Abstract
This chapter concludes the book in six 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 knowledge fragmentation, particularly within the ‘anthropological’ domain (understood broadly, in Max Scheler’s sense). The second section articulates 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 contribute 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 transdisciplinary theorization informing the book.
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- 1.
- 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 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 integrates 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 bearers 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 essentialism whilst also short-circuiting the unacknowledged essentialism at play in the dynamic of foundation-by-exclusion that founds the ever-disavowed 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 completely excluded: the problem of the emergence of novelty.
- 5.
The neuroscientific process thinker Jason Brown describes, in ways consistent 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 microgenesis 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 limitation 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.
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Stenner, P. (2017). Conclusion. In: Liminality and Experience. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_7
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