Liminality and affectivity: The case of deceased organ donation

Abstract

Building on ethnographic work on deceased organ donation in Spain, this paper supplements the concept of affectivity at the core of the emerging field of affect studies with a concept of liminality. The paper 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' amongst 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 which 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 paper ends with a return to ethnographic observations relevant to the characterisation of the deceased organ donation dispositif as a novel form of liminal affective technology.

Affect, Heat and Tacos. A Speculative Account of Thermoception

“…The concept of liminality could even be extended into the ontological domain, as Szakolczai has pointed out, having an experience "means that once previous certainties are removed and one enters a delicate, uncertain, malleable state; something might happen to one that alters the very core of one's being" (2009: 148). Cultural practice as liminal experiences resonates with Whiteheadian process philosophy, and helps to think through an ontology in which experience is fundamental to all forms of reality (Stenner and Moreno 2013).…”

“…Social psychologists Stenner and Moreno (2013), have addressed this processes of transition between two states as a liminal affective experience, where "having an experience" is understood as passing from a certain pattern of relations that is modified to come into a new pattern. In their words, liminality works "as the experience of being on, or crossing over, a threshold, then we begin to understand why affects and emotions are liminal phenomena of transition, and why liminal situations are affective and emotional" (2013: 242).…”

Affect and subjectivity

“…In other words, affect theory does not need to denounce the important analytic category of the subject, rather it can highlight a kind of politics that addresses the subject through processes of circulation, engagement, and assemblage, rather than as originating from the position of a sovereign subject. Some examples of the theorization of subjectivity that addresses the affective experience in relation with social configurations are found in approaches such as Walkerdine and Jimenez (2012) who think through communal beingness in Steeltown in South Wales, Brown and Reavey's (2015) affective approach to the sense-making process of people with traumatic experiences, Blackman's (2012) approach to processes of mediation such as voice hearing, suggestion, and telepathy, and Stenner and Moreno (2013) who feature affective experience as liminal in the context of organ donation.…”

The salience of liminal spaces of learning: assembling affects, bodies and objects at the museum

“…Potentially, both assemblage thinking and actor-network theory have much to offer with regard to a more than human perspective on liminality. Each challenges the anthropocentric impulses attaching to the original anthropological use of the term 1 and takes us into the territory of ontological liminality (Stenner and Moreno-Gabriel, 2013) which is guided by the Whiteheadian principle "that how an actual entity (such as a liminal space) becomes constitutes what that actual entity is" (Whitehead, 1978, p. 23, original emphasis). In a Deleuzian framing, a liminal space has no beginning or end.…”