contingent

relational processes of all kinds. It is this that gives rise to what I have
called a ‘shallow empiricism’, in which the subjectivity which is the basis
of any experience is removed from nature. Ears, tongues and noses are to
be removed from nature if Galileo’s vision of nature is to appear and pros-
per as a core idea within the communication systems that compose the
human society that took shape in the seventeenth century and dominated
from then onwards. More subtly, then, Galileo assumes that the kind of
real reality (primary properties) that can be mathematically abstracted
from what we more broadly take to be reality, is something demonstrably
present ‘in’ an external body: a substance whose size, shape and speed can
be demonstrated. This involves a vision of nature as effectively a mecha-
nistic aggregate of independent material entities, and a vision of science
as an effort to isolate those entities, and describe their relations. Reality,
in sum, is something material and objective that can be ‘represented’
mathematically.
This implicit shallow empiricism acquired explicit prominence in the
‘empiricist’ philosophies of John Lock and, later, David Hume, which
set the scene for modern scientific empiricism. These philosophies pur-
sued theories of knowledge (epistemology) which presupposed that
knowledge must derive from experience, and—more importantly—that
the only source of experience comes from the data of the senses.
Knowledge is thus based entirely on the qualities (tastes, smells, colours,
etc.) whose ontological reality had been disqualified by Galileo. Real
reality is thus construed as a purely objective (but ultimately unknow-
able) externality of material mechanisms, and the ‘subject’ is construed
as a sort of spirit composed of unreal ghostly qualities. According to
shallow empiricism, everything can be grasped as a relation between the
high-grade conceptual mentality of a ‘knower’ and an already fully
formed material object or system external to that knower (a ‘known’).
This representational image cuts out and blocks from view the sense in
which knower and known emerge only in relational processes. It blocks
from view a ‘deep empiricism’ which holds that, first, these supposedly
material entities are themselves processes, and second, that the high-
grade knower must at every point emerge from more basic streams of
process, including modes of perception and feeling that go beyond the
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    129

sense-perception presupposed in the empiricism of Lock and Hume.

Shallow empiricism thus narrows Galileo’s ontological distinction
between subjective qualities and objective quantities to an epistemologi-
cal distinction between knower and known, and splits the two asunder.
It thus obscures the fact that they enter our knowledge only through a
complex spectrum of processes of experiencing that requires the very
living creature whose annihilation we have just witnessed at the birth of
modern science.3

 his Is Not a Pipe: A Parasitical Cascade

T
of Experience
Experience itself, taken at large, can grow by its edges. … Life is in the tran-
sitions as much as in the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to be there
more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-
line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry
autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. (James, 1912/2003: 45)

Life is indeed in the transitions between, on the side of, and at the edges
of, its forms of process, themselves relations. Returning now to Magritte’s
famous picture of a non-pipe it is possible to get a deep empiricist perspec-
tive on some of these transitions, including the three ‘edges’ that are nowa-
days so often presented as insoluble ‘explanatory gaps’. These include the
edges between physical matter and life, between organic life and con-
sciousness and between consciousness and symbolic communication.
These three edges take on a new complexion when viewed from the per-
spective of pure experience as actual occasions of experience. The three
edges correspond to three distinct ways in which Magritte’s pipe ‘is not a
pipe’. This leaves us with our four different ‘pipes’ at play in the artwork,
namely the pipes of power, image, proposition and enunciation. Naturally
great simplifications are involved here, not to mention a bit of poetic
licence, since I have selected words that are easy to remember because their
first letters together spell ‘pipe’. Nevertheless, together, when woven into a
process theory stressing activity or action, these at least provide a mne-
monic for something approaching the full spectrum of experience. This
130  P. Stenner

spectrum is designed to afford the basis of a ‘colour vision’ beyond the

black and white of a nature bifurcated into subject and object.

Power Distinguished from Image

We start simply with the obvious idea that this [image of a pipe] is not a
pipe. Let us mark this first way of ‘not’ being a pipe by naming a difference
between experience of a pipe with its full ‘powers’ and experience of a
simple depiction of a pipe, that is, for short, between ‘power’ and ‘image’.
Another way of putting this is to invoke the ‘formal/objective’ distinction
between the pipe in its formal completeness (see the section on deep sym-
bolism in Chap. 3), and the pipe as it is selectively objectified in the
experience of a seeing observer. Compared to experience with what we
sometimes call an ‘actual’ pipe, the mere image lacks certain powers to
affect us and to be affected by us. This is because the image is an abstrac-
tion involving just the visual dimension of the actual pipe (note that I am
using vision here because we are dealing with a painting, but the argu-
ment extends to all of the senses, their important differences notwith-
standing). We might say that we are confronted with a sense-object of
sight, but not with sense-objects of touch, or sound, of smell and so forth
that we might expect in other circumstances to be correlated with it. This
image is certainly ‘actual’ as an image, and thus has powers to affect us as
an image when we experience it. Furthermore, Magritte’s painting cer-
tainly exists as an object in an art gallery, and that painting can be touched
and even smelled, and it doubtless smells like a painting. But—interest-
ing though this may be—we somewhat miss the point of the painting if
we smell it and touch it. And more importantly, it cannot be touched,
smelled or tasted in the way that an actual pipe can. This is important,
because an actual pipe, after all, is something multi-sensorial that can be
smoked and that yields—when combined with tobacco, fire, mouth and
breath—its own distinctive smells and tastes and other sensuous effects.
The distinction between power and image is therefore certainly not abso-
lute, and the image is better thought of as an abstraction which allows
intensity of concentration on just one part of the full range of powers at
play with an actual pipe. This abstraction indicates that a transition has
occurred. In the process of abstraction to the pipe image, we might say,
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    131

all but the visual aspect is lost. But that image still has powers, albeit pow-
ers that are considerably focused and concentrated in comparison to the
actual pipe with all of its powers to affect us and be affected by us.

Image Distinguished from Proposition

The second way in which this is not a pipe is that this [proposition of a
pipe] is not a pipe in the sense that it is neither an image of a pipe nor a pipe
with full powers. Magritte’s painting provokes a second distinction
between experience with the image or sense-object of a pipe and with the
pipe as a concept or thought-object (or Whiteheadian pre-linguistic
proposition). Taken as a pure and given fact for visual experience, the
image Magritte provides is in fact a spatial array of coloured paint
arranged into shapes on a canvas. It is a complex sense-object of sight.
There is a dark shape with curved sides on a lighter background, for
example. If we were to describe what we actually see, with no embellish-
ment, we should merely describe this composition of shapes and colours.
An imaginary intelligent visitor from outer space with no previous con-
tact with pipes would not be in a position to recognize the image as a
pipe, since to do so requires memory of previous relevant experience.
They would not lack the image, but they would lack the concept. To
reverse a common English expression, it is not that we will ‘believe it
when we see it’, but that we will see it when we believe it. When we, who
do know what a pipe is, look up at this coloured shape and say, or think,
‘there is a pipe!’ we are adding something important to these visual data.
This addition is an act of symbolic reference in which we—albeit uncon-
sciously—make a kind of ‘leap of faith’ in which we take the pure image
(which is a sense-object) as if it were a pipe (which is a thought-object).
Somewhere, in other words, a transition has occurred from object of
sense to object of thought. Even if we do not utter this as a linguistic
proposition, our perception of that painting as an image of a pipe is a
proposition in Whitehead’s technical sense of that term. We are lured to
make a leap from image as sense-object to concept as thought-object
without even being conscious of thinking something like ‘I propose that
these shapes are a pipe’. Nevertheless, this leap of faith presupposes the
concept of a pipe.
132  P. Stenner

Proposition Distinguished from Enunciation

The third way in which this is not a pipe is that this [the enunciation ‘pipe’]
is not a pipe in the sense that it is neither the proposition of a pipe, an image
of a pipe, nor a pipe with full powers. As Foucault (1983) pointed out,
Magritte skilfully lures us to encounter the fact that the discursive enun-
ciation ‘this is not a pipe’ is itself clearly not a pipe with full powers, nor
an image, nor a proposition. To what does the word ‘this’ refer, for exam-
ple? Does it necessarily refer to the painted image of a pipe (this [image]
is not a pipe)? Or to the concept (this [proposition] is not a pipe)? It is
equally possible that it refers to the very word ‘this’ (‘ceci’) which forms
part of the sentence ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ which Magritte has taken
such great care to paint onto his canvas so that it, as it were, resembles
writing. As noted earlier, Magritte himself draws attention to this by say-
ing that in ‘a painting, words are of the same cloth as images’. Magritte
here draws our attention to the level of linguistic communication. For
sure words like ‘this’ and ‘pipe’ are not pipes, since we cannot smoke
words. But equally there has been a transition from the pipe as
­thought-­object to the pipe as communicative utterance. Magritte alerts
us to the fact that the ‘pipe’ as experienced with its full powers of actuality
is not the sense-object ‘(‘pipe’)’, is not the thought-object ‘(‘(‘pipe’)’)’,
and is not the word ‘(‘(‘(‘pipe’)’)’)’. This fourth pipe—a discursive pipe—
leads us into the territory of the discursive construction of reality.

Abstraction and Error

If we observe these four pipes with their three ‘edges’ and liminal transi-
tions, we notice that each one is more abstract than its predecessor and, as
it were, presupposes the level of process at play in the life process of its
predecessor. We can think of this, as outlined above, as a parasitical cas-
cade: without the actual material pipe, no image, without the image of the
pipe, no concept, without the concept of a pipe, no word. This is not to
say, of course, that the more abstract levels do not feed back and re-­enter
experience involving the other levels, because they certainly do. Words,
albeit indirectly, do articulate thoughts which articulate sense-­perceptions
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    133

which articulate causal powers, and once a higher level of process has
emerged, the level below has forever lost its innocence.
It is also notable that with each leap in abstraction the possibility of
error is increased. When in doubt, we prefer to collapse the cascade down
to the next more concrete level of experience. The word pipe has, as it
were, the most risky relationship to an actual pipe. If someone merely
tells us they have a pipe, this might easily be a mistake or even a lie, since
we are dealing merely with hearsay. Words, after all, allow us to commu-
nicate about things in the absence of those things. For this reason, we
encourage our children to think carefully about what they are told, and
not merely to accept it at face value. The saying ‘I will believe it when I
see it’ likewise expresses the relative security that comes with the sense
experience of vision in contrast to conceptual experience or thought. This
is because with perceptual experience of an object we enjoy real-time
acquaintance with that object (we watch the smoke of the pipe as it rises
up in the here and now), whilst conceptual knowledge provides knowl-
edge ‘about’ objects which need not be immediately co-present. In engag-
ing through ‘thought’ with objects which are not now/here, we risk that
they may turn out to be no/where. But we can also, to complete the cas-
cade, doubt the evidence of our eyes and, like doubting Thomas con-
fronted with the risen Christ, insist that ‘to see is to believe but to touch
is to know’. In this way we stress the relative security of contact experi-
ence over that provided by the perception at a distance provided by
vision. Our world is expanded with each layer in the parasitical cascade,
but the cost of its expansion is the risk of getting it wrong.

 hinking the Parasitical Cascade with William

T
James
James’s filter metaphor in which—as cited previously—‘the highest and
most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the
faculty next beneath’, suggests that a given manifold or stream of experi-
ence can be re-entered by a new manifold. This makes possible a selective
appropriation of the data at play, such that only certain relevant material
134  P. Stenner

is ‘sifted’ and taken up into the new or higher manifold. This sifting pro-
cess is associated with the emergence of a ‘higher’ grade of process with
unities that are distinct from the ‘lower’ grade which is, as it were, paras-
ited. As James (1890/1950, p. 162) puts it, we say ‘a higher state is not a
lot of lower states; it is itself. When, however, a lot of lower states have
come together, or when certain brain-conditions occur together which, if
they occurred separately, would produce a lot of lower states, we have not
for a moment pretended that a higher state may not emerge. In fact, it
does emerge under those conditions’.
James’s filter metaphor thus illuminates the abstraction at play in the
liminal transitions that occur at the edge of forms of process, since a filter
‘abstracts’ a usable selection from a rejected body of material that is sifted
away. In this way we get a sense of how more abstract processes might
emerge from more concrete processes. James (1890/1950, pp. 288–289),
in short, gives us a way of thinking about human discourse and conscious
experience as the experience of a final percipient in a long parasitical/
symbiotic chain that ultimately leads (down or perhaps up) to the ‘mov-
ing clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world’.
The human being, viewed in this way, is quite literally a complex mosaic
of disparate forms of more or less ordered process. What we call ‘con-
sciousness’ and ‘materiality’, from this perspective, are not separate sub-
stances but are better thought of as extremely contrasted, yet mutually
presupposing, grades of order or forms of process. As James (1890/1950,
p. 19) put it: ‘This would be the “evolution” of the psychical from the
bosom of the physical’.
To avoid misunderstanding it is crucial to clarify that James’s psychol-
ogy was grounded in a type of proto-process philosophy that he called
radical empiricism. From this perspective all reality is experiential, in
much the way I described earlier. This basically means that ‘everything
real must be experience-able somewhere, and every kind of thing experi-
enced must somewhere be real’ (James 1912/2003, p. 81). At the core of
radical empiricism is the notion of ‘pure experience’ which James
(1912/2003) unfolds in two ground-breaking essays from 1904 (Does
consciousness exist? and A world of pure experience). Like the actual occa-
sion concept for Whitehead, pure experience functions for James as an
alternative to the Cartesian starting point of two substances (thought and
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    135

extension). As James (1912/2003, p. 3) puts it, ‘if we start with the sup-
position that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a
stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff “pure
experience”, then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of
relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may
enter’.
Pure experience is ‘plain, unqualified actuality […] a simple that’
(James 1912/2003, p. 12). As the ‘instant field of the present’ (p. 12), a
pure experience cannot be true or false or subjective or objective since it
just is what it is, a simple that. It is essentially actual. In his phenomenol-
ogy, Husserl (1974) would call this ‘pre-predicative’ experience. This way
of thinking is also very similar to that of Wilhelm Dilthey (1989, p. 265)
who also insisted that we should not begin with the idea that facts of
consciousness are ‘representations’ of a world independent of our experi-
ences, but that ‘whatever exists for me—things, persons, axioms, con-
cepts, feelings—is apprehended in the psychological nexus of the totality
of my consciousness where it primordially and originally exists’. The basis
of this is erlebnis, which is an unreflected immediate experience of what
is given, and only secondarily is erlebnis ‘reflected’ and interpreted as
something physical to be sorted into a category of ‘outer experience’ as
distinct from ‘inner experience’ (see Throop 2002). In James’s terminol-
ogy, erlebnis would be ‘a simple that’ of pure experience, and the distinc-
tion between inner and outer would require a portion of this pure
experience to enter, or re-enter, into some relation with another portion
of experience. This notion of re-entering is thus crucial, and it can be
thought of as a ‘reflecting’ on, or a turning around upon, a pure experi-
ence that is itself purely actual. A given experience is experienced by way
of another experience, adding complexity as feeling feels feeling.

 ower Conceived as ‘Energetics’ and Image Conceived

P
as ‘Percepts’

The important thing to grasp here is that mind and body, consciousness and
brain-state, are not conceived by James as an original duality. The experienc-
ing-consciousness cannot be separated from the experienced-­content by a
136  P. Stenner

process of subtraction. Rather the experience of an outer world or of an

inner world is something that is added to a pure experience, and both are to
be construed as experiences. If we are able to separate consciousness from
content, then this is because we are able to have new and particular kinds of
experiences which build upon and ‘re-enter’ pure experience. There is there-
fore no inner ‘duplicity’ to experience. Rather, there is a creative process
through which something new enters the world.
Experience, to use one of James’s examples, does not have a dual com-
position in the way that paint does, being composed of the pigment that
supplies the content of its colour, and the medium or menstruum which
supplies the form in which the pigment is suspended. If we adopted this
metaphor, we could separate the two by letting the pigment settle and
pouring off the oil or size that serves as its menstruum. The pigment, in
this metaphor, would be the real-world content that is experienced and
the menstruum would be the percipient for whom that content is received
as a conscious report. James’s radical insight is that, on the contrary, any
separation of consciousness from content, mentality from matter, is
achieved only by way of an additive process. This happens if the same
portion of pure experience is taken up as an element in two different
processes involving two different sets of associated experiences with two
different functions. Taken up as part of one society or ‘system’ of experi-
ences (one form of process), it plays the part of a state of mind of a knower
(a thought, for instance), and taken up by another it functions as an
objective content (a thing, for instance). This is essentially what James
means when he insists that consciousness is a function rather than an
entity: ‘subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, real-
ized only when the [pure] experience is “taken”, i.e., talked-of, twice,
considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new
retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now
forms the fresh content’ (James 1912/2003, p. 12).
This ‘functionalism’ is no different in principle from the idea that the
same pot of paint can take on a different function depending upon its
setting within different contexts or streams of activity. In a paint shop,
the pot is a commodity for sale and will be arranged in a desirable way by
the shop-keeper for this function. Spread on canvas, on the other hand,
it becomes a feature within a painting and enacts an aesthetic function.
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    137

In a comparable way, the reader might, for example, experience a pipe,

perhaps a pipe resting on an ash-tray on a table. If we treat this scene in a
common-sense way as in fact being what it seems (a real pipe on a real
table in a real room), we can nevertheless recognize that our reader is at
the same time perceiving those real things. For the philosophically
inclined, this raises the conundrum of how this single reality can be at the
same time in the ‘outer space’ of a real room and in the ‘inner space’ of a
person’s mind. For James, this puzzle is easily solved since it is no differ-
ent from the puzzle of how ‘one identical point can be on two lines’
(p. 7), and this is simple, since it can be, so long as it is situated at the
point of intersection between the two lines. In exactly this way, a ‘pure
experience’ of the pipe can exist at the point of intersection between two
processes, each of which is a society of occasions of experience involving
different associates. The pure experience could perfectly well belong to
both lines of process, and so be counted twice, despite being the same
undivided portion of experience.
In one of these lines of process, for example, the pipe is part of a set of
associates that compose our reader’s field of consciousness which is in
turn part of her personal biography. The that of the pure experience, as
and when it occurs, is the last or latest member of a long train of past
feelings, thoughts, volitions, sensations, expectations and movements
that lead up to the present moment, and the first member of the series of
inner activities that will extend from it into the future. It might be, for
example, the very first occasion on which our reader has decided to smoke
a pipe. It might disappear from view but remain as an exciting prospect
as our reader goes off in search of a match, yielding other perceptions and
emotions. In this line of process the pure experience is appropriated as
part of a series of mental operations that compose a personal biography.
In another line of process, by contrast, the identical ‘that’ of the undi-
vided pure experience of the pipe can be taken as the culmination in the
present of a prior history of physical operations. Before it was ‘here’ and
‘now’ as a pure ‘that’, the material pipe was taken out of a cupboard where
it had sat for several months after having been received as a gift from a
grandfather who had purchased it in a shop after it had been manufac-
tured in a workshop before which point it was part of a tree and so on.
Symmetrically, the pure ‘that’ (for this physical pipe) is also the first term
138  P. Stenner

in a new series of physical adventures the pipe will go through in the

future, including being loaded with tobacco, placed between eager lips
and lit with a flame, and extending forward until the time at which it is
broken after being sat on, consigned to a litter bin and crushed into frag-
ments in a recycling centre. In this line of process the pure experience is
appropriated as part of a series of physical operations.
The lines of mental and of physical operations form ‘curiously incom-
patible groups’ (James 1912/2003, p.  7). The pipe-as-thing may have
existed in practically identical form for many years but as our reader’s
field of consciousness it may exist now for the very first time. As a thing,
it takes energy and time to destroy it, but as percept it is gone just as soon
as you close your eyes. As a thing it can be used to burn tobacco, but no
fire could burn the subjective state, and any size of imaginary flame will
fail to burn actual tobacco. Each group appears to have its own finite
province of meaning. For James, to repeat, mind and matter thus do not
form an original distinction, but are categories into which pure e­ xperiences
may be sorted by way of new experiences that form distinguishable pro-
cesses. The ‘general chaos’ of our manifold experiences tends in this way
to get ‘sifted’ and ordered. It is in this context that James introduces his
distinction between ‘energetics’ and ‘percepts’. There are some pipes for
example, that will always support the burning of tobacco and the tasting
of its smoke. These experiences which, to use James’s terminology, ‘wear
their natures energetically’ come inevitably to be contrasted with those
which ‘fail to manifest them in the “energetic” way’ (James 1912/2003,
p. 17), despite otherwise having identical natures. Mental pipes cannot
be smoked just as mental flames do not set light to tobacco. The experi-
ences that lack the energetic dimension are sifted into the category men-
tal and contrasted with their physical associates. If the stream of
experiences that succeed from the pipe serve to repeat the pipe or else are
in some way ‘energetically’ related to it, they will form in experience a
nexus of associates of ‘stably existing physical things’ (p. 68). But if the
stream of successors differs from the pipe, it may be grouped and taken as
a mental rather than a physical fact: as my passing percept of a pipe, for
instance.
In this way, James implies a basic energetic form of shared connectivity
by which physical things mutually affect and are affected by one another.
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    139

The pipe as a physical thing, in this sense, forms in experience a connec-

tive group with other such physical things, such as tobacco to put in it,
fire to light it with and so forth. This idea of the pipe as energetically
related to comparable physical ‘associates’ is contrasted with the pipe
abstracted as a percept. As a mental percept, the pipe is related to a differ-
ent society of ‘associates’: it is associated with a manifold of comparable
percepts, other images, sensations, feelings and perceptions for instance,
such as the taste of tobacco and the smell of smoke. James thus evokes an
internally consistent society of energetic connectivity, and an internally
consistent society of perceptual connectivity, but there is some disconti-
nuity between these types.
The distinction between matter/body and mind is therefore secondary
to pure experience, and emerges out of pure experience. When ‘reflected’
in this way, a simple that of pure experience becomes something which is
there to be acted upon in the course of a future experience. It is thus not just
a pure actuality but a potential for a future experience which might, as it
were, put it to use or qualify it in various ways. Hence if pure experience
is a pure actuality, then it is an actuality pregnant with what James calls
virtual possibilities. It is ‘a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’
ready to be all sorts of whats’ (p. 49). Or again, ‘the flux of it no sooner
comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts
become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows
as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and con-
junctions’ (p. 49). The pipe in the pure experience was, virtually speak-
ing, both objective and subjective in that it is available to be taken up and
used in either way by new sets of experience which presuppose it. Mind
and matter, as virtuality actualized in different forms of process, are thus
achievements that are the effect of a kind of retrospective doubling or re-­
entry of pure experience by another experience or set of experiences.

Percepts Contrasted with Concepts

We have discussed James’s distinction between a group of energetic asso-

ciates and a comparable but distinct perceptual manifold and linked this
to our prior notions of power and image. James finesses this distinction
140  P. Stenner

with other relevant distinctions that allow us to discern other more com-
plex gradations. He distinguishes, for example, percepts from concepts.
Concepts are groupings of non-perceptual associates that are thus distinct
both from percepts and from energetics. In the PIPE mnemonic they cor-
respond to propositions.
Conceptual societies of associated experiences are non-perceptual
because they concern the world merely thought-of and not directly seen,
heard or otherwise felt. For James, where percepts are continuous and
meaningless (a perception being just what it immediately is), concepts are
discrete, each meaning just what it means (James 1911, pp.  48–49).
There is thus a perceptual grade of order which takes the form of a flux of
sensation into which data from all of our senses enter in a ‘big booming
buzzing confusion’, and there is a conceptual order composed of associ-
ates of discrete concepts, ‘just as real as percepts’ (James 1912/2003,
p. 101), but more abstract. Concepts thus include such non-perceptual
experiences as memories and fancies (imagination).
For James (1911, p. 107) percepts and concepts ‘are made of the same
kind of stuff, and melt into each other when we handle them together’.
James (1912/2003, p. 31) stresses the earlier distinction between percepts
and energetics by contrasting a painted hook with a hook which holds up
an actual picture: ‘In a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to hang a
painted chain by, a painted cable will hold a painted ship’. He uses the
same idea to stress the common ground between sensory percept and
concept: ‘Conception is not like a painted hook, on which no real chain
can be hung; for we hang concepts upon percepts, and percepts upon
concepts interchangeable and indefinitely’ (p.  107). A conception, for
example, is considered true if it leads to a sense-presentation, but the
perception itself is not so much considered true or false, as ‘real’ (it ‘is’ or
it ‘is not’).
This interplay of concept and percept is at the core of James’s under-
standing of pragmatism. His pragmatic rule is that ‘the meaning of a
concept may always be found, if not in some sensible particular which it
directly designates, then in some particular difference in the course of
human experience which its being true will make’ (p. 60). Concepts are
thus tested by way of the percepts of sense-presentations. In this way, the
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    141

tenet of radical empiricism (that the truth of our mental operations is an

affair within experience) is not violated because truth is never a matter of
experience ‘representing’ something that exists beyond experience. In no
case, writes James, ‘need truth consist in a relation between our experi-
ences and something archetypal or trans-experiential’ (p. 107). There is
no fancying of a pipe, and no memory of a pipe without some relation to
the perception of a pipe (even if that pipe happens to be momentarily
lost). The pipe as concept, to summarize, presupposes the pipe as percept,
but, unlike a percept, a concept forms knowledge about an object—and
that object may be merely a possible object.
Concepts can thus be taken as a line of process that also intersects with
the lines formed by energetics and percepts. The point of their intersec-
tion is, equally, a pure experience. In fact, however, the relation is not
completely interchangeable since for James we ‘wrap’ our percepts in
ideas, implying that perceptual experience is in some sense prior and less
abstract. Conceptual societies of occasions presuppose and act upon per-
ceptual societies just as percepts presuppose and act upon energetic
­occasions. Nevertheless, for a creature capable of conceptual thought, the
relation can become interchangeable. Our fancying of a pipe (concept),
for instance, might terminate in an encounter with the image of a pipe
(percept) that might in turn terminate in a coenesthetic (multi-sensorial)
experience of smoking. In this way, James writes about the knowing of a
percept by an idea. It is, once again, a question of one experience—a
conceptual experience—appropriating and working with the expression
of another, in this case a perceptual experience. The concept selects from
a perceptual harvest, creating by abstraction a new economy of connec-
tivity parasitical upon it, and yet generative of a mutually reinforcing
symbiosis.

Concepts Contrasted with Discourse

James regularly implies, but to my knowledge does not develop, a third

distinction between discourse and conception. The suggestion is that lan-
guage based communication forms its own distinct line of process which
142  P. Stenner

not only presupposes, but can also distract us from concepts, percepts
and energetics. It is on this basis, for example, that James chastises those
who are so enamoured with words that they mistake verbal descriptions
for concepts. In addressing one critic, for instance, he says ‘all I can catch
in their talk is the substitution of what is true of certain words for what is
true of what they signify. They stay with words,—not returning to the
stream of life whence all the meaning of them came, and which is always
ready to reabsorb them’ (James 1912/2003, p.  55). James also advises
would-be radical empiricists to ‘take it [experience] at its face value …
just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it,
involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order to
neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again seem
rationally possible’ (p. 26). We should feel before we talk, and talk can
sometimes dull our senses and anaesthetize us from our feelings: we can
talk about war without getting hurt, for instance. Of course, again, there
is a mutual interconnection between language and thought: words, for
James (1911, p.  26), ‘drive us’ to invent concepts, but also each ‘new
book verbalizes some new concept’. Discourse is thus both related to
concept formation, but also distinct from it. We might say that discursive
communication exploits conceptual mentality, and converts it into a new
medium which can be externalized and shared. In this way discourse
parasites a conceptual line of process, from which it abstracts a new econ-
omy of communicative connectivity.
Energetics, percepts, concepts and discourse—as ‘curiously incompat-
ible groups’ (James 1912/2003, p.  7)—are thus candidates for distin-
guishable grades of experience (forming lines of process) in James’s
thought. Each grade involves a manifold of experiential associates, but
each nevertheless shares a common energetic heritage as ‘pure experi-
ence’. We can thus see each grade of experience as a piece in a larger
mosaic of experience, yielding the immanent unity of a plural universe.
James’s mosaic metaphor, however, is rather flat and two-dimensional. In
deepening radical empiricism, I am suggesting that we attend also to the
‘evolutionary’ and transversal aspects that James hints at and that
Whitehead develops in more detail.
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    143

 hinking the Parasitical Cascade

T
with Whitehead
As noted above, the ‘actual entity’ or ‘actual occasion of experience’ is the
equivalent of ‘pure experience’ in Whitehead’s thought. For Whitehead
(1926/1985, p.  187), the different ‘grades’ of experience noted above
would be sets composed of cumulatively more complex actual occasions,
each building upon and containing (through re-entry) what is given by
other events such that the ‘fundamental principle is that whatever merges
into actuality, implants its aspects in every individual event’. The actual
experiences of us talking apes are forever modified by our powers of lan-
guage use, for example, but our speaking presupposes layers of experience
that can never be put into words.
I suggest that Whitehead’s concepts of causal efficacy and presenta-
tional immediacy are directly comparable to James’s energetics and per-
cepts, and that Whitehead thinks what James calls concepts in terms of a
mode of symbolic reference which exploits precisely the difference between
the energetics of causal efficacy and the percepts of presentational imme-
diacy. Since these notions are dealt with in more detail in Chap. 3, I will
merely sketch them here. In a striking passage of Symbolism: Its Meaning
and Effect, Whitehead (1927/1985, pp. 16–17) describes the word ‘expe-
rience’ as ‘one of the most deceitful in philosophy’ and proceeds to anal-
yse it into three modes, ‘each contributing its share of components to our
individual rise into one concrete moment of human experience’. Of the
three, causal efficacy and presentational immediacy are both modes of
perception and symbolic reference is a mode of ‘conceptual analysis’.
Presentational immediacy refers to sense-perception. It is the appear-
ance of the outside world objectified by way of the senses as a constitutive
aspect of our experience. It is mediated by qualities like colour, sound,
taste and odour implicated in a system of spatial relatedness (spatial
extension). This system of spatial extension has an impartial feel: it ‘pres-
ents’ to us the immediacy of an external world. This is so whether what is
immediately presented be delusional or not: an image of a pipe in a mir-
ror, for example, still involves a set of spatially related colours and shapes,
144  P. Stenner

as might a drug induced hallucination. Presentational immediacy is thus

characterized by an effect of externality and spatiality, along with a cer-
tain barrenness implied by the phrase ‘mere appearance’.
For Whitehead, perception via presentational immediacy always pre-
supposes a more basic or primary mode of perception which he calls
causal efficacy. There are clear links here with James, who occasionally
uses the phrase ‘causal efficacy’ interchangeably with ‘energetics’ (James
1912/2003, p. 77 and p. 85). When he does so he explicitly challenges
what I have called the ‘shallow empiricist’ assumption (enshrined in the
philosophy of Locke and Hume) that presentational immediacy is the
only mode of perception, and hence there can be no direct perceptual
experience of causal efficacy. For Hume, for instance, sense of causality is
a secondary phenomenon derived from conceptual thought, but James
(1912/2003, p. 77) directly challenges the assumption that causality is an
‘illusory projection outwards of phenomena of our own consciousness’.
Part of the problem here is the tendency to conflate experience with con-
scious experience (ignoring the fact that the latter is a phase of experience
which emerges only through complex processes of re-entry). For
Whitehead (1927/1985, p. 50), causal efficacy is not just a real mode of
perception but the dominating and aboriginal experience of lower organ-
isms whose experience does not reach the phase of consciousness. Causal
efficacy is ‘the hand of the settled past in the formation of the present’.
Unlike presentational immediacy which gives a ‘show’ of the present,
causal efficacy is thus heavy with a sense of derivation from the past and
its relevance for the future. It arises from a vaguely sensed ‘beyond’ that
shapes us, whilst presentational immediacy projects the clarity of an
externality that arises from within.
Even if we take the high-grade conscious experience of a human being
as an example, we can discern both modes of perception. Looking at this
book in front of you now, the most obvious features of your experience
arise through your senses (the book ‘shows’ itself in front of you as a see-
able image), and as you turn the pages, so the image changes in real time.
But there is an important part of your experience that does not enter
through your senses. Namely, your experience ‘now’ is also determined by
the experience you had roughly a quarter of a second ago. In fact, this
patterned product of a prior experience provides the bulk of the ‘data’ felt
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    145

in the course of the next, now actualizing, occasion of experience,

although it is modified by new data from the senses. The two perceptual
sources of experience in this case are thus the causal efficacy of the imme-
diately prior state of mind, and the modifications wrought on the new
state by way of experience from bodily functionings associated with the
sensory perceptions of presentational immediacy. In other words, what
enters our new experience without taking the sensory route is precisely
our state of experience from the immediate past. This past experience is
‘felt’ by the new experience which re-enters it as it disappears.
Also, the data from the senses play a double role. If we look at a pipe,
we see the pipe (an array of colours and shapes exhibiting the contempo-
rary world as an external special scheme) but we see it with our eyes (our
bodily organs imposing their past characters onto the present experi-
ence). The same applies to our other senses: we smell ‘the smoke’ with our
nose and taste it with our palate. This shows us that the data from our
senses are provided through the causal efficacy of the senses. Causal effi-
cacy is essentially a reformulation of Spinoza’s concept of power as capac-
ity to affect and be affected or, to use Locke’s definition, as a twofold
relation: ‘viz. as able to make, or able to receive, any change: the one may
be called “active”, and the other “passive”’ (Whitehead 1929/1985,
p. 57). For Whitehead (1929/1985, p. 91), ‘the problem of perception
and the problem of power are one and the same’.
Abstracted as two modes of pure perception, neither the powers of
causal efficacy nor the percepts of presentational immediacy admit of
error. Conformation of the present to the past ‘just is’ that feeling, and
the vision of a patch of shaped colour in a spatial array ‘just is’ that vision,
irrespective of whether it might refer to a ‘physical’ pipe, a painting of
one, or a drug induced hallucination. Error becomes possible only when
the two modes are brought together in the unity of a contrast. What
Whitehead calls ‘symbolic reference’ involves those occasions (restricted
to higher organisms) in which components of presentational immediacy
(a shape here, a colour there) are taken as symbols for the components of
causal efficacy (an energetic force affecting and being affected by me). As
was discussed in Chap. 3, this is the most fundamental form of symbol-
ism, defined as the act of taking something (the symbol) for something
else (the meaning). The sense data is ‘taken for’ a causally efficacious
146  P. Stenner

entity or relation. We risk no error if we look at Magritte’s painting and

report that we see a roundish patch of brown elongated on one side and
so on. But we can be wrong if we correlate this with an energetic object
and say we have seen ‘a pipe’. In the latter case we take the risk of symbol-
ism, since we take the coloured shapes as symbols for other elements in
our experience, and adjust our actions or plans accordingly.
Often this creative ‘joining up’ achieved by symbolic reference is
unproblematic and highly advantageous (we can see things remotely, and
then use them intimately), but these advantages arise at the price of
potential error. Imagine that the painting were so realistic that we were
tempted, after making the leap of symbolic reference, to reach out and
pick up the pipe from the painting. We would be disappointed as our
hand met the flat canvas. We would find ourselves having a ‘this is not’
experience, much like the birds who pecked at the grapes painted by the
great Zeuxis.

Conclusion
Building upon Foucault’s analysis of Magritte’s painting, and with the
help of the process thought of William James and A. N. Whitehead, we
have described multiple ways in which ‘this’ is not a pipe. These ways
shed light on four distinguishable modes of experience, which together
gives us an ever more complex spectrum that allow us to avoid a simplis-
tic bifurcation between subjective mind and objective matter. The dis-
cursive pipe is not the propositional pipe or any of the others. The
propositional pipe is not the pipe image. And the pipe image lacks the
causal powers of the energetic pipe. Each mode of experience is part of
a real unfolding process, and each re-enters, appropriates and builds
upon experiences from the prior modes. The pipe constructed in lan-
guage, for example, is part of the multiple streams of discursive com-
munication that—in the ongoing dialectic of speaking and
listening—compose our social systems. The pipe of power is no less part
of a flow of real activity itself divisible into a moment of being affected
(experience) and a moment of affecting other things (expression). Each
occasion of human experience can thus be seen to be composed of a
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    147

gathered multitude of temporalities expressible as at least four dimen-

sions, intersecting in any given moment.
In the course of normal, daily experience, of course, this complex
diversity is more or less smoothly unified. Metaphorically speaking, it
takes the internally coherent form of a calligram where word reinforces
concept reinforces percept reinforces causal efficacy. In painting Ceci n’est
pas une pipe, Magritte draws our attention to those moments when that
calligramic unity is cracked open, and the buzzing multiplicity that is
usually concealed, is revealed to us. Magritte’s painting—gimmicky
though it may sometimes appear—captures this moment of disintegra-
tion, holding it still in a painterly apprehension that allows us to feel and
reflect upon our uncanny nature. These are the ‘uh oh!’ moments that
impel us to turn around upon our experience, and to ask afresh for its
meaning. Thanks to these moments we can no longer remain what we
have only just understood ourselves to be. We are once again on our way.

Notes
1. A similar rhetorical device is used for almost opposite purposes in the bril-
liant book Psychology in black and white, by Salvatore (2015). Salvatore
argues for a psychology in black and white because the theory-driven psy-
chology he proposes should help us to step back from experience and
grasp what is essential about it. From my perspective, one can only step
back from experience in the form of another experience, one step removed.
Common ground between Salvatore’s approach and my own can be found
in the concept of liminality (see Salvatore and Venuleo 2017).
2. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the terms ‘society’ and ‘nexus’ take on distinct
technical meanings. The macroscopic entities that compose our ordinary
worlds (mountains, rocks, rabbits, trees, computers, etc.) are assemblages
of very many actual occasions, and so Whitehead would refer to something
like a rock as a society of occasions (see Stenner 2008; Halewood 2011).
3. It is important to note an important aspect of the bifurcation of nature
that was contributed by Isaac Newton. Through introducing the modern
concepts of space and place, it could be said that Newton doubled the
separation of mind from matter with a splitting of experience from spati-
ality. Newton’s contribution is decisive here since his concepts, despite
148  P. Stenner

their evident questionability, entered as presuppositions into the authori-

tative discourse and practice of natural science. In the Scholium to the first
definitions in his Principia, Newton (1687/1999) defines space and place
(as well as time and motion) in a highly abstract manner designed specifi-
cally to remove the prejudices that he considers to inform ordinary ‘vul-
gar’ understandings of space and place. The vulgar, he suggests, conceive
space, place and time only by way of the relation they bear to sensible
objects: the space between my chair and the wall, for instance, or the time
it takes for the second hand of a watch to circle the dial. To the vulgar,
therefore, space and time are thinkable only in terms of objects external to
them that can be experienced. To counter this prejudice, Newton draws a
distinction between the true, mathematical conception of space and time
and the apparent, vulgar conception. He calls the former ‘absolute’ space
and time, and the latter ‘relative’. Hence absolute time (‘duration’) flows
only from its own nature and completely without regard to anything
external to it (it is universal). Likewise, absolute space exists in complete
independence from anything external to it. It is the expression only of its
own nature, it cannot be affected by anything, and it can have no relation
to experience. Completely real and absolute space is thus unchanging and
immovable and is never to be found in the actual world. My chair, by
contrast, can move, and so can the floorboards it stands on. Not only this,
but the foundations which support my floorboards are ultimately move-
able as is the soil and rock beneath them. The concept of place follows
from these abstractions, since all things take place in space and time. They
are placed in time as part of a succession and in space as part of an ordered
situation. But Newton finds it absurd that the primary places of things
should be movable, and so he calls them absolute places. Absolute space
and time are in this way abstracted from relative space and time, and these
abstractions are then treated as if they had, not only an independent real-
ity, but the (absolute) independent reality necessary to understand the
quantitative relations between all dependent places and objects. The sen-
sible objects that populate the universe can thenceforth be newly defined
as those material bodies to which Newtonian mechanics applies. They are
purely material ‘stuff’ located in absolute time and space. Any qualities
they might be perceived to have that exceed this application can be dis-
carded as ‘secondary’ in nature. The representations by which we know
material reality are thus not themselves real.
   This Is Not … a Pipe: On the Complexity of Experience    149

References
Araújo, A. (2014). William James and Jakob von Uexküll: Pragmatism, plural-
ism and the outline of a philosophy of organism. Cognitio-Estudos – Revista
Electrônica de Filosofia/ Philosophy Electronic Journal, São Paulo, 11(2),
146–156.
Brown, S., & Stenner, P. (2009). Psychology without foundations: History, philoso-
phy and psychosocial theory. London: Sage.
Dilthey, W. (1883/1989). Introduction to the human sciences. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan,
Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1983). This is not a pipe. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Galilei, G. (1623/1960). The Assayer (Il Saggiatore), in The controversy of the com-
ets of 1618 (S. Drake, Trans.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Halewood, M. (2011). A.N.  Whitehead and social theory: Tracing a culture of
thought. London: Anthem Press.
Husserl, E. (1974). Experience and judgment. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
James, W. (1890/1950). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Dover.
James, W. (1911). Some problems of philosophy. London: Longmans Green and
Co.
James, W. (1912/2003). Essays in radical empiricism. New York: Dover.
Levine, J.  (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap. Pacific
Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 354–361.
Manzotti, R. (2006). Consciousness and existence as a process. Mind & Matter,
4(1), 7–43.
Newton, I. (1687/1999). The principia: Mathematical principles of natural phi-
losophy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1998). In Peirce edition Project (Ed.), The essential peirce (Vol. 2).
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Salvatore, S. (2015). Psychology in black and white: The project of a theory-driven
science. England: Information Age Publishing.
Salvatore, S., & Venuleo, C. (2017). Liminal transitions in a semiotic key: The
mutual in-feeding between present and past. Theory and Psychology, 27(2),
215–230.
Serres, M. (1982). The parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
150  P. Stenner

Stenner, P. (2005). An outline of an autopoietic systems approach to emotion.

Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 12(4), 8–22.
Stenner, P. (2008). A.N. Whitehead and subjectivity. Subjectivity, 22(1), 90–109.
Stenner, P. (2011). James and Whitehead: Assemblage and systematization of a
deeply empiricist mosaic philosophy. European Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy, 3(1), 101–130. http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. London:
Routledge.
Throop, C.  J. (2002). Experience, coherence and culture: The significance of
Dilthey’s ‘Descriptive Psychology’ for the anthropology of consciousness.
Anthropology of Consciousness, 13(1), 2–26.
Whitehead, A. N. (1926/1985). Science and the Modern World. London: Free
Association Books.
Whitehead, A.  N. (1927/1985). Symbolism: Its meaning and effect. Virginia:
University of Virginia Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929/1985). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.
 5
This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage
Between Multiple Worlds

Introduction
In the light of concepts introduced so far in this book (fabulation, devised
and spontaneous experiences of liminality, deep symbolism, etc.), this chap-
ter examines Alfred Schutz’s thought-provoking concept of ‘shock experi-
ences’. Schutz distinguishes a number of ‘worlds’, including the worlds of
dream, play, theatre, painting, humour and religion, from the world of
‘everyday life’. He considers the transition from ‘everyday life’ to each of
these other worlds to be a shock of sorts. A key problem with Schutz’s notion
of shock experiences is that the transitions he considers are hardly shocking
at all, and more shocking is the fact that he neglects genuine experiences of
shock. In light of this distinction, the proposal is raised that Schutz’s work
can be usefully supplemented by liminality theory. Through the lens of lim-
inality we can view Schutz’s ‘worlds’ as liminal spheres that are typically
mediated by real liminal technologies and techniques. This allows us to
understand culture as a dynamic mixture between the devised or staged
liminal experiences typical of these worlds and spontaneous liminal experi-
ences including actual shocks. The centrality, in this respect, of religious
experiences of the sacred is explored by way of van Gennep’s notion of the
‘pivoting of the sacred’. Viewed in this light, Schutz’s worlds of play, theatre,

© The Author(s) 2017 151

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_5
152  P. Stenner

painting, religion and so on show up as curious technologically mediated

worlds-within-worlds whose emergence and qualities are traceable to the
fact of their liminal status as worlds-between-worlds. Religious ritual—
which creates a world-within-­and-between-worlds—can be thought of as a
fecund matrix from which other liminal technologies, like theatre and
painting, individuated. Schutz (1945, p.  550) is quite correct when he
writes that: ‘It needs a special motivation, such as the upshooting of a
“strange” experience not subsumable under the stock of knowledge at hand
or inconsistent with it to make us revise our former beliefs’.

Schutz’s Shocks
The creature capable of fabulation, and of collectively devising its own
life-world, no longer lives in one world alone. To grasp this fact, the phe-
nomenological process thinker Alfred Schutz wrote of multiple worlds of
experience. In doing so he was directly engaging with the process thought
of William James, who wrote of multiple orders of realities each with its
own style of existence, and of Henri Bergson, who wrote of multiple
‘planes’ of experience, each characterized by a specific ‘tension’ of con-
sciousness (the plane of action with its tension tight, the plane of dream
with its loosened tension, etc.). Schutz’s concept of multiple worlds was
first inspired by James’s psychology. James (1890/1950, p. 293) described
the world of ‘idols of the tribe’, of mythology, of science and of much
more besides as ‘sub-universes’, each of which appears to us—at least
whilst we are engaging with it—to be ‘real after its own fashion’. Rather
than using James’s terminology of ‘sub-universes’ each with their ‘sense of
reality’, Schutz prefers to refer to theatre, dream, religion and so forth as
‘finite provinces of meaning’ upon each of which we may ‘bestow the
accent of reality’ (p. 554). James, wrote Schutz (1945, p. 533), had inten-
tionally restricted ‘his inquiry to the psychological aspect of the problem’,
leaving it to Schutz to address the psychosocial implications. In address-
ing these, Schutz begins by presenting one of these ‘finite provinces of
meaning’ as primary in the sense that it sets the standard ‘sense of reality’
that is ‘paramount over against the many other sub-universes of reality’
(p. 549). This province he calls the world of everyday life. Since we rou-
tinely take this world to be the natural reality, he argues, we are prepared
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    153

to abandon this attitude only when confronted with ‘a specific shock

which compels us to break through the limits of this “finite” province of
meaning and to shift the accent of reality to another one’ (p. 552). Schutz
goes on to articulate his notion of shock experiences as follows:

There are as many innumerable kinds of different shock experiences as there

are different finite provinces of meaning upon which I may bestow the accent
of reality. Some instances are: the shock of falling asleep as the leap into the
world of dreams; the inner transformation we endure if the curtain in the
theatre rises as the transition to the world of the stage play; the radical change
in our attitude if, before a painting, we permit our visual field to be limited by
what is within the frame as the passage into the pictorial world; our quandary
relaxing into laughter if, in listening to a joke, we are for a short time ready to
accept the fictitious world of the jest as a reality in relation to which the world
of our daily life takes on the character of foolishness; the child’s turning toward
his toy as the transition into the play-world; and so on. But also the religious
experiences in all of their varieties—for instance, Kierkegaard’s experience of
the ‘instant’ as the leap into the religious sphere—is such a shock as well as the
decision of the scientist to replace all passionate participation in the affairs of
‘this world’ by a disinterested contemplative attitude. (Schutz 1945, p. 553)

As noted, it is against the backdrop of a passage from the world of daily

life that the worlds associated with Schutz’s various shock experiences
‘show up’. The world of daily life is the ordinary everyday world of the

Painng

Play

Religion
Humour

Daily life
Dream
World of common sense
Theatre

Fig. 5.1  The form of Schutz’s distinction between daily life and several other ‘worlds’
154  P. Stenner

natural attitude. As Schutz (1945, p. 533) puts it in rather sexist termi-

nology, the world which the ‘wide-awake, grown-up man [sic] who acts
in it and upon it amidst his fellow-men [sic] experiences with the natural
attitude as a reality’. We can crudely depict Schutz’s distinction1 as
follows:

The World of Daily Life

Schutz’s concept of everyday life was inspired by the phenomenology of

Husserl and the process thinking of James, Mead and Whitehead.
Although taken as such, the world of daily life is not in fact brute reality
‘out there’ but reality as it shows up from the perspective of those who
take the ‘natural attitude’. Different realities are possible, not simply as a
function of encountering different external things in different ways, but
as a function of modifications to the natural attitude. The world of every-
day life is shot-through, as it were, with interpreted experience and with
the forms of meaningful practice enabled by this symbolic interpretation.
It may seem simple and real, but its simplicity is ‘calligramic’ (see Chap.
4): like a ship in a bottle, it is hard to imagine the painstaking fabulation
and co-construction by which such an intricate construction could have
entered the bottle through such a small opening. Before returning to
‘daily life’ it is first necessary to briefly unpack the meaning of ‘world’.2
Schutz’s notion of ‘world’ applies to human beings, but it radicalizes
von Uexküll’s (1926) biological notion of Umwelt.3 It has in turn
­influenced contemporary systems theorists who insist that the environ-
ment of each system is necessarily a construction whereby that system
distinguishes itself from what is not itself. Uexküll recognized that the
worlds perceived by different animals (their Umwelten) are different
because each type of organism has its distinct way of affecting and being
affected by events. Having evolved in different surroundings, the recep-
tors and effectors of a fly are different to those of a sea urchin, and in each
case they combine very differently into a Functionskries (functional circle)
which mediates the organism’s activity.
The Umwelt concept introduces a certain contingency into the concept
of ‘world’ that applies to all animals, but for human beings this contin-
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    155

gency is radically expanded due to the existence of the symbolic capacities

discussed in Chap. 3. To put it simply, in providing a third link between
receptors and effectors, a symbolic system transforms the entire human
life-world. Compared to other animals, we humans do not merely live in
a broader reality4 but, importantly, ‘in a new dimension of reality’ (Cassirer
1944, p. 24). We saw in Chap. 3 that Whitehead (1927/1985, p. 73) also
placed a symbolic system at the core of human existence, referring to our
‘vast system of inherited symbolism’ as the basis on which our ‘social sys-
tem is kept together’. Whitehead expresses this new ‘dimension’ of reality
when he describes the action of human beings as ‘symbolically condi-
tioned action’. The dimension of experience afforded by symbolism is
‘what the actual world is for us’ (Whitehead 1927/1985, p. 18). As dis-
cussed in Chap. 4 using the PIPE mnemonic, our powers of activity are
extended not just by the images provided by sense receptors but by the
hypothetical propositions engendered by symbolic reference, and by the
mediation of language. Our world is thus not just the world within
immediate reach of our senses, our hands and our mouths, but also the
possible world of the past (that was previously within reach), of the future
(within attainable reach), of the purely imagined, and of the ‘hearsay’
afforded by language.5 Importantly, it is also the world created by the
various social systems of coordinated practical activity—each a complex
flow of symbolic communication with associated material infrastructure
and deep-seated dynamics of power (legal systems, economic systems,
education systems, industrial systems, political systems, family systems,
welfare systems, etc.)—that compose our human life-worlds.
Returning now to the specific world that Schutz calls everyday life, it
is crucial to recognize that the natural attitude of daily life is a thoroughly
social and historical product that is also by necessity an ongoing collec-
tive creation. It is based upon common sense and it is ‘from the outset an
intersubjective world’. On this basis, Thomas Luckmann, who was one of
Schutz’s students, famously described daily life as a socially constructed
reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966/1981). Schutz thus insists that the
world of daily life ‘existed long before our birth’ and has long been ‘inter-
preted by others’ (Schutz 1945, p. 533). Our interpretations and typifica-
tions are ‘based upon a stock of previous experiences’, adapted to current
needs.
156  P. Stenner

This social dimension is crucial since the natural attitude at play in

daily life is fundamentally about coordinating ‘work’. Schutz (p.  549)
even refers to it occasionally as ‘the world of working’, but he gives a quite
specific theoretical meaning to the word ‘work’, which is worth quickly
unpacking. Technically, work is overt as distinct from covert perfor-
mance. To grasp what Schutz means by overt performance it is necessary
to briefly trace a series of distinctions that begin with his equivalent to
James’s ‘pure experience’ (see Chap. 4), namely: ‘actual experiences of
spontaneity’ (Schutz 1945, p.  534). Spontaneity can then be distin-
guished from conduct, conduct from action, action from performance
and performance from work. These can be called forms of spontaneity
since each is a particular modification of spontaneous actuality.

Spontaneous Actuality Distinguished from Conduct  First, spontaneity as

such is equivalent to pure experience in that it is a pure ‘that’ of actuality.
In itself, as a pure ‘actual experience’, there is no distinction between a
covert, subjective ‘inside’ and an overt, objective ‘outside’. As we saw with
James in Chap. 4, any pure actuality, however, has the potential to be re-­
entered or experienced by another experience (‘reflected’). Spontaneous
experience (which remains essentially actual) can thus be distinguished
from what Schutz calls conduct. Conduct is spontaneous experience that
has become meaningful because it has been ‘reflected’. As reflected, the
pure actuality is selectively taken up as an object for another experience.
Reflected experience thus institutes a distinction between subject and
object of experience. This distinction returns at each subsequent level of
distinction. Schutz thus distinguishes between conduct that is overt (any
meaningful public ‘doing’) and covert (thought would be an example of
a doing which is private).

Conduct Distinguished from Action  Next, conduct itself may be re-entered

by an experience capable of devising some sort of intention. This intro-
duces a distinction between conduct that is automatic or free of intent,
and conduct that is devised in advance. Schutz gives the name ‘action’ to
all that falls on the latter side of the distinction (preconceived projects).
Within the former, non-intentional side he includes ‘so-called automatic
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    157

activities of inner or outer life—habitual, traditional, affectual’ (Schutz

1945, p. 536).

Action Distinguished from Performance  Next, action in turn admits of a

distinction between actions where there is a supervening intent to realize
the project in actuality, and actions where this is lacking. Schutz distin-
guishes the former case—in which a mere forethought becomes an aim
and a mere project becomes a purpose—by using the term ‘performance’
(a performance being an action with a supervening intent of realization).
Performance, like conduct and action may be covert or overt. Overt
actions are always also performances, but covert actions may remain as
phantasms or daydreams which lack any intent of realization (i.e. they are
not performances).

Performance Distinguished from Work  Finally we get to work. Schutz con-

cept of work is based on distinguishing covert performances (such as acts
of thinking aiming at realization—solving a mathematical puzzle, for
instance) from overt performances (where the actions ‘gear into’ the outer
world by bodily movements). It should now be clear why work is overt as
distinct from covert performance. Schutz’s (1945, p. 537) technical defi-
nition of working is thus ‘action in the outer world, based upon a project
and characterized by the intention to bring about the projected state of
affairs by bodily movements’.

As noted, this detour into work was necessary because for Schutz
working is central to the natural attitude of daily life. The world of work
is held together by the pragmatic motive of collectively realizing plans.
From the perspective of this attitude the world shows up as ‘something
that we have to modify by our actions or that modifies our actions’
(Schutz, p. 534). For this reason, the world of daily life shows up to us
as full of clearly defined objects that resist or permit our actions upon
them: as a causally efficacious scene that must be worked and bent to
our designs. The ideal conscious state is therefore that of a wide-awake
self, alive in the hear-and-now to the objects and people relevant to its
158  P. Stenner

tasks. It is easy to detect a certain masculine tenor in his descriptions of

daily life:

It is the world of physical things, including my body; it is the realm of my

locomotions and bodily operations; it offers resistances to overcome which
requires effort; it places tasks before me, permits me to carry through my
plans, and enables me to succeed or to fail in my attempt to attain my
purposes. By my working acts I gear into the outer world; I change it, and
these changes, although provoked by my working, can be experienced and
tested both by myself and others, as occurrences within this world inde-
pendently of my working acts in which they originated. I share this world
and its objects with others; with others, I have ends and means in common;
I work with them in manifold social acts and relationships, checking the
others and checked by them. (Schutz 1945, p. 549)

Schutz doubtless exaggerates in order to secure the point that daily life
is more like a ‘field of domination’ than an object for our contemplation.
For the natural attitude ‘the world is not and never has been a mere aggre-
gate of colored spots, incoherent noises, centers of warmth and cold’
(p. 533). In fact, Schutz suggests that it is part of the natural attitude not
to question this impression of the external reality of the world within our
practical reach. Those taking the natural attitude put ‘in brackets’ any
doubt they may have that the ‘world and its objects might be otherwise
than it appears’ (p. 551) (he calls this bracketing the epoché of the natural
attitude). As daily practice becomes habitual, the world it presupposes
becomes self-evident as common sense, but this common-sensicality is an
achievement that must not itself be taken for granted. The calligram can
crack open, and can transform.
Schutz’s analysis, in short, is designed to show us that in fact the natu-
ral attitude informing the world of daily life is a complex and delicate
bio-psycho-social composition and that ‘the world’ admits of being com-
posed, and is in actual fact composed, in numerous different ways. The
‘tension’ that characterizes the wide-awake subjectivity of daily life, for
instance, need not be so tight. The epoché of suspended doubt need not
apply in this specific way. The sociality of ‘checking’ common ends and
means (which affords mutual coordination of tasks through role-taking)
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    159

might take other forms. The shared ‘standard’ time-perspective enabling

this social coordination may manifest in less than standard ways. At each
level in the progression from conduct to action to performance to work,
alternate paths are possible which do not lead to a world of intentional
projects of realization. Variations within and amongst each of these ingre-
dients (tension, epoché, sociality, time-perspective, form of spontaneity)
inform the composition of worlds rather different to ‘daily life’.

 hock Experiences as Modifications of the Natural

S
Attitude

Schutz’s analysis of multiple worlds is designed to show us the profound

contingency at play in what we call our ‘worlds’: as a result of the hidden
complexity at play in them, they could be, and somewhere are, different.
At least since Berger and Luckmann (1966), it has become well under-
stood that the world of daily life is not a singular world. As they insisted,
what is real to a Tibetan monk might not be real to an America business-
woman, and what is real to the latter might not be real to an American
househusband. Also, the daily life of a given individual is likely to change
as they move through their life course. The daily life of a schoolgirl is not
that of a university student or a factory worker or a retired grandmother.
But the multiple worlds in Schutz’s quotation have little to do with mul-
tiple worlds of daily life in different times and places. It is one thing to
distinguish amongst different worlds of daily life, and another to distin-
guish these multiple worlds of daily life from worlds that are not ‘daily
life’. Having dealt briefly with daily life, I must now deal with the ‘out-
side’ of the distinction drawn in Fig. 5.1 above: the multiple ‘finite prov-
inces of meaning’ that Schutz also calls ‘worlds’.
After examining Schutz’s account, I will suggest that these worlds are
the ‘this is not’ worlds that are the home territory of liminal experience
and fabulation. Once we realize that there are multiple worlds of daily
life, we come to recognize that this brings with it the problem of how to
pass from one of these worlds to another. This question of passage takes
on particular importance when we recognize, with Schutz, the complex
psychosocial integration that is presupposed in enactments of daily life.
160  P. Stenner

In daily life, forms of subjective experience are tightly woven into forms
of material practice and social communication in ways that become
taken-for-granted as common sense, and integrated into our habitus.
There is, we might say, a structural coupling of a particular personal sub-
jectivity and a particular social practice or set of practices. This means
that any passage from world to world is likely to require the ‘undoing’ or
‘de-coupling’ of the forms of process that constitute subjectivity from
those that constitute social practices. Although the situation is complex,
I propose that these occasions of passage involve and conjure a particular
kind of ‘world’ distinct from the ‘daily life’ that is, by definition, under-
going a process of transformation. These are the worlds in which the ship
comes out of the bottle, and the symbolism whose operations are largely
hidden in daily life becomes directly apparent. It is only when the ship
comes out of the bottle that it can become something different. It is only
through becoming different that we realize that perhaps we never were
the ship we thought we were.
Furthermore, if we supplement Schutz’s approach with concepts
related to liminality, this invites attention to the actual liminal affective
media and technologies (‘devices’) of painting, theatre, comedy and so
on, that tend to be neglected in his phenomenology. Although a detailed
study is not possible here, these ‘technologies’ have a deep relationship
with the ritual practices traditionally involved in the transformation of
subjectivity at play during passage between worlds. This enables us to see
that the ‘finite provinces of meaning’ that Schutz assembles on the other
side of the line from daily life, together constitute the symbolic core of
what is called human culture. Cultural activity is not just a stock of sym-
bols, or a way of asserting superiority over the uninitiated, or an archi-
pelago of disconnected phantasmical worlds, but the site of an incessant
and necessary weaving of the psychological (and yet not individual)
dimension of human subjectivity with the social dimension of coordi-
nated collective practice,  and hence a weaving of ideals into mundane
matters of fact.
We have seen that the pragmatic natural attitude adopted in the world
of daily life serves for Schutz as a kind of standard from which the other
‘worlds’ that he discusses, vary, differ or deviate. It is the ‘archetype of our
experience of reality’, whilst the others are considered as modifications.
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    161

As Schutz (1945, p. 552) puts it, it is only when we ‘break through the
limits’ of the world of everyday life that we can ‘shift the accent of reality
to another one’. Such a breaching of limits, he maintains, is experienced
as a ‘shock’. The shock shows us that the standard-time world of working
daily life is, in fact, not the only ‘finite province of meaning’, and that, far
from being natural, it is something of a fabulation. The finite nature of
these worlds means, for Schutz, that there are no transformation formu-
lae that might be used for ‘passing’ from one to another. He thus con-
cludes, with Kierkegaard, that passage between these finite worlds of
meaning requires the performance of a ‘leap’, and hence the subjective
experience of shock.
Schutz notes that it would be interesting to try a systematic grouping
of these finite worlds whose constitutive principle is that they depart
from the common-sense experience of daily life. Such a typology, he sug-
gests, would start by analysing ‘those factors of the world of daily life
from which the accent of reality has been withdrawn because they do not
stand any longer within the focus of our attentional interest in life’
(Schutz 1945, p.  554). This phenomenological vantage point would
allow us to recognize similarities within what is otherwise a heteroge-
neous collection of ‘worlds’, none of which is entirely reducible to another.

Common Features of the Shock Experiences

What, then, do dreams, theatre, painting, comedy, play and religion

share in common? How does this differentiate them from the world of
daily life? The following is an abstract summary of Schutz’s (1945, p. 554)
conclusions about the common ground of these ‘worlds’ in which ‘the
accent of reality has been withdrawn’:

1. Each is a finite province of meaning with its own cognitive style

through which it receives a specific ‘accent’ of reality. The cognitive
style is what lends unity and internal coherence to each of the experi-
ences grouped within the province. Each experience is thus part of the
same form of process. The cognitive style of each is distinct from that
of daily life.
162  P. Stenner

2. There is a consistency of meaning within each province which makes

for an internal compatibility amongst the experiential events which
form that province (call it Q). But what is compatible in province Q
will not be compatible with the meaning at play in a different prov-
ince (call it P). In fact, seen from province P the experiences of Q are
not just incompatible and inconsistent but fictitious (a religious expe-
rience is compatible with other religious experiences, but incompati-
ble with those of daily life, for instance). As William James (1889/2005,
p. 62) argued, ‘any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto
believed and posited as absolute reality. … If I merely dream of a horse
with wings, my horse interferes with nothing else and has not to be
contradicted’.
3. The above feature (a shared form of process amongst the associated
experiences) is what makes the provinces ‘finite’ and this implies the
impossibility of transformation formulae for passing from one prov-
ince to the other. Since an experience from one province is incompat-
ible with those of another, any passage must entail that shock of a
Kierkegaardian leap.
4. This leap is at the same time a modification in ‘the tension of our con-
sciousness’. The ordinary tasks of daily life require a certain ‘tension’ of
our consciousness: we must stay attuned to standard inter-objective
space and standard intersubjective time, and to an intent to realize
projects, for instance. In turning away from this working rhythm of
daily life, these limits are removed, and our conscious experience
admits of different ‘tensions’ with different time relations, experiences
of self, modes of sociality and so forth (our ‘self ’ might dissolve in the
enjoyment of a colour for its pure pleasure, rather than dominate that
coloured thing as a means to an end).
5. The cognitive style specific to each province is in fact this modified
‘tension of our consciousness’, and it can be thought of as a specific
epoché (distinct from the epoché of the natural attitude) with its own
form of self-experience, sociality and time-perspective. An epoché is a
way of bracketing-out reality, excluding some aspects within an expe-
rience, and including others.
6. Each province is a modification of the world of daily life, which can
thus be considered the ‘archetype’ of our experienced reality.
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    163

Daydream  Take daydreaming as a first illustration. There is a consistency

to all of the experiences that together compose a daydream, but each
daydream experience would jar with an experience from beyond that
province. The daydreamer conjures a phantasm or fancy, but in a prov-
ince (Q) in which they are free from the usual obligation of an intention
to realize that fancy or phantasm (i.e. a P-based obligation where P is the
everyday-life archetype). The ordinary daily world (P) has been bracketed
out in an epoché which frees them (relaxes the tension of their conscious-
ness with respect to its usual perceptual objects and intended actions) to
indulge their fancy in a world (Q) with its own time-perspective, mode
of self-experience, and so on. Within this province, there is a modifica-
tion of the pragmatic motive to master an ‘outer world’ and overcome the
resistance of objects, and this defines the form of spontaneity at play.

A daydreamer like Don Quixote, for example, has turned away though
decreasing tensions of consciousness from the world of working, allowing
the accent of reality to cling to imaginary phantasms. From within his
province, he sees windmills as giants (which it is his mission as a knight
to attack according to the books of chivalry which fuel his fantasy life).
This experience could not pass beyond the province of daydream and into
daily life without being ‘exploded’ by incompatible experiences which
would contradict and de-realize it, as when Aesop’s dog confronts the wet
reality of the water’s surface. Don Quixote, by contrast, does not submit
to an explosion of his experience when confronted with the fact that his
giants are windmills. Instead, he maintains his imaginary province by
insisting that the giants were indeed real, but had been transformed into
windmills by his arch-enemy the magician. Far from exploding the phan-
tasms, they occupy the entirety of the Don’s world, since now even the
windmills are magical creations. The daydream can thus continue with-
out any obligation to realize its project in practical reality (bracketing of
the world of work); the Don can live in the magical time and space con-
jured by his chivalric novels, free from the bondage of standard intersub-
jective time and space; he can bracket out the pressing reality of the now/
here world within reach and enjoy instead the virtual never-never land of
a no/where; and his self-experience can expand to the grand self of a
Knight, whom phantasy others can only adore.
164  P. Stenner

Dream  In an actual sleeping dream, to give a second example, this delim-

iting (bracketing out) of the ordinary waking world is facilitated and
intensified in a literal, physical way by a literal blocking of direct percep-
tion and of the capacity for motor response. The ‘tension’ of conscious-
ness is thus at a minimum. Visual perception, for instance, is impeded by
closed eyes, and motor response is reduced physiologically as part of the
sleep-state. The dreamer—albeit in a distinctly altered state—thus enjoys
even more intensely the imagery and symbolism afforded to their altered
consciousness by this bracketing.6 In terms of the form of spontaneity,
their sleeping self—while dreaming—feels no practical interest in
­clarifying its perceptions or testing them in practice, and yet it continues
to recollect imagery snatched from waking life, albeit within the curi-
ously timeless time-consciousness described so well by Freud (1913/1965).

Experience of self is also radically transformed in dreams. For example,

I once dreamed that I was swimming in a murky pool and saw a decaying
corpse rising from the depths beneath me. This, along with the feelings I
felt, is what Freud called the manifest content of the dream. Terrified, I
tried to push it back to the bottom, only to discover it was still alive. As
it came back up towards me I glimpsed its face. Its face was my own face
as a child. I was immediately overwhelmed with a sense of pity for this
creature that moments ago inspired nothing but terror. This was an
example of a dream that left me, upon waking, with a profound sense of
its importance, as if something had been disturbed within my sense of
self. Nevertheless, it quickly faded, and indeed my verbal rendering of it
is but a dim approximation of the vivid actuality of the dream itself (belief
in its experiences cannot survive the passage to daily life). Like many
people do in such circumstances, I thought a lot about it and came to my
own interpretation of what it might ‘mean’. I took it as symbolizing that
I had energetically rejected certain aspects of myself, which had been
neglected as a consequence. Those neglected aspects of me still existed,
but took the metaphorical form of an almost dead body, submerged in
dirty waters, with a face frozen in the time of childhood. This interpreta-
tion takes seriously the idea that two levels are at play in the dream sym-
bolism: that which was manifest as the dream itself, and the meaning of
that content for the world of my daily life.
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    165

Dream imagery is clearly not ‘rational’ like the wide-awake experiences

of the world of daily life, but it does constitute a province of experience
with a distinctive ‘cognitive style’. Concretely, each dream experience dis-
plays the ‘double reference’ of a manifest and a latent meaning (Rozik
2002, p.  262). Dreams have a special status amongst Schutz’s worlds,
however, in that they are thoroughly ‘internal’ to the dreamer. There may
be a striking resemblance between dreaming and experiencing an absorb-
ing theatre or cinema performance (Rozik 2002), but in dream there is
no publicly observable form. Only the dreamer can experience her
dreams, and—no matter how real they may appear to the one ­dreaming—
the dream is produced by the dreamer. This is why dreams display double
reference: as products of the dreamer who alone consumes them, their
‘manifest’ content inevitably expresses something of the dreamer’s psy-
chological situation (their latent meaning).

Play  Freud pointed to the commonalities between child’s play and the
artistic activity of a creative writer. Like Schutz, he evokes the notion of a
distinctive ‘world’:

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in
childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his
play or games. Might we not say that every child behaves like a creative
writer, in that he creates a world of his own or, rather, rearranges the things
of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think
he does not take that world seriously and he expends large amounts of
emotions on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.
(Freud 1908/1959, p. 143)

Freud is surely correct to draw attention to the seriousness of play, but

note that for Johan Huizinga (1938/1955, p. 13)—the great founding
father of cultural history—play is ‘a free activity standing quite con-
sciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘non-serious’ but at the same time
absorbing the player intensely and utterly’. Freud and Huizinga are clearly
operating with two different meanings of the word ‘serious’. We might
say that in order to be serious in Freud’s sense of the word, play must not
be serious in Huizinga’s sense of the word. In other words, it is precisely
166  P. Stenner

because play is sequestered from serious daily utilitarian life (Huizingian

seriousness) that the player can afford to engage in it with serious inten-
sity (Freudian seriousness): it is really important because it is not really
important.

What, then, is the ‘cognitive style’ that lends play its distinctness as a
finite province of meaning? For Bateson, it is a certain kind of ‘this is not’
experience. For Bateson (1972/2000, p. 180), play is characterized by a
certain type of communication about communication (meta-­
communication). To be play, each action performed must at the same
time meta-communicate a message to the effect that: ‘These actions in
which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they
stand would denote’. If an insult is thrown during a play fight, for exam-
ple, it must somehow be communicated that this insult does not denote
what an insult would otherwise denote. Implicit here is one of Russell’s
paradoxes which stem from the simultaneous existence of two distinct
orders. The ‘actions for which they stand’ refers to the order of daily life
whilst the ‘actions in which we now engage’ refer to the current activity
of play. But the point is that, to be play, both orders must be invoked in
some way in order that the contrast can be drawn. Again, therefore, we
find a curious doubling similar to that of daydreams and dreams, in
which the cognitive style of the play world is betwixt and between two
worlds. As neatly put by Akerstrom Anderson and Pors (2016, p. 168),
play operates ‘as a special kind of doubling machine. Play splits the world
into a world of play and a world of reality. The real world is where signs
and actions represent what they say they do. In the world of play, by con-
trast, signs and actions are objects of play.’ The message ‘this is play’ cre-
ates a psychological frame within which the various play experiences take
on their consistency as play. The frame defines, as it were, the finite nature
of the province. The same could be said of the material frame of a picture,
or the curtain of a theatre. The frame in all three cases directs attention to
what is defined within it, and shapes how that data is to be apprehended
and made use of.
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    167

Finally, although there is not space to attend to it here, with respect to

time-perspective and sociality, it is notable that Huizinga (1938/1955,
p. 13) observes that play proceeds ‘within its own proper boundaries of
time and space’ and that it ‘promotes the formation of social groupings
which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their differ-
ence from the common world by disguise or other means’.

F our Weakness with Schutz’s Account of Shock

Experiences
This Is Not a Shock

Schutz’s profound analysis has four main weaknesses. First, he overplays

the notion of shock in his examples. Certainly the dream state is rather
distinct from being wide-awake, but is falling asleep really such a shock
and a leap? Usually I drift off rather than leap off to sleep. The shock is
surely elsewhere? I am certainly excited when the curtain is raised in a
theatre, but I would not describe myself as having to ‘endure’ this as a
surprising transformation. There is a comparable exaggeration at play
with all the other examples provided: the ‘radical change’ we undergo in
looking at a painting, our ‘quandary’ on accepting the terms of a jest and
so on. Schutz is letting his intellectual excitement about the profound
insight he is fabulating lead him astray. Certainly the key is that each of
these situations is indeed a transition or a passage. But he feels the need
to dramatize this passage precisely because, without this dramatization,
we might fail even to notice that a passage from one world to another has
occurred. He is like Aesop: fabulating in dramatic form the event of a
conceptual feeling that might otherwise be passed over without trace. As
he himself recognizes during a more sober moment of the essay, ‘my mind
may pass during one single day or even hour through the whole gamut of
tensions of consciousness, now living in working acts, now passing
through a day-dream, now plunging into the pictorial world of a paint-
ing, now indulging in theoretical contemplation. All these different expe-
riences are experiences within my inner time; they belong to my stream
168  P. Stenner

of consciousness’ (Schutz 1945, p. 575). The shock is in fact that there is

no shock.

The Real Shocks Are Elsewhere

The second weakness of Schutz’s account is the absence of real shock

experiences. Why, in introducing this new analytic category of the shock
experience, does Schutz see fit to exclude—in the context of this essay at
least—practically every experience that an ordinary wide-awake person
adopting the ‘natural attitude’ would consider shocking? The death of a
loved one; a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness; the outbreak of war; a
sudden earthquake; the discovery of an infidelity; a near accident in an
absent lift; plunging into cold water through a thin layer of algae. It
seems that Schutz concerns himself only with the devised, self-produced
variety of liminal experience. He neglects the spontaneous, ‘unstaged’
liminal experiences introduced in Chap. 3: the experiences that we must
go through because they happen to us. In disturbing its forms of process,
do these spontaneous ‘Uh Oh!’ experiences not puncture the commit-
ment to the natural attitude of daily reality in a more obviously shocking
way? Do they not also transform one’s consciousness, one’s mode of
sociability, one’s sense of time? They too must be included in any viable
account of shock experiences because they also entail a modification to
what Schutz calls the ‘tension of consciousness’ and hence to the modes
of conscious experience (including sense of time, cognitive style and type
of sociality) associated with routine daily life. To the extent that they are
impossible to bracket out using the epoché of the natural attitude, they
too call into question the taken-for-granted nature of ‘reality’.
For example, a response to an unexpected bereavement can be thought
of as a ‘finite province of meaning’ (1) that forces a sort of ‘leap’ (2) that
alters the ‘tension of our consciousness’ (3) yielding its own mode of self-­
experience, sociality and time-perspective (4) that is distinct from the
world of daily life (5). With respect to Schutz’s second feature, however,
we find a problem. Certainly the experiences that compose an ‘unstaged’
shock experience U are neither consistent with nor compatible with the
experiences of routine daily life P. However, it is surely not the case that,
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    169

‘seen from P, supposed to be real’ all of the experiences belonging to U

‘would appear as merely fictitious’. On the contrary, the shock of an
unstaged liminal experience is precisely that it is understood to be real
and not fictitious. The fictitious quality is doubtless a feature of dreams,
play, theatre, jokes and (although this raises a number of important ques-
tions) religion, but—perhaps with the exception of dreams—these are
precisely experiences that are in some sense ‘staged’ or ‘devised’, and it is
the lack of such artifice that characterizes a shock experience we feel
obliged to call ‘real’.
It is the case, however, that a spontaneous or unstaged liminal experi-
ence can have a certain quality of fictitiousness that psychoanalysts would
describe as a denial of the emergent reality. This, however, is something
rather different than the more or less deliberate contrivance of a fictional
reality that one finds amongst the devised or staged experiences. Proust,
for example, gives a vivid description of Marcel’s response to the death of
his beloved Albertine in his novel In search of lost time. He received a tele-
gram explaining that Albertine had died due to a fall in a riding accident.
The real Albertine was dead, but she still existed in his mind. He still
expected her to walk through the door as usual, to be there when he
awoke. This ‘contradiction between the living memory of Albertine and
my consciousness of her death’ (Proust 2000, p. 610) is not so mysteri-
ous. It is precisely what Schutz describes as the ‘incompatibility’ between
experiences from different worlds. As Proust puts it, it is attributable to
the fact that human beings are ‘amphibious creatures who are plunged
simultaneously in the past and in the reality of the present’. For this rea-
son, Marcel found that the ‘idea that Albertine was dead’ had to contest
‘furiously with the idea that she was alive’. Proust expresses this directly
when he writes: ‘For the death of Albertine to have been able to eliminate
my suffering, the shock of the fall would have had to kill her not only in
Touraine but in myself ’ (p. 546). So in this specific sense, an unstaged
liminal experience can at times appear somehow unreal (and hence ‘fic-
tional’) to the one going through it, but this experience of coming to
terms with an emergent reality can be rather clearly differentiated from
the experience of creating or engaging with a self-occasioned performance
like a painting, a theatre performance, a novel like Proust’s, or a make-­
believe episode of play. These latter are performatively ‘staged’ in the
170  P. Stenner

sense that the liminal experiences are ‘self-occasioned’ by means of fabu-

lative activity with the specific liminal affective technology.
Taken together, both types of shock experience expose the fact that
what had previously been lived in the natural attitude as if it were simple
external reality is in fact a complex product of symbolically mediated
activity that had been, but no longer can be, taken for granted. In daily
life, Whitehead’s symbolic reference is simply ‘what the actual world is
for us’, but when that delicate form of psychosocial order is frustrated or
disturbed or even breaks down in the context of a genuine shock
­experience, the symbolic reference falters, loses its transparency and
shows up as what the world is not. In these situations, the clarity of con-
sciousness and the rigour of reason can all too easily melt into the confu-
sion of affectively charged imagery and mixed metaphor: the ship of the
symbol comes out of the bottle that it symbolized, and when it does so,
it looms fearsomely like the giant genie emerging from the lamp of the
Arabian Nights.

 he Need to Move Beyond Pure Phenomenology

T
and Consider the Social Devices of the Liminal
Affective Technologies

The third weakness is that even though Schutz deals only with the self-­
generated, devised liminal experiences associated with forms like theatre
and art and of religious rituals and myths, he neglects the fact that these
are part of material social forms and media that together have long con-
stituted a large swathe of what we call ‘cultural activity’ or ‘cultural pro-
duction’. The fabulations of painting, of comedy, of theatre and of religion
are not just finite provinces of meaning: they really are social worlds in
the sense that they are more or less institutionalized, collectively worked
at cultural forms. The exceptions to this rule are the fabulations of dreams,
play and laughter which can indeed arise spontaneously, even though
they are self-produced. Dream, play and laughter arguably provide the
basic symbolic ingredients and forms for the more elaborately crafted and
socially cultivated liminal experiences and expressions like religious rit-
ual, painting, tragedy and comedy (Rozik 2002).
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    171

There are, in short, a number of well-established media for fabulating—

or technologies for devising—the ‘shock’ experiences Schutz discusses,
and these must be attended to. The experiences that we enjoy and express
by way of the media of painting, theatre, ritual and myth, but also in our
play, our jokes and our dreams are in a very important sense, not just self-
produced by people, but self-referential. The play or the painting is first of
all to be enjoyed as the play or painting that it is. We are invited into these
forms of symbolism on their own terms, for their own sakes, and in this
respect they differ from symbols whose chief function is to signal some-
thing beyond the symbolic form—as was discussed in Chap. 3. Unless we
are lost, we do not listen to music to locate the position of the musician,
but to dwell upon the sound qua sound, and unless we are a biographer,
we do not read In search of lost time to discover facts about the life of
Marcel Proust. The same self-reference applies to a joke: to be understood
as a joke it must not be taken seriously, but is to be enjoyed for the singu-
lar self-referential world it creates. If we take it literally we do not laugh.
Schutz does not go nearly far enough in writing ‘seen from P, supposed to
be real, Q and all the experiences belonging to it would appear as merely
fictitious’. The experiences of Q worlds are not simply judged fictitious
from the outside: the practices they involve always include the artifice of a
doubling of world P, such that each act and each experience in world Q is
recognized as being not of world P. It is in precisely this sense that Schutz’s
worlds are ‘this is not’ worlds. It is through this doubling that world P is
held in suspense so that world Q can be enjoyed for its distinctive experi-
ences. This means that the world of painting or theatre or play or comedy
is never in fact a single world—as Schutz appears to assume—but always
at least two worlds, one within another. These are the various liminal
worlds whose home territory is at the interstices and points of passage
between the various centripetal worlds of daily life.

Ignoring the Dynamic Relation Between ‘Daily Life’

and the Liminal Worlds

This brings me to the fourth weakness. Because Schutz does not take into
account the distinction between spontaneous and self-occasioned shock
172  P. Stenner

experiences, he is unable to recognize the vital importance of their rela-

tionship. In creating their own self-referential worlds, each of these lim-
inal worlds with their accompanying liminal affective technologies affords
the creation of liminal experience that has some relation to spontaneous
experiences of shock or disturbance. It is the dynamic relation of these
‘two worlds’ that is decisive. It is important to tread carefully here. I am
not merely drawing attention to the fact that art works contain ‘represen-
tations’ of things found in everyday life (paintings of trees, stories about
people and things, actors acting out characters, etc.). I am also not claim-
ing that the novelist Edna O’brien is right and that all art comes from an
initial wound (or an initial shock), since this would be too totalizing a
claim. The conceptual feelings or intuitions expressed in an art work can
be very subtle. Indeed, the whole range of experience can be the subject
matter for artful staging in whatever medium is preferred. Today that also
includes—increasingly—art which expresses the importance of ordinary,
unexceptional, far-from-liminal everyday life. For some, there is even a
fundamental ‘ontological gap between life and representation of life’
(Rozik 2002, p. 12). Nevertheless, the spontaneous liminal experiences
of life cry out, as it were, for symbolic expression, precisely because they
challenge and transform the ‘natural attitude’ of daily life, and this ren-
ders them de facto important and hence significant. They rupture the
existing forms of symbolism which might have been adequate for the past
but, as Marcel discovered, fail in the face of the newly emergent. New
symbolism must be invented where old symbolism fails, and this neces-
sitates a bridge or portal between daily life and the fabulous worlds we are
considering (Greco and Stenner 2017).
On a recent radio programme I heard a Syrian teacher from what is
now always referred to as ‘war-torn Aleppo’ describe in tearful voice how
the children in what is left of her school use their art lessons to spontane-
ously draw pictures of bleeding bodies and severed limbs. Their songs
sing of warplanes that they wish would fly away and doubtless their
dreams are overpopulated with images of fear and horror and their jokes,
if they have any, will be affected. These pictures, dreams, jokes and songs
are indeed each of them self-referential. In each, nevertheless, it seems
clear that the shock is elsewhere, and that its re-visiting in ‘devised’ form
is part of a process of symbolizing and making sense of what has, until
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    173

that point, disturbed common sense and escaped symbolization. Indeed,

it is precisely because these forms are self-referential and hence are not
directly about those spontaneous experiences that they can serve as a
vehicle for symbolically transforming them.

Liminality and the Sacred
In the discussion above I did not deal with the world of religion, but sug-
gested that one of its primary technologies (ritual) might be considered
as a matrix of other liminal technologies (like theatre and art). This sec-
tion provides important background to this idea through an exegesis of
the concept of liminality that builds on the other chapters of this book.
Schutz does not explicitly use the concept of liminality, but it is at play
most distinctly when he writes of the inner transformations associated
with transitions between worlds. For example, the inner transformations
associated with ‘the transition to the world of the stage play … the pas-
sage into the pictorial world … the transition into the world of play’. In
fact, the term ‘liminal’ was first introduced precisely to illuminate the
importance of this idea of passage between worlds. Arnold van Gennep, let
us recall, first used it in his 1909 book The Rites of Passage. A rite of pas-
sage is a ceremonial pattern of rites which accompanies ‘a passage from
one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another’
(van Gennep 1909, p. 10). It is from this book that we get the concept of
a rite of passage that is now so accepted that it is part of common sense.

The Pattern of the Rites of Passage

Van Gennep himself did not receive the recognition he deserved during
his lifetime, largely because he clashed with the Durkheimian intellectual
empire that was then busy establishing itself in France and in Europe
more generally (Thomassen 2014).7 Also, his concept of liminality may
not have caught on if not enthusiastically advocated by the British pro-
cess anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner described van Gennep as the
‘first scholar who perceived that the processual form of ritual epitomized
174  P. Stenner

the general experience in traditional society that social life was a sequence
of movements in space-time, involving a series of changes of pragmatic
activity and a succession of transitions in state and status for individuals
and culturally recognized groups and categories’ (Turner 1977, p. 66).
Van Gennep, as Turner points out, was interested in rituals, but in the
context of a processual view of social life. Social life, from this perspective,
is a ‘sequence of movements in space-time’. These are not just physical
movements, but ‘changes of pragmatic activity’ and ‘transitions in state
and status’. A change of pragmatic activity is simply a change in what
people are doing, but it also relates to changes from one of Schutz’s worlds
of daily life (governed by its pragmatic motive and natural attitude) to
another. For example, it might be a change from the activity of having a
meeting in one’s village to discuss important repairs that need doing to
the activity of going fishing. Or it might be a change from the activity of
building a boat to the activity of travelling to a nearby island. A given
‘pragmatic activity’ can be thought of as a sphere or ‘circle’ of practice to
the extent that our activities tend to have a familiar, repetitive, cyclical
feel to them. Such circles of practice—which together with many others
comprise the meaningful conduct of daily life—go to the heart of what
human existence actually is: all of us are somehow situated within a set of
more or less mutually understood scenes of daily conduct (Holzkamp
2013, p.  314). We live and experience as part of an ongoing world of
practice, and clearly there are points or junctures at which we go through
‘changes of pragmatic activity’.
What Turner calls transitions in ‘state and status’ is also quite straight-
forward to understand. A change in state might be a change such as
becoming ill or becoming pregnant or giving birth or reaching puberty or
dying. A change in status might be a change with respect to the social
category recognized to apply to a person, such as the change from single
to betrothed and from betrothed to married, from familiar to stranger, or
the change from warrior to village elder or from Italian citizen to UK citi-
zen, and so on. Changes in status are often—but not always—directly
related to changes in pragmatic activity. A person who is promoted in
their job or given a new role in the community gets a new status, and that
comes with new tasks and responsibilities, and hence a change of ‘prag-
matic activity’. A small child who for the first time goes to school acquires
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    175

a new status as ‘pupil’ and they are quickly presented with a new set of
learning exercises and tools. Human pragmatic activity is fused with a set
of symbolic categories (like the category ‘pupil’ or indeed ‘child’). This is
partly what is meant by the notion that our practice is symbolically con-
ditioned (and ‘socially constructed’). Through such categories human
practice can be communicated about and ‘made sense of ’ by all parties
involved. It can be directed towards complicated ends: the aim of educa-
tion, for instance, is unthinkable without the discursive categories at play
in educational practice (the pupil, the teacher, the syllabus, the exams,
etc.).
A given scene of pragmatic activity associated with a given status (and
other discursively organized meaningful categories) mapped onto physi-
cal and organic processes can be thought of as a ‘world’ in Schutz’s sense
of a finite province of meaning. It is a complex composition. In this sense,
van Gennep gives us an image of society not simply as a set of more or
less structured ‘worlds’ of daily life (each with its positions, stations, roles,
statuses, etc.)—but also as a constant shifting set of movements from one
of these worlds to another: of transitions between positions and relations
between stations. These might be events of becoming, as when we acquire
a new status and become something different (married not single,
employed not unemployed, retired not employed, a stranger and not a
familiar, etc.); changes of season; or other changes of circumstance like a
change of dwelling place or a homecoming after a phase of absence.
Again, often these different aspects are related: a change of status might
take effect at the start of a new season and might involve a territorial
movement to a new location (your promotion will start next term and
you will move to the large office on the third floor). A change of social
category can thus entail (but of course need not) a change of residence
during an appropriate phase of the yearly cycle.
These transitions—viewed as a whole from afar—have a recurrent,
cyclical feel. They may be unique and novel to those going through them
for the first time but, viewed from afar they are patterns that repeat:
Winter will end and Spring will follow just as death is followed by new
birth. Van Gennep (1909, pp. 189–190) sums up this vision of life as
movement and rest, transition and stability rather neatly: ‘Life itself
means to separate and be reunited, to change form and condition, to die
176  P. Stenner

and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and rest, and then to
begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new
thresholds to cross: the thresholds of summer and winter, of a season or a
year, of a month or a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity,
and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife—for those
who believe in it.’
Van Gennep’s chief insight was twofold. First, it was to recognize the
extent to which these thresholds and transitions at the joints between
worlds are the occasion for the ceremonials he called rites of passage.
Second, it was to recognize that these ceremonials have a distinctive pat-
tern suited to this fact. The book Rites of Passage marshals a huge amount
of data on ritual ceremonies from practically every published anthropo-
logical account in all the major European languages. As he notes (p. 190),
he was not the first to observe striking resemblances amongst the differ-
ent components of otherwise very different ceremonies.8 Van Gennep’s
contribution, however, concerned the order of rites within ceremonial
wholes. Beneath a variable multiplicity of forms he found the recurrence
of a typical pattern which he called ‘the pattern of the rites of passage’
(p. 191).
This pattern expresses precisely the transformational significance of
rites of passage as marking the kinds of thresholds we have been describ-
ing as transitions between positions. Namely, there is a three-phase order
that begins with preliminary rites (also called rites of separation), moves
through the liminal rites (also called rites of transition), and ends with
postliminal rites of incorporation. Van Gennep gave the name ‘liminal’
to the middle phase of transitional rites which is, to use Turner’s famous
phrase, ‘betwixt and between’ the old and the new world. However, in
calling the separation rites ‘preliminal’ and the incorporation rites ‘post-
liminal’, he was giving a core significance to the idea of some sort of limit,
the crossing of its threshold, and the establishment of new limits (the
Latin word ‘limen’ means threshold).
Variation notwithstanding, the preliminary rites of separation typically
symbolize and perform a de-coupling or break from the world that is
being departed from. Often, for example, this will take the form of rituals
which involve some form of cutting or breaking or losing or isolating, as
when a young Turko-Mongol groom cannot enter the room full of wed-
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    177

ding guests before using his foot to break a red thread held by two women
across the floor. Before that occurs, another separation ritual will have
taken place in which female friends of the bride take her away and hide
her, leaving the young man to search the village all night long (symbol-
izing the separation of the bride from her friendship group). Postliminal
rites of incorporation, by contrast, typically symbolize and ceremonially
perform a re-coupling or re-integration with what will then have become
the new world. Again using the example of marriage (although the point
is that these findings apply to all rites of passage), the new couple might
be united by the fact of being bound together by a single cord or tying
parts of their clothing together or sharing the same food or exchanging
belts or bracelets or rings (which are symbolic of unbroken unity).
Befitting their ‘betwixt and between’ status, the liminal rites often sym-
bolize movement or even flying, as when a bride is carried across a thresh-
old. Liminal rites also often involve some form of a trial or quest or
challenge that must be faced by those going through the transition. Young
men from the Satere-Mawe people of Amazonian Brazil, for example, are
obliged to participate in an initiation ritual that involves dancing whilst
wearing a pair of carefully constructed gloves infested with bullet ants,
the bite from one of which is estimated to be 30 times more painful than
a bee-sting. They must ‘go through’ (i.e. transition through) this painful
ordeal up to 20 times before participating in the rites which finally incor-
porate them into manhood. Often some sort of dangerous test is directly
combined with imagery of flying, as with the now famous Gol ritual in
which young initiates from Pentacost Island, Vanuatu, dive headfirst
from a tall tower in a flight that would kill them but for vines tied to their
ankles and connected to the tower to break their fall. The Volador ritual
from Mexico is rather similar but involves multiple participants ‘flying’
from a tall pole (see Thomassen 2014, p. 175).
Van Gennep’s argument is far from reductionist and he discusses many
variations and complications of the basic three-fold pattern. For example,
banishment ceremonies are likely to place more emphasis on rites of sepa-
ration than initiation ceremonies. Also in many places the state of being
‘betrothed’ (which is liminal with respect to the worlds of adolescence
and marriage) is sufficiently elaborated so that it constitutes its own state
or world and hence the same three-fold ritual arrangements can be redu-
178  P. Stenner

plicated. Thus one finds a fractal arrangement in the passage from adoles-
cence to betrothal which itself contains separation, transition and
incorporation phases, as might the passage from betrothal to marriage.
Furthermore, van Gennep acknowledges the many other types of ritual
(e.g. rites of protection, of purification, of fertility, of ordination), and
shows how they relate to rites of passage (e.g. van Gennep 1909, p. 12).
He is careful not to totalize his new category: ‘it is by no means my con-
tention that all rites of birth, initiation, marriage, and the like, are only
rites of passage’ (p. 11).

This Is Not the Sacred

To my knowledge, van Gennep never used the word ‘liminality’ as a noun
and would have been surprised at its significant uptake in today’s aca-
demic literature, from archaeology to sociology and from history to psy-
chology. The risk is that liminality as a concept becomes reified as if it had
clear meaning as a specifiable and observable ‘it’. In fact, for van Gennep
the liminal is precisely not a clear thing. It is better described in terms of
a cultural symbolization (predominantly in the medium of ritual) in
response to the ambiguity, ambivalence and potentiality produced by a
process of transition as such. Liminality thus evokes transition as it is hap-
pening, and as such is quite literally neither the world of departure nor
that of arrival. As a sensitive juncture of transition, the liminal is therefore
not designed to explain anything. On the contrary, liminality points pre-
cisely to situations of potentiality in which, as Thomassen (2009) puts it,
‘what happens’ might take many different courses, but the actual outcome
is uncertain. Liminality is about the process of becoming and not about
explaining what already exists.
As discussed earlier in this book, this processual mode of thought fore-
grounds experience. Liminality is not reducible to an objective aspect of
the world but evokes a mode of experience. Szakolczai (2009) points out
that the very concept of ‘experience’ itself implies a processual event: it is
something that happens to us, or something we go through.9 This means
that we cannot objectify liminality and treat it as a realized thing in the
external world that offers itself for our neutral description. The inspiring
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    179

British archaeologist Pryor (2004, p.  173), for example, describes the
causewayed enclosures of prehistoric Britain in relation to the ‘special
status of physical liminality’ whereby the sacred burial zones of the ances-
tors are materially demarcated from the profane living areas, and located
in or near physically impressive landscapes. From this point it is all too
easy to treat liminality as if it were the name for an observable archaeo-
logical or even geological feature, much like the Ancient Roman limes
(which was the Roman name for the fortifications that marked the limits
of their empire), or ‘liminal’ extremes like Land’s End. Liminality, as we
have seen, entails much more than this observable spatial meaning of a
physical border or threshold.
Considered in a purely physical and spatial sense, for instance, liminal-
ity becomes entirely relative and meaning-free because anything and
nothing can be liminal depending upon the frame of comparison that is
used. London is liminal when a spatial frame centred on Europe is
adopted, but it is quite central when the frame is expanded to include
North America. The Mediterranean is liminal with respect to Europe, but
quite central when the frame includes North Africa and the Near East.
The point is that Pryor’s ‘physical liminality’ takes on meaning only when
we take into consideration—as indeed he does—the assumed experiences
of Neolithic Britons and, more specifically, their assumed experience of
something like ‘the sacred’. A causeway might be built to express an expe-
rience of the sacred (as burial sites, this would have included the pro-
found transition of death and its mediation by burial rites), and to enable
its recurrent enactment. But until we grasp that experience, or project it
back in time to make sense of the purpose of the causeway, to call it
liminal lacks the proper meaning. Likewise, physical extremity of the
­landscape—whether an impressive cave or stunning cliff or inspiring
mountain or remote promontory, may express for a people an experience
of the sacred, but until we grasp that aesthetic experience, to describe this
feature of the landscape as ‘physical liminality’ lacks meaning.
In considering the experience of liminality above I have deliberately
lingered on the notion of the sacred since, as noted above, my intent in
this section is to illuminate Schutz world of religion. The sacred—in the
sense I have been developing above—is tightly connected to liminality. It
is tempting to propose that liminal experience is the experience of the
180  P. Stenner

sacred, but perhaps it is more accurate to say that what is called ‘the
sacred’ is one of the primary ways in which liminal experiences are sym-
bolized and rendered comprehensible and communicable. This already
extends van Gennep’s meaning, however, and so first it is important to
show how the liminal and the sacred are linked in his way of thinking, for
they clearly are.

Van Gennep and the Sacred

First, it must be noted that van Gennep deviates from the anthropologi-
cal tradition begun by Robertson Smith in the late nineteenth century
and continued, with some important variations, by Frazer, Durkheim
and others. As described by Douglas (1975), Robertson Smith defined
the parameters of a new school of research into the sacred, the holy, the
pure and the impure when he drew a rather firm distinction between
religion proper and the non-religious magical conduct of those he
called—using the racist terminology then common—‘savages’. Savages,
he argued, are ruled by taboo with its primitive ‘magical superstition
based on mere terror’, and taboo is rather different from holiness. The
racist oversimplifications involved in this concept of ‘the savage’ are
thankfully now clear to many, although modes of thought which under-
estimate different forms of culture are still all too common. For Robertson
Smith, the key difference between religious people and savages is the
primitive way in which savages fail to keep their concept of the sacred or
the holy completely separate from concepts of impurity, uncleanness and
defilement. To ‘distinguish between the holy and the unclean, marks a
real advance above savagery’ (Robertson Smith 1889/1927, p.  153).
Hence, although both concepts are often considered versions of the
sacred, taboo—for Robertson Smith—is quite distinct from holiness.
Taboo mixes the sacred and the unclean, whilst holiness keeps them
clearly apart. I stress Smith’s influential rejection of any ambivalence to
the sacred (its ‘purification’ into the holy) since, as we shall see, van
Gennep offers us an account of the sacred which acknowledges rather
than rejects its ambivalent nature.
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    181

Frazer (1890/1955, p.  23) echoes Robertson Smiths’ idea when he

finds contradictions in the way his Syrian informants talked about not
eating pigs. Some said ‘the pigs were unclean; others said it was because
the pigs were sacred’. This, he concludes, ‘points to a hazy state of reli-
gious thought in which the idea of sanctity and uncleanness are not yet
sharply distinguished being both blent in a sort of vaporous solution to
which we give the name of taboo’ (Frazer 1890/1955, p. 23). Again, we
see the prejudice that taboo is the confused sacred of primitive thought,
whilst religious thought proper cleanly separates the sacred from the
impure and defiled. Frazer further reified the idea of a ‘primitive mental-
ity’ in an evolutionary scheme whereby savage thought—supposedly
based on magic (and thought to work by principles of contagion and
similarity) evolves into a genuinely religious cosmology based on superior
super-natural beings. Magic and taboo are basically seen as primitive and
hence deeply flawed ways of understanding the nature of the world: sci-
entific cognition led astray (and yielding flawed technology). Magic in
this context means any ritual enacted in the absence of religion.
Van Gennep (1909, pp. 13–14), by fortunate contrast, does not make
a firm distinction between religion and magic on the basis that the former
has a clean concept of the sacred whilst the latter wallows in a mixed and
impure notion of taboo. Instead, he operates with an inclusive classifica-
tion of religion. Within the category of religion he differentiates dynamis-
tic religions (which are monistic and impersonal) from animistic religions
(which are dualistic and personify religious powers into single or multiple
beings, whether plant, animal or anthropomorphic). The animistic reli-
gions are further divided into totemism, spiritism, polydemonism and
theism. All of these religions he groups under the category of ‘theory’ and
contrasts theory with ‘technique’. All the known categories of rites (sym-
pathetic/contagious, direct/indirect, positive/negative) are thus consid-
ered as magical techniques which may be deployed along with different
‘theories’. This means that for van Gennep the religion/magic distinction
is an inclusive theory/technique distinction and not a distinction
between a proper religious form and one which falls short because it is
primitive superstition. Taboo, in his scheme, is not a savage way of
understanding the sacred, but a specific type of rite, namely, a negative
rite (a prohibition which commands ‘not to do’) which exists only as a
182  P. Stenner

counterpart to a positive rite, and which can be found in different forms

in all religions. This stance flows from the fact that van Gennep does not
view religions simply as more or less successful ways of explaining the
universe, as if their task were merely to produce accurate cognitive repre-
sentations of the real physical world the better to control it (or, following
Durkheim, representations of society itself ).
This detour has hopefully made clear that van Gennep’s concept of the
sacred differs from that of the influential tradition described above. The
second point is that van Gennep does not thereby fail to recognize the
obvious differences with respect to the sacred that exist between different
types of society. There will be an obvious difference between religious
experiences and ideas that have been rationally systematized on the basis
of sustained scholarship undertaken with the benefit of writing and read-
ing, and forms of religion that, for whatever reason, have not been medi-
ated by the written word. It also goes without saying for van Gennep that
our modern society operates on a vastly bigger scale, with huge compara-
tive complexity and with the benefits (not to mention costs) of modern
science and technology. He also takes for granted key historical develop-
ments such as the phase of the development of cities that some societies
went through about 5000 years ago which for that reason is given the
name ‘civilization’ (i.e. the kind of culture that develops in cities as dis-
tinct from agrarian or hunter gatherer groups). In fact he begins The Rites
of Passage with a comparative discussion of the place of the sacred in dif-
ferent forms of society. Each larger society, he states, contains several dis-
tinctively separate social groupings, but as we move from more complexly
civilized to the simpler forms of society, these differences ‘become accen-
tuated and their autonomy increases’ (van Gennep 1909, p.  1). In an
important passage he writes:

A society is similar to a house divided into rooms and corridors. The more
the society resembles ours in its form of civilization, the thinner are its
internal partitions and the wider and more open are its doors of communi-
cation. In a semicivilized society, on the other hand, sections are carefully
isolated, and passage from one to another must be made through formali-
ties and ceremonies. (van Gennep 1909, p. 26)
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    183

Here, van Gennep compares the accentuated differences within and

between social groupings to the carefully isolated sections of a house,
with its thicker walls and narrower doors. In such a house/society, to
move from one room to another is to go through a quite notable change
of condition and status. Such a change of condition cannot be taken
lightly for granted and does not occur ‘without disturbing the life of soci-
ety and the individual’ (p. 13). Rites of passage are the cultural forms and
ceremonies that have been developed to make sense of and to manage,
but also to artfully generate under controlled circumstances, this distur-
bance. They reduce any harmful effects and they facilitate the adjustment
of the mutual perspectives of those involved. These religious forms thus
clearly cannot be understood as if they were primarily aiming (rather
poorly) at an explanation of the external universe, or at a description of
society or human nature. The purpose of the rites of passage, rather, is to
enable and to symbolize passage from one well-defined position to
another. They are cultural forms or ‘technologies’—with strong magico-­
religious aspects—for fostering, managing and navigating the liminality
of transition and becoming.
Furthermore, the cultural-historical process that van Gennep describes
metaphorically as a thinning of society’s internal partitions and the wid-
ening of its communicating doors through historical development is
associated with an ever-decreasing domination of the secular by the
sacred: ‘We see that in the least advanced cultures the holy enters nearly
every phase of a man’s [sic] life. Being born, giving birth, and hunting,
to cite but a few examples, are all acts whose major aspects fall within the
sacred sphere’ (van Gennep 1909, p.  2). In our modern societies, by
contrast, although there are clearly important differences between differ-
ent social groupings, the tendency is to dissolve the real significance of
those differences in favour of a differentiation based on what people do
rather than what they inherently are (a so-called principle of ‘functional
differentiation’). In our societies social groupings have increasingly spe-
cialized into smaller or ‘thinner’ social groupings like professions and
trades and the basis for passage from one of these to another has increas-
ingly become purely economic or intellectual. Our categories of race,
class and gender, in this context, are but officially should not be factors
which determine a person’s capacity to move between the different rooms
184  P. Stenner

in our increasingly ‘open plan’ society. These official principles are sym-
bolized by rights of equality. This does not of course mean that people
are in fact given equal opportunities, but rather that the official symbol-
ism states that they should be. Van Gennep suggests that the only remain-
ing distinction that is clearly marked by magico-religious ceremonies is
that between the sacred and the secular or profane. One still cannot pass
from the secular domain into the priesthood (or indeed be unfrocked
from the priesthood) without the intermediation of a ceremonialized
stage of transition.

The Pivoting of the Sacred and Its Ambivalent Nature

In societies where the sacred is more widespread and ubiquitous, practi-

cally all such acts of transition are ‘enveloped in ceremonies’ (van Gennep
1909, p. 3) and hence each life is punctuated and interwoven with cere-
monialized transitions from conception to birth to adolescence to mar-
riage to parenthood to status advancement to old age to death. This
explains the basis for the underlying similarity—upon which infinite cul-
tural variations are played out—amongst the ceremonies associated with
each of these transitions. But even in societies dominated by the sacred,
the sacred is not absolute. It is not a fixed property of an inherently ‘sav-
age’ mind incapable of reason and perpetually dominated by unconscious
desire, as Freud suggests. The sacred is precisely not absolute. Rather, to
use van Gennep’s phrase, there is a ‘pivoting of the sacred’ (p. 12). This
means that the sacred is not experienced everywhere but appears variably.
This is interesting and worth dwelling on, since it further illuminates the
concept of liminality. The sacred, to quote van Gennep again, is ‘brought
into play by the nature of particular situations’ (p. 12). More specifically,
it appears in the gaps and transitions—in the movements between thickly
walled rooms. When and where the sacred appears, then and there rites
are performed.
Van Gennep gives three generic examples. First, a man at home with
his tribe is in the realm of the secular (to apply the metaphor of the
house, he is clearly within a given ‘room’), but if he goes on a journey and
nears the camp of foreign strangers, he enters a sacred realm. He becomes
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    185

sacred as he becomes a stranger. As he crosses the threshold, so the sacred

‘pivots’. In becoming a stranger he crosses a magico-religious frontier that
requires a ritual treatment. Here it is worth recognizing that under many
circumstances a stranger is in fact something different to a familiar, and it
would be rather risky not to recognize this difference. It is wise to hesi-
tate. Some societies treat the stranger as a powerful being to be taken
great care of, whilst others respond with aggression, and this ambivalence
is not accidental or incidental. The people of the Fiji Islands, for example,
have been known to rob, mistreat and even kill strangers who are consid-
ered magically dangerous (the islanders exercise a violent ‘right of ship-
wreck’, for instance). The stranger—both from her own perspective and
from that of others—is in the specially ambivalent and unstable condi-
tion that van Gennep correctly associated with ‘the sacred’. They find
themselves—as sacred—simultaneously malevolent and benevolent:
equally open to abuse and high praise. This is precisely because such lim-
inal occasions generate an indeterminacy of status, and this indeterminacy
carries both negative and positive (and indeed neutral) potentials: we do
not know if the stranger is a dangerous threat, a purveyor of good tidings
or merely a figure passing through. Our hesitation expresses this volatility
at the ambivalent source of the sacred.10
The point here is that the sacredness is relative to the condition of pas-
sage which brings it into play. To give the second example, a Brahman is
a priest by birth into a caste, and hence sacred from the perspective of
other castes. But within the Brahman world ‘there is a hierarchy of
Brahman families some of whom are sacred in relation to others’ (van
Gennep 1909, p. 12). Here again, the sacred is not something fixed and
absolute, but something that ‘pivots’ with changing circumstance: in one
setting (with those from another caste) this Brahman is sacred, but in
another setting (a meeting with a higher Brahman family), this same
Brahman must hesitate in the face of their new relative state of
profanity.
Third, in many societies the genders form clearly distinct categories
and a woman is sacred to all initiated men, but not to women and the
uninitiated. If a woman becomes pregnant, however ‘she also becomes
sacred to all other women of the tribe except her close relatives’. In all
three examples we can see how the sacred emerges in different places as a
186  P. Stenner

person moves from place to place and hence from status to status. What
was profane one moment is sacred the next: ‘Whoever passes through the
various positions of a lifetime one day sees the sacred where before he
[sic] has seen the profane, or vice versa’ (p. 13). What van Gennep calls
the ‘magic circles’ of the sacred pivot—as if on shifting gears. In fact—if
you will excuse the freely mixed metaphors, the sacred is always brought
into play during the movement of the gearstick between these ‘gears’. I
am assuming, of course, that we can take a given ‘gear’ to be equivalent
to a world in Schutz’s sense, or a room in van Gennep’s metaphor.

Liminality as a Wavering Between Worlds

In our modern societies, passage from one country to another is largely

an administrative matter of having and showing the correct documents
(although clearly the recent waves of mass migrations introduce impor-
tant new dynamics). Things were not so simple for General Grant who,
upon entering Asyut territory in Upper Egypt during the late 1870s was
obliged to step over a flow of blood between the severed head of bull that
had just been sacrificed and the rest of its still quivering body. One can
imagine General Grant wavering for a moment before stepping across the
flow of this bloody Rubicon. Van Gennep points out that the situation
that obtains in ‘our part of the world’ where one country effectively
touches another is a recent development and that the more usual situa-
tion is for each territory to be surrounded by a strip of ground that is
neutral (in fact we retain the idea of ‘no-man’s land’). One must pass
through this neutral zone to enter another territory. In Ancient Greece
the neutral zones were used as market places and indeed the Campo
Marzio in the times of the Roman Republic was used for military training
(hence the name). Elsewhere they tend to be deserts or marshes. This
provides an excellent illustration of the ‘pivoting of the sacred’ because
for someone in the neutral zone the territories either side are sacred.
However, from the perspective of the inhabitants of the two territories, it
is the neutral zone that is sacred.
Van Gennep uses this example of two symmetrical but opposed experi-
ences of the sacred to capture the core of his meaning of the liminal qua
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    187

‘transition’. Whoever passes from the territory (from which perspective

the neutral zone is sacred) to the neutral zone (from which perspective
the territory is sacred) finds themselves, for a certain period of time, in ‘a
special situation’ (p.  18). Van Gennep puts this special situation quite
precisely when he writes: ‘he wavers between two worlds’ (p. 18). It is
precisely this hesitant ‘wavering’—this ‘betwixt and between’—which
van Gennep designates with the word ‘transition’ (and hence with the
liminal). The wavering is simultaneously spatial/physical and symbolic/
magico-religious. Transition so designated ‘may be found in more or less
pronounced form in all the ceremonies which accompany the passage
from one social and magico-religious position to another’ (p. 18).
In sum, van Gennep enables us to grasp that the sacred is not a pure
holiness as assumed by Robertson Smith. The sacred is associated with
the hesitant and inherently ambivalent experience of a wavering between
two worlds, and people go through this experience during transitions
between one world and another. It is for this reason that the sacred is
neither absolute nor pure, but an experience which pivots to correspond
with the special situation of those undergoing significant transitions.
Those who are in this special situation are both perceived by others to be
inherently ambiguous and ambivalent potentials and also correspond-
ingly, are likely to perceive themselves in this way. This shared ‘this is not’
perception composes the sacred, or at least a significant aspect of it.
Contra Robertson Smith, what we call ‘the sacred’ is indeed this e­ xperience
of what Frazer (1890/1955, p. 23) described as a ‘hazy state of … a blent
… vaporous solution’. The sacred is precisely the ambivalence of the clean
and the defiled, the holy and the monstrous. If we can make those dis-
tinctions clearly, we are far from the sacred. I suggest that it is our
response—collectively and personally—to the felt importance of this
wavering ‘betwixt and between’ that gives us religion, or inclines us to
lose it. The same wavering is tackled, albeit in slightly different ways, by
art, theatre, song, dream, play and humour. This wavering is the well-­
spring of culture.
188  P. Stenner

 onclusion: Matters of Fact and Matters

C
of Importance
This chapter began by critically examining Schutz’s shock experiences.
These shock experiences are associated with what he called the ‘worlds’ of
dream, play, theatre, painting, humour and religion. I emphasized the
difference between these worlds of meaning and what we might call the
‘standard’ that is provided by the taken for granted and pragmatically
focused world of daily utilitarian life. Although this distinction ought
not to be exaggerated or reified, for Schutz, in the world of daily life we
adopt a natural attitude which takes-for-granted the real and external
nature of the ordinary world, despite its socially constructed nature.
Naturally, ‘daily life’ differs from place to place, person to person and
time to time. What distinguishes daily life is thus not the details of its
content, but a quality of experience that differentiates it from more
‘extra-ordinary’ experiences. It can be helpful to think of daily life as the
common-sense world personified so vividly, not by Don Quixote, but by
his side-kick Sancho Panza in Cervantes’s great novel. Sancho is an ordi-
nary, real and pragmatic peasant labourer. He is greedy yet kind, and he
is faithful yet liable to save his own skin when danger arises. His feet are
firmly on the ground and he knows which side his bread is buttered on.
To borrow a phrase from Whitehead, in this world what matters are mat-
ters of fact.
We saw that each of Schutz’s other worlds constitute a departure from
this standard provided by the natural attitude of daily life. Dreaming,
playing, acting, painting, joking and so on share in common the fact that
they are worlds that are folded back onto themselves to create, as it were,
worlds-within-worlds. This introverted creation requires a certain sus-
pension of the usual limitations that implicitly frame the world of every-
day life. Schutz follows Husserl in using the Greek word epoché to indicate
this bracketing or suspending of the limits of the natural attitude. A
judge, for example, engages in epoché when they withhold their judge-
ment until they have heard all the evidence from a case. This attitude or
practice is not so different from the situation in which we suspend our
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    189

disbelief when we go to the theatre or to the movies. We turn-off, as it

were, our ordinary tendency to immediately judge the reality or worth of
something, and we do so in order that we can entertain and enjoy the
story line. In the sleep which recurrently rounds our little lives, this sus-
pension occurs naturally, creating the conditions for dreams. In the play
of children a different but comparable suspension can be achieved by the
wink of an eye. Think of the world of the Don in Don Quixote, who is
enraptured by lofty and impractical ideals, and led by dreamy and noble
visions of romance and chivalry. Think of the world of the fiery prophets,
enflamed by a profound sense of virtue communicated from the heights
of mountains, the depths of caverns and from the hungry loneliness of
desert and wilderness. Or think of the world of Plato, oriented to the
transcendent forms of good, beauty and truth invisible to those of us
stuck in the caves of our mundane lives. Socrates, when describing love,
mentions feeling the tickle of feathers beneath his skin, indicating the
re-growth of the wings that will allow the lover to ride the warm currents
of love and rise above daily life. In these worlds we move beyond the
limits that define daily life, and we open up to experiences that transcend
those limits. These worlds are Whitehead’s worlds of importance. They are
not oriented to pragmatic matters of fact, but to an aim at the big picture
of what really matters to us. They are not about the natural attitude, but
about vital subjectivity (Stenner 2017).
I identified a number of limits to Schutz’s theory, including the curious
fact that none of Schutz’s examples are in fact shock experiences and that
actual shock experiences are lacking from his account. The shock, I sug-
gested, is elsewhere. I pursued this issue further by way of the concept of
liminality. The concept of the liminal—first articulated by van Gennep—
‘saves’ Schutz’s insights, whilst substantially expanding their scope. Van
Gennep’s concept of rites of passage—and his attention to rituals more
generally—provides us with a key for understanding the liminal nature of
each one of Schutz’s ‘finite worlds’. This is first of all because, as cultural
practices, rituals serve to punctuate, as it were, the social fabric of every-
day life. Rites of passage in particular are enacted at the ‘joints’ between
the different spheres of practice that comprise everyday life. In forcing us
to hesitate, they facilitate passage across such joints.
190  P. Stenner

But if the ‘joints’ of a social order are the site of the emergence of
cultural forms like ritual, this already expresses a sense of the importance
of such occasions. Human culture is not just a matter of achieving pas-
sage across thresholds, but of retaining a sense of the importance of what
is experienced in such passages. In circumstances where passages or tran-
sitions are considered sacred, rituals serve to stage or ceremonialize the
passage, and thus to import its importance into the realm of human
culture. But what is brought into the realm of human culture in this
way, can be thought of as something that comes from ‘beyond’ and
which transcends the routine symbolism of that culture. This implies a
different sense in which a liminal experience exceeds the limits of the
natural attitude of mundane daily life. If the limits of everyday life create
a ‘finite province of meaning’, then a breach of those limits affords an
experience which not only punctuates, but also punctures that finite
province, giving an experiential glimpse of something comparatively
unlimited and infinite.11 This glimpse of the infinite (or at least of some-
thing beyond the normal ‘finite’ limits of daily life) contributes to inspir-
ing the idea of the sacred, and the related idea of the aesthetic which
flows from it, and of the ludic, which infuses it. Ritual does not just
respond to and contain this idea of the sacred, it also keeps it alive as a
living symbol, preserving, communicating and sanctifying it. In this
respect, ritual can be considered as perhaps the original liminal affective
technology, and as the matrix from which the other media and devices
(such as theatre, painting, music and dance) have emerged or individu-
ated through historical time.
Schutz ‘worlds’ of dream,12 play, theatre, painting, humour and reli-
gion thus do indeed share something vitally important in common, and
are decisively significant to psychosocial theory. The key to understand-
ing what they share, however, is their status as liminal experiences situ-
ated ‘betwixt and between’ the various different praxiological worlds of
everyday life. Due to the very nature of passage, each of these phenomena
is characterized by a distinctive wavering between two worlds. This gives
these liminal ‘worlds’ a distinctively doubled character. They are worlds-­
within-­worlds precisely because they are worlds-between-worlds. If you
will excuse some horrible neologisms, we might say that their double-­
worldedness (as worlds within worlds) is a function of their trans-­
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    191

worldedness (as worlds between worlds). They are liminal in that they
come into play—with rhythmic regularity—at the limits of everyday
worlds of pragmatic, utilitarian activity. The dangerous/exciting traversal
of these limits is the stuff that dreams are made of. But it is also the stuff
that play, theatre and art are made of, and the stuff that the sacred is made
of. Indeed, as I have suggested, it is the stuff that human culture and
subjectivity is made of.

Notes
1. These distinction diagrams derive from Spencer-Brown’s (1969) mathe-
matical treatise ‘laws of forms’ in which the first principle is the perfor-
mative act: ‘draw a distinction’. The distinction separates an inside from
an outside, and thus marks a difference which can then be indicated. I
have borrowed the technique of using this idea in illustrative diagrams
from Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen.
2. Although Schutz does not mention him, Simmel’s (1918/2015, p. 19)
observations about the concept of world seem directly pertinent to his
account. Simmel notes that to popular consciousness the word ‘world’
implies the sum of all real things and events, whether comprehensible or
not. But actually if we were to apprehend all the contents of the world
bit by bit we would not yet have a ‘world’, since a world must in fact
have a distinctive form through which its innumerable particulars are
apprehended. A ‘world’ with such a form is not just made up of lots of
different contents we have encountered, but also all those contents that
are not accessible to us and that we cannot yet comprehend. When we
know the ‘form’ of a world ‘we are somehow in possession of a formula
that allows even the unknown to attach to the known and to combine
with it into the unity of one world’ (p. 19). A world thus does not con-
tain isolated pieces, because each piece is apprehended as part of a uni-
tary coherence, whether known or unknown. The question then
becomes: what is the definite form that defines the coherence of a given
world, and distinguishes it from another.
3. Jakob von Uexküll (1926) stressed that an animal’s Umwelt (environ-
ment) is not the physical world of the physicist but the world as it is
experienced by a particular organism. It is a specifically biological world.
The biological structure of each organism is tightly fitted to its environ-
192  P. Stenner

ment by way of a system of receptors (by which the organism is affected

by things) and a system of effectors (by which the organism affects things).
Together, these systems combine stimuli and response into a mutually
presupposing functional circle or Funktionskreis. The things that enter
into and are acted upon within the Funktionskreis of a fly are very different
from those that affect and are affected by that of a sea-urchin. This means
that in a fly world we find only ‘fly things’ and in a sea-urchin world only
‘sea-urchin things’, and that the worlds these creatures perceive are differ-
ent worlds. Of course, we human beings can, with the help of science,
observe common physical features between those worlds, but such obser-
vations—if they exist—belong within our Umwelt. Our Umwelt too is
limited by what can enter the circle of our Funktionskreis. In distinguish-
ing the daily life of human beings from something like physical reality,
Schutz was aware that the human world of daily life is an abstraction from
a broader totality just as the sea-urchin’s Umwelt is an abstraction—made
possible by the Funktionskreis of the sea-urchin—from a broader totality.
What is abstracted from the totality by sea-urchins, flies and human
beings is different in each case, and constitutes the worlds of these differ-
ent creatures. Although it might sound a little abstract, the key difference
is precisely that between abstraction and totality.
4. This is not some anthropocentric clarion call for human superiority,
since our heightened capacity for symbolism is a mixed blessing. The
mediation of symbolism leads to a relative dulling of human senses and
responses compared to those of other animals (compare our visual acuity
to that of the eagle, or our sense of smell to that of the dog or our sense
of hearing to that of a cat). Humans are capable of getting lost in imagi-
nary worlds and of losing others in our stories. Indeed it might well be
said that sense of physical reality recedes as symbolism advances. This is
part of the explanation for the enhanced human capacity for brutality.
5. Symbolism adds another layer of abstraction to von Uexküll’s (1926)
notion of the animal Umwelt. The animal Umwelt is an abstraction from
a broader totality in the same sense that a territory can be considered an
abstraction from the broader totality of the earth (I will not go into the
differences between territory and Umwelt here). Out of all that exists on
the broader totality of the earth, a given animal—a dog for instance—
territorializes just one small portion as its unique Umwelt (without for-
getting that dogs are pack animals). That portion abstracted from the
whole is known as the animal’s territory, and a dog will scent-mark its
territory with urine (the urine, however, functions not as a symbol of
  This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    193

territory, but as a signal). But just as the territory is not the earth, so—
when it comes to symbol using human beings—it must be recognized
that the symbolic ‘map’ is not the same as the territory that is symbol-
ized. If the map is not the territory then this is a reminder not to confuse
the symbol with what is symbolized or the name with what is named.
The map is a transformation of territory which codes it into a new sym-
bolic medium whose usefulness is a function precisely of its difference
from the territory itself. The map-qua-symbol is an abstraction from an
Umwelt which in turn is an abstraction afforded by the Funktionskreis of
an animal. The map is not the territory is not the earth.
6. In the language of Husserl’s (1964) phenomenology, dream and imagi-
nation lack the positionality of what he calls ‘thetic consciousness’.
Thetic consciousness is consciousness positioned in relation to what it
takes to be an object, as when Aesop’s dog takes its visual experience as
an edible bone. Husserl describes imagination as non-thetic and as con-
sequently ‘neutral’. A useful metaphor for imagining this is a car in neu-
tral. In waking daily life we must always be in gear, and we must change
up and down through the gears as we adjust to the different realities that
confront us (hills, turns, increasing speed, etc.). In dream and daydream
we are not obliged to drive and we experience the non-thetic conscious-
ness equivalent to a car in neutral. To link this to the terminology already
introduced, in dream and daydream the symbolic gears which link pre-
sentational immediacy to causal efficacy are placed in neutral, and we
enjoy the symbolic reference for its own sake.
7. For functionalist sociologists, social science is always about finding the
social function that social structures of various kinds serve and treating
that function as the explanation for the social structure.
8. To name but a few (cited in van Gennep 1909/1961), Hartland had
noted resemblances between certain marriage rites and initiation rites;
Frazer had compared the similarities between funerals and puberty rites;
Hertz had found resemblances between ceremonies of birth, marriage,
funerals and rites for opening a new house, and so on. In addition, eth-
nographers and folklorists like Bastian and Tylor had shown that amongst
the majority of the world’s peoples, very similar rites are performed for
very similar purposes.
9. Szakolczai (2009) points out that the famous ‘first word’ of Greek phi-
losophy, apeiron, is equivalent to the Latin liminality in referring to in-
between moments when conventional limits are removed.
194  P. Stenner

10. In their social psychological research on the ‘place identity’ associated

with physical boundaries in Northern Ireland, John Dixon and his col-
leagues (Hocking et al. in preparation) have described Alexandra Park in
North Belfast as a ‘liminal space’. Like several other parks and places in
Belfast, this ‘open’ public space nevertheless reflects the ‘divided’ sectar-
ian organization of the wider city (it is ‘both’ public and open ‘and’
divided and sectarian), with Catholic and Protestant residents using dif-
ferent access points, and avoiding certain zones. It is easy to understand
how a stroll through this park might be experienced as an unstable and
potentially disconcerting ‘wavering between worlds’.
11. Like the liminal world of dreams, the liminal world of play punctuates
and punctures daily life, although its borders are far more fluid and
porous. Play, like dreams, is thus distinct from the natural attitude that
Schutz associates with daily life, but it weaves its importance into utili-
tarian matters of fact. Play can be thought of as providing ‘a source for
the creation of new worlds of meaning beyond the everyday world’
(Voegelin 1974, p. 311).
12. Dreams, for instance, are liminal with respect to waking life in the obvi-
ous sense that the processual stream of our waking life is punctuated by
sleep. The dream is thus a modification of waking consciousness, and
presupposes it. But these punctuation points are also points at which our
everyday life is, as it were, punctured and hence exposed to a mode of
experience that transcends our usual consciousness. These points of
exposure can be thought of as portals which permit some degree of com-
munication between the dream world and daily life despite, as it were,
the autonomy and self-referentiality of the dream world. This communi-
cation is two-way. To some degree, there is passage from daily events to
dream, and passage from dream to daily events. As psychologists like
Freud and Jung insisted, the portal permitting this two-way passage is
necessarily obscure. We can wake up after a dream with a profound sense
of the singular and vital importance of what we just dreamed, and yet
within moments that sense of importance tends to drain away, sup-
planted by the mode of consciousness proper to the practical tasks of the
day. Nevertheless, there is passage between worlds, and this passage per-
mits a kind of weaving between the ‘importance’ registered in the dream
experience, and the practical ‘matter of fact’ experience of daily waking
life. Through being woven into waking experience, the dream can remain
in the background, tinging our actions and the way we interpret events
with a tacit importance.
   This Is Not … a Shock: On the Passage Between Multiple Worlds    195

References
Akerstrom Anderson, N., & Pors, J. (2016). Public management in transition:
The orchestration of potentiality. Bristol: Policy Press.
Bateson, G. (1972/2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Berger, J., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Cassirer, E. (1944). An essay on man. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Douglas, M. (1975). Implicit meanings: Selected essays in anthropology. London:
Routledge.
Frazer, J. (1890/1955). The golden bough: A study in magic and religion. London:
Macmillan.
Freud, S. (1908/1959). Creative writers and day-dreaming. In J. Strachey (Ed.),
The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol.
9, pp. 143–144, 146–153). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1913/1965). The interpretation of dreams. New York: Avon Books.
Greco, M., & Stenner, P. (2017). From paradox to pattern shift: Conceptualising
liminal hotspots and their affective dynamics. Theory and Psychology, 27(2),
147–166.
Hocking, B. T., Sturgeon, B., Jarman, N., Dominic, B., Dixon, J., Whyatt, D.,
Huck, J., & Davies, G. (in preparation). Place-identity and policy: Sharing
leisure spaces in the post-conflict city.
Holzkamp, K. (2013). In E. Schraube & U. Osterkamp (Eds.), Psychology from
the standpoint of the subject: Selected writings of Klaus Holzkamp. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Huizinga, J. (1938/1955). Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Husserl, E. (1964). The idea of phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
James, W. (1889/2005). The psychology of belief. In J. M. Capps & D. Capps
(Eds.), James and Dewey on belief and experience. Illinois: The University of
Illinois.
James, W. (1890/1950). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Dover.
Proust, M. (2000). In search of lost time, vol V. The fugitive. London: Vintage.
Pryor, F. (2004). Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans. Bury
St Edmunds: Harper Perennial.
Rozik, E. (2002). The roots of theatre: Rethinking ritual and other theories of ori-
gin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
196  P. Stenner

Schütz, A. (1945). On multiple realities. Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research, 5(4), 533–576.
Simmel, G. (1918/2015). The view of life: Four metaphysical essays with journal
aphorisms. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Smith, W.  R. (1889/1927). Lectures on the religion of the Semites. New  York:
Macmillan.
Spencer Brown, G. (1969). Law of form. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Stenner, P. (2017). Being in the zone and vital subjectivity: On the liminal
sources of sport and art. In T. Jordan, K. Woodward & B. McClure (Eds.),
Culture, identity and intense performativity: Being in the Zone (Antinomies).
London: Routledge.
Szakolczai, Á. (2009). Liminality and experience: Structuring transitory situa-
tions and transformative events. International Political Anthropology, 2(1),
141–172.
Thomassen, B. (2009). The uses and meanings of liminality. International
Political Anthropology, 2(1), 5–27.
Thomassen, B. (2014). Liminality and the modern. Farnham/Burlington:
Ashgate.
Turner, V. W. (1977). Process, system, and symbol: A new anthropological syn-
thesis. Daedalus, 106(3), 61–80.
van Gennep, A. (1909/1961). The rites of passage. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Voegelin, E. (1974). Order and history. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Von Uexküll, J. (1926). Theoretical biology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Whitehead, A.  N. (1927/1985). Symbolism: Its meaning and effect. Virginia:
University of Virginia Press.
 6
This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling
Between Ontology and Anthropology

Introduction
What is affect? Or, put differently, what is not affect? For the last 20 years
or so, this question has preoccupied researchers from many disciplines
spanning the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. For
some—particularly in the humanities—this preoccupation is so signifi-
cant that it has been called a ‘turn to affect’. Gregory Seigworth, one of
the prominent advocates of this affective turn, describes how he was
inspired to pursue an interest in affect by the following sentences from
Marcus:

not just institutions but moments—moments of love, poetry, justice, resig-

nation, hate, desire—… within the mysterious but actual realm of everyday
life (not one’s job, but one’s life as a commuter to one’s job, or in one’s life
as a daydreamer during the commute) these moments were at once all pow-
erful and powerless. (Marcus, cited in Seigworth and Gregg 2010, p. 20)

Like much of the literature of the affective turn, this quotation is vague
yet suggestively profound. Institutions are contrasted with moments,
jobs with commuting, commuting with daydreams, and all the while

© The Author(s) 2017 197

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_6
198  P. Stenner

priority is given to the mysterious and ambivalent (powerful yet power-

less) stuff that dreams—(love, poetry, etc.)—are made of. It gives priority
to ‘aesthetics’ in its broadest sense, as feeling and sensibility, but in so
doing it rejects the more familiar, static understandings of aesthetics, and
escapes sense again. This is not my beautiful house.
In this chapter I offer a critical reading of the ‘affective turn’ as an intel-
lectual development premised on a rejection of the onto-epistemological
primacy of ‘discourse’ in psychosocial research. I propose that a key prob-
lem with the otherwise insightful positions of those who reject the pri-
macy of discourse is a tendency to bifurcate affect and discourse into the
two poles of an irreconcilable difference, when the real challenge is to
weave and integrate what is associated with ‘affect’ into what is associated
with ‘discourse’ (Greco and Stenner 2008; Leys 2012; Wetherell 2012;
Cromby 2015). Beyond this shared anti-discursive premise, the affective
turn is a hybrid affair influenced by a range of different traditions, each
operating with a rather different account of ‘affect’. Once this plurality is
acknowledged, it becomes less sustainable to insist on the firm distinction
between ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ that characterizes much of the literature of
the affective turn. As a result, it becomes easier to tease apart a number of
different intellectual tasks and conceptual stakes that are raised by the
turn to affect, even if this challenges the ‘affective turn’ as such, which can
no longer turn on the distinction between affect and emotion. Based on
this analysis, and on the concepts introduced in the course of this book
as a whole, the chapter develops an account of affect and emotion centred
on the onto-epistemological relevance of experiences of liminality.

‘Not Just Institutions But Moments’:

Contrasting Actualized Forms and Forms
in the Process of Actualization
How are we to make sense of the contrast Marcus draws, in the quotation
above, between ‘institutions’ and ‘moments’—and what can that contrast
really tell us about ‘affect’? We can begin to address this question through
what Raymond Williams (1977) called structures of feeling. Despite the
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    199

somewhat misleading use of the word ‘structure’ (which can be re-thought

as a form of process), ‘structures of feeling’ is a processual concept in that
it is based upon a distinction between the fixed forms or finished products
of a culture, and processes that are in the making. A simple example of
this could be provided by any action. An action can be viewed as an ongo-
ing process (actio) or as a performed act, which has been done (actum) (see
Schutz 1945, p. 537). Once we have uttered ‘good morning’, for instance,
it is an actum that has been actualized. It happened just as it happened
(which is certainly not to say that it cannot be re-interpreted, that is a dif-
ferent question). In the process of uttering it, by contrast, its potential has
not yet been fully actualized and hence it could take different directions
in its becoming (the ‘good morning’ could have morphed into a com-
plaint, for instance). The actum is in the past, the actio is in the living
present. But as Williams (1977, p. 128) observes, the ‘living presence is
always receding’. With the flow of time, the open potentiality of the pres-
ent can appear to escape us because it is moving ever forward, and what is
left behind is converted into the formed wholes of so many finished prod-
ucts. Much like Schutz, Williams is keenly aware that the perspective of
the actio is always that of those living through it in the now. When I live
through an act in process I am proximally aware of the state of affairs my
actions are bringing about. Williams (1977, p. 130) calls this ‘practical
consciousness’ and distinguishes it from thought about practice. This
means that, as an actor, I do not proximally observe my experiences of this
process I am living through, although I certainly ‘have’ these experiences.
To observe them I have to turn-around upon my experience, and reflect
back upon it as an actum. When provoked to stop and think in this way,
it is no longer my ongoing acting (actio) that I prehend, but my action
that is now in the past, and actualized. I step out of time, as it were. Or
rather, the past becomes my present in that my vivid present now con-
cerns itself with my own experience from the past. The reader should
recall that this style of thought—where experience experiences experi-
ence—was introduced under the title of ‘deep empiricism’ in Chap. 4.
The problem, according to Williams (1977, p.  128), is that most
descriptions of human social and cultural activity concern themselves
only with the formed wholes of the past, and not with the ‘forming and
formative processes’. In fact, for Williams what is dominant in culture is
200  P. Stenner

always about seizing ‘the ruling definition of the social’: a definition that
always takes the form of a fixed whole. For him, it is above all ‘this seizure
that has especially to be resisted’. His concept of ‘structures of feeling’
(which he also calls ‘structures of experience’) is designed to orient us
instead to the forming and formative processes. The use of the term ‘feel-
ing’ does not imply a purified and exclusive concern with affect (a con-
cept of affect as distinct from thought, for instance, would be a good
example of a finished form that is the product of reflection), but points
rather to the inclusive nature of the experience in question: ‘practical
consciousness is what is actually being lived, and not only what it is
thought is being lived’ (Williams 1977, p.  131). But Williams issues
another important warning that psychosocial researchers interested in
affect would be wise to heed. The ‘structures of feeling’ concept does not
differentiate and bifurcate a social dimension from a psychological
dimension. In fact, Williams (1977, p. 130) plainly and correctly assumes,
not just that ‘practical consciousness is always more than a handling of
fixed forms and units’, but also that ‘all consciousness is social, its pro-
cesses occur not only between but within the relationship and the related’.
If the concept has value, it is because it refuses to allocate ‘feeling’ to
individual psychology (or some other silo), but insists that a structure of
feeling ‘is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and mate-
rial, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate
and define exchange’ (p. 131).
Starting with this psycho/social feeling/thought unity, Williams (1977,
p. 128) warns that it is precisely here (with ‘structure of feeling’ as a form
of process and not a fixed form) that we gain insight into the cultural
mode of separating ‘the social from the personal’. He identifies this sepa-
ration with the power of the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘psychological’ as two
great modern ideological systems. If the dominant definition of the social
is a definition based on an always already formed object or fixed product
from the past, then there is a tendency to consign all that is present, vivid
and in-process to the psychological domain of the merely subjective. If
‘the social is the fixed and explicit—the known relationships, institutions,
formations, positions—all that is present and moving, all that escapes or
seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and the known, is grasped
and defined as the personal: this, here, now, alive, active, “subjective”’
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    201

(Williams 1977, p. 128). The undeniable experience of the vivid present

is in this way displaced and captured in abstractions ‘like “human imagi-
nation”, the “human psyche” and the “unconscious”, with their “func-
tions” in art and in myth and in dream’ (p. 130). Something very similar
can be said about the relationship between thought and feeling:

As thought is described, in the same habitual past tense, it is indeed so dif-

ferent, in its explicit and finished forms, from much, or even anything that
we can presently recognize as thinking, that we set against it more active,
more flexible, less singular terms—consciousness, experience, feeling—and
then watch even these drawn towards fixed, finite, receding forms.
(pp. 128–129)

In short, the structure of feeling concept is designed to refuse and sub-

vert the ideological tendency to separate the individual from society, and
the affective from the rational: the feelings at issue are inextricably social
and are part of a unity of experience-in-process that opens up to thought—
‘not feeling against thought, but thought as feeling and feeling as thought:
practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating
community’ (Williams 1977, p. 130).
This generative contrast between formed wholes and forming or for-
mative processes puts the emphasis upon psychosocial order as a self-­
organizing emergent rather than something that is created thanks to
some ‘trans-experiential agent of unification’ (James 1912/2003, p. 23).
This emphasis on emergence gives value to a phase betwixt and between
fixed forms that have already emerged (reified as objectivity and reason)
and the chaos of formlessness (reified ideologically as subjectivity and
affect), and ‘structures of feeling’ occupy this liminal zone. Williams
(1977, p. 133) puts this quite vividly through a metaphor of crystalliza-
tion: ‘structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution,
as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been pre-
cipitated and are evidently more immediately available’. Semantic forma-
tions that have precipitated are those which have acquired a sufficient
degree of symbolization such that they can be, or have been, discursively
articulated. They are part of ‘official consciousness’ and they function in
the discursive practice of social systems. But before such experience can
202  P. Stenner

become ‘fully articulate’ (such that it admits of and can define the forms
of social exchange that constitute social systems) it must pass through the
‘embryonic phase’ that Williams identifies as a ‘structure of feeling’. From
the perspective of those practical modes of consciousness that compose a
form of process that has already precipitated, these structures-of-feeling-­
in-process-of-formation are necessarily ‘at the very edge of semantic avail-
ability’ (Williams 1977, p. 134). New structures of feeling are necessary,
however, to the extent that ‘official consciousness’ fails to express certain
experiences, often—but not exclusively—experiences of those who are
marginalized and oppressed. These ‘experiences in solution’ are social in
nature (i.e. they have a structure and are not pure personal idiosyncrasies)
although the collective that experiences them as part of its incipient prac-
tical consciousness may not yet recognize itself as a collective. This poten-
tial absence of discursive reflection, however, does not prevent a ‘structure
of feeling’ from exerting pressures which limit and lend order to the
shared ongoing experience of the vivid present.
Methodologically, Williams used the ‘structure of feeling’ concept to
guide his analysis of significant but subtle socio-cultural transformations.
He was interested in defining ‘a particular quality of social experience and
relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which
gives the sense of a generation of a period’ (p. 131). But he wanted to
resist the standard social science technique (which he called an ‘epochal
analysis’) of trying to explain such transformations as ‘epiphenomena of
changed institutions, formations, and beliefs, or effects of changed class
relations’ (p. 128). An epochal analysis suffers from being a ‘top down’
explanation that relies on the very social categories Williams has argued
to be abstracted generalities based on finished social forms. For Williams,
these finished forms do not provide explanations, but themselves require
to be explained. The abstract can never explain the concrete, but is to be
explained by way of it.
Let me now return to the quotation from Marcus with which we
started. I am suggesting that what inspires a turn towards affect in this
contrast between ‘institutions’ and ‘moments’ is precisely this processual
contrast between actualized forms and forms in process of actualization,
forms whose social experience remains liminal and ‘in solution’. If these
moments are ‘at once all powerful and powerless’, this is because they are
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    203

occasions for the precarious emergence of novel forms. If they are ‘myste-
rious’, this is because—as social experience in liquid solution—they are
on the edge of semantic availability. If they are about the movement asso-
ciated with a ‘commute’, this is because they are about the experience of
passage from one form to another. If they are associated with the emo-
tions of love, resignation, hate and desire, this is because the experiences
in question are lived experiences—singular and vital—of the transforma-
tion of forms of process. If they are associated with ‘poetry’ and ‘day-
dreaming’, this is because the birth of these experiences is enabled and
enacted through the mediation of liminal affective technologies which
serve as their mid-wives.
But as well as encouraging this five-fold inspiration, I am also high-
lighting a five-fold danger at play in the turn to affect: the danger of iso-
lating ‘affect’ from other modes of experience as if it were a pristine state
of primitive unqualified autonomy (as when affect is starkly distinguished
from emotion or discourse, see e.g. Clough 2010); the danger of separat-
ing all that is fixed and explicit from all that is in vivid, living process, and
of sequestering and sacralizing it into a series of mysterious moments that
remain forever virtual (Massumi 1995); the danger of concealing one
more variant of the personal/subjective under the paradoxical label of the
asubjective (Thrift 2004); the danger of ‘othering’ notions of stability and
form and advocating an existence of permanent commuting, having
deconstructed all structures from which to depart or arrive; the danger of
daydreaming whilst—amidst the shimmer of greenhouse gases—the
planet burns. These inspirations can be followed, and the dangers avoided,
if we can rethink affect as referring to a range of liminal phenomena
tightly connected to vectors of transition, always in concrete historical
settings involving multi-layered flows of embodied interaction.

Turning from Discourse to Affect

The so-called turn to affect, as implied above, is not just a fascination
with a new subject matter (‘affect’), but a much broader mutation in
knowledge practices. Couze Venn goes as far as to describe it as ‘a new
204  P. Stenner

understanding of human being and a new politics of the living’ (Venn

2010, p. 159). Gibbs (2010, p. 188) describes it even more grandly as
‘the overarching project of rethinking the human in the wake of a sus-
tained critique of Western rationality’. This is indeed so, and it follows
that these issues cannot be re-solved simply by providing a more adequate
description of an empirical referent corresponding to something like
‘affect’ or ‘emotion’. Using Williams’s concept, we can view this ‘rethink-
ing’ as indeed a question of a new cultural emergence that remains, despite
much ink having been spilled, at the edge of ‘semantic availability’. In my
view the emergent new understanding is taking the form of the species of
transdisciplinary process thought that has been the concern of this book,
and within which context affectivity takes on a new and crucial theoreti-
cal significance. Its slow emergence, consistent with Williams’s perspec-
tive, embodies ‘a particular quality of social experience and relationship,
historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense
of a generation of a period’ (Williams 1977, p. 131). The turn to affect,
in short, can itself be analysed in terms of a certain kind of ‘structure of
feeling’, whose emergence can be traced through a longer history.
Informed by the ‘structure of feeling’ concept, I am offering something
of an affective reading of the turn to affect. Even though I am critical of
it, I do not wish to disparage the uptake of the concept of affect as a mere
intellectual fad or fashion (see also Wetherell 2012). I have no problem
with the fact that a new term or terminology might grab collective atten-
tion for a while with its exciting promise of a new paradigm. As Susan
Langer wrote nearly 80 years ago, the ‘sudden vogue of … a key-idea is
due to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploit-
ing it; we try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with
possible stretches of its strict meaning … when we become familiar with
the new idea our expectations do not outrun its actual uses quite so far,
and then its unbalanced popularity is over’ (Langer 1942/1978, p. 23).
Instead of championing ‘affect’ at the expense of ‘emotion’ or ‘discourse’,
here I wish to help with the process of settling down into addressing the
problems that a concept of affect really does raise for knowledge across
the disciplines.
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    205

The Textual Turn as a Protest on Behalf of Process

Part of the difficulty is that the term affect has served in recent years as the
keystone for the edifice of this entire movement or turn. In this respect,
the term affect functions a little like the term ‘discourse’ did, or does,
amongst advocates of the discursive or textual turn that preceded the
affective turn. The term discourse, for instance, came to serve as code for
a different way of doing social science that starts from the premise that
reality is socially constructed through discursive practices. Reality, the
story went, is not just described by our talk and text: discourse is the
primary medium through which it is performatively enacted, decon-
structed and reconstructed. This meant that the word discourse came to
carry the burden of an entire world-view-in-formation and even a com-
mitment to group membership (a symbolic badge of membership for
those who belong to the constructionist or post-structuralist commu-
nity). The notion of discourse also had the advantage of an empirical
referent providing the basis for a new methodology: discourse analysis.
The constructionist social scientist knows that they must collect and anal-
yse discourse. The ‘other’ social scientist, superseded by the discourse ana-
lyst, is the essentialist who believes reality to be natural, singular and out
there to be described—using objective and rational positivistic meth-
ods—once and for all. The discourse analyst questions this ‘reality’ in the
progressive name of opening up the possibility of constructing a differ-
ent, and hopefully better reality.
The textual turn made an important move towards affirming the pro-
cessual nature of embodied human psychosocial life, stressing how our
shared and symbolically mediated realities are performatively constructed
in streams of ongoing materially situated interaction. This work included
a significant rethinking of affectivity, based upon reloading it with the
symbolism that a mechanistic naturalism had stripped from it (assuming
affect to be bestial, primitive and otherwise ‘lowly’). Monica Greco and I
(2008), for example, noted an explosion of broadly social constructionist
or post-structuralist work on questions of feeling, sentiment, emotion,
affect, passion and mood (what we called ‘affective life’). Feminism was a
significant influence here, since feminists were amongst the first to point
206  P. Stenner

out the masculinist bias at play in the old Platonic, Augustinian, Cartesian
and Kantian dogma whereby reason must assert itself as (transcendent)
‘master’ over the (natural) passions and sentiments (e.g. Merchant 1980;
Crawford et al. 1992; Hemmings 2005). We observed that:

the resurgence of … interest in the emotions among social scientists is

closely associated with the textual turn. It was first in that context that
affective life became the site of an intellectual battleground of sorts.
Emotions became the object of a tug-of-war in which social scientists influ-
enced by the textual turn struggled to drag them across the line separating
the psycho-biological from the socio-cultural. Prior to this struggle, affec-
tive life had fallen squarely within the territory claimed by the natural sci-
ences. For the most part, social scientists who wished to tackle the emotions
had been obliged to deal with more peripheral issues, such as the social
shaping of the expression of emotions. The implicit understanding was that
emotions, at root, were psychobiological, ‘natural’ objects. (Greco and
Stenner 2008, p. 6)

The textual turn was indeed a veritable transdisciplinary shift in our

knowledge formations, and it particularly affected the social sciences
which had long been dominated by an inadequate ontology and method-
ology borrowed largely from the natural sciences. But its limitations are
now equally clear. Despite its proudly proclaimed deconstruction of dual-
isms, its limits were set through an implicit bifurcation between nature
and culture. Whatever the merits, it is clearly problematic to imagine that
the nature/culture distinction can ever be ‘deconstructed’ by way of an
insistence that nature is only knowable to us insofar as it is socially con-
structed as a part of our (patriarchal, capitalistic, Eurocentric) culture.
Whilst this argument is in one sense obviously pertinent and vital (since
we’ve got to use words if we are to speak, and ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are
good examples of words), it privileges, when crudely handled, the cultural
side of the distinction whilst leaving nature as such forever unspeakable
(see Edwards 2006). It remains for the social constructionist to talk end-
lessly about the manifold uses to which the word ‘nature’ (or ‘emotion’ or
whatever other piece of discourse) can be, and has been, put in various
and endless scenes of language, shaped by the various and endless power
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    207

games of social actors as part of their various and endless socially con-
structed institutions. This is not to deny that if one examines people’s talk
about emotions in painstaking detail one finds it to be ‘rich and various’
and ‘marvelously useful in working up descriptions … and in handling
accountability’ (Edwards 1999, pp. 272–273). This kind of analysis is all
very well—indeed it was admirable in an historical context where most of
psychology studiously excluded everyday discourse as methodological
noise (Stenner 2015)—but meanwhile, the windows and doors tend to
get shut to whatever is not discourse. It is no accident that this pendulum
swing would produce a counter swing (again, with feminist scholars play-
ing a key role, see e.g. Grosz 1994; Gatens 1996; Sehgal 2014) in the
direction of giving centre stage precisely to the unspeakable otherness-to-
discourse that can be discerned by many in the word affect (but also in
concepts like the body, practice and ontology).

The Affective Turn and Its Three Main Strands

The literature of the affective turn is largely predicated upon a rejection

of the onto-epistemological primacy of discourse. I am proposing instead
that it constitutes a similar protest on behalf of process, albeit a more
explicit one in this sense. As such, the turn to affect should be seen as a
continuation and intensification of the project implicit in the discursive
turn. Like the term discourse, the term affect does not function within
the affective turn simply to designate some empirically describable reality.
Rather, it carries the excitement of a thrilling new breakthrough in
thought. It thus functions also as a symbol which captures the new
insight, and which designates a difference in approach: a difference in
mode of thought and feeling of the new collective, and even a different
form of power and mode of governance. This symbolic and collective
function can make the meaning of the word affect appear very vague and
woolly indeed, as if something important might be lost were too much
clarity to intrude. Furthermore, as with the rejection of positivism in the
name of discourse, the rejection of discourse in the name of affect is usu-
ally also enacted in the progressive name of opening up the possibility of
a different reality, albeit an un-nameable virtual reality that forever escapes
208  P. Stenner

us. Instead of being cast out as ‘other’ to culture, nature—in this

account—is re-construed as the vital source of creativity and the very
‘becoming of culture’ (Massumi 2002, p. 12). However, unlike discourse,
affect is not something we can collect, transcribe and analyse, and that is
the point. It does not take an objective or public form that gives us the
impression that we have it in front of us, like readable words on a page or
recordable sounds in the air. Whatever affect is, it is not an ‘it’ that can be
designated by a ‘this’. Whatever this is, it is not affect, since affect has
already moved on and changed form. The affective turn stands up for this
gesture of escape, and—in the name of affect—protects what escapes
from being captured and frozen in discourse.
Affect, to quote Brown and Tucker (2010, p.  238), is ‘in essence
beyond ordinary experience’. In this notion of affect as a pre-personal and
virtual force or capacity that precedes and exceeds, consciousness we
should also hear Williams’s point about experience beyond ‘official con-
sciousness’ and at the liminal ‘edge of semantic availability’. To press this
experience into a form we can be conscious of, and talk about, is, for
some, to spoil its whispered promise of freedom, and its faint scent of
possibilities undreamed. The affective turn stands up for those un-named
and un-nameable possibilities that must forever remain virtual. Affect is
not … yet. Not quite.
The affective turn is not a singular movement, but the rejection of the
textual turn in the name of affect is announced loud and clear in each of
its distinct strands. Here I note just three of the prominent strands that
became evident to me in the 1990s. One influential strand comes from
the queer theory and cultural studies advocated by Eve Sedgwick, and a
key publication was Sedgwick and Frank (1995). Entitled Shame in the
cybernetic fold, this article begins with a scathing attack on the limitations
of critical discursive theory and proceeds to celebrate the theory of affect
proposed by the US psychologist Silvan Tomkins.1
A second important strand of influence was the resurgence of interest
in psychoanalytical thought and its application to sociological issues,
sometimes called psychosocial studies (e.g. Elliott and Frosh 1995). This
psychosocial tradition draws upon a long tradition of psychodynamic
theory about affect (Green 1977). It has always had an ambivalent rela-
tion to the discursive turn because in part it represented the absorption of
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    209

social constructionist and post-structuralist ideas into psychoanalytic

thought, and in part it presented a critique of these ideas (Hollway and
Jefferson 2000). The rejection of the textual turn is nowhere more clear
than in Ian Craib’s (1997) description of the social constructionism asso-
ciated with the discursive turn as a mass manic psychosis.2
A third (and perhaps the most widespread) strand was heavily influ-
enced by Brian Massumi’s highly creative use of Deleuze’s philosophy to
champion affect for its autonomy from discourse. Massumi (2002, p. 4)
describes his project as an effort to ‘part company with the linguistic
model at the basis of the most widespread concepts of coding’, and he is
scathing about discursive approaches (see the bristling response from the
discourse analyst Margaret Wetherell 2012, Chap. 3). Particularly influ-
ential was his 1995 article The autonomy of affect. By the autonomy of
affect Massumi means its openness and hence its potential for novelty
and disruption. Using one of Bergson’s favourite distinctions, affect is
something virtual as distinct from something actual. This distinction is
quite abstract, but in essence very simple: the virtual is an undifferenti-
ated potential whose openness is necessarily closed down as soon as it is
actualized as some concrete occurrence or entity. If an occasion of actual-
ity effects a reduction in the complexity of what is possible, then one can
think of those discarded possibilities as existing in a virtual manner (as
real but unactualized possibilities). The actual is thus always a limitation
or reduction or subtraction with respect to the buzzing possibilities of the
virtual which, as it were, hover around any given actual. Affect construed
thus as virtuality, by definition ‘escapes confinement’ (Massumi 1995,
p. 228), and here again we find a resonance with Williams’s notion of a
fleeting living presence (still entertaining the possibilities of the virtual)
which always escapes its actualization in a concrete actum. On this basis,
Massumi insisted that affect and emotion belong to distinct registers
which must not be confused, the former being an open, autonomous,
virtual ‘intensity’ which escapes the confinements of structured, con-
scious meaning that, for him, characterizes the latter.3 Through this con-
cept of affect as virtuality (sometimes rendered as ‘intensity’), the realm
of the ‘this is not’ (the not quite, not yet and no longer) is celebrated as
the liminal zone of real becoming. It symbolizes the ‘virtual as cresting in
a liminal realm of emergence’ (Massumi 1995, p. 92).
210  P. Stenner

Massumi also gives affect a distinctively political relevance, arguing

that it ‘holds a key to rethinking postmodern power after ideology’. In his
1995 article he discusses former US President Ronald Reagan’s political
appeal in terms of his transmission of affective potentials that were circu-
lated by mass media and then actualized as qualified contents by those at
the receiving end. In this way, Massumi (p.  102) argues—or rather
asserts—that Reagan was able to ‘produce ideological [i.e. discursive]
effects by non-ideological [i.e. affective] means’. Reagan’s mesmeric voice,
for instance, can be thought of as transmitting affective potentials that
many TV viewers actualized as an emotion of confidence. The suggestion
is that Reagan’s political appeal was less about the content of his policies
and the meaning of his statements, and more about the affective atmo-
sphere he was able to generate within a mediatized system. In the era of
Donald Trump, these kinds of arguments about the relative irrelevance of
discursive content surely take on a new pertinence. In developing this
aspect of his philosophy, Massumi once again follows Deleuze (2007),
loosely perhaps, who famously proposed that the disciplinary power that
Foucault had identified with the modern period (for Foucault, the disci-
plinary society took over from societies of sovereignty around the time of
Napoleon) was supplanted in the mid- to late twentieth century by soci-
eties whose main principle of power was ‘control’. Disciplinary power
works by stabilizing collective liminal personae by way of modes of regi-
mentation within institutional enclosures. Crudely, it captures ‘affect’ in
‘discourse’. Control, by contrast, relies upon a more subtle modulation of
affect, supplementing these closed systems with open-ended, free-­
floating, networked and ultra-rapid modes of control (particularly, but
not exclusively, those afforded by digital technology and media, with the
paradigm being the stock exchange). Where discipline barks discursively
organized orders to a massified and passified cohort of inmates (where
individuals are allocated distinct positions in the contained mass), con-
trol continually modulates and stimulates the affect of ‘dividuals’ (who at
the last resort are data points in data banks), suspending those controlled
into a perpetual metastability of liminal potentiality.
Each of these three strands thus shares a conviction that a concern with
affect might overcome the limitations of approaches oriented solely to
discursive meaning (sometimes referred to as ‘discursive imperialism’).
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    211

Advocates of the affective turn thus typically hope to supersede the dis-
cursive turn. Perhaps the dominant theme—and that picked up by the
most prominent advocates of a turn to affect—has been the idea that
affect is radically distinct from emotions (construed as ‘personal’). For
Seigworth and Gregg (2010, p. 1), for example, affect implies ‘vital forces
beyond emotion’ because emotion is considered too structural a concept:
too close to the work of institutions and ideology. When Patricia Clough
(2010, p. 223) synthesizes some of the influences noted above, to give
another example, she contrasts affect (which is bodily, unconscious, vir-
tual and pre-personal and, effectively, all things ‘good’) with emotion
(which is consciously mindful and discursive, and associated with all
things ‘bad’), and she boasts of ‘toppling … semiotic chains of significa-
tion and identity and linguistic-based structures of meaning making’
from their ‘privileged position’.4 This ‘affect is not emotion’ gesture has
become almost synonymous with affect theory. But it is problematic.

Questioning the Affect/Emotion Distinction

I have stressed the importance of acknowledging that the affective turn
does indeed respond to an important limitation faced by some adherents
to the textual turn. Whilst making important steps towards addressing
the processual nature of reality, the textual turn can also limit itself to
purely discursive processes and hence serve as an obstacle to the form of
transdisciplinarity that this book aims to foster (cf. Wetherell 2012). If
the affective turn is to avoid being regressive, however, it must not sacral-
ize ‘affect’ as if it were the foundation stone rejected by the builders of the
discursive turn, and it must integrate—not polarize—accounts of affec-
tive and discursive processes and practices. In my view, the currently
popular affect/emotion distinction indeed serves to sacralize affect.
I turn first to Massumi’s work because it is an important source of the
sharp distinction between affect and emotion that now characterizes
much of the literature of the affective turn. As I have stated, a valuable
part of his work is its insistence upon the virtual/actual distinction, but
he over-extends this into an affect/emotion distinction.5 In what follows
I will identify and disambiguate several rather different concepts of
212  P. Stenner

affect—or perhaps components of a broader concept of affect—at play in

Massumi’s work and within the affective turn more generally. Once we
have disambiguated and collected them, we can be more precise about
what we are talking about. Massumi, for all his evident brilliance and
charisma, is inconsistent with his terminology, which he self-consciously
changes in different sections (see Massumi 2002).

Affect as Virtual

For example, at one point Massumi insists that one of his ‘clearest lessons
… is that emotion and affect … follow different logics and pertain to
different orders’ (1995, p. 88). Within this concept, affect is identified
with virtuality and emotion with actuality. We can call this first concept:
affect as virtuality. As already discussed, the virtual is that which exceeds
and escapes actualization, but remains, as it were, in a ‘this is not’
form  (never conscious). In one sense it is, to use Whitehead’s phrase,
either ‘negatively prehended’ during an actual occasion of experience, or
prehended only as a vague ‘fringe’ or penumbra.6 Based on this distinc-
tion it is easy to contrast affect with emotion, since affect is precisely what
is not felt during, and by, an occasion of experience whilst emotion would
be something that is felt. Just as every light needs some darkness to shine
in, so a penumbra of excluded ‘affect’ would attend every experience. As
discussed in Chap. 3, by using the phrase ‘what is felt’, I do not imply
conscious feeling. But it is clear that in this definition affect can neither
be felt nor consciously felt. What is less clear is why this concept (a pure
intensity existing in a state of pristine autonomy) should be called ‘affect’
(and not simply ‘the virtual’).

Affect as Two-Sided Liminal Vector (‘Feeling’)

In another section, by contrast, Massumi gives the following definition:

What is being termed affect in this essay is precisely this two-sidedness, the
simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the
virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other. Affect is this
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    213

t­wo-­sidedness as seen from the side of the actual thing, as couched in its
own perceptions and cognitions. (Massumi 1995, p. 96)

This is obviously a very different proposition. It is equally abstract,

but it does not commit us to an absolute decision between two differ-
ent orders (affect and emotion). It suggests instead a mixed and liminal
space/time of becoming ‘betwixt and between’ virtual and actual forms
of order. It also assumes that affect is felt, since otherwise it makes little
sense to describe it as being ‘seen’ and as ‘couched in its own percep-
tions and cognitions’. If we were to express this second concept of affect
in Whiteheadian terms, it would be precisely affect as feeling or ‘posi-
tive prehension’. As feeling, affect would be a phenomenon of transi-
tion, or what mathematicians call a ‘vector’. The feeling, in Whitehead’s
terms, is the process of transition: an activity not a state of mind—the
kind of ‘grasping’ that is implied in ‘prehension’, one might say. The
activity of feeling is not the ‘actual’ as fixed, finite, receding form, but
the process of actualization whereby potentials are concretely realized.
This concept makes it much harder—in fact impossible—to differenti-
ate affect from emotion, blurring them in liminal fashion rather than
polarizing them.

Affect as Transformative Encounter

More concepts of affect are opened up when we turn to Massumi’s invo-

cation of the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, whom he uses to
justify his strong affect/emotion distinction. Spinoza was the first to seri-
ously challenge Descartes’s deeply influential bifurcation of ‘thought’
and ‘extension’ into two distinct substances. This bifurcation served to
sediment and reinforce the profoundly destructive ‘shallow empiricist’
division between a world of essentially meaningless matter (brute physi-
cal reality based on Galileo and Newton’s laws of motion and rest) and
the matterless meaning of eminent thought. Massumi (1995, p.  88)
describes Spinoza as being ‘a formidable philosophical precursor on …
the difference in nature between affect and emotion, [and] on the irre-
ducibly bodily and autonomic nature of affect’. Spinoza, however, does
214  P. Stenner

not draw a distinction between affect and emotion, let alone argue for a
‘difference in nature’. Spinoza wrote in Latin and used the term ‘affec-
tus’ (as well as their variants afficio and affectio), not the word emotion,
which was barely used until the early nineteenth century (though in
some English translations of his work, affectus is often translated as
‘emotion’). Spinoza (1677/1989) discusses the affects at great length in
his most famous book, the Ethics. What he calls ‘the affections of a body’
are the modifications that occur in the course of an encounter with
another body. Spinoza’s concept of affect thus places the encounter at
centre stage. When Spinoza deals with concrete examples of affects, far
from marking a difference in nature from emotion, he discusses what we
would now call emotions—that is to say, he discusses experiences called
things like anger, fear, joy, jealousy, envy and so forth. The important
thing is his approach to these emotions, which always emphasizes modi-
fications wrought by encounters. Anger, for Spinoza, is thus a particular
kind of modification that occurs in particular types of encounters. We
might call this third concept of affect: affect as transformative
encounter.

Ontological Affect

It is important, however, to understand that Spinoza does not limit his

understanding of affects to human emotions. On the contrary, Spinoza is
seeking much broader generality. Here we find an important basis for a
distinction between affect (as applicable ontologically) and emotion (the
specifically anthropological manifestation of affects), although I am obvi-
ously not claiming that Spinoza makes the distinction using those terms
(since he doesn’t use the word emotion). For him, all entities—whether
potatoes, panthers or poets—are to be understood in relation to the affects
they are capable of in their encounters with other entities. His philosophy is
thoroughly relational in that anything that exists does so as a function of its
relations, and hence of the affects it is capable of going through (and pro-
voking) during its encounters. All finite entities in nature are affected/modi-
fied by other entities in nature. This is also the relational basis for a process
philosophy because it starts with, and foregrounds, the idea that affect is a
reciprocal process of affecting and being affected. This is an important con-
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    215

tribution to deep empiricism, since relational affects are placed at the core
of all natural processes (which are consequently not considered as meaning-
less mechanistic matter). This ontological stance extends, obviously, to
anthropology: that is human beings. When it comes to human beings, those
affects often take the form that we would now call emotions (but not exclu-
sively, since feelings of hunger, sensations of touch, etc. are not emotions in
the modern sense, but might be considered affects in Spinoza’s sense).
The affect/emotion distinction I have just described is obviously not
the one Massumi draws between a virtual order and an actual order, but
rather the difference between a concept applied in a general ontological
way, and a concept applied in a specifically anthropological, way (pertain-
ing to human beings). Since the bodies of both are modified in the process
of their encounters, the ontological concepts of affectus and affectio apply
equally to snails and to people, but this does not mean that the experi-
ences of snails and people are the same. A snail is not capable of being
affected and of affecting others in the manner that we call ‘envy’ and,
perhaps in some respects, we humans are not capable of being affected in
the manner of a snail. We sometimes give the name ‘emotions’ to these
specific human affects (i.e. to affects at the specifically anthropological
level), and we might need another name for the specifics of the snail’s
affections. From a Spinozist perspective, both specific sets could quite
properly be called—using the more general category—affects. As Spinoza
(1677/1989, p. 89) put it in a note qualifying the 13th proposition of part
2 (that the body is the object constituting the mind): ‘The things we have
shown so far are completely general and do not pertain more to man than
to other individuals, all of which, though in different degrees, are never-
theless animate.’ We might call this fourth concept of affect: ontological
affect as distinct from anthropological affect.

 ffect as Encounter Understandable

A
Under the Attribute of Bodily Extension

Massumi’s second point is equally problematic, since Spinoza nowhere

argues for the ‘irreducibly bodily and autonomic nature of affect’. In the
first place, as Massumi is well aware, Spinoza is most famous for what is
called his thought/extension parallelism. This means that he resolutely
216  P. Stenner

refuses to separate mind/thought from body/extension and instead basis

his entire philosophy upon the argument that these are not two separate
substances, but one substance which can show up to an observer under
two different attributes. There is no ‘irreducibly bodily’ event for Spinoza,
since each and every event can be considered under at least the two attri-
butes ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ (a little like James’s radical empiricism
discussed in Chap. 4).
For Spinoza, there are three primary affects from which all others
derive: pleasure, suffering and desire. Taking desire as an example, Spinoza
uses different words to get at this idea that the same thing can be consid-
ered in different ways, under different attributes (‘thought’ and ‘exten-
sion’). He uses desire to refer to the endeavour of any thing to preserve
itself or to ‘persist in its own being’. He uses the word ‘will’ when this
endeavour is ‘referred solely to the mind’ (Spinoza 1677/1989, p. 137),
and he uses the word ‘appetite’ ‘when referred to the mind and body in
conjunction’. The endeavour (‘conatus’) is not to be understood as either
mental or physical, but as neither mental nor physical or, what amounts
to the same thing, both mental and physical. He refuses to make that
separation, and disagrees fundamentally with Descartes and his tradition
of mind masters. This is how Spinoza is able to debunk those who believe
in the myth of a free and autonomous will which ‘decides’—in some
eminent fashion—in blissful independence from physical bodies. And
this is also why, symmetrically, Spinoza insists on doubt with respect to
our knowledge of bodies, suggesting that we do not in fact know what a
body is capable of. When we ascribe powers to a ‘mind’ as distinct from
a ‘body’ we tacitly assume that the body is not capable of producing the
effects we have ascribed to mind. The body is not a brute machine and
the will is never just ‘mind stuff’ operating in an eminent way: we grant
it a mistaken autonomy only when we abstract it from its ever-present
embodiment. Will, for example, is always already appetite, but appetite
understood in a limited way (solely through the attribute of thought).
This is why Spinoza insists—in a superb proposition that clearly inspired
William James’s theory of emotion—that ‘in no case do we strive for,
wish for, long for, or desire anything, because we deem a thing to be
good, but on the other hand we deem a thing to be good, because we
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    217

strive for it, wish for it, long for it, or desire it’ (Spinoza 1677/1989,
p. 137).7
In sum, Spinoza’s parallelism prevents any notion of affect as ‘irreduc-
ibly bodily’, just as it prevents any notion of emotion as irreducibly men-
tal, since for Spinoza there is a single substance undergoing its encounters
in ways that can always be considered in relation to both attributes: ‘Both
the decision of the mind and the appetite and the determination of the
body by nature exist together—or rather are one and the same thing,
which we call a decision when it is considered under, and explained
through, the attribute of thought, and which we call a determination
when it is considered under the attribute of extension and deduced from
the laws of motion and rest’ (Spinoza 1677/1989, p. 133 [note to propo-
sition 2 of part 3]). There would be no problem, of course, if a person
preferred to use the word ‘affect’ to refer to certain experiences considered
under the attribute of extension and ‘emotion’ to refer to those same
experiences considered under the attribute of thought. This would not be
Spinoza’s distinction, of course, but it could be perfectly compatible with
his philosophy. In fact, I suggested just this allocation of terms in a paper
on affect and emotion published several years ago (Stenner 2004). This is
a fifth concept of affect, in which affect refers to certain experiences
grasped under the attribute of bodily extension.8

Affect as Self-Creation

Massumi’s notion of affect as bodily and autonomic risks de-coupling

affect from Spinoza’s most important contribution: the insistence that
affect is always tied to encounters and hence to power (Brown and Stenner
2001). This is at the heart of Spinoza’s definition of power as an increase
in a mind/body’s capacity to affect and be affected by other mind/bodies.
Spinoza’s other two primary affects make sense in just this context, since
pleasure is defined as the experience of an increase in power, and suffering
the experience of a decrease. This move makes the affects core to the
domain of ethics, which concerns the collective and personal navigation
of power relations. It also implies, as noted above, a thoroughly relational
account of entities as fundamentally composed out of the power relations
218  P. Stenner

they participate within, and not as pre-given self-contained entities. We

become something different, for example, as we form real political alli-
ances with others. More fundamentally, our very bodies are relational
alliances between innumerable bodily forms. In this way, Spinoza
insists—not just that mind and body are expressions of the same thing,
but that they refer to an ever-unfolding process of encounter giving rise
to encounter, each encounter ‘affecting’ those involved in the new com-
position either by increasing their powers (positive affects like joy register
an increase in the power to affect and be affected in further encounters),
or decreasing them (negative affects like fear and shame register a decrease
in these powers). Spinoza thus refuses to abstract mind from body, but is
equally assertive in refusing to abstract the ‘individual’ from the flow of
ever-creative social practice. In fact, Spinoza (1677/1989, p. 64 [note on
proposition 29 from part 1]) works with a distinction between Naturing
and natured nature (Natura naturans/Natura naturata) which is the onto-
logical equivalent to Schutz’s actio/actum distinction and Williams’s
‘forming and formative processes’/‘formed wholes’ distinction. Natura
naturans is nature as infinite and active self-creation and Natura naturata
is nature as passive finished product. Massumi, as a Deleuzian philoso-
pher, is doubtless aware of these issues, but nevertheless, his work—when
it hardens into a routine distinction between affect and emotion—risks
losing this cutting edge. We can call this sixth concept of affect: affect as
self-creation.

Affect as Technical Scientific Concept

A strong affect/emotion distinction is also problematic in relation to the

other two main strands of influence in the affective turn. Silvan Tomkins
himself, for instance, did not draw the distinction between affect and
emotion that is now routinely assumed amongst scholars. Like Spinoza,
when Tomkins discusses the affects that make up the affect system, he
refers to explanations for what ordinary people would call emotions: the
experiences we call anger, fear, shame, disgust, joy and so forth. In his
published work, Tomkins uses the word ‘emotion’ very rarely, and the
reason that he prefers the word ‘affect’ is that he wanted a more scientific
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    219

sounding word that would allow him and his readers to step back from
routine and common-sense assumptions about emotions. In short, what
ordinary ‘lay folk’ call their ‘emotions’, the scientist—with the benefit of
their objective research—recognizes as proper to an innate system of
affects. This is clearly not a question of distinguishing a positive content
called ‘affect’ from another positive content called ‘emotion’ but of replac-
ing the folk wisdom of ordinary language with a more rigorous and exact
vocabulary based on scientific knowledge (for an appreciative critique of
Tomkins see Stenner and Greco 2013).9
Something similar can be said about the psychoanalytical concept of
affect which, as with Spinoza (who influenced Freud and many of his fol-
lowers), circulates around the three fundamentals of pleasure, distress and
desire. Freud himself used a mixture of terms including Affekt, Gefühl and
Empfindung, each of which has been translated into English and French
in multiple ways, including feeling, sentiment, emotion, affect, affection
and sensation. Since Freud’s time there has been much theorization
wherein affect refers to the adventures of unconscious drive energy10 as it
is ‘stored up’ in the ego, ‘invested’ in objects and so forth. Only limited
aspects of this dynamic process are consciously available to ordinary peo-
ple (e.g. as emotional experiences of ‘anxiety’, ‘fear’, ‘anger’, ‘jealousy’). In
the psychoanalytic tradition, the difference, noted above in relation to
Tomkins, between ‘lay’ and ‘scientific’ terminology is thus compounded
by the fundamental psychoanalytic distinction between unconscious and
conscious. Since, as a science and a clinical practice, psychoanalysis con-
cerns the dynamic influence of what is not conscious (or at least, of feel-
ings that motivate us and yet cannot easily be put into words), then the
ordinary terminology and lay theories are necessarily partial and dis-
torted. What we, as lay people, consciously think of as our emotions (if
we use that word) is revealed by the psychoanalyst to be something rather
different, and so another term is needed. In psychoanalytic therapy, for
example, what the client may think of at one moment as love or hatred
towards the analyst is viewed by the analyst as something very different,
with a different nature and origin (the so-called transference).11 It is evi-
dently easier to talk about what is said about affect than about affect
itself.
220  P. Stenner

Affect as Categorical Term

André Green (1977) is perhaps the main psychoanalytic authority on

affect. He points out that in France the adjective ‘affectif ’ and the verb
‘affecter’ are part of everyday vocabulary, whilst in the UK the term ‘emo-
tion’ is typically preferred for talking about roughly the same thing, and
‘affective’ has a more neutral ring. He notes that there is a great deal of
variability both within the work of individual psychoanalytic thinkers,
and between different thinkers. For Green, for example, the entire tradi-
tion of Lacanian psychoanalysis is basically Freud without the affect. But
for all psychoanalysts, affect challenges thought, and the question of the
relationship between affect and discourse (or ‘representation’) becomes
directly salient. Affect, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is intelligible
and communicable only in so far as it is associated with a certain repre-
sentation mediated by words, and typically the process of therapy is con-
ceived as a way of rendering something like affect ‘graspable’ and
‘digestible’ by thought (Matte Blanco 1975, 1988). Green has offered a
highly influential way of using the concept of affect within psychoanaly-
sis. His position is that affect should be a metapsychological term and not
a descriptive term with a specific referent. The word ‘affect’ should thus
be reserved for use as a categorical term which groups together ‘all the
nuances that German (Empfindung, Gefühl) or French (émotion, senti-
ment, passion etc) bring to this category’ (1999, p. 8). This, of course, is
yet another way of conceptualizing affect in relation to emotion, since
here affect is a generic category into which emotion falls as one amongst
other more specific members. Of course the choice of words here is arbi-
trary and the important thing is the concept: with respect to the word, we
might just as well follow Whitehead or Susan Langer (see Chap. 3) and
use the term ‘feeling’ as our categorical term (Cromby 2011).

 ynthesis: Process Thought and ‘Ontological

S
Affect’
If the discussion above is not misguided, then the affective turn—so long
as it is based on something like Massumi’s affect/emotion distinction—
turns on flimsy ground. It is little wonder that ‘first encounters with
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    221

theories of affect might feel like a momentary (sometimes more perma-

nent) methodological and conceptual free fall’ (Seigworth and Gregg
2010, p. 4). Of those who state things like ‘affect is … vital forces insist-
ing beyond emotion’ (p. 1), or that ‘affect is … synonymous with force’
(p. 2) or that ‘one of the surest things that can be said of affect and its
theorization is that they will exceed, always exceed the context of their
emergence, as the excess of ongoing process’ (p. 5), or that ‘affect can be
understood then as a gradient of bodily capacity’ (p. 2), it is wise to ask:
which exactly, of the eight possible meanings of affect described above
(they are interrelated, and there are doubtless more), are they talking
about? This is not at all to say, however, that there is no merit in concern-
ing ourselves, say, with Massumi’s revitalizing of the Bergsonian distinc-
tion between the virtual and the actual. On the contrary, Massumi’s
inspirations (Deleuze and Bergson) are crucial to process thought. The
point is that, if we don’t want to confuse ourselves and others, we should
be more clear about the distinctions we are making, what words we are
using to mark them, and when and how they are to be applied.12
Admittedly, these issues are bewilderingly complex, and we should be
grateful for any clarity Massumi and his colleagues have been able to
bring. In this section I wish to discuss perhaps the most complex issue of
affect as an ontological concept or ontological affect. I noted that for
Spinoza, all entities—and not just people—are to be understood in rela-
tion to the affects they are capable of in their encounters with other enti-
ties. This concept of affect thus supplies a thread of continuity that runs
throughout all nature, but amidst the continuity are numerous differ-
ences, since although everything is part of nature, nature is far from
homogenous, but composed of manifold different modes. The form that
affectivity takes amidst that mode of nature we call ‘humanity’, for exam-
ple, will be distinct from that of other modes (and we may even want to
think in terms of ‘emotions’, since that word is in common-sense use),
but there will be also be common ground. The sheer scope of this trans-
disciplinary idea can make one fear ‘conceptual free fall’, but it is crucial
if we are to grasp the profound significance of affect (or what Whitehead
terms feeling) to process thought.
As a first step let us foreground the ontological significance in process
thought of the ‘event’ or actual occasion of experience as the ultimate and
222  P. Stenner

atomic unit of reality (as discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4). Schematically, an

actual occasion is a formative happening in which some new pattern is
lent to some aspect of the world through some activity. The happening
(the patterning) is the ‘experience’ and the pattern it leaves is its ‘expres-
sion’. As discussed in Chap. 3, in calling this process of patterning ‘expe-
rience’, Whitehead is using the word in a massively expanded way, with
no implication of consciousness or even sentience. Recall the earlier dis-
cussion of Williams’s processual distinction between ‘formed wholes’ (of
the immediate past), and ‘forming and formative processes’ (of the pres-
ent). The former are the products or ‘expressions’ of the latter. The formed
wholes are ‘fixed’ and ‘explicit’, but I showed how Williams warned
against reducing the sense of living, vivid immediacy that is associated
with ‘forming processes’ to the merely personal and subjective, abstracted
from the material and objective. Williams’s distinction (which I mapped
onto Schutz’s actum/actio distinction) can be generalized well beyond
socio-cultural processes. Spinoza, as we saw, generalized it ‘ontologically’
to the entirety of nature through his distinction between Natura naturans
and Natura naturata. The distinction thus applies to all forms of process,
from the physical to the socio-cultural through the biological and the
psychological. It applies at each level of the PIPE mnemonic discussed in
Chap. 4, for instance. In Whitehead’s terms, it corresponds to the distinc-
tion between the process of actualization (the actual occasion of experi-
ence itself ) and its product or expression. This applies whether the actual
occasion in question be a communicative event (as part of a social process
of communication) or a bio-chemical reaction (as part of a cellular pro-
cess). At the physical level, for instance, rust is the formed product of the
process of rusting.
Whitehead, like Williams, Schutz and Spinoza, stresses that the real
internal constitution of things is grasped only by way of self-constitution
effected by the ‘actio’ or ‘forming process’ of an actual occasion in process
of actualization (‘experience’). That process whereby a subject actualizes
itself in relation to its objects is, for Whitehead, a process of prehending
which he also calls feeling. Strictly speaking, for Whitehead a feeling is a
‘positive prehension’ and he uses the phrase ‘negative prehension’ to indi-
cate whatever is excluded from feeling during an occasion in process of
actualization (an actual occasion of experience is composed of prehen-
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    223

sions, and it always makes a selection amidst possibilities for feeling, and
is defined as much by what it does not feel). This process of feeling can-
not occur without what is felt, however, and what is felt is precisely a
selection from the ‘formed wholes’ that are the past products or ‘expres-
sions’ of prior actualizations (each datum of experience being an actum in
Schutz’s sense, a piece of Natura naturata). As with ‘experience’, in using
the word ‘feeling’, Whitehead is obviously and self-consciously expand-
ing the concept well beyond its familiar meaning as a conscious human
experience (as in ‘I am feeling a little queasy after reading these para-
graphs’). Also, far from sequestering living vitality to a merely subjective
feeling, Whitehead construes the process of subjective feeling as part
of the very actualization of objective reality. The ‘substance’ of the actual
world is, for Whitehead, the product of events of transition from actual-
ity to actuality and feelings, in this way of thinking: ‘are “vectors”; for
they feel what is there and transform it to what is here’ (Whitehead
1929/1985, p.  87). Self-creative Natura naturans creates the creatures
that compose Natura naturata.
Without going into unnecessary detail, I make these observations to
indicate how—within process thought—a concept of feeling (or, for
Spinoza, ‘affect’) assumes enormous ontological importance. Whitehead
(1929/1985, p.  310) puts this quite emphatically when he writes that
there ‘is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every
reality is there for feeling: It promotes feeling; and it is felt’. Although
something of this importance resonates within the turn to affect, it is
obvious that this cannot be grasped in terms of a simple distinction
between affect and emotion, or affect and discourse as if discourse stood
for the fixed and formed and affect for the unfixed and transformative. If,
for example, the process we are dealing with is a piece of talk, then we still
find the contrast between talk in process of actualization and talk as
formed product, already actualized and in the immediate past, serving
now as datum for the next living moment. Viewed as a formed product,
the talk is pure dead talk: we can transcribe it and have it in front of us as
an ‘expressed’ external object for an eternity of analysis. But viewed as
forming and formative process in the living present from the perspective
in the now of those communicating, it is mobile and rich with the poten-
tial of the full gamut of feelings human beings are capable of. The feeling
224  P. Stenner

is not just part of the occasion, it is the process through which the occa-
sion comes to be selectively actualized. And, obviously, the simplest piece
of talk is made possible by, held aloft by, literally thousands of other
processes that provide its inarticulable supports, but that are necessarily
‘negatively prehended’ (i.e. excluded from feeling) by the talkers.
Construing affect and feeling in this very abstract ontological manner
(as having pertinence throughout nature, and supplying its continuity)
does not mean that all nature—from rock to rabbi—is uniform, but it
does prevent the sharp distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ that was
the subject of Chap. 4. There are two equally erroneous intellectual paths
to uniformity: the first attempts to explain all ‘higher’ emergent processes
in terms of basic material causes (the rabbi is modelled on the rock, and
reduced to meaningless matter) and the second explains all ‘lower’ pro-
cesses as if they had ready-made features of the ‘higher’ (the rock is gifted
and animated with the thoughts and feelings of the rabbi). Both are curi-
ous paths to take, and they emerge only when a more simple path to dis-
crimination has been blocked. The mind/matter distinction is a simple
path, yet it is misleading because it overcomes uniformity only by sacrific-
ing the continuity of nature. It is a quick and dirty way of recognizing a
difference between rock and rabbi, since we can easily contrast the matter
of the rock with the mind of the rabbi. But from a biological perspective
this sharp distinction clearly serves to omit certain ‘lower’ forms of life
which are indeterminate in this respect. Vegetables and certain simple
animal species, for example, appear close to inorganic nature at their low-
est and human mentality at their highest (Whitehead 1938/1966, p. 150).
For Whitehead, the main challenge for contemporary thinking is to elab-
orate the general continuity that exists between human experience, at one
extreme, and those physical occasions and feelings  that are the subject
matter of physics, at the other (Whitehead 1933/1935, p. 244):

An occasion of experience which includes human mentality is an extreme

instance, at one end of the scale, of those happenings which constitute
nature. But any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside
nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also
enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there
be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    225

nature is mere bluff, founded upon vague phrases whose sole merit is a
comforting familiarity. We should either admit dualism, at least as a provi-
sional doctrine, or we should point out the identical elements connecting
human experience with physical science. (Whitehead 1933/1935, p. 237)

In sum, much as affect serves for Spinoza, for Whitehead, feeling is the
thread which permits this continuity amidst divergence. This is not sur-
prising since Whitehead wanted to update Spinozist thought and make it
compatible (along with the work of Bergson, James and Dewey) with the
latest science. As a theoretical physicist, he could see that by the early
twentieth century, physics had moved towards a conception of basic real-
ity as activity and process, rather than brute matter. At the most basic
level of reality, feeling must be understood as energy and the processes
studied by physicists are understood in terms of the passing of energy
from particular event to particular event: ‘The words electron, proton,
wave-motion, velocity, hard and soft radiation, chemical elements,
­matter, empty space, temperature, degradation of energy, all point to the
fact that physical science recognizes qualitative differences between occa-
sions in respect to the way in which each occasion entertains its energy’
(Whitehead 1933/1935, p. 238).
The ultimate physical entities are thus always ‘vectors indicating trans-
ference’ (Whitehead 1929/1985, p.  238), and the coherence of macro-­
physical forms like rocks is a complex emergent ‘expressed’ from this raging
and recurrent microscopic activity  of ‘physical feeling’. For Whitehead’s
purposes, this situation in physics is sufficient for the identification of a
basic form of actual occasion in which the ‘experience’ is composed of
purely conformal physical feelings: a flux of energy transferred from occa-
sion to occasion. The energy from a previous occasion, we might say, is a
datum or object that is received into the new occasion, only to be passed
on to the next occasion (as an ‘expression’ for a new ‘experience’). There is
no doubt that it stretches ordinary language to refer to the receiving occa-
sion as a subject feeling its object, but nevertheless, we have here the bare
minimum required to identify ‘experience’ understood as the selective pat-
terning or ordering of whatever is received as data, and passed on to the
next occasion (allowing the co-assembly of many such events). Whitehead
calls these simple physical feelings. A simple physical feeling is an act of
226  P. Stenner

causation (Whitehead 1929/1985, p. 236), and for this reason Whitehead

also talks of ‘causal’ feelings (Whitehead 1929/1985, p. 236). Causality as
such is thus the process by which the cause transfers its feeling to be repro-
duced by the new subject as its own (see the section on causal efficacy in
Chap. 3). Causation is the conformal re-enactment of feeling as it flows
from atomic occasion to atomic occasion. Such feelings explain the mass
conformity in the physical world that supports the laws of physics in any
given epoch. Furthermore, all occasions of experience, no matter how
complex and developed they might become, are constructed around the
vector quality of simple physical feelings. All our physical relationships ‘are
made up of such simple physical feelings, as their atomic bricks’ (Whitehead
1929/1985, p. 237).
Bergson was also fascinated by this sense of continuity, and pointed
the way towards thinking about how more complex grades of feeling
might emerge from the self-organization of forms that are more simple:

Hydrochloric acid always acts in the same way upon carbonate of lime
whether in the form of marble or of chalk yet we do not say that the acid
perceives in the various species the characteristic features of the genus. Now
there is no essential difference between the process by which this acid picks
out from the salt its base and the act of the plant which invariably extracts
from the most diverse soils those elements that serve to nourish it. Make one
more step; imagine a rudimentary consciousness such as that of an amoeba
in a drop of water: it will be sensible of the resemblance, and not of the dif-
ference, in the various organic substances which it can assimilate. In short,
we can follow from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the simplest
conscious beings, from the animal to man [sic], the progress of the operation
by which things and beings seize from their surroundings that which attracts
them, that which interests them practically … simply because the rest of
their surroundings takes no hold upon them: this similarity of reaction fol-
lowing actions superficially different is the germ which human conscious-
ness develops into general ideas. (Bergson 1908/1991, pp. 159–160)

In this passage, Bergson identifies continuity between the selective

actualizations at play in the acid’s encounter with chalk, the plant’s
encounter with soil, the amoeba’s encounter with organic substances in
its aquatic environment and the human experience of the world. All
involve operations by which selective seizures are made from the sur-
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    227

roundings. Each of these seizures is a process of re-patterning some aspect

of the actual world by ‘feeling’ what attracts, and negatively prehending
whatever takes no hold upon them. The acid, to put it in Spinoza’s lan-
guage of power, is affected by the chalk which it affects, just as the plant
is affected by the soil it affects. In a very minimal sense, therefore, there is
a ‘subject’ and an ‘object’ of these activities in which the world is selec-
tively actualized, but they emerge only through their relational encounter
in real time (through an actual occasion). Compared with higher forms
of experience, a simple physical feeling does not add to the datum in
question, but merely passes it on, having actualized potential in the same
way as its predecessors and its contemporaries. To the extent that one can
talk of their subjective form—that is, the way in which they feel, appro-
priate or prehend their objects—one must talk of a conformal subjective
form whereby the feeling in question is merely re-enacted and passed on
to future occasions with identical subjective forms. ‘Subjectivity’ is at an
absolute minimum.

 rades of Actual Occasions of Experience

G
Within the Continuity of Feeling

Such conformal, causal, physical feelings nevertheless contain the poten-

tial to give rise to and to be included within processes that engender more
complex and developed subjective forms, such as those found in early
instances of ‘life’. As discussed by way of the PIPE mnemonic of Chap. 4,
this requires a complex process of self-organization, and always entails
elaborate hierarchies of feelings of feelings of feelings that are only begin-
ning to be grasped in principle, let alone understood (but see Atlan
1998/2011). Viewed crudely from the outside, however, we can discern a
variety of different grades of actual occasions of experience corresponding
to a variety of levels of coordinated complexity, each level building upon
and presupposing the others. Whitehead (1938/1966, p. 157) identifies
six such grades, stressing that these are rough distinctions with fuzzy edges:

1. Human existence, body and mind

2. All other animal life
3. All vegetable life
228  P. Stenner

4 . Single living cells

5. All large-scale inorganic aggregates
6. All happenings on the infinitesimal scale disclosed by modern

physics.

The importance of these grades is that they admit both of continuity

and of difference (gradualism). For instance, despite being part of it, the
infinitesimal ‘quantum’ scale of level 6 loses all trace of the passivity typi-
cal of the large-scale inorganic aggregates of level 5 (which are composed
of occasions dominated by conformal physical feelings). Something that
lives (levels 1 through 4) also loses something of the passivity of the inor-
ganic. A vegetable from level 3, for example, is composed of the coordi-
nated functioning (in the form of cells, for instance) of billions of
molecules, and in one sense it is obviously part and parcel of the larger
field of nature in which it is situated: it is forever gaining molecules and
losing molecules, and a clear-cut distinction between it and its wider
environment is never strictly possible. Nevertheless, despite being a
region of the wider world, the vegetable is also a bounded and highly
internally coordinated region capable of activity that is considerably more
organized and selective than, say, the mountain on which it grows.
Something is alive if it is a region of nature ‘which is itself the primary
field of the expressions issuing from each of its parts’ (Whitehead
1938/1966, p. 22). The more refined products of the ‘experiences’ of one
part of a vegetable (e.g. its green leaves in encounter with sunlight and
oxygen) can be ‘felt’ in turn by those of another part (the growth and
storage of energy in a seed). It is this feeling of feeling within a circum-
scribed region of coordination that affords the vegetable its remarkable
‘autopoietic’ activity when compared to the passivity of the inorganic.
Both plants and animals are ‘composed of various centres of experience
imposing the expression of themselves on each other’ (Whitehead
1938/1966, p. 23), but when we compare vegetable life to that of level 2
we find that animal life—particular that which includes a nervous sys-
tem—is comparatively more centralized. Of the numerous centres of
experience, one tends to dominate and to receive as its data expressions
from numerous other more specialist centres. The expressions from occa-
sions of feeling generated from multiple regions across an animal’s body
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    229

are, as it were, poured into its brain for further feeling and coordination
of feeling. This higher-order coordination affords a deepening of the rep-
ertoire of possible experiences and expressions, but—unlike a vegetable
which lacks the higher level of complexity afforded by this centralized
hierarchy of feeling—if this dominant activity is lost, the whole coordi-
nation collapses (Whitehead 1938/1966, p. 24). This fragility, of course,
is the price paid for the enhanced ‘activity’ of the animal compared to
plant life: it’s enhanced capacity to respond in novel ways to novel
situations.

The Personal Identity of Human Beings

The human body of level 1 is, like any living body, also composed of the
coordinated functioning of billions of molecules into cells, organs and so
forth. Like any living body, it too composes a region distinct from its
environment and yet never cleanly separated from the larger field of
nature. We can thus consider the human body to be that region of nature
which is the ‘primary field of human expression’ (Whitehead 1938/1966,
p. 22). But how should we think of those occasions of experience which
include human mentality and that Whitehead described as ‘an extreme
instance, at one end of the scale, of those happenings which constitute
nature’? As a result of these complex feelings, when we conceive of human-
ity, we are ‘apt to emphasize rather the soul than the body. The one indi-
vidual is that coordinated stream of personal experiences, which is my
thread of life or your thread of life’ (Whitehead 1938/1966, p. 161). But
our personal identity as a coherent stream of consciousness, despite its
abstraction, is no less embodied than any other experience, and, on one
level, it represents a continuity with the energetic events of the physical
world and the vital events of the organic world. These are feelings of feel-
ings of feelings which have, through this refinement, become maximally
abstract and active and which, far from merely reproducing the datum
and passing it on, add to it creatively and flexibly in the face of a changing
environment. These are experiences that include conceptual and proposi-
tional feelings of the kind discussed in Chap. 3 and that originate from and
intensify ‘this is not’ experiences. And yet, no matter how rarefied, they
230  P. Stenner

remain feelings. From this perspective what we call a ‘thought’ is not to be

distinguished from a ‘feeling’, since it is a feeling. But such a rarefied feel-
ing abstracts from and builds upon the expressions of all the other experi-
ences composing the body of the thinker. A feeling is not always a thought,
but a thought is always a feeling. It is part of nature and arises from within
nature, and not from beyond it.
For Whitehead, this coordinated stream of personal experiences is to
be thought of as yet another instance of a system or society of actual
occasions. Each occasion of experience is a self-realizing event that
becomes and then perishes.13 Each occasion has its direct ‘inheritance’
from its past and its anticipation of what it will become in the future.
Each occasion is a concrescence of many data into the unity of the sub-
jective form. However, for Whitehead, what is distinctive about the
grouping of such experiences into societies is that the assemblage is
purely temporal with no spatial dimension in evidence. It is purely a
matter of one occasion of experience following another and giving rise
to another, and so forth in a temporal chain or series. Whitehead calls
the occasions which occur in such a purely temporal personal soci-
ety ‘presiding’ occasions (Whitehead 1933/1935, p. 263). The enduring
entity associated with such a society is a person conceived as an enduring
percipient.
The society of occasions that constitutes our sense of personhood can
exist only in the context, as it were, of an embodied and spatial complex
of broader ‘living’ societies. The ‘presiding occasion’ abstracts itself, as it
were, from this broader complex, presupposing its inheritance but trans-
forming it into a new maximally temporal register. The human being as a
whole thus exceeds its presiding occasions. It presupposes the unity of the
wider nexus of living societies which constitute its living body. This set in
turn presupposes a wider environment of living and non-living assem-
blages from which that body has abstracted itself. The psyche is never
disembodied and the body is never de-worlded. We hence return to a
continuity theory of world, body and psyche.
It should go without saying that the human being cannot be sharply
differentiated from other highly complex forms of animal life, and yet—
as discussed in Chap. 3—some sort of Rubicon has been crossed. We live
in a self-fabulated virtual dimension that makes us capable of what
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    231

Whitehead calls outrageous novelty. We see this most obviously in the

arts and literature, in dreams and daydreams, in ritual and theatre, in play
and science. Robert Musil’s main character in his novel The Man Without
Qualities, for instance, is considerably more preoccupied with the con-
ceptual entertainment of unrealized possibilities than with the actualized
matter of fact. The future possibilities of our being can become such a
major issue for us that it outstrips the value of our immediate quality of
life. As Whitehead puts it, ‘the life of a human being receives its worth,
its importance, from the way in which unrealized ideals shape its pur-
poses and tinge its actions’ (Whitehead 1938/1966, p. 27). This is why,
with respect to human affective experience, many of our emotions are less
‘about’ the actual world than the possible worlds we feel in the now. A
dog can show fear, but its fear concerns the larger dog looming upon it in
the now. Our human fears and anxieties rarely feel what is actually upon
us now, but what we dread about tomorrow, or the weeks to come: dreads
that can consume us even if they never actualize in practice.

 ack to Humanity: Affectivity

B
as the Experience of Liminality
The last section was an attempt to clarify what is meant by the ‘ontologi-
cal’ concept of affect (from Spinoza) or feeling (from Whitehead) that is
core to process thinking and yet still remains quite implicit amongst
authors of the affective turn. It is a distinctly abstract concept and bears
little relation to our usual ways of thinking about, for example, human
emotions. In so far as this ontological agenda is implicit within the affec-
tive turn (which it is), it is clear why ‘affect’ might be marked off from
‘emotion’, but so long as this agenda remains merely implicit, confusion
is inevitable. Most theories concerned with specifically human affectivity
(e.g. the numerous biological, psychological and sociological theories of
emotion) do not engage with this ontological project, and would not
even recognize it.14 This is not surprising since things are complex enough
when dealing solely with human emotions.
232  P. Stenner

Where theories of emotion do build upon continuities with other ani-

mals, however, we tend to find an interesting if unsurprising bias.
Emotions tend to be construed instrumentally as survival mechanisms
that are hard-wired in the face of imperious biological necessity. A dis-
tinct pragmatic machismo infects these theories. If we experience rage/
anger, terror/fear and love/affection, we are told that this is because our
ancestors—like many other mammals—were obliged to fight, flee and
fuck for their lives, and they would not have done so without these in-­
built animal motives. Cognitive theories finesse this basic picture, but
remain thoroughly instrumental or goal-oriented (Stenner and Greco
2013). The practicalities of survival and competition are the imperious
keynotes, and human nature as such gets defined in their light. To carica-
ture the picture a little, human beings at source and essence are construed
like so many violent versions of Captain Caveman (or woman), wielding
a club and grunting threats.

 evised or ‘Staged’ Liminality: The Self-Production

D
of Affectivity and Affectivity as Self-Production

Whilst it would be foolish to deny adaptation to the practical realities of

a hostile environment, this image of humanity and its emotions neglects
a whole swathe of affective practice and experience that is arguably just as
definitive of our species, and that has been at the core of this book.
Morrissey (1985) from the British pop band The Smiths sums this up in
a lyric that reads: ‘and if the day came when I felt a natural emotion, I’d
get such a shock I’d probably jump in the ocean’. Morrissey expresses the
point that many if not most of our emotional experiences are not ‘natu-
ral’ but heavily mediated. This is because human beings are specialists in
artfully provoking and shaping their own emotional experiences.
Morrissey’s song is itself a good example of a form of expression that has
been carefully designed so that we can listen to it in order to produce
feelings for or in or with ourselves. We might prefer Prokofiev or Cole
Porter, but if we enjoy The Smiths, we listen to them to produce these
‘Smiths’ affects in and amongst ourselves. The song, we might say, occa-
sions our actual experience. Music is endemic and takes such multifarious
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    233

forms because it is so affectively effective. But the same applies, not just
to all of the arts, from painting and poetry to architecture and theatre,
but also to the various games and sports that people spend so much time
making and engaging with. Each type of medium that I have called a
‘liminal affective technology’ serves, first and foremost, to excite and
shape emotional feeling by means of its ‘presentations’ (see the represen-
tation/presentation distinction from Chap. 3). These ‘technologies’ are
affective practices in a much more specific sense than Wetherell’s (2012).15
They are not just practices in which the body is ‘more intrusive than it
ordinarily is’ or where there is ‘notable talk about emotions and feelings’
or where ‘something personally significant seems to have occurred’
(Wetherell 2012, p. 97): they are practices in which a carefully designed
product of prior feelings is self-consciously used to occasion comparable
feelings amongst those participating.
Furthermore, this self-occasioning self-generation of emotional feeling
is as valid a candidate for defining our species as its brutal ‘Captain
Caveman’ twin. Our prehistoric ancestors are now becoming better
known for what remains of their beautiful cave art and their exquisite
musical instruments than their flint axes and knives. The Sapiens in Homo
Sapiens turns out to have been well chosen. Sapiens does not first of all
mean ‘wise’ or ‘rational’ but tasting—in the sense of the capacity for dis-
criminating between qualities. We are the species that creates our own
environment, and we do so ‘aesthetically’, with taste. Where we can, we
occasion our own experiences, and we aim for an enhancement and
intensification of the experiences we like, and it has always been so. If a
threshold was crossed during our hominization, my money is on a thresh-
old concerned with the emergence of these liminal affective
technologies.
As described in Chap. 3, ritual plays an important and arguably pri-
mordial role amongst the liminal affective technologies. Ritual contains
elements of the aesthetic (proper to art forms like music, dance, painting,
cookery) and elements of the ludic (proper to games and sports like
­bull-­jumping, gambling, wrestling, racing), and it tends to combine them
within practices generating an overarching experience of the sacred (as
defined in Chap. 5). Ritual is an ancient practice traceable to the very
earliest archaeological records. Cristea (1991, p.  151) has studied rock
234  P. Stenner

engravings and paintings from the central Sahara some of which date to
well before the fourth millennium BC (some indeed to the seventh
Millennium). He concludes that the depictions of ‘masked men, masks,
processions [and] dances … prove beyond any doubt that in those ancient
times the performance of rituals in Tassili was general, being part and
parcel of the daily social life of its inhabitants’. Similar compelling cases
have been made for the ritual use of Palaeolithic cave paintings (Zorich
2011; Lewis-Williams et al. 1988).
Like Morrissey’s song, ritual too can be understood in terms of the self-­
generation (as well as the creative expression) of emotion. Whatever else
it may be, a ritual is an affective practice that is regularly enacted and re-­
enacted to recreate, formulate and express valued feelings and emotions.
When the Omaha Indians danced around a vessel containing water,
drank from it and sprayed some water into the air, this was not merely an
imitation of rain but an expression of its importance and hence of the
emotional value of rain to those who depend upon it. The emotional
value of rain is merged, through ritual practice, with the emotional enjoy-
ment of the dance and other ritual activities. Anyone who has partici-
pated in a living ritual (as distinct from a dead ceremony enacted only
out of formal duty) knows about the self-induced affectivity generated by
its different components, whether these be chanting, dancing around a
fire, singing, taking drugs, public speaking, dressing up or putting oneself
through painful ordeals. Ritual is characterized by a certain excessive and
repetitive quality that seems not to be reducible to a utilitarian survival
mechanism since it doesn’t procure the self-preservation of the organism.
The ancient Greek word for ritual, dromenon, means ‘thing done’, but the
‘thing done’ in ritual is curiously disconnected from what we normally
think of as practical activity. Whitehead (1926/2005, p. 20) goes as far as
to define ritual as ‘the habitual performance of definite actions which
have no direct relevance to the preservation of the physical organisms of
the actors’. In this sense ritual is related to play, and is associated—even
in certain animals—with ‘superfluous energy and leisure’. Just as in play
we might repeat the actions necessary for real working, building, clean-
ing, fighting or hunting, so in ritual we tend to repeat significant actions
for their own sakes, and in doing so, we can repeat the feelings. As
Whitehead (1926/2005, p. 21) puts it with characteristic precision: ‘emo-
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    235

tion waits upon ritual; and then ritual is repeated and elaborated for the
sake of its attendant emotions. Mankind became artists in ritual.’
This notion that mankind ‘became artists in ritual’ is profound. It does
not simply mean that people became good at doing rituals but that what
we call art was born from its matrix (see the discussion of the emergence
of epic poetry from ritual in Chap. 2). Whitehead stresses that this capac-
ity to excite emotions for their own sake (and that means, precisely, not
from biological necessity) was a tremendous discovery. It sensitized the
human creature to experiences beyond the imperious ‘world of work’, as
discussed in Chap. 5. As Whitehead (1926/2005, p. 21) puts it, mankind
‘was started on its adventures in curiosity and of feeling’. We became art-
ists in ritual because ritual provided the basic means for the self-­generation
of emotional feelings. Those means could be further refined into the
more specific and potent forms of art, play and religion that would,
through historical time, gradually come to comprise ever-changing
human culture. According to this account, ‘religion and play have the
same origin in ritual … because ritual is the stimulus to emotion, and an
habitual ritual may diverge into religion or into play, according to the
quality of the emotion excited’ (Whitehead 1926/2005, p. 21). Thus the
original Olympic Games of the fifth century BC were more than tinged
with religious significance.
Whitehead’s thinking on the originary nature of ritual may well have
been influenced by his friend and colleague Jane Harrison, who was a
core member of the ‘Cambridge Ritualists’. Harrison (1913, p. 26) also
emphasized the emotional factor in ritual, and she compared it directly
with art: ‘at the bottom of art, as its motive power and its mainspring,
lies not the wish to copy Nature or even to improve on her … but rather
an impulse shared by art with ritual, the desire, that is, to utter, to give
out a strongly felt emotion … by making or doing or enriching the
object or act desired. … This common emotional factor it is that makes
art and ritual in their beginnings’. Nevertheless there are important dif-
ferences between ritual and art as liminal affective media. Building on
some of Nietzsche’s insights, Harrison (1913) proposed that the theatre
of Ancient Greece emerged from ritual (for a recent criticism, see Rozik
2002). A little like the Olympic Games, Athenian tragedy took place on
holy ground only during high festivals like the winter and spring
236  P. Stenner

celebrations of Dionysos,16 and was considered an act of worship. Actors

wore ritual vestments and the front row was reserved for priests. Harrison
(1913) builds upon an account given by Aristotle in his Poetics to the
effect that the ‘Chorus’ at the core of ancient theatre (but separate from
the actors on the stage) was originally composed of practitioners of
Dionysian ritual who would sing the Dithyramb. The Dithyramb was in
essence a ritualistic song with well-established origins in Dionysian rit-
ual17 (Rozik 2002, p. 146). Through time, the actors on the stage gradu-
ally split off from the activities of the Chorus, and effectively offered
interpretations or commentaries or embellishments of the dithyramb.
For Harrison, Dionysian rituals were associated with Winter and
Spring festivals because the God symbolized the death and rebirth of
nature (symbolizing the imagined ‘death’ of vital crops at the hands of
winter, and their rebirth in Spring, for instance). The novelty of the the-
atre, from this perspective, was that the Dionysian rites allegedly still
enacted by the chorus in the orchestra were observed by spectators in the
theatron. The dromenon (or ‘thing done’) of ritual thus, in Harrison’s
account, passed gradually into the drama of theatre. As Harrison puts it:

the kernel and centre of the whole was the orchestra, the circular dancing-­
place of the chorus; and, as the orchestra was the kernel and centre of the
theatre, so the chorus, the band of dancing and singing men—this chorus
that seems to us so odd and even superfluous—was the centre and kernel
and starting-point of the drama. The chorus danced and sang that dithy-
ramb we know so well, and from the leaders of that dithyramb we remem-
ber tragedy arose, and the chorus were at first, as an ancient writer tells us,
just men and boys, tillers of the earth, who danced when they rested from
sowing and ploughing. (Harrison 1913, p. 124)

For Harrison, this transition from dromenon (ritual) to drama (the-

atre) is concretely expressed in the architectural design of Greek theatres,
which—as indicated above—are divided into two main areas: the orches-
tra (usually a sacred circular space for the ritual enactments and song of
the chorus) and the theatron (for seating the audience). In ritual proper,
by contrast to theatre, active and serious participation is the rule, and so
there would be no place for a stage separating the actors from the observ-
ers seated in the theatron.
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    237

Cultural media and forms like theatre and ritual are rarely discussed by
psychologists, and yet they are, and in some form have always been, deci-
sive to the shaping of human experience and emotions.18 Even the brief
discussion above shows that, compared to ritual, theatre introduces—
through its very architecture—a critical distance from what is enacted
(i.e. what we might call the ‘material’ of the ritual or the performance). It
is easy to imagine how this distance might work to change the relation
(both of the actors and the observers) to the material that is enacted and
experienced. An extreme way of contrasting this changed relation would
be to say that in ritual, that material is often considered sacred (a ritual—
even if it has a comic element—is enacted in earnest, and from the per-
spective of the participants, they do not ‘act’ a ‘part’ but become something/
one different by way of the ritual), whereas in theatre the material might
simply be for edification or entertainment (aesthetic).19 Only once we
understand that the theatre ‘stages’ strongly emotional scenes for our con-
templation that might otherwise have been the preserve of ritual can we
begin to understand why and how the invention of theatre and the
­invention of philosophy went hand in hand in Ancient Greece, and—
along with the third invention of democracy—gave rise to a new epoch.

Spontaneous or ‘Unstaged’ Liminal Affectivity

In drawing attention to devised liminal affectivity my intention is not to

deny the brutal realities of our ‘Captain Caveman’ where nature appears
in the raw with tooth and claw. In fact, throughout this book I have dis-
cussed the tension and relationship between staged and unstaged, devised
and spontaneous types of liminal experience, whilst always insisting that
this distinction is nothing but a helpful abstraction. I call both ideal types
‘liminal’ because they concern experiences of becoming or transforma-
tion, but any distinction between liminal and normative/stable is also,
ultimately, just a useful abstraction, and always a matter of perspective.
In his Theologico-political treatise, Spinoza (1670/1951, p. 3) drew a con-
trast between well-structured and rule-bound situations, and situations of
doubt in which people are ‘driven into straights where rules are useless’. He
had in mind the situations of war and religiously inspired conflict that were
238  P. Stenner

endemic before and during his lifetime and that affected him personally. In
well-structured circumstances, he suggests, the human mind tends to be
‘boastful, overconfident and vain’. Most people, ‘when in prosperity, are so
over-brimming with wisdom (however inexperienced they may be), that
they take every offer of advice as a personal insult’. Put these same people
in the straights of more chaotic circumstances, however, and Spinoza finds
that they ‘know not where to turn, but beg and prey for counsel from every
passer-by’. They fluctuate ‘pitiably between hope and fear’ and become
superstitious and generally ‘very prone to credulity’. Spinoza is here cor-
rectly suggesting that the same people can show very different characteris-
tics—have very different opinions, values and feelings, for instance—as
they cross the line between these two types of situation. I suggest that we
think of these situations of doubt and crisis as spontaneous liminal occa-
sions with a characteristic mode of spontaneous liminal affectivity.
The doubt and crisis Spinoza invokes arise from the fact that forms of
process that were taken for granted have been perturbed or disrupted. As
discussed at length in Chap. 5, since human subjectivity is intricately
woven into the forms of shared meaning that make up our various social
practices, any significant disruption to a social form of process will shock
and uproot the psychic constitution of those who participate. The closest
to an account of a spontaneous liminal occasion I have managed to find
in Whitehead’s work is the following:

Nothing is more interesting to watch than the emotional disturbance pro-

duced by any unusual disturbance of the forms of process. The slow drift is
accepted. But when for human experience quick changes arrive, human
nature passes into hysteria. For example, gales, thunderstorms, earth-
quakes, revolutions in social habits, violent illnesses, destructive fires, bat-
tles, are all occasions of special excitement. There are perfectly good reasons
for this energetic reaction to quick change. My point is the exhibition of
our emotional reactions to the dominance of lawful order, and to the
breakdown of such order. When fundamental change arrives, sometimes
heaven dawns, sometimes hell yawns open. (Whitehead 1938/1966, p. 95)

There is no shortage of examples of such experiences. When discussing

René Magritte’s painting in Chap. 4, for example, I did not mention that
his life was rocked as a 14 year old by the suicide of his mother, who
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    239

drowned herself in a nearby river. Many of Magritte’s paintings are

haunted by the ‘this is not-ness’ of his mother. The experience was a pro-
foundly affective liminal moment that heralded a decisive transformation
in his life. The event of a shocking death is liminal in the sense that it
opens a highly mobile, volatile and affective space and phase of transition
which we must live through before we become able to cobble together and
incorporate a new sense of who we are and how we are to go on. Rom
Harré (1986, p. 4) long ago warned psychologists not to imagine that
words like ‘anger’, ‘love’, ‘grief ’ or ‘anxiety’ refer to some entity that can
be abstracted from the flux of situated interaction and studied. Rather,
when dealing with affectivity of this kind we are in fact always dealing
with experiences involving concrete unfolding situations that follow the
disruption of prior forms of process: ‘grieving families at funerals, anxious
parents pacing at midnight, and so on’. Affectivity is always profoundly
implicated in such moments of transition and disruption.
But affectivity is, in one sense, a constant: it does not just appear in
situations of disruption or transformation, but threads through our lives
at every conceivable point. Although the distinction is far from absolute,
we can contrast spontaneous liminal occasions with more standard, sta-
ble, routine and normative situations (the ‘daily life’ discussed in Chap.
5). It is not that there is no affectivity at play under stable conditions, but
that it takes, as it were, a different form. Under stable circumstances there
is no doubt that moments of ambiguity, crisis and uncertainty routinely
arise, but these tend to be tackled either by what Sally Falk Moore (2013,
p. 50) calls ‘processes of regularization’ (which aim to ‘crystallize and con-
cretize social reality, to make it determinate and firm’ and to smooth over
the cracks), or by ‘processes of situational adjustment’ (which exploit
areas of ambiguity in order to ‘reinject elements of indeterminacy into
social negotiations’, so that small-scale changes or adjustments to social
reality are facilitated). Either way, the forms of social process maintain
their more or less predictable order, and the forms of subjective experi-
ence retain a degree of ‘objectivity’ which permits them to reasonably
‘expect’ a workable future. One might argue that the familiar categories
supplied by our vocabulary for emotions are perfectly adequate in these
orderly situations. Things are different when the order of a form of pro-
cess breaks down. Harré’s ‘anxious parent pacing at midnight’ faces a
240  P. Stenner

moment when the usual dictates of social structure—the usual rules that
govern their lives—are suspended: their child has gone missing. When
subjectivities are structured by clearly applicable norms and rules they
acquire a relatively ‘objective’ character (the nature of outer and inner
reality is not in question, for instance) but when taken-for-granted cer-
tainties are swept away, for whatever reason, we can easily loose our grasp
of external reality and our sense of inner self-coherence (see Stenner and
Moreno 2013).
As I have suggested in earlier chapters, the relationship between the
devised and the spontaneous liminal experiences flows from the require-
ment to invent new forms of process when the old forms collapse. The
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was very familiar with suicidal
depression, pointed to this very relationship when he said: ‘Many people
have at some period serious trouble in their lives, so serious that it can lead
to thoughts of suicide. This is likely to appear to one as something nasty, as
a situation which is too foul to be the subject of a tragedy. And it may then
be an immense relief if it can be shown that one’s life has the pattern rather
of a tragedy, the tragic working out and repetition of a pattern’ (cited in
Tomkins 2008, p. 151). A situation too foul to be the subject of a tragedy
is yet, suggests Wittgenstein, somehow relieved by the recognition of the
pattern of a tragedy, or tragic pattern of one’s toxic life. This patterning is
reminiscent of the rhythmic pattern of sobbing that allows the desolate to
bridge the chasm of an event of profound loss and shock, as they absorb
themselves in the living pulses of the body they have been reduced to. And
here we discern once again the rhythmic drum beat of the ritual.
In sum, on the one hand, as we have seen, ritual (as the matrix of the
devised liminal experiences) generates its own affectivity and ‘collective
effervescence’ (Durkheim 1912/2001). On the other hand, the affectivity
generated by spontaneous liminal experiences (happenings like accidents,
disasters, crises, etc.) tends to provoke a certain process of ritualization as
if the repetition and symbolism of ritual served to tame and subdue the
passions at play, rendering them rhythmic, patterned, communicable and,
as it were ‘musical’. In this way, we might say that ritual helps to convert
crises into dramas, perhaps converting something approximating raw
affectivity into meaningful and communicable emotion in the process. It
is thus liminal experience of the spontaneous variety that provokes and
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    241

gives rise to liminal experience of the devised variety. This explains why, for
Geertz (1973, p. 132), rituals are so important as cultural symbols: ‘The
sorts of symbols … regarded as sacred varies very widely. Elaborate initia-
tion rites, as among the Australians; complex philosophical tales, as among
the Maori; dramatic shamanistic exhibitions, as among the Eskimo; cruel
human sacrifice rites, as among the Aztecs; obsessive curing ceremonies, as
among the Navaho; large communal feasts, as among various Polynesian
groups—all these patterns and many more seem to one people or another
to sum up most powerfully what it knows about living’.

Conclusion
I began this chapter on affect with a quotation from an article by
Seigworth and Gregg (2010) which I tried to make sense of with the help
of Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’ concept. Williams was feeling for a way
to theorize the emergence of novel cultural forms which, by necessity, are
at the edge of semantic availability. I used this quotation because Gregory
Seigworth described it as an important inspiration for his own adventures
within the ‘affective turn’. The quotation emphasized moments over
institutions and feelings over positions, and I have drawn attention to
these ‘moments’ as occasions of liminal emergence that are navigated and
managed by way of liminal affective technologies. I suggested that the
affective turn is itself understandable as a cultural emergence—namely,
the emergence of process thinking—and that it is also at the edge of
semantic availability. I challenged the tendency within the literature of
the affective turn to make a clean separation between affect and emotion,
and I pointed to several rather different, but overlapping, concepts of
affect at play in the literature. I emphasized the centrality of an ontologi-
cal concept of affect to process thought since this question is neglected
and requires considerable attention. In addressing anthropological affect
I introduced a distinction between the affectivity of liminal and stable
circumstances, and between spontaneous and devised forms of liminal
affectivity. I by no means claim that this exhausts the territory of the turn
to affect, but I think that it puts its concern with becoming in a new light
that I hope will prove productive to psychosocial scholars.
242  P. Stenner

Notes
1. In his four-volume work Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (published between
1962 and 1991), Tomkins (1962) argued for the existence of a small num-
ber of basic biologically hard-wired affects (these include distress/anguish,
shame/humiliation, fear/terror, anger/rage, interest/excitement, enjoy-
ment/joy, surprise/startle, disgust and dissmell). The affect system is theo-
rized as an amplifier of drive signals, and each affect hypothesized to be
triggered by an innate activating mechanism associated with differential
densities and patterns of neural firing. Tomkins theory thus assumes a
biological reality to human affects, and gives them a key role in human
psychology and culture.
2. Craib (1997) suggested social constructionists suffer from a delusion that
the world is constructed and at their disposal, and that this illusion func-
tions to defend them from a confrontation with their powerlessness to
explain that world. They imagine they are lucid and rational, but all the
whilst their thinking is shaped and determined by the affect.
3. Massumi (1995) equates affect with intensity, and contrasts it with what
he calls quality. In a densely complex and controversial argument, ‘quality’
and ‘intensity’ are presented as two distinct systems which operate in par-
allel. Taking the example of an image of a snowman, ‘quality’ is identified
with a ‘signifying order’ which indexes the experience of the image to con-
ventionally accepted intersubjective meanings (‘this is a snowman’). The
‘intensity’ of the image, on the other hand, is identified by Massumi with
the strength and duration of its effects (e.g. the effects the image has upon
a person’s heart-rate or upon the electrodermal activity of their skin). For
Massumi, quality and intensity are always co-present in any given situa-
tion, but follow different logics and come in different mixtures, the latter
perpetually capturing the former, but never quite succeeding, since inten-
sity always escapes its fate of being fixed by qualities. Emotion is thus
defined by Massumi in relation to the capture and taming of affective
intensities by way of qualities, and is associated with the higher-order pro-
cesses of meaning-making, consciousness and communication that are
often grasped with concepts of discourse (and semiosis more generally).
Affect, in turn, is defined as an unstructured, unassimilable remainder of
intensity, associated with the virtual potentialities of the autonomic ner-
vous system, and with an asubjective and pre-personal connective logic
that operates outside of consciousness and beyond the normativities of
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    243

social order. Affect, in short, escapes articulation in discourse. In this way,

Massumi is able to observe that approaches which take discourse as their
keynote tend be concerned only with ‘quality’ at the expense of ‘intensity’,
and yet, of the two, intensity is, for Massumi, the vital factor and the unac-
knowledged source of novelty. Massumi’s work is thus understandable as a
prolonged critique of what he sees as an endemic neglect of intensity/
affect, and a plea for its decisive relevance for any understanding of the
emergence of novelty in evolving systems of all kinds.
4. Garfinkel’s work is a good example of a discursive approach that is very
much attuned to process thought, but that—in its excitement—tends to
close all doors and windows to other forms of process. This comes down
to his preoccupation with structure and his grounding assumption—
explicitly derived from Talcott Parsons’ ‘wonderful book’ The Structure of
Social Action—that normative accountability is the guiding principle of
social life (Garfinkel 1988, p. 104). Although his famous breaching exper-
iments show an interest in situations in which there is a temporary sus-
pension of structure, it is clear that such occasions of absence matter to
Garfinkel only as exceptions that prove the rule of a structure which must
necessarily and immediately return. Garfinkel and those that follow him
thus profoundly neglect the liminal transitions that my book aims to fore-
ground. The following well-known quotation is remarkable in its stiflingly
authoritarian insistence on nothing but the unquestionable objective fact
of perpetual structure and order:
‘For ethnomethodology the objective reality of social facts, in that, and
just how, it is every society’s locally, endogenously produced, naturally
organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement,
being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work,
with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, pass-
ing, postponement, or buyouts, is thereby sociology’s fundamental phe-
nomenon’. (Garfinkel 1988, p. 103)
5. Massumi’s 1995 article begins with a highly selective interpretation of a
series of experiments that are very much within the social psychological
tradition. The experiments were led by the German psychologist Hertha
Sturm to investigate how psychological reactions to film can be modified
by voice-overs with different characteristics. Sturm became interested in a
short film shown on German TV that had excited some attention from
parents because their children had been disturbed by the film. The film
244  P. Stenner

shows a snowman melting on the roof garden of the man who built it. The
man watches and then takes it to the mountain where it can stay intact
longer, and bids it farewell. The experiment involved showing this film to
children under three conditions: the original film (which involved no dia-
logue), a ‘factual’ condition (in which a voice-over was added, giving fac-
tual statements about the action) and an ‘emotional’ condition (in which
the voice-over articulated and expressed the emotional feel of the action).
In each condition, the children who watched were asked to rate the film
on a ‘pleasant-unpleasant’ scale and a ‘happy-sad’ scale, and they were also
tested on their memory of the film. Memory was best for the emotional
version and worst for the factual version, and pleasantness was highest for
the original wordless version and lowest for the factual version. Massumi
claims to find this muddling, although it seems obvious that a film
designed to be impactful without words would be enjoyed more in exactly
that form. It seems equally obvious that superimposing a dull factual nar-
rative would both spoil it for the children and, for this very reason, make
it less memorable. Also, it seems perfectly logical that adding the ‘emo-
tional’ narrative would enhance memory on a test that requires the child
to recall using language (since they have been given some workable lan-
guage for this as part of the film in this condition), and might not spoil
the film quite as much as the factual voice-over. Be that as it may, the
result that Massumi finds truly strange is the finding that—presumably
irrespective of condition—those scenes in the film that were rated most
pleasant were also rated most sad. It is in order to explain this finding that
Massumi elaborates his complex network of theoretical distinctions start-
ing with content/effect and moving onto quality/intensity, mutating into
redundancy of signification/redundancy of resonation and culminating with
emotion/affect. Again, however, it seems quite obvious that when people
(children and adults alike) view a sad film, the bits we most enjoy about it
(and hence would rate as more ‘pleasant’) are precisely the sad bits, just as
the best bits of a horror movie are the scenes that are scary. We are disap-
pointed by tear-jerkers that fail to jerk tears and by horror movies that fail
to scare. This finding is only ‘strange’ if it is assumed that the children
cannot enjoy the sadness they feel when watching a film. Indeed, it is this
assumption that seems strange to me, and not the idea that the partici-
pants might have used the ‘pleasantness’ scale to indicate their
enjoyment.
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    245

6. Massumi is first of all influenced by Deleuze, not Whitehead. It is impor-

tant to recognize, however, that Deleuze is very much a process thinker
who sought to reignite a tradition of process thought including Bergson
and Nietzsche that has roots in Spinoza and Leibniz. In the ‘what is an
event?’ chapter of the book on Leibniz, Deleuze describes Whitehead as
‘the successor’ or diadoche, and as the ‘last great Anglo-American phi-
losopher before Wittgenstein’s disciples spread their misty confusion’
(Deleuze 1993, p. 76). This is a true homage to Whitehead as the inheri-
tor of a tradition of process thought grounded in the concept of the
event (or, strictly, the actual occasion).
7. In a directly comparable way, James (1884) proposed that we do not run
from the bear because we are scared, but that we are scared because we
run from the bear. It is not a matter of a mental construction—the ‘emo-
tion’—determining a physical course of events, but of a stream of events
that are both/neither mental and/or physical (hence James proceeds to
show that what we might take to be a mental emotion is composed of
bodily feelings like a racing heart, sweating palms, tensed musculature,
etc.).
8. Interestingly enough, a distinction between affect and emotion is also
drawn by Damasio, but, contrary to Massumi et al., he uses the word
‘emotion’ to denote physiological and not psychological processes. In fact,
Damasio’s (2000, 2004, 2006) main message is that ‘emotion’ is distinct
from ‘feeling’. ‘Emotions’ are bodily, biological processes controlled by
the brain and ‘feelings’ are mental experiences of such emotions. Both
taken together can be called ‘affects’. Emotions come first. They are basic
homeostatic devices designed through evolution to regulate life func-
tions. Feelings are perceptions of parts and states of the body—that is
perceptions of the ongoing homeostatic life regulation that includes
emotion. Feelings ‘translate’ the ongoing life-process of the body into
something like mind language and in so doing contribute to life regula-
tion on a higher level informed by consciousness. It is notable that
Damasio (2004) directly acknowledges the ‘Spinozist’ nature of his the-
ory. This different choice of terminology should warn against getting too
attached to arbitrary linguistic labels like ‘affect’, ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’
and should teach us to concentrate instead upon the concepts that these
words are being used to designate.
9. Having said that, two issues muddy the water here. First, for Tomkins
(1962), affects work by generating a conscious report (typically a posi-
246  P. Stenner

tively or negatively valenced experience/feeling that plays a motivational

role), and hence there is scope for referring to this conscious dimension
as an emotional experience, whilst retaining the term affect for the
organic machinery underlying and occasioning the experience (see
Stenner 2004). Second, Tomkins stresses that actual affective occasions
rarely involve the innate affects in their pure form, but usually in com-
plex blends and temporal dynamics bound by memory and imagination
into what he calls ‘scripts’. This notion holds out much promise for
understanding how affective experience becomes blended or interwoven
with linguistically mediated modes of experience. For some interpreters
of his work, these more complex experiences are designated ‘emotions’ in
contrast to the basic affect system.
10. In fact, Tomkins (1962) was one of those who engaged in a sustained but
sympathetic critique of Freud’s tendency to reduce the affects to modifi-
cations of basic drives (especially the sex drive), although the old idea of
drive energy (to which ideas become attached) still animates much psy-
choanalytic thought.
11. Freud’s engagement with transference is important also because it
extended the frame of the intelligible field of study of affectivity from the
individual to the relationship between two people (the transference con-
cerns the feelings a patient develops for their analyst). It is obvious that
the transference cannot be understood by considering an individual
alone. Others, like Bion (1961, p. 14) extended the intelligible field still
further, considering the affectivity of group dynamics. This extension of
the frame of intelligibility beyond the individual is a valuable aspect of
the affective turn, which I will return to.
12. Process thought has the potential to integrate multiple meanings of
affect distinguished in this chapter. In refusing to place human experi-
ence outside of nature it calls for the fourth concept of ontological affect.
It does not allocate ‘feeling’, ‘affect’, ‘emotion’ and so on to the realm of
the unreal or the ‘merely subjective’. Rather, the subject is construed as
that which comes into being through the process of feeling its objects
(Williams’s forming and formative process, Whitehead’s actual occasion
of experience, Schutz’s actio) and those objects are in turn construed as
the products of this process of feeling (Williams’s formed products,
Whitehead’s concretized matters of fact, Schutz’s actum). This is the ter-
ritory of the sixth concept of affect as self-creation. Process thought thus
construes reality itself as an unfolding and dynamic procession of rela-
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    247

tional encounters. This is the territory of the third concept of affect as

transformative encounter or passage. Feeling/affect is the selective pro-
cess of actualization through which the actual world becomes what it is.
This is the territory of the second concept of affect as liminal vector.
Since this ‘positive prehension’ (feeling the data of world) is a selective
process which entails the ‘negative prehension’ of all that is not felt, so
actual occasions of experience are necessarily surrounded by a penumbra
of virtual potentials that are no less real for the fact of having not been
felt. This is the territory of the first concept of affect as virtual.
13. The neuroscientific process thinker Jason Brown (2012) describes what
he calls the ‘microgenesis’ of each and every brain/mind state. The per-
ception of any object or the production of any act is the final phase of a
brain/mind state that leads from the brain’s core its surface. Such micro-
genesis is the becoming of the perceptual object or act, and the entire
sequence is a pulse that perishes on satisfaction only to be revived, in
overlapping waves, all within in a fraction of a second. For Brown (2012,
p. 29) ‘an emotion is an inner or subjective feeling that is generated by
the same process that deposits or actualizes an act or object, namely the
micro-temporal process that leads from the archaic core of the mind/
brain state to its outcome at the neocortical surface’. This challenges the
old idea of discrete brain locations for discrete functions (e.g. a limbic
system whose upward discharge yields feeling and whose downward dis-
charge yields display), and shows the profound limitation of efforts to
reduce experience to chemistry or anatomy.
14. Obvious exceptions are Damasio (2004) and Brown (2012).
15. Wetherell (2012) introduces the important concept of affective prac-
tices. It is notable that most of the examples she gives in the chapter in
which she introduces the concept are practices mediated by liminal affec-
tive technologies or techniques. Her inspiration, for instance, comes
from Goffman’s (1961) work on rituals, and other examples deal with
therapy and children’s play.
16. Dionysos was a God associated with wine and revelry but also death and
rebirth.
17. Pickard-Cambridge (1927, p. 47) traces the Dithyramb to at least the
early seventh century BC where Archilocus refers to it as a riotous revel-
song at Paros and ‘the fair strain of Dionysus’.
18. Attribution theorists, for instance, entirely take for granted the universal
nature of the actor/observer distinction without recognizing its historical
248  P. Stenner

and cultural conditions of emergence, and social theorists do the same

when they deploy ‘dramaturgical’ metaphors based on theatre and
assume them to be universal.
19. This raises the question of a possible hybrid phase ‘betwixt and between’
ritual and theatre where explicitly theatrical elements might be incorpo-
rated within the religious frame of ritual (and hence be one more means
of enacting and reproducing an existing version of the sacred). But
equally, such a hybrid might also catalyse an immanent critique or ques-
tioning (afforded by the new ‘distance’ between actor and observer cre-
ated by theatre) of what could then no longer be held sacred in the same
way (and hence provoke a change in the ‘beliefs’ of lived culture). In
discussing an Ancient Egyptian coronation drama, Gaster (1950) used
the phrase ‘dramatic ritual’ to capture the former sense of features of
drama which are still firmly linked to the sphere of religion rather than
literature.

References
Atlan, H. (1998/2011). Intentional self-organization: Emergence and reduc-
tion, toward a physical theory of intentionality. In S. Geroulanos & T. Mayers
(Eds.), Henri Atlan: Selected writings on self-organization, philosophy, bioethics
and Judaism. New York: Fordham University Press.
Bergson, H. (1908/1991). Matter and memory (trans: Paul, N.M. & Palmer,
W.S.). New York: Zone.
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. London: Tavistock.
Brown, J. W. (2012). Love and other emotions: On the process of feeling. London:
Karnac.
Brown, S., & Stenner, P. (2001). Being affected: Spinoza and the psychology of
emotion. International Journal of Group Tensions, 30(1), 81–105.
Brown, S. D., & Tucker, I. (2010). Eff the ineffable: Affect, somatic manage-
ment, and mental health service users. In M. Gregg & G. Seigworth (Eds.),
The affect theory reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Clough, P. T. (2010). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bod-
ies. In M. Gregg & G. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Craib, I. (1997). Social constructionism as a social psychosis. Sociology, 31(1),
1–15.
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    249

Crawford, J., Kippax, S., Onyx, J., Gault, U., & Benton, P. (1992). Emotion and
gender: Constructing meaning from memories. London: Sage.
Cristea, G. (1991). Pre-theatre: Rock paintings and engravings in central Sahara
(Tassili n. Ajjer). Assaph – Studies in the theatre, 7, 121–160.
Cromby, J. (2011). Scullery’s question: Multiplicity, felt experience and conti-
nuity. In P. Stenner, J. Cromby, J. F. Motzkau, J. Yen, & Y. Haosheng (Eds.),
Theoretical psychology: Global transformations and challenges. Toronto: Captus
Press.
Cromby, J. (2015). Feeling bodies: Embodying psychology. London: Palgrave.
Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens. London: Vintage.
Damasio, A. (2004). Looking for Spinoza. London: Vintage.
Damasio, A. (2006). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain.
Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin.
Deleuze, G. (1993). The fold: Leibniz and the baroque. London: The Athlone
Press.
Deleuze, G. (2007). Postscript on the societies of control. Available at http://deleu-
zelectures.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/postscript-on-societies-of-control.html.
Accessed 15 July 2012.
Durkheim, E. (1912/2001). In M. Cladis (Ed.), The elementary forms of religious
life (C. Cosman, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Edwards, D. (1999). Emotion discourse. Culture and Psychology, 5(3), 271–291.
Edwards, D. (2006). Discourse, cognition and social practices: The rich surface
of language and social interaction. Discourse Studies, 8(1), 41–49.
Elliott, A., & Frosh, S. (Eds.). (1995). Psychoanalysis in context: Paths between
theory and modern culture. London: Routledge.
Garfinkel, H. (1988). Evidence for the locally produced, naturally accountable
phenomena of order, logic, reason, meaning, method, etc. In and as of the
essential quiddity of immortal ordinary society (I of IV): An announcement
of studies. Sociological Theory, 6(1), 103–109.
Gaster, T. H. (1950). Thepsis: Ritual and drama in the ancient near east. New York:
Henry Schuman.
Gatens, M. (1996). Imaginary bodies: Ethics, power and corporeality. London:
Routledge.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic
Books.
Gibbs, A. (2010). After affect: Sympathy, synchrony, and mimetic communica-
tion. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader. London:
Duke University Press.
Goffman, I. (1961). Encounters. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
250  P. Stenner

Greco, M., & Stenner, P. (2008). Emotions: A social science reader. London:
Routledge.
Green, A. (1977). The conception of affect. International Journal of Psycho­
analysis, 58(2), 129–156.
Green, A. (1999). The fabric of affect in the psychoanalytic discourse (A. Sheridan,
Trans.). London: Routledge.
Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Harré, R. (Ed.). (1986). The social construction of emotion. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harrison, J. E. (1913). Ancient art and ritual. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hemmings, C. (2005). Invoking affect: Cultural theory and the ontological
turn. Cultural Studies, 19(5), 548–567.
Hollway, W., & Jefferson, T. (2000). Doing qualitative research differently: Free
association, narrative and the interview method. London: Sage.
James, W. (1884). What is an emotion? Mind, 9(34), 188–205.
James, W. (1912/2003). Essays in radical empiricism. New York: Dover.
Langer, S. K. (1942/1978). Philosophy in a new key: A study in the symbolism of
reason, rite, and art (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lewis-Williams, J., Dowson, T., Bahn, P., Bandi, H., Bednarik, R., Clegg, J.,
Consens, M., Davis, W., Delluc, B., Delluc, G., Faulstich, P., Halverson, J.,
Layton, R., Martindale, C., Mirimanov, V., Turner, C., II, Vastokas, J.,
Winkelman, M., & Wylie, A. (1988). The signs of all times: Entoptic phe-
nomena in upper Palaeolithic art. Current Anthropology, 29(2), 201–245.
Leys, R. (2012). The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry, 37(3), 434–472.
Massumi, B. (1995). The autonomy of affect. Cultural Critique, 31(2), 83–109.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Matte Blanco, I. (1975). The unconscious as infinite sets. London: Duckworth.
Matte Blanco, I. (1988). Thinking, feeling and being. London: Routledge.
Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revo-
lution. New York: Harper & Row.
Moore, S. F. (2013). Law as process: An anthropological approach. Oxford: James
Currey Publishers.
Morrissey, The Smiths. (1985). Nowhere fast. On Meat is murder. Sire Records.
Pickard-Cambridge, A.  W. (1927). Dithyramb, tragedy and comedy. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Rozik, E. (2002). The roots of theatre: Rethinking ritual and other theories of ori-
gin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Schütz, A. (1945). On multiple realities. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 5(4), 533–576.
   This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology…    251

Sedgwick, E. K., & Frank, A. (1995). Shame in the cybernetic fold: Reading
Silvan Tomkins. Critical Inquiry, 21(2), 496–505.
Sehgal, M. (2014). Diffractive propositions: Reading Alfred North Whitehead
with Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. Parallax, 20(3), 188–201.
Seigworth, G., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg &
G. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Spinoza, B. (1670/1951). A theologico-political treatise (Elwes, Trans.). London:
Dover.
Spinoza, B. ([1677] 1989). Ethics: Including the improvement of the understand-
ing (R. H. M. Elwes, Trans.). New York: Prometheus books.
Stenner, P. (2004). Is autopoietic systems theory alexithymic? Luhmann and the
socio-psychology of emotions. Soziale Systeme, 10(1), 159–185.
Stenner, P. (2015). A transdisciplinary psychosocial approach. In K.  Slaney,
J. Martin, & J. Sugarman (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of theoretical and philo-
sophical psychology: Methods, approaches and new directions for social science.
New York: Wiley.
Stenner, P., & Greco, M. (2013). Affectivity. Informática na Educaçao: Teoria e
Prática, 16(1), 49–70.
Stenner, P., & Moreno, E. (2013). Liminality and affectivity: The case of
deceased organ donation. Subjectivity, 6(3), 229–253.
Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: Towards a spatial politics of affect.
Geografiska Annaler, 86, 57–78.
Tomkins, S. (1962). Affect, imagery, consciousness (Vol. 1). New York: Springer
Publishing Company.
Tomkins, S. (2008). Revisions in script-theory. In M. Greco & P. Stenner (Eds.),
Emotions: A social science reader. London: Routledge.
Venn, C. (2010). Individuation, relationality, affect: Rethinking the human in
relation to the living. Body and Society, 16(1), 129–161.
Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding.
London: Sage.
Whitehead, A.  N. (1926/2005). Religion in the making. New  York: Fordham
University Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929/1985). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.
Whitehead, A.  N. (1933/1935). Adventures in ideas. London: Cambridge
University Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1938/1966). Modes of thought. New York: The Free Press.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zorich, Z. (2011). A chauvet primer. Archaeology, 65(2), 1–5.
 7
Conclusion

Psychosocial Transdisciplinarity
The nexus of problems motivating a transdisciplinary approach to the
psychosocial is not new. In 1928 Max Scheler (1928/2009, p.  5)
announced that the ‘ever-growing number of special disciplines which
deal with the human being conceal, rather than reveal, his [sic] nature, no
matter how valuable these disciplines may be’. In making sense of this
multiplicity, Scheler identified three types of ‘anthropology’, by which he
meant three types of general theory of humanity. He pointed out that we
have ‘a theological, a philosophical and a scientific anthropology before
us but which, as it were, have no concerns with each other: yet we do not
have one uniform idea of the human being’. In fact, he concludes that in
‘no historical era has the human being become so much of a problem to
himself [sic] as in ours’ (Scheler 1928/2009, p. 5).
If anything the situation is considerably worse today. The last 50 years
have seen an unprecedented explosion of knowledge production, but at
the source of this explosion is a fragmentation that Nicolescu (2002,
p. 34) calls, rather dramatically, the ‘disciplinary big bang’. In the follow-

© The Author(s) 2017 253

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_7
254  P. Stenner

ing vivid description, he gives particular attention to knowledge of the

human ‘subject’:

The fragmentation of the disciplinary universe is in full swing today. The

domain is inevitably becoming more and more specific; that which enables
communication between disciplines is becoming more and more difficult,
even impossible. A multischizoid, complex reality appears to have replaced
the simple, one-dimensional reality of classical thought. In turn, the sub-
ject is put in shambles by being replaced with an ever-increasing number of
separate parts, which are studied by different disciplines. (Nicolescu 2002,
p. 34)

Today’s typical and normative response to the ‘Babelization’ intro-

duced by knowledge fragmentation is to forget that there ever might be a
uniform idea of humanity, and to attack the very idea as symptomatic of
an old-fashioned desire to impose control through singularization, or as
prompted by a self-serving illusion of yearned-for past integrity that
never existed. Be that as it may, we do indeed face unprecedented knowl-
edge fragmentation, and when it comes to knowledge of ‘human being’,
this has been compounded by the paradox of the psychosocial, as defined
and discussed in Chap. 1. Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the founder of
positivism advised that humanity cannot be explained in terms of the
nature of what he called ‘man’ considered in abstract: ‘The so called
observations made on the mind, considered in itself and a priori’ writes
Comte, ‘are pure illusions’. To ‘know yourself … is to … know history’
(Comte cited in Cassirer, p. 88). This powerful warning against abstract-
ing the psychological from the social remains relevant today. As psycholo-
gism gives way to biologism, there is a growing temptation to imagine
that somehow all the properties of humanity can unfold themselves, not
just from an isolated mind, but from an individual brain. What is
required—and what I have aimed for in this book—is an extended con-
ception of psychology, grounded in experience, as a composition which
includes the full spectrum of social and cultural forms (themselves medi-
ated by organic and physical processes) that mediate our subjectivity.
Taking the paradox of the psychosocial as its point of departure, this
book has aimed towards putting the study of liminal experiences of
  Conclusion    255

transition and transformation squarely onto the agenda of those scholars

aiming to ‘think together’ the psychic and the social. Illustrated through
discussions of affect and emotion (Chap. 6), dream and imagination
(Chap. 5), fabulation and symbolism (Chaps. 2 and 3) the book has
proposed what I hope is a distinctive and fruitful approach to the rela-
tionship between psychology and the social sciences, with much to share
with the arts and natural sciences. It develops the idea that the psycho-
logical and the social are inextricably bound up with the flows and forms
of human cultural activity, and with the flows of organic life (Pickering
1996). Each and every psychological experience is culturally embedded
and organically embodied.
If every actuality is a composition within process, then ultimately the
biological, the psychological, the cultural and the social cannot be cleaved
apart and treated as if they were separate entities which can be under-
stood in abstraction from the flows in which they participate and indi-
viduate. This in turn means adopting an approach capable of moving
between and across the usual disciplinary boundaries, and of thinking in
terms of complex compositions: a transdisciplinary approach. It means
learning how to move from, say, a historical consideration of ritual or
theatre or art or sport to an interest in emotional dynamics, to a focus on
physiology. The theatre, as discussed in Chap. 6, is not simply a form
within human culture: it is a form of cultural technology which lends
shape and pattern to the minds, memories, thoughts and emotions of
those who participate in the compositions it affords. As a cultural medium
it contributes its share to the maintenance and transformation of the
societies in which it exists. The emergence of theatre in Ancient Greece
was a transformative psychosocial event whose influence was on a par
with the co-emergence of philosophy and democracy. Modern dramatur-
gical sociological theories that take their cue about human nature from
the theatre must recognize that the mode of thought they attribute to
humanity as such is in fact limited and historically contingent. The same
applies to media like writing, law, philosophy, science and so on, each of
which—in its own complex ways—transforms the compositional possi-
bilities of the human lives in which it appears.
256  P. Stenner

Life as Transcendence
A characteristic feature of this book has been the use of art objects as
vehicles for unfolding core theoretical distinctions relevant to psychoso-
cial research. In the account I have developed, these distinctions are born
in transformative experience which is symbolically expressed in an art-
work which, in turn, offers itself as a source of inspiration to others. For
example, informed by Susan Langer’s discussion of the artwork as a per-
ceptible form expressive of feeling and Whitehead’s account of symbol-
ism, I discussed Aesop’s fable of the dog and his reflection, and Magritte’s
painting of a non-pipe, as materializations of micro-liminal occasions of
‘this is not’ experience. I proposed a process of fabulation whereby experi-
ence that is difficult to express discursively can be formulated and recon-
structed through presentational symbolism. This approach is compatible
with other theoretical perspectives that I have not been able to prioritize
in this book, especially that of Vygotsky (1925/1971) who articulates a
passage from sense to meaning mediated by art:

The melting of feelings outside us is performed by the strength of social

feeling, which is objectivized, materialized, and projected outside of us,
then fixed in external objects of art, which have become the tools of society.
Art is the social technique of emotion, a tool of society which brings the
most intimate and personal aspects of our being into the circle of social life.
(Vygotsky 1925/1971, p. 78)

I mention Vygotsky because this basic idea, combined with many oth-
ers, has been put to use in some excellent recent work resonant with the
approach of this book (Zittoun and Gillespie 2016; Zittoun 2013; Nissen
and Solgaard Sørensen 2017). Tania Zittoun and her colleagues, for
example, discuss artworks as ‘symbolic resources’ that lend meaning to
life transitions, and Morten Nissen and his colleagues show how artistic
techniques can provide new possibilities for action for those struggling to
control their use of drugs. Vygotsky’s observation that art is a ‘social tech-
nique of emotion’ clearly resonates with my characterization of art as a
liminal affective technology productive of devised liminal experiences.
My aim with this characterization is a little broader, however, since it
  Conclusion    257

opens up the relationship of art to a much wider set of devised affective

practices with roots in ritual. This in turn has enabled me to express
something of the complexity of the relationship between devised liminal
experience (comprised of events that are artfully performed) and sponta-
neous liminal experience (comprised of events that befall us), and to con-
trast both with the world of daily life (comprised of events in the mundane
sense of routine occurrences). All the while, of course, it is vital to recog-
nize that these contrasts are necessarily ex post facto intellectual recon-
structions of a singular and collectively lived life-process that is ultimately
an indivisible unity, and which these contrasts divide precisely at the
point of their unity. This point of unity is graspable as a weaving of the
sense of importance that is snatched from liminal events into the matter of
fact routines of daily life such that a certain richness formative of ideals can
acquire concrete determinacy in ordinary practical activity. From the per-
spective I have been developing, this weaving—which integrates personal
subjectivity into societal practices—is the basis of human culture in its
living immediacy.
In Chap. 3 I briefly described Masaccio’s famous fresco of the expul-
sion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, since this is another
good example of a work of art which catches a liminal occasion in the act
of its passage and freezes it, as it were, for our contemplation. The fresco
extracts an event. As an art work, it thereby provides an occasion which
affords (to those who appreciate it, of course) a rich experiential encoun-
ter. To relate the content of this fresco to the theme of Chap. 6, it depicts
affect in terms of an unfolding encounter during a transformative event.
We are shown the distress on Eve’s face as she staggers from the scene,
mouth open in a cry, eyebrows contorted and raised together at the mid-
dle of her brow, and we have no difficulty in identifying her profound
sorrow. But it is obvious that this event of a downward plunge in her
affective state is directly connected to the fact of the broader event being
depicted: that she is being cast out of the only home she has known by a
father whose fury knows no bounds. Adam responds slightly differently,
but in a way no less consistent with the force of this event. He bends his
head and torso downwards and covers his face with his hands in an
expression of mixed horror and shame. In covering his face with his hands
he simultaneously prevents himself from properly seeing what is
258  P. Stenner

­ appening, and from being seen. His hands thus serve to partially ‘bracket
h
him out’ from the horrible situation. We can easily identify the urge to
disappear associated with shame and embarrassment, but we are also
aware of how the biology of our face betrays us as it fills with the blood
of a blush which can only attract the attention of others, as if we are
obliged to appear to disappear. The affect at play is thus equally describ-
able under the attribute of bodily extension (lowered head, pulsing blood,
etc.), under the attribute of thought (desire to hide, feeling of distress),
and under the attribute of shared communication (what the face expresses
to others present), but each of these attributes must be grasped as an
abstraction from what is in fact a unity of unfolding events.
The situation in which Adam and Eve find themselves is liminal in the
sense that, as they stagger forwards at the behest of the sword-wielding
angel, they are stepping over or through a boundary that had once fixed
the limits of their world. They are no longer what they once were, but
they are not yet what they will become. Before this point they were not
even aware that their position in the world of the Garden, and their exis-
tence therein, had been constituted by a boundary. They became aware of
the boundary only by stepping over it, and as a result of overstepping,
they were forcefully unbound from the limits which had structured their
taken-for-granted daily existence. They were no longer the favourite and
privileged creatures of their father, no longer free to innocently roam
amidst the plentiful bounty of the Garden (with all of the enjoyable rou-
tine practices this would have afforded them), no longer protected by the
guardian angel, but obliged to somehow recreate themselves as self-­
conscious eternal wanderers. Of course, according to the mythology,
both had received advanced warning not to eat the apple from the tree of
knowledge. They were told that there were limits, but they had not expe-
rienced those limits. It would be better to say that they simultaneously
knew and did not know about the consequences of their actions. They
knew the consequences, but—like the rest of us with limited foresight—
only up to a certain point.
Although he does not mention liminality, in a brilliant essay called Life
as transcendence Georg Simmel (1918/2015, p. 2) expresses the essence of
life in a paradox: ‘we are bounded in every direction, and we are bounded
in no direction’. He argues that our lives are made determinate by
  Conclusion    259

b­ oundaries in two senses. We have boundaries in the sense that we con-

tinually orient ourselves in terms of a high threshold above us, and a low
threshold below us. Each thought is wiser or more foolish, more noble or
more cowardly. Each deed is more or less meaningful, effective, moral
and so on. Our powers of action are enhanced towards the high points,
and diminished as we take a downward swerve towards the low points.
The boundary above and below us ‘is our means for finding direction in
the infinite space of our worlds’ (Simmel 1918/2015, p. 2). And at the
same time as having boundaries we are boundaries. By this, Simmel
means that human life is the paradox of the boundary between being
determinately bounded in every direction, and being bounded in no
direction. To be what we are, each boundary is necessary, and yet ‘every
single specific boundary can be stepped over, every fixity can be displaced,
every enclosure can be burst, and every such act, of course, finds or cre-
ates a new boundary’. The boundary is unconditional (since it constitutes
the threshold of our world and the structure of our position in it) and the
boundary is conditional (since each boundary can be gotten around or
transcended). The unified act of life is always a combination of a bound-
edness that lets us be what we are, and the transcendence of boundary
which is the only means by which we can become what we were not. We
are boundaries in that we are the synthesis of bounded position and lim-
inal transition. Adam and Eve stand for all of us who must burst through
the bubble of our boundedness. They stand for all of us who, in moving
beyond our limits, know the intimate connection between passion and
passage, emotion and motion. It is no accident that religion, ritual, art,
theatre, dream, imagination and all the other worlds-within-and-­
between-worlds are to be found like so many wild animals drinking at
this source.

Generative Paradox
Der Mensch ist etwas, das überwinden werden soll (Man is something that
is to be overcome).
Something to be overcome: thus spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1891/1969,
p. 41). We began in Chap. 1 with something to overcome: the paradox of
260  P. Stenner

the psychosocial. We cannot and yet we must separate the psychological

from the social, we cannot and yet we must know ourselves. I presented
this as more than just a mind game, and proposed it instead as the gen-
erative principle of psychosocial creativity: psychosocial existence can
form its forms and ‘carry on’ only to the extent that it overcomes the
pragmatic obstacles posed by paradox. I do not claim originality for this
concern with paradox as generative. A long whilst back, Plato defined the
philosopher as the one who stands at the threshold between knowing and
not knowing. In some sense we are all philosophers: double-­faced, stand-
ing proudly ashamed with one foot in what we know and one foot in
what we don’t.1 We saw in Chap. 2 that the Muses announced exactly this
ambivalence to Hesiod. Perhaps every important thought begins in the
embarrassment of paradox, because every important thought must think
what was unthought and give expression to depths unspoken. To feel the
new shame of no longer being ashamed of one’s shame: something to be
overcome. This new expression of the felt-unthought, typically born of
shock, is the process of fabulation I unfolded in Chap. 2. And as I argued
in Chaps. 3 and 6, thought born in paradox is a thought inseparable from
feeling. Thought feels a feeling that feels and, as it does so, it feels the
thought being born in feeling.
Even before Plato, the pre-Socratics had already begun rolling with the
paradox of that which is stable only because it moves. It is from this para-
dox that the process thought described in Chap. 4 unfurls itself and spins
like a child’s spinning top, stable thanks only to its motion. But as also
discussed in Chaps. 2 and 6, the boundless continuity of the creative real
can exist and be thinkable only in relation to the firmly bounded, discon-
tinuous creatures that actually populate our equally bounded and discrete
planet, like so many footprints marking the passage of the process that
has just swept past.2 Fluid, interconnected and indivisible continuity thus
has an intimately paradoxical relationship to punctual, atomic, epochal
individuality (known formally as Zeno’s paradox). Process is poorly
grasped as the pure flux of flow because a boundary must exist if a thresh-
old is to be crossed, and no threshold is crossed without a subject that is
transformed by that crossing. For every transition, there is a position and
for every relation, there is a station.
Chapter 5 provided a theoretical vocabulary for the weaving of these
relations between stability and transformation, a weaving that constitutes
  Conclusion    261

and replenishes a human culture and a human subjectivity that is forever

exhausting itself and forever moving beyond. In dealing with Schutz’s
shockless shocks, Chap. 5 also confronted the paradox of the serious play
at work in the liminal worlds at the margins of a daily life whose indubi-
table reality and facticity we are obliged to create and constantly reinvent.
Paradox, as I have tried to show throughout the book, is that which con-
structs because it destroys; that which is included by being excluded; that
which is irrevocable because it is revocable; that which communicates
because it can’t communicate; that which is ‘got’ because it is ‘gone’; that
which works because it doesn’t work; that which continues because it is
discontinuous; that which dies because it is born; that which is different
because it is the same; that which is within because it is without; that
which is mine because it is yours. We must no longer fall silent when the
masters of logic point out the logical difficulties of paradox and contra-
diction. Thanks to the likes of Russell and Whitehead (1910/1963),
Gödel (1931/1995) and Spencer-Brown (1969), such logical difficulties
are now understood to be the ineradicable source of logic, rather than its
nemesis.

Ontological Liminality
Chapter 1 proposed a deeply empirical approach to the paradox of the
psychosocial by posing the question: where and when do we encounter
these paradoxes? Where and when, for example, does our sense of inner
and outer dissolve and come undone leaving us perplexed as to what we
know to be ‘ourselves’ and what we know to be ‘the others’? This question
gave a new significance to the concept of liminality. I proposed that it is
during liminal occasions that the psychological and the social morph
from the clarity of an either/or into the indistinction of a both/and that is
simultaneously a neither/nor. Liminal occasions, like those depicted in
Aesop’s fable of the dog and in Masaccio’s fresco of the expulsion, are
occasions of psychosocial undoing.
But in the course of this book I have extended the concept of liminality
quite radically, and argued for its transdisciplinary potential. It remains
here to consolidate this extension into a concept of ontological liminality
of general utility. Certainly van Gennep’s and Turner’s work (discussed at
262  P. Stenner

various points in this book) has shown liminality to be a valuable concept

at the anthropological level, with application well beyond the territory of
ritual (Bell 1997). But, building on the work of many others, I have also
implied a more general use wherein liminality pertains to transformations
within any given form of process, or to any transition between given forms
of process. This broadens the concept beyond anthropology, giving it
potential ontological significance, but of course it accommodates the
anthropological use in which the forms of process in question are mean-
ingfully ordered spheres of social and cultural activity mediated by com-
munication (and presupposing conscious human actors). A liminal
occasion, understood more generally, entails any sensitive threshold which
has the character of a volatile event or occasion of becoming (see also
Thomassen 2014). Although van Gennep appears to have been the first
scholar to use the term ‘liminal’, it is possible that he was familiar with the
use of the term limen within early psychology. It was used by Herbart
(1824–5) and then Fechner (1860/1999) to denote the still rather myste-
rious transitional threshold of intensity beyond which a stimulus presented
to a subject is consciously experienced. Whilst it is prudent not to indis-
criminately confuse these different spheres of usage, it is also clear that this
gives the concept a bio-psychological significance which complements its
psycho-sociological significance in anthropology. Pointing to a different
sphere of application again, Szakolczai (2009) argues that the famous ‘first
word’ of Greek philosophy, apeiron, is equivalent to the Latin liminality in
referring to in-between moments when conventional limits are removed.
He points out that the word ‘experience’ itself implies a self-transcendent
moving beyond, whereby something transformative is gone through.

 he Paradoxical Grounding of Ontological Liminality

T
in Process Thought

A common feature of disparate uses of the concept of liminality is that

they all incline towards thinking processually. It is therefore within fully-­
fledged process thought that we encounter something approximating an
ontological account of liminality, even where that word is missing. This is
not surprising since, as we saw in Chap. 1, process thought articulates
  Conclusion    263

itself against thought which is grounded in the idea of a static substance

whose nature can only be more or less accurately represented in thought
or reflected in experience. A process approach begins with happenings,
flows, events and occasions rather than states or substances and their rep-
resentations, and it shows these substances and structures to be processes.
A rock, for example, is part of a flow of transformation when understood
from the perspective of geological time, and it only appears to be static
from our limited time-perspective. The issue here is therefore a matter of
how one flow of duration (that of geology) intersects with that of another
duration (human perception). From a process perspective, all things per-
ish and recur (Brown 2012, p. 31), and all of nature is understood as a
rhythm of arising, perishing and replacement. There are four main rea-
sons why process thought gives something like ‘liminality’ a new onto-
logical role:

First, because things are defined by their relevance to other things, and
by the way other things are relevant to them. If the essence3 of things
is relational, this gives new salience to whatever is ‘betwixt and between’
concrete material things, and to relevance more generally (Savransky
2016).

Second, because things are constituted in and by their temporal rela-

tionship to a past that is giving rise to a future. If the essence of things
is processual, this means that whatever is spatial is also ‘betwixt and
between’ times. For these two reasons we no longer think we can get to
the essence of things by eliminating temporal and spatial ‘betwixt and
between-ness’, because this is the essence of things (Brown and Stenner
2009).

The third reason is that process thought emphasizes creativity and

emergence. Thought and experience can never be understood merely
as representations or reflections of a pre-existing reality (as they are in
substantialist, representational thought), since at stake is the emer-
gence of new forms of reality. Process is not a concept to be separated
from ‘content’ and it is not just meaningless movement but, as stressed
264  P. Stenner

throughout this book, it concerns the emergence of novelty. Whitehead

(1929/1985, p.  327) is clear in insisting that the ‘expansion of the
universe with respect to actual things is the first meaning of “process”’.
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: ‘[T]he
many become one and are increased by one’ (Whitehead 1929/1985,
p. 21).

The fourth reason is that in stressing creativity process thought gives a

fundamental role to the process of experience, but experience con-
ceived as a liminal going through. In fact Whitehead distinguishes two
related meanings of process. The first, described above, is ‘microscopic’.
It is the process through which an actual occasion converts its merely
real data into determinate actuality (the microscopic process of concres-
cence viewed from the perspective of the occasion itself ). The second is
the process whereby the new ‘particular existent’ (the concrete actual-
ity created by concrescence) is taken up in turn as new data for the
constitution of the next actual occasion, allowing the process to be
repeated and developed. The second is the macroscopic process of tran-
sition viewed from the ‘external’ perspective of the newly arising occa-
sion. This is essentially a modification of Whitehead’s distinction
between formal and objective existence, where in the internal, micro-
scopic process of concrescence the actuality exists formally, and in the
external macroscopic process of transition it exists objectively (see
Chap. 3). These are, however, two sides of a single process which allows
Whitehead to simultaneously conceptualize the expansion of the uni-
verse (via the process of concrescence) and the actual nature of the
universe in any stage of this expansion (via the process of transition).
In this way Whitehead avoids Bergson’s error of identifying process
only with the flux of continuity, and of consigning discrete, bounded
organisms to the status of illusion (see Chap. 2).
  Conclusion    265

The Ontological Liminality of A. N. Whitehead

I have laboured this fourth delicate point because it is decisively impor-

tant for grasping Whitehead’s philosophy in particular as a philosophy of
liminality. It is precisely the juxtaposition of, or the endless baton-­
exchange between, the two aspects of process (concrescence and transi-
tion) that gives rise to what Whitehead calls the pulse or the ‘rhythm of
the creative process’. This rhythm ‘swings from the publicity of many
things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private indi-
vidual to the publicity of the objectified individual’ (Whitehead
1929/1985, p.  151). The objectified individual is the product of the
­process of concrescence to be newly felt by the next occasion, and the
private individual is the process of concrescence itself, seen from the ‘pri-
vate’ and ‘microscopic’ perspective of the occasion itself. In Modes of
Thought Whitehead (1938/1966) characterizes this same swinging
rhythm in terms of a constant movement between experience and expres-
sion. In the course of an actual occasion of experience the expressed data
of the world is prehended into a unity. The result is a new expression
which in turn becomes data for the next arising occasion of experience.
This in turn, upon its satisfaction, will itself yield as its expression a new
‘particular existent’. As we saw in Chap. 6, ‘feeling’ is thus the ‘reception
of expressions’ and ‘Expression is the diffusion, in the environment, of
something initially entertained in the experience of the expressor’
(Whitehead 1938/1966, p. 23).
If, as discussed in Chap. 5, van Gennep gives us a processual image of
society as a series of positions accompanied by a series of transitions, or as
a series of states accompanied by a series of movements of passage between
states, then, on a cosmological level, Whitehead’s process ontology gives us
a directly comparable vision of the universe as a series of objectified expres-
sions accompanied by a series of objectifying experiences. The same pulse
between position and transition, solid and liquid, pivotal and liminal is at
play in both modes of thought. Just as the actual occasions of concrescence
are the points at which the universe is creatively expanded, so the liminal
experiences at the interstices of human socio-cultural activity are the pri-
mary sites of cultural replenishment and psychosocial innovation. This
266  P. Stenner

point did not escape Victor Turner (1969/1995) who articulated it, per-
haps over sharply, in his distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘liminal anti-
structure’, identifying the latter as the quick of culture (as the quick of a
thumb nail is the source of that structure’s growth). Drawing on Dilthey
rather than Whitehead, Turner describes cultural expressions in directly
comparable processual terms as the ‘crystallized secretions of once living
human experience’ (Turner 1982, p. 17), and observed that ‘experience
urges towards expression’ (p. 37). The ritual process for Turner also entails
a certain rhythm of structural solidification and liminal melt-down. As he
said of ritual processes:

ritual processes contain within themselves a liminal phase, which provides

a stage (and I use this term advisedly) for unique structures of experience
(Dilthey’s Erlebnis) in milieus detached from mundane life and character-
ized by the presence of ambiguous ideas, monstrous images, sacred sym-
bols, ordeals, humiliations, esoteric and paradoxical instructions, the
emergence of symbolic types represented by maskers and clowns, gender
reversals, anonymity, and many other processes which I have elsewhere
described as “liminal”. The limen, or threshold, a term I borrowed from van
Gennep’s second of three stages in rites of passage, is a no-man’s-land
betwixt and between the structural past and the structural future as antici-
pated by the society’s normative control of biological development. (1986,
p. 41)

If we juxtapose this insight with Whiteheadian process philosophy, we

encounter an ontology in which experience as such is fundamental to all
forms of reality, and where experience is directly linked to questions of
passage. But for Whitehead, something like ‘rites of passage’ apply across
nature, as indicated in the following description of the adventures of a
single molecule: ‘Consider one definite molecule. It is part of nature. It
has moved about for millions of years. Perhaps it started from a distant
nebula. It enters the body; it may be as a factor in some edible vegetable;
or it passes into the lungs as part of the air. At what exact point as it enters
the mouth, or as it is absorbed through the skin, is it part of the body? At
what exact moment, later on, does it cease to be part of the body?
Exactness is out of the question. It is only to be obtained by some trivial
convention’ (Whitehead 1938/1966, p. 21).
  Conclusion    267

But we find an equivalent ontological liminality in other process think-

ers too.

The Ontological Liminality of G. H. Mead

We saw in Chap. 1 that G. H. Mead (1932/1980, p. 47) articulates a

processual account of sociality as a phase of adjustment during a passage
from a system that is now in the past, to a system in process of formation.
The passage is instigated by the advent of an emergent event and Mead
stresses the reality both of this event and of the subsequent phase of
adjustment betwixt and between the old system and the new. In empha-
sizing what I called ‘sociality-as-passage’, he draws our attention precisely
to the event of transformation as it is happening, before the new system
has settled. Mead’s startling identification of sociality with ‘the capacity
of being several things at once’ (Mead 1932/1980, p. 49) is not restricted
to the anthropological level of human sociality but is designed to be
applicable to the entirety of nature. It relates to any situation in which a
novel event must exist for a time in a liminal condition when it is simul-
taneously part of the old order from which it emerged, and the new order
heralded by its advent. Mead engaged quite deeply with the physical and
biological sciences of his time, and was looking for a unified approach
whose key is that, to use his phrase, it takes ‘time seriously’ (Mead
1932/1980, p. 176):

It is the task of the philosophy of today to bring into congruence with each
other this universality of determination which is the text of modern sci-
ence, and the emergence of the novel which belongs not only to the experi-
ence of human social organisms, but is found also in a nature which science
and the philosophy that has followed it have separated from human nature.
(Mead 1932/1980, p. 14)

It is only by taking time seriously as part of a ‘philosophy of the pres-

ent’ that we arrive at the concept of emergence underpinning sociality-as-­
passage. For Mead the present is ‘the seat of reality’. By saying this he does
not intend to reduce the past and the future to the present, or to deny any
meaning to the past and the future. He does not believe in the idea of a
268  P. Stenner

pure present instant which is timeless. As he puts it: ‘If we introduce a

fictitious instantaneousness into a passing universe, things fall to pieces’
(Mead 1932/1980, p. 177). Mead does mean, however, that neither the
past nor the future exists as an independent reality. They are meaningful
only in relation to a present and hence all different pasts and futures have
their ‘seat’, so to speak, in a present. If our realities are actual only in a
present, then our pasts and our futures gain their actuality also from our
present occasion of actuality. The past that has passed has ceased to exist
and must be reconstructed in every present moment, but we do so with
an eye to a not yet existing future. And yet each present is an event that
becomes and then perishes, its disappearance conditioning and giving
rise to the next present occasion.4
To the extent that the past is a present reconstruction, it is something
that is revocable, but Mead also insists that the past is irrevocable. He says
it quite straightforwardly: the past is ‘both irrevocable and revocable’
(Mead 1932/1980, p. 23). The revocable nature of the past is attributable
to the emergent event: a new becoming that was not there in advance. The
emergent event is ‘the occurrence of something which is more than the
processes that have led up to it and which by its change, continuance or
disappearance, adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise
have possessed’ (Mead 1932/1980, p.  23). When life first emerged on
earth, something was added to purely physical processes that they would
not otherwise have possessed, and yet—unless we are to entertain a bifur-
cated metaphysics—we must affirm that it emerged from those processes.
The same with self-consciousness, or symbolic language, or theatre, or a
new technology, or a new idea and so on.
To the extent that they became the seat of reality, defining the locus of
a new present, each of these events of emergence entail a reconstruction
of the events that led up to them. The emergent always and only arises
within the present, but its appearance creates a new standpoint—a new
present—from which the past is looked back upon, and reconstructed. A
new scientific discovery for example, catalyses a reconstruction of past
knowledge, and creates a new past of scientific errors and precursors, and
a new horizon of hypotheses. Or a new insight into one’s own character
can be a trigger for reconstructing the meaning of one’s own life. This is
the basis of the revocable nature of the past, which is ever reconstructed
  Conclusion    269

from the present vantage point. This reconstruction is an important

aspect of what Mead means by the phase of adjustment through which an
emergent reality comes to ‘settle’ after the phase of its shocking birth.
And yet the past is also gone, irrevocably. That something was and is no
longer, is irrevocable and never changes, but what does change is the
‘what it was’. The ‘what it was’ is revocable because it concerns the impor-
tance of ‘what it was’. That importance belongs always to the present
moment. The emergent event changes the past because it transforms
present importance. In this way we see the connection between impor-
tance and emergence that I discussed in relation to liminal experience in
the conclusion of Chap. 5.

The Ontological Liminality of Georg Simmel

Simmel’s distinctive processual metaphysics is also grounded in a deep

meditation on the nature of time (a meditation that informed Heidegger’s
[1927/1990] writing of Being and time). Like Mead and Whitehead,
Simmel (1918/2015, p. 6) recognizes the profound actuality of the pres-
ent occasion, but rejects the account of the present as a mere instant
which would be ‘as little time as the point is space’ (Mead’s ‘fictitious
instantaneousness’ and Whitehead’s fallacies of ‘simple location’ and ‘sim-
ple occurrence’). Certainly, Simmel argues, from the rather conceptual
perspective of a logically observed object, we must conclude that the pres-
ent is simply the point where past and future collide. From this perspec-
tive only past and future make up amounts of time, and the present is a
minimal punctual point. Understood as a mere punctuality in this con-
ceptual sense, the present alone is real, since the past is no longer and the
future is not yet. But this would mean, not just that only the present is
real, but also that, since there can be no amount of time in the present,
time is not in reality and reality is not something temporal (since ‘the
concept of time can be applied to reality’s contents only if the atemporal-
ity they possess as present has become a “no more” or a “not yet”, at any
rate a nothing’ [Simmel 1918/2015, p. 6]).
Simmel is clear, however, that this paradox has force only as an abstract
argument concerning a logically observed object. He contrasts it with the
270  P. Stenner

fact that in lived-life we directly feel the temporal dimension of the living
present (see the arguments for causal efficacy in Chap. 3). This sense that
present reality is always, already, and also a bit of its past and a bit of its
future is most apparent for conscious experience but, as we shall see,
Simmel traces it deeper into organic life as such (but he does not go as far
as Whitehead in extending the concept of organism into physical exis-
tence as well). In conscious experience previous experience continues to
live as memory, and in this way the sphere of the actual present ‘stretches
back’ to the point in the past at which it was formed. We therefore rou-
tinely and directly comprehend that our actual experience is not solely
present but extended backwards onto a past moment to which it remains
attached. We feel our present experience to have come out of its immedi-
ate past and we live that present, as it were, back into the past.
Something similar obtains with respect to the future. The present tran-
scends itself in that we directly feel an immediate carryover (Simmel’s
word is Hineinleben) of present experience (thoughts, feelings, percep-
tions) into the future. In the present moment we open the cupboard door
and reach in for the tin of tomatoes we anticipate to be there moments
beforehand. Thus the future is in the present. And we anticipate this way
because we remember putting the tin in the cupboard yesterday. Thus the
past is in the present. In this way we feel directly that the thresholds
between present, past and future are not real. Rather than time having no
reality, we conclude that it is the abstract concept of the present as a simple
instantaneous occurrence that has no reality beyond that created by our logic.
To avoid the trap of concluding that this conscious experience of mixed
time is a mere imposition of higher thought, Simmel deepens his account
by finding that the same mixture of temporalities defines non-­conscious
life: ‘Life truly is both past and future’ (Simmel 1918/2015, p. 8). If a life-
form actually lives, this means that at any given moment of its actuality it
transcends itself and hence ‘its present forms a unity with the “not yet” of
the future’ (Simmel 1918/2015, p. 8). Today’s biologists would refer to the
constant self-generation proper to every living cell, organ and organism as
a process of autopoiesis (Varela 1991). Any living thing, we might say,
maintains its form through continual transformation: ‘life is at once fixed
and variable; of finished shape and developing further; formed and ever
breaking through its forms; persisting yet rushing onward’ (Simmel
  Conclusion    271

1918/2015, p. 10). But in addition to self-­generation, if something lives it

must reach out beyond itself, to feed, to reproduce, to create its niche.
Whitehead (1929/1985, p. 106) makes a similar point when he describes
food as theft necessitated by insufficiency. As long as an organism lives, it
is insufficient in the sense that it never ceases to break down, and it lives
only as long as it can ensure a ready supply of food from the outside. Food
is that which, when broken down, can enter into the chemical associations
necessary for the work of ongoing structural repair (see Stenner 2011).
But the present of a living form is also embedded in the structures and
genetic codes of a past from which alone its present could have unfolded.
In this way Simmel rejects the superficial account whereby time is logi-
cally differentiated into the three grammatically separate tenses of past,
present and future. If we adopt this merely ‘punctual’ account then ‘the
immediate continuous stretching of itself into the future, which every
living present signifies, gets concealed. The future does not lie ahead of us
like some untrodden land that is separated from the present by a sharp
boundary line, but rather we live continually in a border region that
belongs as much to the future as to the present’ (Simmel 1918/2015,
p. 9). Exactly the same ‘border region’ applies to the past, which is carried
by the present in any and every moment of its existence. If the present is
vivid actuality, then it is an actuality that the past has never left and that
the future is already present within. Like Mead, Simmel makes plain that
this does not mean that the past thereby rises from its grave. If we live
continually in a border region where past and future are part of every
present experience: if we intimately know the future and the past in each
of our present moments: this is precisely because the future is unknow-
able and the past irrevocably gone. We know and yet we don’t know, or
we know because we can’t know.

 ynthesis: Ontological Liminality Within a Theory

S
of Limits

As with Whitehead and Mead, it is therefore through a deep rethinking

of time that Simmel arrives at a perspective on what I am calling onto-
logical liminality. Life itself is liminal in that it exists ‘in a border region’
272  P. Stenner

and that ‘we stand at once on this side and on the other side’ of its thresh-
old (Simmel 1918/2015, pp. 7–9). To be alive is to step beyond one’s life,
to be more life and even more than life: ‘to climb beyond oneself in growth
and reproduction, to sink below oneself in old age and death—these are
not additions to life; rather, such rising up and spilling over the bounded-
ness of the individual condition is life itself ’ (Simmel 1918/2015, p. 14).
Whitehead (1939/1958, p. 8) sums up the art of life in a directly compa-
rable way as a ‘three-fold urge: to live, to live well, to live better … the art
of life is first to be alive, secondly to be alive in a satisfactory way, and
thirdly to acquire an increase in satisfaction’ (Greco 2008).
The concept of ontological liminality grasps this core idea that exis-
tence itself is a unity of boundary setting and boundary overstepping.
Existence itself is process. Ontological liminality thus follows from a the-
ory of limits, their setting and their overstepping. Simmel puts his ver-
sion very clearly with respect to the anthropological dimension when he
defines the human being as ‘the limited being that has no limit’ (Simmel
1918/2015, p. 6). It is obvious that within this theory of limits, the lim-
inal (understood as the removal or absence or overstepping of limits)
acquires profound significance.
It is Whitehead (1922/2007, p. 16), however, who takes a theory of
the limit the furthest: ‘I use the term “limitation” for the most general
conception of finitude’. The concept of finitude implies that of infinity,
and hence something finite is a limitation with respect to the infinite. In
fact, after an apology for using a new word, Whitehead deploys the word
factuality to express the inexhaustibleness of all that is and all that is
becoming in the universe. He prefers this word to ‘fact’ because ‘fact’ sug-
gests merely one amongst other facts. He prefers ‘factuality’ to ‘totality’
because ‘totality’—being the sum of all subordinate aggregates—implies
a conclusive aggregate that contains ‘all that there is’. He denies this view
because it fails to express the sense of inexhaustibleness, for example ‘in
the very conception of the addition of subordinate aggregates, the con-
cept of the addition is omitted although this concept itself is a factor of
factuality’ (Whitehead 1922/2007, p. 15).
If factuality is unlimited, then any given ‘factor’ we encounter can be
grasped as a limitation of factuality. A factor qua limitation is something
carved out of factuality or canalized within factuality. Importantly, this
  Conclusion    273

means that ‘limitation’ is not just a negative concept, but has its own
content. A living organism is a limited factor within unlimited factuality
because it is a canalization of and within the wider physical universe. A
finite conscious experience is a limited factor within unlimited factuality
because it is a canalization of and within the factuality of a living organ-
ism which is itself a factor within a broader physical factuality. In the
same way, ‘the abstract is a limitation within the concrete, the entity is a
limitation within totality, the factor is a limitation within fact’ (Whitehead
1922/2007, p. 16). This is the sense in which one can think of an organ-
ism as abstracting itself from its environment and a conscious experience
as, likewise, abstracting itself from its more particular milieu.
This theory of limitation is what allows us to avoid the misleading
tendency to treat the factor as an ‘inside’ and the factuality as an ‘outside’
or the factor as a mere ‘part’ and the factuality as the ‘whole’. Instead, the
factor (whether it be consciousness, life or some other finite thing) is
always a limitation of factuality in the quite precise sense that it ‘refers to
fact[uality] canalized into a system of relata to itself, i.e. to the factor in
question’ (Whitehead 1922/2007, p. 16). That ‘system of relata’ exists as,
and thanks to, a limitation, but it is also a positive addition to factuality
and not a negative lack. It is thanks to the limits supplied by the canal
that self-referential processes can occur that would otherwise be impos-
sible, just as there could be no barge traffic without the canal on which
the barge travels. As the great quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger
(1944/1990, pp. 3–4) put it in his book What is life?, there are ‘events in
time and space which take place within the spatial boundary of a living
organism’ that modern physics and chemistry simply and obviously can-
not ‘account for’. The organism is a system of self-referential and autopoi-
etic relata that has successfully canalized itself within wider factuality. The
same applies to consciousness, which canalizes factuality in its own pecu-
liar way. Again, this is not quite a relation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’
because the canalization precisely requires and hangs on the space/time
betwixt and between the organism and its environment, the bounded
limit and the more than of transcendence that constitutes that limit by
breaching it. In the same way, we must ‘get rid of the notion of conscious-
ness as a little box with some things inside it’ (Whitehead 1922/2007,
p. 17).5
274  P. Stenner

This theory of limitation expresses more clearly why relationality and

process are the essence of all entities. We are part of a broader factuality
from which we have become abstracted, but with which we always and
inevitably maintain the trace of a connection. In an important sense,
every actual occasion—as a limitation within factuality—is a momentary
experience which ‘implicates’ (Bohm 1980)—from its partial perspec-
tive—the whole of reality within it. This perspective abolishes any notion
of nature as an aggregate of self-contained entities, each isolatable from,
and independent of, the others. Instead: ‘Each event signifies the whole
structure’ (Whitehead 1922/2007, p. 26). This is why the notion of an
isolated event (a simple occurrence in a simple location) is a contradic-
tion in terms. We are part of a broader factuality, but we can participate
more fully in that factuality, and grasp the nature of our participation,
only by overstepping the limits that made us what we were. It is in this
sense that liminality shows itself as the formless and transforming form
that is fundamental to the universe. There is not a division between forms
with qualities produced by way of limitation (‘structure’) and a vital con-
tinuity of a limitlessly intensive living flux (‘event’), but a unity composed
of the pulse of limit, liminality, limit, liminality, each giving rise to the
next. I end this necessarily abstract section with a quotation from Simmel
that demonstrates his keen awareness of this point:

A deep contradiction exists between continuity and form as ultimate

world-shaping principles. Form means limits, contrast against what is
neighbouring, cohesion of a periphery by means of a real or an ideal center
to which, as it were, the ever on-flowing sequences of contents or processes
are bent back, and which provides that periphery with a firm hold against
dissolution in the flux. (Simmel 1918/2015, p. 13)

 eyond Structure and Event: Passing One

B
More Time from Ontology to Anthropology
It follows from the ontological account sketched above that liminality
cannot refer simply to the exceptional or extraordinary events that I have
emphasized throughout this book as spontaneous liminal occasions or to
  Conclusion    275

the artfully mediated experiences that I have called devised liminal occa-
sions. Rather, liminality is at play always and everywhere and it can emerge
into salience during even the most familiar and routine social practices.
The distinction between the ordinary predictability of everyday life and
situations, zones and times that are liminal is always a relative distinction,
and always the product of our intellectual activity. The same applies to
the distinction between spontaneous and devised liminal occasions. No
event is truly spontaneous and there can be spontaneity in all ritual, artis-
tic and sporting performances (one might say that these modes of life are
canalized in a manner that precisely fabricates the possibility of spontane-
ity within protected bounds). Nevertheless, these distinctions are crucial
if we are to grasp the ever present dynamic of the making and breaking of
limits, and of the fusion of vitality/importance/ideal with persistence/
matter of fact/practical reality. An ontological account of liminality
should enhance rather than deaden our sense of the relevance of liminal-
ity and limits to human life, society and politics.
Take as one final example William Sewell’s (1992) historical analysis of
the French Revolution of 1789. For those involved, the French Revolution
was a real-life liminal situation. Although it could be characterized as a
spontaneous liminal occasion, it nevertheless shows a mixture of sponta-
neity and ‘staging’, and displays how liminal affectivity is core to both.
Sewell himself does not refer to the revolution as liminal. Nevertheless,
he grasps it in a productive way in terms of a distinction between ‘event’
and ‘structure’. For Sewell, structure refers to the consistent reproduction
of streams of social practices, whether these be work practices, consump-
tion practices, cultural activities or whatever. What lends these practices
their consistency and stability over time is the fact that they are not free
floating but are embedded in modes of social power and associated with
established ways of distributing resources. Their enactment is also shaped
by normative cultural schemas in the form of discourses which lend them
a common-sensical nature and appeal (and which doubtless specify ques-
tions of rights and duties). This notion is clearly entirely consistent with
the notion of form of process used in this book, where the form of process
in question is here sociological in nature.
Events, by contrast, are defined by Sewell (1992, p. 843) as ‘sequences
of occurrences that result in transformations of structures’. These events
276  P. Stenner

may of course be the culmination of historical processes long in play

(Sewell writes extensively about the circumstances that conditioned the
revolution—including the near bankruptcy of the state, the crop-crises
and the constitutional crisis over taxation). Nevertheless, as with Mead’s
notion of the event, Sewell (1992, p. 843) states that events transform
social relations in ways ‘that could not be predicted from the gradual
changes that may have made them possible’. Again, as the transformation
of a form of process, this concept of event expresses my ontological defi-
nition of liminality.
Building on Sewell’s profound analysis, the 12 days stretching from
July 12th to 24th can be thought of as a liminal phase of generalized
insecurity. In his own terms, this ‘was an extraordinary period of fear,
rejoicing, violence, and cultural creativity that changed the history of the
world’ (Sewell 1992, p. 845). He writes:

During this period, the usual articulations between different structures

became profoundly dislocated. Actors, consequently, are beset with insecu-
rity: they are unsure about how to get on with life. This insecurity may
produce varying results, sometimes in the same person: anxiety, fear or
exhilaration; incessant activity, paralysis, extreme caution, or reckless aban-
don. But it almost certainly raises the emotional intensity of life, at least for
those whose existence is closely tied to the dislocated structures. And when,
in France in the summer of 1789, the structural dislocation is pervasive
and deep, virtually everyone lives on the edge. (Sewell 1992, p. 845)

This event can thus be thought of as a liminal happening or enactment

that existed betwixt and between more orderly and structured circum-
stances (Scott Georgson and Thomassen 2017). More specifically, to use
Mead’s terms, these days were days in which the psychosocial order was
no longer what it previously had been, but was not yet what it would
become. We are dealing with a movement and emergence of a new soci-
etal (and hence psychosocial) form of process. Sewell points to some of
the characteristics of spontaneous liminal occasions when he writes of the
heightened emotionality at play and of the profound ambivalence and
uncertainty: the oscillations from exhilaration to fear, from paralysis to
reckless abandon. But, importantly, he also points to the crucial relation-
ship between spontaneous liminality and its symbolization by way of the
  Conclusion    277

devised forms. Symbolism, ritual and other forms of collective activity, he

suggests, became newly relevant during these liminal days, and were cru-
cial to the subsequent emergence and consolidation of novel forms of
process. Examples of ritualistic symbolism include the seizing and dis-
playing of the ‘sacred flag of the fatherland to the applause and the trans-
ports of an immense crowd of people’ following the storming of the
Bastille, and the ‘display on pikes of severed heads’ (Sewell 1992, p. 853).
It is through this discussion of ritual that Sewell explicitly refers to
liminality. In the traditional anthropological usage, the affectivity associ-
ated with liminality is generated by means of rituals (ritual serves, in
other words, as a liminal affective technology). However, when discussing
liminality in his context, Sewell makes a perceptive reversal. He notes
that during the events of July 1789 the opposite relation between ritual
and affectivity was at play. Namely, he suggests that the affectivity and
collective effervescence (Durkheim 1912/2001), generated in the events
themselves ‘induced those present to express and concretize their feelings
in ritual’. It is worth quoting Sewell at length here:

the taking of the Bastille was created as a legitimate revolution through the
performance of these spontaneous rituals. Most scholarly study of ritual
focuses on religious rites of one kind or another. In most religious rituals,
the participants are collected into a place marked off as sacred and then
participate in a series of activities that induce a certain emotional state—
quiet awe, rapt attention, terror, intense pleasure, or frenzied enthusiasm as
the case may be. In many cases, participants enter into what Victor Turner
has called liminality—a state of ‘betwixt and between’ in which social con-
straints and hierarchies momentarily evaporate and the celebrants experi-
ence a profound sense of community with one another and with the deity
or deities. It is the creation of this sense of communitas that gives rituals
their psychological and social power. In episodes like those surrounding the
taking of the Bastille, the usual process is reversed: rather than ritual induc-
ing the emotional excitement and sense of communion, the emotional
excitement and sense of communion … induce those present to express
and concretize their feelings in rituals. (Sewell 1992, p. 871)

Having captured the Bastille, the victors celebrated ritualistically, for

example, with a triumphal procession towards city hall in which the cap-
278  P. Stenner

tured weapons, flags and defeated soldiers were displayed to the massed
onlookers in a way that emphatically symbolized the defeat of the might
of the King by the new ‘people’. Sewell is at pains to stress that the mean-
ing here symbolized was the emergence of something new, and it emerged
(as a presentational symbol) into articulability through this ritualistic
medium. Although we are now used to talking about such events as ‘revo-
lutions’, Sewell points out that prior to these days there was no such
clear-cut concept of revolution, and that this concept—with its implica-
tion of a sovereign people using justifiable violence to introduce a new
political system—was invented during these events by means of the lim-
inal processes of symbolization just described (the discursive detail of the
concept could then be further articulated by the National Assembly in
the period that followed the revolution). Ritual, in other words, was
essential to the creation of a new communicable meaning of political
revolution and popular sovereignty that would form the discursive basis
of the new political order.

Conclusion
This book has offered a theoretical contribution to a growing field of
study. It is about what it means to think ‘psychosocially’, whether within
social psychology, within psychosocial studies, or more broadly within
the many other research fields that must grapple with embodied experi-
ence in social settings. The book offers an approach rather than a field of
study. It is obviously not about something specific like drug addiction,
the collapse of communism in Slovakia, helping older people to remain
active, explaining why groups conform, managing the trauma of a cancer
diagnosis, coping in the wake of a natural disaster or violent conflict,
struggling to maintain weight loss after a diet and so on, but—if I have
been successful—it should have application in all of these domains, and
indeed in any domain that involves an inseparable mix of social and psy-
chological ingredients.
But it is obviously not a ‘theory’ in the sense of a fixed set of principles
that can be ‘applied’. Nothing could be further from the approach I advo-
cate, which puts experience first and which insists that in fact the abstrac-
  Conclusion    279

tions of theory are to be explained by and grounded in concrete actual

occasions of experience rather than the other way around. Theory with-
out data is as dead as data without theory. But the data of the world is vast
and rich and if we are truly to be empiricists we must dive deeply into it.
What this book offers is not a theory to be applied ‘top down’, but some-
thing more like an ethos or style of thinking that allows access to relations
and movements that are too often obscured from view by disciplinary
thought.
The approach I have offered is transdisciplinary. I have taken the view
that it is necessary to think more carefully through the transdisciplinary
problematic shared in common by many psychosocial scholars, and that
this issue is far more complex and demanding than is usually thought. I
have set out in full knowledge of how bewilderingly complex and even
scary it is to venture out in this way, and to leave behind the security of
our disciplinary grooves. To do so is akin to leaping off the river bank and
diving into the flowing river. It can feel as if one will simply drown in
complexity. And yet this book encourages just such a jump, dangerous
though it may feel, and may be. It is intended as a helpful guide to show
some of the ways of getting in and getting across. Like Aesop’s dog who
dropped his meat, sometimes we need to get wet if we are going to get
across the limit currently facing us, and constituting us.
For those who like to begin with first principles, I assumed from the
very beginning a rather paradoxical foundational principle according to
which knowledge cannot be guaranteed by a foundation (Morin 2008).
As I argued with Steve Brown (Brown and Stenner 2009), foundations
are good things upon which to build a house, but rather problematic if
what you wish to do is move in order to follow the movements of your
subject matter wherever it goes, whichever disciplinary borders it tres-
passes across. And our subject matter does indeed move. This is why
transdisciplinarity calls forth a relational process ontology, and vice versa.
The Greek God Atlas might serve to symbolize the stable foundations
of disciplinarity, since in his mythology he was an inventor of disciplines
(astronomy and its practical applications), and the personification of the
endurance and strength needed to establish and hold firm a given terri-
tory (Stenner 2015). Atlas supported the weight of the earth despite
being tormented by the many-headed Hesperian Drakon. Atlas is capable
280  P. Stenner

of standing powerfully astride a disciplinary territory, holding it firm and

defending its boundaries with precision and authority. What is ‘inside’
the territory is his property and his business, but beyond that territory
stands another Atlas, and then another, since all the territory is ‘carved
up’. Goods can be exchanged between territories (interdisciplinarity),
and alliances formed to conquer new territory (multidisciplinarity). But
these activities are carefully controlled by Atlas.
The ethos of transdisciplinarity, by contrast, is better encapsulated in
the light and agile and mobile figure of Hermes (Serres 1992). Hermes is
the winged God of boundaries, events, movement, translation, transfor-
mation and invention, and is responsible for enabling communication
between more stable figures within a given realm (e.g. between the Gods),
and between distinct realms (e.g. the realms of Gods and mortals, the
living and dead). This mobile Hermetic ethos of transdisciplinarity is
orthogonal to the static (state-centred) ethos of disciplinarity. They
should not be mixed up, since the strengths of one are weaknesses for the
other. The Drakon with its many heads is a vivid symbol of the kind of
complex, ambiguous and mobile multiplicity that is unbearable to an
Atlas (God of position), but that is ‘business-as-usual’ to a Hermes (God
of transition).
I do not call for transcending disciplines and embracing the flow of
becoming out of some aimless preference for change or some reluctance
to knuckle-down and belong.
I have no wish to celebrate the subjective over the objective or the
imaginary over the real, the liminal over the stable, the future over the
now or the creative over sheer hard work. Many, for example have argued
for an idiographic approach in contrast to nomothesis, or a qualitative
approach in contrast to quantification, or a phenomenological approach
in contrast to realism or a constructionist approach in contrast to essen-
tialism. It seems to me that these once critical voices now tend simply to
err in the opposite direction. They stress and celebrate multiplicity, rela-
tivity, change, instability, complexity, uncertainty, as if these things were
values in themselves. Indeed, these dissenting ‘alternative’ voices are now
so established that they have quietly become the status quo against which
they rail. The point is not to stress subjectivity at the expense of objectivity,
or local detail and not global pattern or change rather than stability or the
  Conclusion    281

qualitative as opposed to the quantitative, affect over emotion or the con-

structed instead of inherited actuality. The challenge is integration and
movement between these simplifying abstractions.
Indeed, underpinning the shift in academic emphasis from the stable
object side of things to the fluctuating subject side, are significant changes
in the vaguely understood social world that we call ‘global society’.
Contemporary society, and not just the wealthy west, is now routinely
described in many of its most significant aspects as being in a state of
permanent change. Until recently, it seems, change, turbulence and tran-
sition were seen as temporary anomalies. Like an interrupted TV signal,
a stable state of normal service would be resumed as soon as possible.
Now the unpredictable flux is here to stay. Now we are increasingly
called—whether as citizens, employees, learners, parents, patients, cus-
tomers or clients—to expect and be prepared for permanent change
without resolution. We must shape-shift and be ever attentive to the need
to adapt to new challenges under new conditions. We can’t rely, we are
told, on what we have inherited from the past, or on what happened
yesterday, but must ‘push the limits’ and think ‘outside the box’ (Akerstrom
Anderson and Pors 2016). We must morph and change ourselves, regu-
larly casting aside the character armour that protected us last week but
that weighed us down yesterday. We must actively involve ourselves in
ever-renewed innovations in the face of an unpredictable future whose
form, we are told, will depend on our resourcefulness and adaptability.
We are invited to live our lives permanently ‘on the line’ or, as the sports
psychologists would have it, ‘in the zone’ of an enduring state of flow
(Stenner 2017).
This message ceases to appear radical and critical once we grasp how it
emanates, in large part at least, from the corporate domain of global capi-
talism. The beating heart of this process is surely the corporation, and in
the field of business management there is now much talk of such things
as ‘transient competitive advantage’. The days are gone, we are told by
McGrath of the Harvard business review (2013), when a business could
aim at building a sustainable competitive advantage, because nowadays
such advantage is likely to evaporate in a matter of months. This means
that companies that spend those months designing a single long-term
strategy are risking their demise. To keep ahead of the pack they must
282  P. Stenner

perpetually and simultaneously create many new transient competitive

advantages. In short, we must know an unpredictable future that we can-
not know, and we respond, not just by changing ourselves, but by sus-
pending ourselves in a state of potentiality for changed action. We are
called upon by the merry-go-round of global capital to live the paradox
(of suspended animation and animated suspense) that Szakolczai (2016)
calls permanent liminality.
If there is a value to the transdisciplinary approach this book has
offered, with its ontological stress on liminality, it is as much to do with
resisting and overcoming the paradox of permanent liminality than with
celebrating it. If we are obliged to perpetually renew ourselves, then let us
do so in a manner that is sustainable and ethical. The value of the con-
cepts of liminality and experience that I have tried to articulate is cer-
tainly the light they bring to the process of becoming more active, both
individually and collectively. Without downgrading the importance of
the routines of daily life, they should help us to see the relevance of
attending to sensitive junctures of transition, not to explain anything, but
to point precisely to situations of potentiality in which ‘what happens’
might take many different courses, but the actual outcome is uncertain
(Thomassen 2009). We need to grasp these situations if we are to contrib-
ute to a progressive rather than a disastrous future. As Deleuze put it with
characteristic precision:

the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the
conditions under which something new is produced. (Deleuze and Parnet
1987/2002, p. vii)

Notes
1. Saint Augustine (1974, p. 41) was faithful to philosophy when he wrote
that ‘He only errs who thinks he knows what he does not know’, but
Wittgenstein (1921/1965, p. 45) betrayed it by insisting that the ‘diffi-
culty in philosophy is to say no more than you know’.
2. With this footprint metaphor I am referring the reader back to Chap. 2
where I discussed Bergson’s (1932/1986, p. 209) concept of reality as a
creative energy which leaves behind bounded organisms that he thinks of
  Conclusion    283

as like a ‘footprint, which instantly causes a myriad grains of sand to

cohere and form a pattern’. Bergson, as I argued, thus celebrates
unbounded flux over bounded discontinuity. Like Whitehead (who inte-
grates the boundedness of an actual occasion with the unboundedness of
perpetual process), Simmel (1918/2015, p. 9) has a more balanced view:
‘Life is at once flux without pause and yet something enclosed in its bear-
ers and contents, formed about individualized midpoints, and contrarily
it is therefore always a bounded form that continually oversteps its bounds;
that is, its essence’.
3. For social scientists schooled in social constructionism the word ‘essence’
will jar since they have constructed identity and community against the
figure of the ‘essentialist’. But observe that it is more valuable still to be
able to reclaim the very concept of essence as ‘relational essence’, since this
simultaneously undoes the essence of what is problematic about essential-
ism whilst also short-circuiting the unacknowledged essentialism at play
in the dynamic of foundation-by-exclusion that founds the ever-dis-
avowed unity of the ‘constructionist’.
4. This aspect of the present is therefore the basis on which we can take time
seriously, and hence recognize that, to quote Mead again, ‘The world is a
world of events’. Mead engaged with Whitehead’s work up until the mid
1920s and, to my knowledge, never read Process and reality and so never
directly engaged with the actual occasion concept, using ‘event’ instead to
denote ‘that which becomes’ (Mead 1932/1980, p.  21). Nevertheless,
much like Whitehead, Mead’s thought starts with what is usually com-
pletely excluded: the problem of the emergence of novelty.
5. The neuroscientific process thinker Jason Brown describes, in ways consis-
tent with the approach I am articulating, what he calls the ‘microgenesis’
of each and every brain/mind state. The perception of any object or the
production of any act is the final phase of a brain/mind state that leads
from the core regions of the brain to its neocortical surface. Such micro-
genesis is the becoming of the perceptual object or act, and the entire
sequence ‘is an indivisible epoch that perishes on completion and is
revived, in overlapping waves, in a fraction of a second’ (Brown 2012,
p. 28). This challenges the old idea of discrete brain locations for discrete
functions (e.g. a limbic system whose upward discharge yields feeling and
whose downward discharge yields display), and shows the profound limi-
tation of efforts to reduce experience to chemistry or anatomy. It also
provides a workable alternative to the metaphorics of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’
that still dominate psychosocial thinking.
284  P. Stenner

References
Akerstrom Anderson, N., & Pors, J. (2016). Public management in transition:
The orchestration of potentiality. Bristol: Policy Press.
Augustine, S. (1974). The essential Augustine. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Bell, C. (1997). Ritual: Perspectives and dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bergson, H (1932/1986). The two sources of morality and religion. (trans: Ashley
Audra, R. & Cloudesley Brereton). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press.
Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Routledge.
Brown, J. W. (2012). Love and other emotions: On the process of feelings. London:
Karnac.
Brown, S., & Stenner, P. (2009). Psychology without foundations: History, philoso-
phy and psychosocial theory. London: Sage.
Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1987/2002). Dialogues. London: Continuum Press.
Durkheim, E. (1912/2001). In M.  Cladis (Ed.), The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (C. Cosman, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fechner, G.  T. (1860/1999). Elemente der psychophysik. Leipzig: Thoemmes
Press.
Gödel, C. (1931/1995). In S.  Feferman et  al. (Eds.), Collected works
III. Unpublished essays and lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Greco, M. (2008). On the art of life: A vitalist reading of medical humanities.
The Sociological Review, 56(2), 23–45.
Heidegger, M. (1927/1990). Being and time. Oxford: Blackwell.
Herbart, J. F. (1824–5). Psychologie als wissenschaft, neu gegründet auf erfahrung,
metaphysik und mathematik. Königsberg: Unzer.
McGrath, R.  G. (2013, June). Transient advantage. Harvard Business Review.
https://hbr.org/2013/06/transient-advantage
Mead, G. H. (1932/1980). The philosophy of the present. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Morin, E. (2008). Complexity. Cresskill: Hampton Press.
Nicolescu, B. (2002). Manifesto of transdisciplinarity. New York: SUNY.
Nietzsche, F. (1891/1969). Thus spake Zarathustra. London: Penguin.
Nissen, M., & Solgaard Sørensen, K. (2017). The emergence of motives in lim-
inal hotspots. Theory and Psychology, 27(2), 249–269.
Pickering, J. (1996). Beyond cognitivism: Mutualism and postmodern psychol-
ogy. In P. Pylkkanen, P. Pylkko, & K. Hautamaki (Eds.), Brain, mind and
physics (pp. 48–63). Amsterdam: IOS Press.
  Conclusion    285

Russell, B., & Whitehead, A. N. (1910/1963). Principia mathematica (Vol. 1).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Savransky, M. (2016). The adventure of relevance: An ethics of social inquiry.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Scheler, M. (1928/2009). The human place in the cosmos. Evanson: Northwestern
University Press.
Schrödinger, E. (1944/1990). What is life? Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Scott Georgson, M., & Thomassen, B. (2017). Affectivity and liminality in ritu-
alized protest: Politics and transformation in the Kiev uprising. Theory and
Psychology, 27(2), 198–214.
Serres, M. (1992). Hermes: Literature, science, philosophy. Baltimore: John
Hopkins University.
Sewell, W. (1992). Historical events as transformations of structures: Inventing
revolution at the Bastille. Theory and Society, 25(6), 841–881.
Simmel, G. (1918/2015). The view of life: Four metaphysical essays with journal
aphorisms. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Spencer Brown, G. (1969). Law of form. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Stenner, P. (2011). Psychology in the key of life: Deep empiricism and process
ontology. In P. Stenner, J. Cromby, J. Motzkau, & J. Yen (Eds.), Theoretical
psychology: Global transformations and challenges. Concord: Captus.
Stenner, P. (2015). A transdisciplinary psychosocial approach. In K.  Slaney,
J. Martin, & J. Sugarman (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of theoretical and philo-
sophical psychology: Methods, approaches and new directions for social science.
New York: Wiley.
Stenner, P. (2017). Being in the zone and vital subjectivity: On the liminal
sources of sport and art. In T. Jordan, K. Woodward, & B. McClure (Eds.),
Culture, identity and intense performativity: Being in the Zone (Antinomies).
London: Routledge.
Szakolczai, Á. (2009). Liminality and Experience: Structuring transitory situa-
tions and transformative events. International Political Anthropology, 2(1),
141–172.
Szakolczai, Á. (2016). Permanent liminality and modernity. London: Routledge.
Thomassen, B. (2009). The uses and meanings of liminality. International
Political Anthropology, 2(1), 5–27.
Thomassen, B. (2014). Liminality and the modern. Farnham/Burlington:
Ashgate.
Turner, V. (1969/1995). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. New York:
Aldine de Gruyter.
286  P. Stenner

Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. New York:
PAJ.
Varela, F. (1991). Organism: A meshwork of selfless selves. In A. Tauber (Ed.),
Organism and the origins of self (pp. 79–107). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publisher.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1925/1971). The psychology of art. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1922/2007). The principle of relativity with applications to
physical science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929/1985). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1938/1966). Modes of thought. New York: The Free Press.
Whitehead, A.  N. (1939/1958). The function of reason. Boston: The Beacon
Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1921/1965). The blue and brown books. New York: Harper and
Row.
Zittoun, T. (2013). On the use of a film: Cultural experiences as symbolic
resources. In A. Kuhn (Ed.), Little madnesses (pp. 135–147). London: Tauris.
Zittoun, T., & Gillespie, A. (2016). Imagination in human and cultural develop-
ment. London: Routledge.
 Author Index1

A Bergson, H., 3, 26, 27, 38, 44–64,

Adam, 2, 84, 257–259 67, 72, 74, 81, 120, 152, 209,
Aesop, 28, 41, 71, 72, 76, 79, 221, 225, 226, 245n6, 264,
83–88, 90, 93, 99–101, 282–283n2
104–105n6, 105–106n7, Bion, W. R., 246n11
163, 167, 193n6, 256, Bogue, R., 27, 38, 40, 44, 58, 60,
261, 279 67n1
Aion, 60 Brown, S. D., 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 31n1,
Akerstrom Anderson, N., 166, 281 39, 120, 208, 217, 263, 279
Artaud, A., 59, 65, 66 Butler, J., 113
Atlan, H., 227

C
B Cassirer, E., 73, 103n3, 155, 254
Badger, 87, 90, 91, 93, 98, 99, 101 Cervantes, 188
Bateson, G., 108n10, 166 Clough, P., 203, 211
Beethoven, L.Van, 67 Comte, A., 254
Bell, C., 262 Craib, I., 209, 242n2
Berger, J., 155, 159 Cromby, J., 2, 198, 220

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1 

© The Author(s) 2017 287

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9
288  Author Index

D Green, A., 208, 220

Darwin, C., 26 Guattari, F., 14, 59, 60
Deleuze, G., 3, 14, 16, 27, 40, 44,
58–66, 103n3, 113, 209, 210,
221, 245n6, 282 H
Descartes, R., 26, 126, 213, 216 Haraway, D., 113
Dilthey, W., 10, 48, 62, 83, 135, Harré, R., 239
266 Harrison, J., 3, 42, 235, 236
Don Quixote, 163, 188, 189 Heidegger, M., 113, 269
Douglas, M., 180 Herbart, J. F., 262
Hesiod, 38, 39, 42, 66, 260
Hollway, W., 2, 209
E Holzkamp, K., 174
Edwards, D., 206, 207 Homer, 42, 65, 66
Elliot, A., 208 Huizinga, J., 165, 167
Eve, 84, 208, 257–259 Hume, D., 93, 96, 97, 128, 129,
144
Husserl, E., 89, 135, 154, 188,
F 193n6
Fechner, G., 10, 262
Foucault, M., 29, 111–120, 132,
146, 210 J
Frank, A., 208 James, W., 10, 13, 16, 26, 29,
Frazer, J. G., 180, 181, 187, 193n8 99, 111, 120–122, 126,
Freud, S., 7, 8, 12, 13, 164, 165, 129, 133–144, 146, 152, 154,
184, 194n12, 219, 220, 156, 162, 201, 216, 225,
246n10, 246n11 245n7
Frosh, S., 2, 6, 208 Jaspers, K., 81
Jefferson, T., 209
Jung, C. G., 85, 194n12
G
Galileo, G., 44, 126–129, 213
Garfinkel, H., 113, 243n4 K
Geertz, C., 241 Kandinsky, W., 117, 118
Gillespie, A., 256 Kant, E., 26, 93, 96
Gödel, K., 261 Kierkegaard, S., 153, 161
Greco, M., 3, 11, 13, 172, 198, 205, Klee, P., 117, 118
206, 219, 232, 272 Kronos, 39, 60
   Author Index 
   289

L P
Langer, S., 3, 16, 28, 43, 45, 55, Panza, S., 188
64, 66, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, Peirce, C. S., 26, 90, 102–103n1,
79, 87, 103n1, 103n2, 108n11, 116
103n4, 105–106n7, Pickering, J., 255
106–107n8, 107n9, Plato, 40–43, 67n2, 189, 260
204, 220, 256 Pors, J., 166, 281
Luckmann, T., 155, 159 Proust, M., 169, 171
Luhmann, N., 12 Pryor, F., 179
Python, M., 7

M
Magritte, R., 28, 29, 111–121, R
129–132, 146, 147, 238, 239, Reavey, P., 39
256 Rozik, E., 165, 170, 172, 235,
Manzotti, R., 126, 127 236
Masaccio, 84, 257, 261 Russel, B., 73, 79, 166, 261
Massumi, B., 203, 208–213,
215, 217, 218, 220,
221, 242–243n3, S
243–244n5, 245n6, Sacks, H., 113
245n8 Salvatore, S., 147n1
Matte Blanco, I., 220 Savransky, M., 263
Mead, G. H., 3, 12, 16, 21–23, 26, Scheler, M., 31, 253
31, 82, 91, 92, 97, 98, Sedgwick, E. K., 208
108n11, 154, 267–269, 271, Seigworth, G., 197, 211, 221, 241
276 Sewell, W., 31, 275–278
Moore, S. F., 239 Simmel, G., 31, 83, 191n2, 258,
Moreno, E., 16, 64, 240 259, 269–272, 274, 283n2
Morrissey, 232, 234 Smith, R., 29, 180, 181, 187
Motzkau, J., 3, 6–9, 11, 12, 39 Socrates, 40–44, 48, 66, 67n2,
189
Spencer-Brown, H., 191n1, 261
N Spinoza, B., 26, 30, 46,
Newton, I., 126, 147–148n3, 213 145, 213–219, 221–223,
Nicolescu, B., 3, 4, 253, 254 225, 227, 231, 237, 238,
Nietzsche, F., 26, 60, 235, 245n6, 245n6
259 Stengers, I., 7
290  Author Index

Stenner, P., 2–4, 9–12, 15, 16, Von Uexküll, J., 154, 191n3, 192n5
31n1, 39, 64, 108n12, Vygotsky, L., 103n3, 256
120–122, 125, 147n2, 172,
189, 198, 206, 207, 217, 219,
232, 240, 246n9, 263, 271, W
279, 281 Wetherell, M., 198, 204, 209, 211,
Szakolczai, A., 15, 62, 104n5, 178, 233, 247n15
262, 282 Whitehead, A. N., 3, 16, 17, 26–31,
40, 43, 61, 71, 75, 87–94,
96–100, 103n1, 106–107n8,
T 107n9, 111, 120, 122, 126,
Thomassen, B., 62, 173, 177, 178, 131, 134, 142–146, 147n2,
262, 276, 282 154, 155, 170, 188, 189, 212,
Thrift, N., 113, 203 213, 220–231, 234, 235, 238,
Tomkins, S., 12, 208, 218, 219, 245n6, 246n12, 256, 261,
240, 242n1, 245–246n9, 264–267, 269–274, 283n2,
246n10 283n4
Tucker, I., 208 Williams, R., 30, 79, 198–202, 204,
Turner, V., 14, 15, 21, 62, 83, 173, 208, 209, 218, 222, 241,
174, 176, 261, 266, 277 246n12
Winnicott, D., 16–21
Wittgenstein, L., 73, 113, 240,
V 245n6, 282n1
Van Gennep, A., 15, 29, 61, 151,
173–178, 180–187, 189,
193n8, 261, 262, 265, 266 Z
Varela, F, 270 Zittoun, T., 256
 Subject Index1

A liminal, 23–26, 28, 30, 31, 64,

Abstraction, 1, 9, 46, 47, 51, 55, 66, 79, 160, 170–172, 190,
89, 91, 92, 120, 126, 127, 203, 233, 235, 237–241,
130, 132–134, 141, 247n15, 275, 277
148n3, 192n3, 192–193n5, ontological, 31, 214, 215,
201, 229, 237, 255, 220–227
258, 278, 281 as vector of transition, 30
Actual occasion, 94, 122–124, 129, Affective turn, 30, 197, 198, 205,
134, 143, 147n2, 212, 221, 207–212, 218, 220, 231, 241,
222, 225, 227–230, 245n6, 246n11
246–247n12, 264, 265, 274, Affectivity, 47, 48, 73, 99, 108n12,
279, 283n2, 283n4 204, 205, 221, 231–241,
Aesthetic, 75, 76, 86, 106n7, 136, 246n11, 275, 277
179, 190, 198, 200, 233, 237 Ah ha!, 28, 71, 80–85, 101
Affect Anthropology, 61, 197–241, 253,
categorical, 220 262, 274–278
distinguished from emotion, 203 Anti-structure, 14, 266

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refers to note.

1 

© The Author(s) 2017 291

P. Stenner, Liminality and Experience, Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9
292  Subject Index

Art, 21, 24, 28, 30, 40, 41, 48, 50, 182, 194n12, 222, 242n3,
53, 58, 59, 64, 65, 67, 71, 73, 254, 258, 262, 280
74, 77, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87, Communitas, 277
101, 103n3, 104n5, 105n7, Concrescence, 230, 264, 265
116, 118, 119, 130, 170, 172, Consciousness, 11, 12, 21, 71, 80,
173, 187, 191, 201, 231, 233, 83, 88, 90, 94, 100, 101, 119,
235, 255–257, 259 120, 124, 129, 134–138, 144,
Art of life, 104n5, 272 152, 162–164, 167–170,
Atlas, 279, 280 191n2, 193n6, 194n12,
Autonomy, 65, 182, 194n12, 203, 199–202, 208, 222, 226, 229,
209, 212, 216 242n3, 245n8, 273
Autopoiesis, 270 Critical psychology, 2, 5
Culture, 5, 20, 25, 30, 31n1, 40, 42,
43, 73, 81, 88, 151, 160, 180,
B 182, 183, 187, 190, 191, 199,
Bastille, 277 206, 208, 235, 242n1,
Becoming, 5, 14, 16, 43, 48, 59–66, 248n19, 255, 257, 261, 266
81, 85, 95, 122, 123, 160,
174, 175, 178, 183, 185, 199,
208, 209, 213, 233, 237, 241, D
247n13, 254, 262, 268, 272, Day dream, 167
280, 282, 283n5 Discourse/discursive, 5, 28–30, 65,
Bio-psycho-social, 158 71, 74–80, 83, 84, 86,
Both/and/neither/nor, 14, 15, 261 106n7, 113, 117, 118, 132,
134, 141, 142, 146, 148n3,
175, 198, 201–211, 220,
C 223, 242–243n3, 243n4,
Calligram, 114, 115, 118, 119, 147 275, 278
Calligramatic, 115, 118, 119, 147, Dispositif, 118
154 Dithyramb, 236, 247n17
Causal efficacy, 92–98, 100, 107n8, Drama, 52–54, 82, 236, 240,
107n9, 124, 143–145, 147, 248n19
193n6, 226, 270 Dream, 29, 30, 41, 56, 59, 122,
Collective effervescence, 240, 277 151–153, 161, 162, 164–167,
Common sense, 137, 155, 158, 160, 169–172, 187–191, 193n6,
161, 173, 188, 219, 221 194n11, 194n12, 198, 201,
Communication, 12, 128, 129, 132, 231, 255, 259
141, 142, 146, 155, 160, 166, Dromenon, 234, 236
   Subject Index 
   293

E contact, 91, 98, 133

Emergence, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, distant, 98
20–23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31n1, this is not, 28, 71–73, 80, 81, 84,
38, 44, 50, 68n3, 73, 83–85, 86, 90, 99–101, 105n6,
91, 134, 152, 190, 201, 203, 106n7, 112, 146, 166, 229,
204, 209, 221, 233, 235, 241, 256
243n3, 248n18, 255, 263, 264, transcendental, 96, 121
266–269, 276–278, 283n4 uh oh!, 80, 82, 84, 86, 168
Emergent event, 21, 22, 82, 84, 99, unconscious, 85, 94
267–269 Expression, 7, 12, 20, 25, 37, 44, 55,
Emotion, 30, 47, 73, 124, 165, 198, 73, 74, 78, 89, 100, 103n3,
211, 212, 255, 281 104n5, 106n7, 123, 131, 141,
Empiricism 146, 148n3, 170, 172, 206,
deep, 29, 91, 97, 111, 119–129, 218, 222, 223, 225, 228–230,
199, 215 232, 234, 257, 260, 265, 266
radical, 122, 134, 141, 142, 216
shallow, 29, 96, 108n12, 121,
126–129, 213 F
Energetics, 124, 135–146, 229, 238 Fable, 28, 37, 41, 46, 51, 52, 71–77,
Energy, 45, 55–59, 138, 219, 225, 79–87, 89–91, 100, 101,
228, 234, 246n10, 282n2 104n5, 104–105n6,
Enunciation, 7, 29, 121, 124, 129, 105–106n7, 256, 261
132 Fabulation, 20, 27, 28, 37–67, 72,
Epoché, 158, 159, 162, 163, 168, 74, 76, 81, 86, 100–102, 151,
188 152, 154, 159, 161, 170, 255,
Erlebnis, 135, 266 256, 260
Event, 8, 38, 71, 122, 154, 216, 255 Factuality, 272–274
Everyday life, 15, 29, 151, 152, 154, Feeling
155, 161, 163, 172, 188–190, conceptual, 85, 102, 167, 172
194n12, 197, 275 conformal, 225–228
Evolution, 11, 55, 56, 134 physical, 225–228
Experience propositional, 229
actual occasion of, 122, 123, 134, and thought, 74
143, 212, 221, 222, 246n12, Formal constitution contrasted with
264, 265 objective constitution, 92
ah ha!, 83 Form of process, 15, 63, 124, 125,
conscious, 29, 94, 122, 124, 125, 136, 161, 162, 199, 200, 202,
134, 144, 162, 168, 270, 273 238, 239, 262, 275, 276
294  Subject Index

G Liminal
Garden of Eden, 84, 257 affective technology, 23–26, 28,
30, 79, 170–172, 190, 203,
233, 241, 247n15, 256, 277
H affectivity, 31, 64, 237–241, 275
Hermes, 280 Liminal experience
Humour, 29, 151, 187, 188, 190 devised/staged, 86, 151, 169,
232–237
spontaneous/unstaged/wild, 86
I Liminality
Illusion, 13, 19, 20, 46, 63, 87, 89, anthropological, 31, 61, 262, 272,
101, 127, 242n2, 254, 264 277
Image, 29, 45, 46, 51–54, 57, 72, ontological, 31, 261–274
75, 77–81, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93, Liminal rites, 176, 177
101, 102, 103n3, 105n6, Limitation, 2, 26, 47, 60, 61, 96,
105–106n7, 106–107n8, 104n5, 125, 188, 206, 208–211,
111–121, 128–132, 135–139, 247n13, 272–274, 283n5
141, 143, 144, 146, 155, 172, Ludic, 190, 233
175, 232, 242n3, 265, 266
Imagination, 13, 21, 27, 39, 49, 50, 57,
59, 67–68n3, 75, 103n2, 140, M
193n6, 201, 246n9, 255, 259 Micro-liminality, 28
Importance, 30, 40, 42, 53, 67n1, Multi-disciplinarity, 4, 280
84, 90, 101, 105n7, 107n8, Muses, The, 38, 39, 41, 43, 81, 101,
107n9, 159, 164, 172, 173, 260
187–191, 194n11, 194n12, Music, 24, 39, 42, 43, 65, 67, 77,
211, 223, 228, 231, 234, 257, 79, 104n5, 105–106n7, 171,
269, 275, 282 190, 232, 233
Incorporation rites, 176 Mysticism, 40, 43
Intensity, 130, 166, 209, 212, Myth, 27, 38–44, 46, 54, 56, 58, 64,
242–243n3, 244n5, 262, 276 79, 84, 85, 104n5, 105n7,
Inter-disciplinarity, 4, 280 170, 171, 201, 216
Intuition, 27, 47, 55–64, 72, 83, 172

N
L Natural attitude, 154–162, 168, 170,
Leap, 13, 15, 115, 131, 133, 146, 172, 174, 188–190, 194n11
153, 161, 162, 167, 168 Natura naturata/natura naturans,
Limen, 176, 262, 266 218, 222, 223
   Subject Index 
   295

Nature, 5, 42, 45, 47, 49, 73, 111, Pattern/patterning, 3, 16, 21, 55,
126–129, 161, 184–186, 200, 79, 83, 114, 122, 123,
253 147n2, 173–178, 222, 225,
bifurcation of, 28, 108n12, 240, 241, 242n1, 255, 264,
126–129 280, 283n2
No/where now/here, 133, 163 Pattern shift, 3, 11
Perception, 27, 49, 51, 81, 89–97,
99, 100, 107n8, 124, 128,
O 131, 133, 137, 139–141,
Objectification, 45, 74, 92, 97, 143–145, 164, 187, 213,
105n6, 123 245n8, 247n13, 263, 270,
Ontology, 3, 26, 28, 54, 197–241, 283n5
265, 266, 274–279 Performance, 82, 86, 106n7, 114,
156–159, 161, 165, 169, 234,
237, 275, 277
P Performativity, 113
Painting, 24, 28–30, 65, 73, 77–79, Personal identity, 229–231
103n4, 104n5, 105n6, 106n7, Philosophy, 21, 26, 27, 38–47, 49,
111–113, 115–118, 130–132, 66, 77, 92, 93, 111,
136, 145–147, 151–153, 160, 119–122, 126, 128, 134,
161, 167, 169–172, 188, 190, 143, 144, 147n2, 193n9,
233, 234, 238, 239, 256 209, 210, 214, 216, 217,
Paradox 237, 255, 262, 265–267,
deparadoxification, 11 282n1
foundational, 10 PIPE, 120, 140, 155, 222, 227
generative, 259–261 Pipe, this is not a, 111–148
of the psychosocial, 6–15, 17, 20, Play, 4, 13, 17, 21, 29–31, 41–44,
23, 254, 259, 261 48, 49, 55, 61, 66, 79, 87,
pragmatic, 10 90, 97, 101, 116, 117, 129,
Zeno’s, 260 130, 132–134, 136, 145,
Paralysis, 10, 61, 276 151, 153, 156, 159–167,
Parasite, 125, 126, 142 169–171, 173, 175, 184–191,
Parasitical cascade, 125–127, 194n11, 203, 206, 212,
129–146 226, 231, 233–235,
Passage, 14–16, 18, 19, 21–24, 48, 239–241, 246n9, 247n15,
57, 60–64, 72, 79, 83, 84, 86, 258, 261, 265, 275–277,
95, 143, 151–191, 203, 226, 283n3
247n12, 256, 257, 259, 260, Poetry, 24, 38, 41–44, 53, 65, 197,
265–268 198, 203, 233, 235
296  Subject Index

Power, 5, 10, 13, 29, 41, 45, 51, 54, Rite de passage, 24
55, 59, 60, 81, 85, 91, 107n8, Ritual, 16, 38–44, 76, 152, 231, 255
112, 114, 118, 120, 121, 124,
126, 129–133, 135–139, 143,
145, 146, 155, 181, 200, 206, S
207, 210, 216–218, 227, 235, Sacred, 29, 39, 44, 45, 104n5, 151,
259, 275, 277 173, 178–187, 190, 191, 233,
Pragmatism, 140 236, 237, 241, 248n19, 266,
Presentational immediacy, 92–98, 277
100, 107n8, 107n9, 143–145, pivoting of the, 151, 184, 186
193n6 Sayable, 29, 112–120, 124, 127
Process thought, 26, 27, 29, 30, 122, Seeable, 29, 112–120, 126, 127, 144
146, 152, 204, 220–227, 241, Self, 7, 12, 16, 17, 19–21, 23, 52,
243n4, 245n6, 262–264 73, 81, 101, 157, 162–164,
Proposition, 7, 25, 29, 73, 106n7, 232–237
118, 121, 129, 131, 132, 140, Self-consciousness, 84–86, 268
155, 213, 215–218 Self-organization, 125, 126, 227
Psychoanalysis, 5, 6, 219, 220 Semantic availability, 25, 30, 79,
Psychosocial, 1–31, 44–58, 64, 72, 202–204, 208, 241
73, 79, 84, 85, 152, 159, 170, Separation rites, 176
190, 198, 200, 201, 205, 208, Shaman, 63, 65
241, 253–256, 260, 261, 265, Shock, 29, 30, 65, 71, 80, 81, 84,
276, 278, 279, 283n5 151–191, 232, 238, 240, 260
Psychosocial studies, 1–31, 208, 278 Similitude, 118–119
Smiths, The, 232
Social construction, 205, 206, 209,
R 242n2, 283n3
Relational process ontology, 3, 279 Sociality
Religion, 21, 27, 29, 30, 38, 42, as passage, 267
44–46, 49–57, 59, 151, 152, as system, 22
161, 169, 170, 173, 179–182, Spontaneity, 25, 156, 159, 163, 164,
187, 188, 190, 235, 248n19, 275
259 Structure, 3, 9, 14–16, 23, 27–31,
static/dynamic contrast, 56 66, 98, 105n7, 191n3, 193n7,
Representational thinking/theory, 199, 200, 202, 203, 211, 240,
112, 113 243n4, 259, 263, 266, 271,
Resemblance, 102n1, 115–119, 165, 274–278
176, 193n8, 226 Structure of feeling, 30, 198–202,
Revolution, 26, 31, 238, 275–278 204, 241
   Subject Index 
   297

Subjectivity, 1, 10, 12, 20, 44, 102, 190, 203, 213, 223, 236, 239,
106n7, 108n12, 121, 128, 243n4, 255, 256, 259, 260,
136, 158, 160, 189, 191, 262, 264, 265, 280–282
227, 238, 240, 254, 257,
261, 280
Superject, 17 U
Symbol Uh oh!, 28, 71, 80–85, 87, 99, 101,
contrasted with icon, 102n1, 116, 112, 147, 168
117 Umwelt, 154, 191–192n3,
contrasted with index, 116 192–193n5
Symbolic reference, 28, 71, 87, 92, Unconscious, 38, 57, 71, 84, 94,
97–100, 107n8, 131, 143, 95, 100, 124, 184, 201, 211,
145, 146, 155, 170, 193n6 219
Symbolism
deep, 28, 71, 87–99, 130, 151
discursive, 30, 71, 76–80, 83, 84, V
106n7 Veil of Maya, 45, 46, 54
presentational, 28, 71, 76–80, 83, Virtual, 51, 86, 87, 139, 163, 203,
84, 87, 106n7, 256 207–209, 211–213, 215, 221,
230, 242n3, 247n12
Vital subjectivity, 189
T
Taboo, 180, 181
Technology, see Liminal, affective W
technology Wavering, 29, 186, 187, 190,
Textual turn, 205–209, 211 194n10
Theatre, 21, 24, 29, 30, 65, 66, 82, Work, 6, 21, 23, 26–29, 31, 41,
86, 104n5, 106n7, 151–153, 42, 58, 61, 65, 67, 67n1, 73,
160, 161, 165–167, 169–171, 74, 76, 84, 89, 100, 108n10,
173, 187–191, 231, 233, 108n11, 112–114, 116, 118,
235–237, 248n18, 248n19, 151, 156–159, 163, 172,
255, 259, 268 181, 205, 210–212, 214,
Totemism, 45, 181 218, 220, 225, 235, 237,
Transcendent, 46, 55, 189, 206 238, 242n1, 243n3, 243n4,
Transdisciplinarity, 1–6, 27, 211, 245–246n9, 247n15, 256,
253–255, 279, 280 257, 261, 262, 271, 275,
Transition, 14–21, 25, 29, 42, 61, 280, 283n4
62, 129–132, 134, 151, 153, World, 7, 38, 75, 111, 151–191,
167, 173–179, 183, 184, 187, 205, 257