On/at the Edges of Liminality: Analytical Extensions Betwixt and between Thresholds

Abstract

A central task of social and cultural psychology, as well as the philosophy of culture, is the analysis of the felt significant effects of cultural forms. These forms function as what Stenner calls “affective mediational technologies” or “liminal affective technologies.” Iris Murdoch defined them as outer frameworks that occasion as well as define inner events. Their diverse logics inform the ineluctable universal transitional character of our lives, marked by the liminal sense of moving out of and between universes of meaning. As partner disciplines, philosophy and cultural psychology aim to uncover the variations and the contents of the multiplicity of occasions of experiencing elicited or created by these forms. This philosophically oriented chapter “rotates” some examples of rituals of attention that illustrate how an emergent sense of a liminal opening can spontaneously arise in, be provoked by, and transform any context of experience in which we encultured beings live. Where are the experiential “edges” of the frames of liminal experiences? How “fuzzy” are they? Robert Musil offers a challenge: “to pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames.”