Abstract
Building on ethnographic work on deceased organ donation (DOD) in Spain, this article supplements the concept of affectivity at the core of the emerging field of affect studies with a concept of liminality. The article begins by focussing on relevant scenes in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film ‘All about my mother’, using these as a spring-board to discuss the recent ‘turn to affect’ among social scientists and humanities scholars. This ‘turn’ is characterized in relation to a move towards the ‘event’ side of a ‘structure/ event’ polarity. A case is made for a process approach that better integrates event and structure, and better links ontological and empirical dimensions of research. To these ends, a distinction is drawn between an ontological account of liminality (informed by the process philosophy A.N. Whitehead) and an anthropological account (informed by the process anthropology of V. Turner and A. Szakolczai), both of which give a decisive role to affect or ‘feeling’ qua liminal transition at the joints and other interstices of structural order. The article ends with a return to ethnographic observations relevant to the characterization of the DOD dispositif as a novel form of liminal affective technology.
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Notes
One of the co-authors has elsewhere in this journal addressed the fact that by the time of writing Process and Reality (1927–1928) Whitehead’s ‘terminology had shifted from “event” to “actual occasion/entities” with the latter defined as “the limiting type of an event with only one member” ’ (Whitehead, 1927–1928/1985, p. 73)’ (for more details see Stenner, 2008, p. 98).
Estudi etnogràfic dels moments claus en l’itinerari de donació d’òrgans i teixits. Fonaments qualitatius per una millora de l’efectivitat de les pràctiques hospitalàries. Barcelona, 2008 (Premis Caixa Sabadell). This is an ethnographic study exploring the organ donation process in a hospital. It was carried out by a research team from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) consisting of Professor Lupicinio Íñiguez-Rueda, Dr Jordi Sanz, Eduard Moreno and Gemma Flores-Pons.
We note that passage, like transition, is a key concept in Massumi’s writing but, perhaps as part of his movement away from traditional forms of social sciences (Brown, 2009), he seems to prefer philosophical references such as Bergson over Turner or van Gennep. It is doubly striking in this context that academics such as Massumi disregard the work of Turner because, like Bateson, he was seen by Deleuze and Guattari as an exceptionally creative ‘smooth’ thinker capable of analysing rhizomatic multiplicities (that is mutually constitutive relations between seemingly separated domains), such as language, symbolism, material culture and social organization (Jensen and Rödje, 2009, p. 26).
To give an extreme example, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, inspired by the hubris of power, illegitimately forced his way to the status of King by killing Duncan. In this disastrously botched rite of passage, Shakespeare brilliantly draws attention to the disjuncture between Macbeth’s pattern of subjectivity and that required for the external status of King by developing the metaphor of clothes (pattern of external structure), which fit poorly upon a body (pattern of subjectivity). Occupying a new status or position is thus likened to occupying strange garments that ‘cleave not to their mould, but with the aid of use’. The best example is in Act V, Scene II when Angus describes how Macbeth’s murderous usurpation has yielded minute subjective revolts such that:
Those he commands, move only in command,
Nothing in love: Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
Arpad Szakolczai (2009) provides an excellent and inspiring summary that links Turner’s work to the philosophical tradition of Plato and to a tradition of social theory associated with Dilthey, Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and a number of others. Szakolczai is a little less clear about linking liminality to affective experience, and here we have attempted to extend his insights by introducing a tradition he does not appear to be familiar with, namely Whiteheadian process philosophy.
This model is based mainly on a chapter on ‘Grief Therapy’ in a Dutch ‘Handbook of Behavioral Therapy’ edited by JWG Orlemans in 1984.
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Stenner, P., Moreno-Gabriel, E. Liminality and affectivity: The case of deceased organ donation. Subjectivity 6, 229–253 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2013.9