Abstract
The research addresses organisational practitioners’ capacity for noticing and responding to fleeting, small gestures and indeterminate impressions that register as bodily sensations in the midst of dynamic circumstances. The thesis explores such experience as occurring in the realm of the liminal - liminality taken up as a quality of experience when vague perceptions are sensed and felt viscerally at the very edge of articulation.The research asks how this domain of experience, here discussed as liminal perceptive sensibility, may be brought further into articulation while retaining the quality of the experience. This involves experimenting with a combination of first person reflexive narratives of a poetic and disclosive style. The starting point is the bodily lived experience of being a player amongst others in different scenes of social organising and inquiring into the range of noticings potentially available as the scene unfolds. The research proposes that a reflexive practice of laying out the detailed texture of such experience through writing itself acts developmentally to alert and prepare practitioners to become more able to work with the precarious potentiality of where things might go next.The thesis contributes to discussion of the cultivation of liminal perceptive sensibility by relating a number of theoretical ideas: the paradox of involved detachment of Norbert Elias; the move ‘upstream’ towards working with the coming into being of phenomena of Henri Bortfoft; John Shotter’s ‘withness-thinking’ (rather than aboutness-thinking) and his concept of ‘joint action’; Jenny Helin’s exploration of ‘vertical writing’ and ‘listening- writing’ for writing that is anchored in the body and emphasises curiosity and unpredictability. The thesis also draws on the literary work of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector for writing that captures the fleeting.
Keywords
liminality, bodily writing, withness-writing, bodily sensing, minor gesture, perceptive sensibility, disclosive writing, unarticulated feelings, fleeting experiences, edge of language, phenomenology of the fleeting, John Shotter, vertical writing
Document Type
Thesis
Publication Date
2024
Recommended Citation
Schneider, J. (2024) BEFORE SENSING BECOMES A SOME-THING: Writing with the bodily experience of liminality in processes of social organising. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Retrieved from https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/ada-theses/102
