The Curious Case of the Boundary

The Curious Case of the Boundary

Elisa N. Matse

Master Thesis

RMA Artistic Research

University of Amsterdam

June 2015

Supervisor: Miriam van Rijsingen

Second reader: Jeroen Boomgaard

Table of contents

Introduction 3 _ 6

Matters of concern 7 _ 11

Virtual potentialities and actual becomings 12 _ 18

Borderlinking through metramorphosis 19 _ 22

Liminality and communitas 23 _ 26

Conclusion 27 _ 30

Introduction

I was born in the statistically most average city of the Netherlands. It goes by the name of Woerden, and is located in the central province of the Netherlands, Utrecht. After having lived in four different houses over 19 years of time, I moved to Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. It was the moment when I changed status of being an inhabitant of Woerden (and constituting its averageness), to becoming an occasional visitor. Gradually I started to look at Woerden differently than when I did when I still lived there, or in fact, more consciously.

The last house I lived in with my family (they still live there), is a house that was part of a big development project that resulted in a new neighborhood on the East side of the city. I have seen this house being built from scratch, starting from the moment its foundation was laid. As soon as the concrete had dried and we were allowed onto the property, we gratefully left our footsteps on it. Walking over its bare surface with only our imagination to see what it would look like was our way of starting to get familiar with the place. This was something we all appreciated being able to do, and in particular my parents, since they had committed to buy a house without ever having seen what it looks like, and not unimportantly, felt what it feels like. It was a leap of faith to commit to move into a place that for a long time looked nothing like a comfortable place to live. We could not wait for the house to be finished so we could actually make it our own and reassure ourselves that this was indeed the very place we wanted to call home. But as long as that was not possible yet, we visited the house in many different stages of development, so as to not miss the experience of its remarkable creation.

Many months later we finally moved in. The first couple of months the house had a smell that I now call ‘newness’ when I encounter it again. It was very exiting to live in such an oddly unhistorical place. But as time passed by, the ‘newness’ faded away together with the smell. It became a house like every other house we had lived in before. The surrounding of our house also changed from being spotless to taking on traces of use. The trees planted down our street – which in the beginning looked more like single branches sticking out of the ground than actual trees – gained momentum over time. In summers they would carry beautiful pinks blossoms, for unfortunately no more than two weeks, but this was nevertheless always a time to look forward to. During the winter the now leafless trees would all of a sudden look much bigger and more imposing than we knew them, as they were working hard to

carry the laden of snow that had fallen on their skinny arms. This beautiful scenery would usually also not last for more than a few days at the time, so whenever it occurred, we admired it dearly.

About four years after I had changed my address from this house, I had just arrived in Woerden to visit my grandmother, who lives on the other side of the city than where I used to live. As I got off the train from Amsterdam I set off to walk to her house. Throughout the years that I was not living in Woerden anymore, I started to become interested in the mundane things I had started noticing over time, through walking through the city. These were things I had never really paid attention to when I lived there, but now I did actually notice the houses, parks, and people that I passed. I noticed the clothes people wore, the kind of bikes they used (much fancier ones than the rusty ones many of us have in Amsterdam), and in particular the houses they lived in.

That day I visited my grandmother, I passed a long curly street with a canal on the right and a long row of tiny and rather old houses on the left. Since many people leave their curtains open during the day, I was able to peek into many of their living rooms. These houses are so small that before you know it, your gaze has gone straight through and has hit the fence at the end of the backyard. One of the first things I wondered after looking into these houses time and again on this same walk, was not only how people manage to live in such small houses, but rather why they chose to organize their limited availability of space the way they do. This question came to mind as I started noticing an in my eyes remarkable similarity between what I saw inside the living rooms of the houses down this street. In almost all of the living rooms I saw – singular or multiple, small or large – plants in pots. Now you might wonder why I am even pointing that out. It is quite common that people have some kind of decoration in their homes. The reason this however really interested me, was that these plants in particular were given so much space. And despite the fact that there are many different ways to decorate one’s house, I saw plants in almost all of them. Many times the whole windowsill was filled with a, it seemed, carefully selected row of plants. I say selected, because you could tell that many of them had been bought in pairs as they were positioned to make a nice symmetrical display in the windowsill. In some houses the plants were very even so big that they were positioned on the floor. All in all there was hardly a home without them.

My gaze then drifted to the surroundings of these houses. I noticed the gardens up front and in the back. No matter how small some gardens were, in this

street there never was a house without one. Taking the back and front yard together, it seemed to be of a similar scope as the whole ground floor of one house. I considered this a remarkable choice of design and it led me to wonder why these gardens are so prevalent in the (Dutch) city scape. I could not get my head around what is it that makes people create so much space, not for wildly growing, but for highly cultivated nature.

These recurrent observations stayed on my mind and I started realizing that what struck me was the ambiguity I noted, in particular in the application of elements of nature in and around man-build houses. The natural elements, such as bushes in gardens and plants in pots in houses refer to something natural and uncontrollable. However, the fact that each of these natural elements were always to be found within the confines of either the home or the garden, carried with it a certain form of restriction. And although these notions – the natural and artificial, the uncontrollable and controlled – are considered each other’s opposites, in and around these houses in Woerden I saw them manifest simultaneously. This got me interested in that which makes it possible for opposites to exist simultaneously. In our various languages and understandings of the world around us, opposite equations are used very often. It however started to dawn upon me that this is a construct that does not correspond with the workings of the world; one that harbors life and has a future. Then I do not mean the whole world at large, or even at nano-level, but at the very basic level of what we perceive in the mundane, such as in a Dutch garden.

I therefore want to use the Dutch garden as a thinking apparatus to fathom the hidden potentialities of the ambiguous, the in-between, and the boundary on which opposites and other separated entities meet. The garden represents the ambiguous, because it simultaneously speaks of natural processes and human interference. It is not clear where exactly the borderline is that divides the man-made from the natural. This is because there is simply no clear-cut boundary between the one and the other, despite the fact that the adjectives ‘man-made’ and ‘natural’ are not exactly the same or fully overlapping. They overlap in parts, sometimes more than others. Their relationship is in a constant flux. This therefore represents something that cannot be pinned down or categorized, which is therefore ambiguous, and surfaces on the boundary. Through this example, the following notions appear to be of importance in building an understanding of the workings of the ambiguous that falls outside, or in-between, categorizations: restriction vs. openness, the (conceptual) boundary that lies in-between opposites and the crossing thereof, the

construction of facts, and the (re)connecting of separated or opposite entities. These notions will therefore form the thread throughout this thesis. Through a so-called round-table discussion, I will analyze the writings of various authors, in particular anthropologists and philosophers, to shed light on these topics from different angles. These theoreticians are Bruno Latour (and his writings on matters of fact and matters of concern), Elizabeth Grosz (on the in-between), Bracha L. Ettinger (on borderlinking through metramorphosis) and Victor Turner (on rites of passage and the notion of liminality). Even though they all use different concepts and thinking apparatuses, each of them will bring me closer to forming an understanding of what happens on conceptual, virtual, actual and potential boundaries, and why this is kept hidden for the eyes of most of us.

Matters of concern

I remember when I played games as a kid out on the street. Me and my friends would chalk our own game boards on the pavement. My favorite game was ‘declaring war’ (which is a peculiar name and does not sound very child friendly, I admit). This is how it was played:

One of us drew a big circle with chalk onto to pavement and divided the circle up as a pie chart in what we called different countries. Each of us chose a country and wrote the name of that country on one of the parts of the circle. I remember I always wanted to be either Russia or the Unites States; the bigger the better. Everyone who played along would then stand on their ‘land’ within this circle and so the game begun. One person would say ‘I declare war to…’. This was the moment when everybody was allowed to trespass the border of his or her country and run around outside the circle. At an unexpected moment, the declarer of the so-called war would shout the name of one of the countries, and the person who ‘owned’ this country would rush back to their piece of land within the circle. As soon as she touched the ground of her country within the circle, she would yell ‘stop!’. This is when everybody running around outside the circle would stop at the place they were at, which was somewhere on the outside of the circle. The task of the person now in her own country within the circle was to tag someone in no-mans land. If she managed to do that without leaving her piece of land, she was allowed to appropriate the piece of land the tagged person was standing on. In order to get the other kids close to her so she could potentially tag then, she would close her eyes and yell ‘go go go’, at which signal the other kids would try to get back to their country. But as soon as she says ‘stop’, everybody has to stand still in the spot where they were at, and she can open her eyes and again try to tag someone. (It was even allowed to stretch out on the ground with only your feet still in your country, and tag somebody by touching them). If she managed to tag someone, she would then draw a circle around the feet of this person, by which this piece of land became hers and the tagged person would retreat into her country in the circle. These extra pieces of land appropriated outside the main circle functioned as private safe zones to walk on, so that you could not be tagged while being on there. The game continued until everybody was either tagged or back in their country without having been tagged on their way there. It would then proceed in the same manner; somebody anew declares the war to another country, and when everybody is back in the main circle, a new war

can be declared, giving everyone the opportunity to appropriate as much land as possible and prohibit others from doing so. The one who in the end has the most pieces of land could call herself the winner.

Through this game and others, we got acquainted with the idea of land being either yours or mine from an early age on. There were no in-betweens. When you got tagged, you had helped someone gain more land and become a stronger player in the game, since more land meant more safety, more space to move and therefore also more power. Of course this was very innocent and not related to actual war. We never held any grudges over this game, because it was not personal; we were simply abiding by its rules, until the game was over. But now many years later, I am wondering if a game like that was in fact nothing but innocent, or did it perhaps narrow down or fixate kids’ way of looking at the world as they were forming their own idea of reality? Are you really the winner when you outdo everyone in terms of appropriating land? Is it not also fun to play the same game with another set of rules? Why are kids learning that having more power and space than others equals excelling and winning the game?

A possible and very straightforward answer to the last question might be that this sadly but simply is how the world works. When you do not protect your personal territory – whether this is physical or mental space – others will do it for you, and not in your own but in their best interest. In our world there is only a certain amount of space available. Having more space means you are more present, and the people around you need to take you in account more than when you are hardly noticeable to them. The more room you have to move, the fewer obstacles you face making miles, the freer you are to go your own way. And that is something we value highly in our society: being able to conduct your personal plans instead of being forced into a fixed direction by rules that others set for you. Each of us fights to have a piece of the cake we all share, and since not working hard to keep your piece can make you lose it, we have to set the bar even higher and try to take that which is not ours (yet), because in this game stagnation is deterioration. And it is very hard not to abide by the rules of the game you find yourself part of.

For myself personally, only through very consciously observing the mundane of the world I inhabit (without trying to let everything make sense right away), I started realizing something significant in this regard. This was, on the one hand, that what I observe around me and, on the other hand, how I had gotten accustomed to think about and analyze this world, did not seem to fully correspond with each other.

Surely there were many occasions when the application of the paradigm or ‘looking glasses’ I over time created for myself to interpret the world, seemed to fit the scenery I was looking at almost perfectly. Such a framework, of which its application facilitates the establishment of categories, definitions, meanings and explanations, could hypothetically speaking really click onto the scenery that was in my vision and facilitate new or deeper translations of what I was seeing. Still, there nevertheless always seems to be a gap between what can be seen or understood through the use of frameworks that cut the world up in categories, and things that are simply too small to be perceivable, too big to fit within the frame or too far away to come anywhere near the downcast shadow of the framework that is held over the scenery of study.

For how to capture reality in, let us say, words? The complexity of the world around us transcends our means of expression by far. Yet in order to communicate about our feelings, thoughts and understandings, standardized systems are put into play to translate and transmit snippets of this reality. Unsurprisingly, many elements of the world we inhabit, and call reality, never make it through these transmissions, and are henceforth discarded or overlooked. This for example happens when we define the world around us in terms of ‘matters of fact’. Reality is much more complex and flexible than a matter of fact could ever express (Latour, 2004, p. 232): ‘’Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called

states of affairs’’ (ibid., original emphasis). Why is it then that matters of fact are so

present in people’s thinking and acting, while they are actually so inadequate?

This is because there is an underlying problem at stake here. According to Bruno Latour, the use of unrealistic matters of fact is being sustained by two positions in social sciences that each interpret scientific objects in a narrow-minded way. These are what Latour calls the fairy and fact position (ibid., p. 237). Critics coming from the fairy position usually explain the scientific object as a fetish object on which someone projects their desires (ibid.). The scientific object is reduced to being nothing more than a white screen on which the power of society or domination is projected and the person standing in relation to it is considered a naïve believer (ibid., p. 238). As if that does not sound negative enough; there also is the fact position. From this position a person’s behavior towards a scientific object is ‘’’’explained’’ by the powerful effects of indisputable matters of fact’’ (ibid.). These facts can have originated in any kind of discipline, and their development has not

been examined, meaning that there does not have to be much truth to the matter (ibid.). The effects of these ways of analyzing show that any kind of scientific object can always be critically explained, if not from one position in social sciences, then from the other. (Latour does in this case not go into possible exceptions.) Always having an explanation at hand might seem convenient, were it not that ‘’[o]bjects are much too strong to be treated as fetishes and much too weak to be treated as indisputable causal explanations of some unconscious action’’ (ibid., p. 242). In order to see objects for what they really are and can be, we would need another way to approach them. Latour therefore proposes a third position that he calls a ‘fair position’ (ibid., p. 243), out of what seems sheer desperation in his quest to open our eyes to our blunt ways of dealing with realities around us. But rather than leaving us stuck in contemplation over what ‘fair’ in this regard could mean and ponder on what to do with the matters of fact of which our society is permeated, he introduces a new concept that responds to exactly those questions. Rather than dealing with matters of fact, he proposes to talk and think in terms of what he calls matters of concern. By this he does not mean that we should turn away from matters of fact altogether, hoping in vain that they will become harmless over time. The solution lies rather in treating matters of fact as matters of concern, allowing them to move from their state of isolation back into their ‘gathering’ where they came from in the first place, to (re)gain the qualities of a matter of concern (ibid., p. 246).

In order to do so, we would have to turn back to the object. A (scientific) object can be found standing in opposition to a ‘thing’, as introduced by Heidegger (ibid., p. 232). When we talk about a thing versus an object, ‘’the latter is abandoned to the empty mastery of science and technology’’, whereas ‘’the former, cradled in the respectful idiom of art, craftsmanship, and poetry, could deploy and gather its rich set of connections’’ (ibid., p. 233). A thing is a gathering (ibid., p. 235) that stands for the complexity and multi-sidedness of a matter of concern. A matter of fact is in that sense closer related to the object seen as mastered by science and technology. But as mentioned before, an object cannot by default be explained as being either a fetish object or material to prove whatever fact, because there is more than meets the eye of critics in the fairy and fact position. And this is because ‘’all objects are born things, all matters of fact require, in order to exist, a bewildering variety of matters of concern’’ (p. 247). So in order for matters of fact and dismantled scientific objects to become useful again, we should start by trying ‘’to talk about the object of

science and technology, the Gegenstand, as if it had the rich and complicated qualities of the celebrated Thing’’ (ibid., p. 233, original emphasis).

The place where objects can become things again is in the arena Latour calls the ‘Thing’: the place where objects are reconnected with their complex ‘gathering’ or ‘web of associations’ where they originated from, in order ‘’to exist later as what

stands apart’’ (ibid., p. 236, original emphasis). This shows why it is important not to

‘’attack, criticize, expose, historicize […] matters of fact, to show that they are made up, interpreted, flexible’’ and also why we are not supposed to ‘flee out of them into the mind or add to them symbolic or cultural dimensions’’ (ibid., p. 245). For if we would, matters of fact would remain useless and stand in our way as seeming opponents of much more encompassing matters of concern. Yet when they transform back to matters of concern, this will allow us not to dismiss the complexity and ever changing reality of our world through a rigid and factual approach, but rather incorporate its inherent complexity in the building of our understanding of it. Up until then matters of fact and matters of concern are distinguished by the boundary that delineates the matter of fact. Yet the boundary not only limits, it also provides a way out of its own delineation.

Virtual potentialities and actual becomings

The concept of the boundary can best be understood by looking at it through a construction in which it has a clear function, for example in notions of binary thinking. In the case of opposites, the boundary that lies in the middle carries the task of protecting what is on either side from being infected by what is on the other side. In our common understanding, what we consider opposites can in most cases not exist simultaneously, so when one of the two would take the overhand, the other has no choice but to disappear. When there is light, darkness fades away, and that which is high cannot simultaneously be low, provided that the same standard is used in determining this. Yet when there is no darkness, one cannot define light, because there would be nothing to compare light with on that same level. There would simply be total light. In binary thinking, the notions that find themselves on either side of the boundary that both separates and connects them are related to each other exactly through their utmost otherness. And although an oppositional division may sound like a fair 50/50 divide, this construct does not work that straightforward. For when the right hand term is totally different from the left hand term, it underlines the not-being-different of the left hand term. Even though the hypothetical borderline is drawn exactly in the middle, one of the two can in this type of analysis still be the bigger, better or greater. This is where the notions of the signified and the signifier come in, as introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure.

When speaking in terms of for example man vs. woman, the latter functions as a signifier to the former, the signified. Consequently, the second term is denigrated in relation to the first. There are however different schools and theoreticians that provide various interpretations of binary thinking. Searle for example writes (in 1983) that in order to undermine logocentrism, the hierarchy needs to be reversed. In doing so, the right hand term becomes the privileged term, on the basis of the fact that it creates the possibility for the left hand term to be (New York Review of Books, Oct 27, 1983). This is related to Nietzsche’s deconstruction of causality. When the effect causes the cause to become one in the first place, then the effect should instead be treated like a cause (ibid.). Yet ‘’[t]he jarring loose of cause and effect does not, as has often been argued from a Baudrillardian perspective, make power mechanisms obsolete. Quite the opposite, it opens the door for their arbitrary exercise.’’ (Massumi, 1993, p. 26) Irigaray challenges what Derrida has called phallogocentrism in yet another way, by stating that in dualist thinking,

there are not two terms, but only the semblance of two terms, because in fact there is only one (Grosz, 2001, p. 92-93). Taking up the example of man vs. woman again, the woman in this approach only represents that what man is not. The left hand term is the only term there is. The right hand term is nothing more than a simulacrum of the opposite of the left hand term. ‘’There is no woman in this structure, only the formula of a woman that would complement, supplement, and privilege masculinity.’’ (ibid., p. 93) The domination over the right hand term ‘’infinitizes the […] term, rendering it definitionally amorphous’’ (ibid., p. 94).

Despite the fact that the right and left hand term have been reinterpreted many times, the binary structure itself oftentimes remained out of harms way. This stern relation of fixed entities, is kept into place by power relations that try to fixate and secure the future, in order to keep exercising control over it and direct its future for its own purposes (ibid., p. 101). Dualisms therefore present themselves as givens (ibid., p. 95).This makes one tend to overlook the fact that dualisms nevertheless find themselves in an ongoing process of redefining themselves and renegotiating their position (ibid.). Although the binary structure can remain the in place, the meaning and value of the terms that are at play will nevertheless shift (ibid.). The binary structure is one of many existing power relations that, in order to function, need to ‘’repeat themselves and congeal over time’’, so they can keep ‘’a fundamental identity even amidst ever-changing details’’ and secure the future (ibid., p. 103). Power relations intend to halt development. This mechanism can also be found at work in an attempt to create an ultimate good place, namely a utopia. The utopic is a movement towards the ideal, yet always on the verge to a dysfunctional utopia, namely a dystopia (ibid, p. 134 & 135). It relies on three processes or systems, namely;

- The materials and social arrangements people need to function in a certain way (which ultimately keeps them functioning like this);

- The impetus of time, which threatens any type of fixities that are in use, due to the luring of the future over the present and past;

- The regulation and organization of spaces to be inhabited. (ibid., p. 137)

Out of these three processes, the second is characteristically different from the first and third. Social arrangements and the organization of space are systems that keep things in place. The impetus of time however is threatening exactly these systems that keep things as they are, or keep things heading into the same direction as they were. So in realizing utopia, the idea of the unpredictable future that can at any

moment disrupt the present utopic situation, is often put aside for the sake of keeping everything in a state of perfection. Rather than in the past or future, utopia is anchored in the here and now: ‘’The utopic organization is conceived as a machine capable of solving foreseeable problems through the perfection of its present techniques’’ (ibid.). And although the reason to create a perfect society is to create reassurances and plans for a better future, it is preventing itself from having a future altogether in the act of doing so (ibid., p. 138).The utopic’s ‘’movement to perfection or to the ideal […] is adequately conceivable only in the temporal dimension, and above all in the temporal modality of the future’’ (ibid., p. 134). This is how utopias are always on the verge of being a dystopic society; they are like a river without flow that starts to rot. It is the freezing of this flow of time that blocks the future’s ‘’openness of becoming that enables divergence from what exists’’ (ibid., p. 141). Yet this divergence, which is not present in stern power relations which consequently lead to a temporal utopic or dystopic situation, is what is necessary for our world to have a future, and is therefore also embedded in the many natural systems and structures that make up our world.

For even the most rigid structures in our world are not immovable. They are perhaps what Simondon calls a ‘’metastable equilibrium’’ (Combes, 2012, p. 3), a false stability whereby a minor change in the parameters of the system can break the equilibrium at any moment. For ‘’[p]ower relations, like matter and like life, are dissipative structures that also exercise chaotic bursts, upheavals, derangements, reorganization, quantum leaps. Insofar as they retain any identity, they also continually transform themselves, while nonetheless clinging to the goal of freezing, arresting, or containing the future in its own image and according to its own interests’’ (Grosz, 2001, p. 103). Despite sporadic upheavals, the binary structure nevertheless continuously returns to its metastable equilibrium. The chaotic bursts (within power relations) result at most in the temporary shifting of the parameters of the system, not the actual changing of it.

The only space of negotiation, the place of actual change, is on the slash between the two entities separated from each other (ibid., p. 92). For on the in-between – the border in-between the one versus the other – there is a potential that allows not only for the one of the two terms to be established, but also for the other. The in-between ‘’fosters the other’s transition from being the other of the one to its own becoming, to reconstitute another relation, in different terms’’ (ibid., p. 93). In this different relation the binary structure is not entirely abandoned. The binarized

categories are rather being reconnected. Through the analyzing of their particularities and the reconnection that takes place on the basis of that, their inherent potentials will come to the fore rather than being entirely discarded (ibid., p. 64-65). We also saw this come to the fore in Latour’s account of matters of fact. Rather than totally abandoning them, he proposes that we (re)approach them and reconnect them with their gathering, so that their up until then denied potentials will be enhanced rather than abandoned. And the ‘’way these two’’ what Grosz calls ‘series’ ‘’are capable of being aligned to connect, to create their plane of consistence or coexistence, […] is made possible through the operations of the outside’’ (ibid., p. 68).

This notion of the outside is in this case not a right hand term that stands in sharp opposition to the inside. In Deleuze’s interpretation of Foucault, ‘’the inside is an effect of the outside: the inside is a fold or doubling of the outside’’ (ibid., p. 67). For Deleuze, these folds of the outside are series (ibid., p. 68). These series are made up out of the same ‘stuff’ as the outside. Borders and in-betweens take shape as folds, and define themselves by the outside: The in-between is ‘’a space without boundaries of its own, which takes on and receives itself, its form, from the outside, which is not its outside (this would imply that it has a form) but whose form is the outside of the identity, not just of any other (for that would reduce the in-between to the role of object, not of space) but of others, whose relations of positivity define, by default, the space that is constituted as in-between’’ (ibid., p. 90). The forming of the inside is an actualization of the virtual outside. Yet before the crossing of the non-space of the in-between, there is no inside nor outside according to Massumi (1993, p. 27). This distinction only becomes apparent when a virtual boundary is crossed and henceforth materializes: ‘’Every boundary is present everywhere, potentially. Boundaries are set and specified in the act of passage. The crossing actualizes the boundary – rather than the boundary defining something inside by its inability to cross. There is no inside, and no outside. There is no transgression. Only a field of exteriority, a network of more or less regulated passages across thresholds’’ (ibid.).

The outside is a virtual condition of the inside that ‘’both enables and resists the movements of territorialization and deterritorialization’’ (Grosz, 2001, p. 64 & 65). This constant flux in ‘’moving matter animated by peristaltic movements’’ (ibid., p. 66), allows for becomings to take place and happen anew each time:

Becoming is the way in which each of the two series can transform: becoming is bodily thought, the ways in which thought, force, or change, invests and

invents new series, metamorphosing new bodies from the old through their encounter. Becoming is what enables a trait, a line, an orientation, an event to be released from the system, series, organism, or object that may have the effect of transforming the whole, making it no longer function singularly: it is an encounter between bodies that releases something from each and, in the process, releases or makes real a virtuality, a series of enabling and transforming possibilities. (ibid., p. 68-69)

In this regard it can be helpful to also look at Whitehead’s conception of becoming: ‘’His ontology is one that emphasizes the individuality of all becoming, but only insofar as each becoming is situated within and emerges from a wider complex of becoming. This wider complex, or the outside, he calls ‘’the extensive continuum’’, which is ‘’one relational complex…. It underlies the whole world, past, present and future‘’ (Halewood, 2005, p. 65). Whitehead’s idea is that actual entities are always in a state of becoming, for when they have become, they die right away in order to become a potential part of another becoming, that once it has become will again split up and become parts of other becomings. Due to their ever-changing position in the extensive continuum, actual entities constantly oscillate between being subject and object (ibid., p. 66). Every new becoming is however not entirely new, due to processes of repetition that are present there. There are two kinds of repetition at issue. The first is ‘’the repetition of the becoming itself; the second is that what becomes, in itself, repeats the universe in a novel way’’. This novelty expresses Derrida’s idea of difference.

According to Whitehead, the extensive continuum is infinite, because it is not bounded or determined by other elements, and it is real, because it ‘’expresses a fact from the actual world’’ and also concerns this world in its present day condition (ibid., p. 65). Whereas for Whitehead entities are actual, Deleuze also goes into the relation of entities that are not yet actual, but virtual (ibid., p. 69). Yet ‘’they are still real, but not in the sense of being thinglike’’ (ibid.). For him ‘’the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension’’ (Deleuze in Halewood, 2005, p. 70). So the virtual does not stand in opposition to the real, but rather to the actual (ibid., p. 71). Deleuze sees a reciprocal relationship between the virtual and the real: ‘’Each makes a certain imperceptible contribution to the other,

not adding any particular feature or quality but a depth of potential, a richer resonance’’ (Grosz, 2001, p. 79).

Despite the fact that Whitehead talks about actual entities (which form insides within the outside), the extensive continuum is not actual to him. This corresponds to the notion of virtuality, also because ‘’virtualities exist in such a way that they actualize themselves in splitting up and being divided’’ (Halewood, 2005, p. 71), which is what happens in the extensive continuum. What connects Deleuze’s non-actual entities (that do not non-actualize per se) is their interrelation of potentiality (ibid. p. 69). For Whitehead there is a so-called ‘’utter potentiality of the universe’’ that he calls ‘eternal objects’ (ibid., p. 72). ‘’They are real but do not exist until they ingress into particular becomings (until they are actualized; hence moving from virtual to actual through the process of incarnating matter)’’ (ibid. p. 72). Actual entities either do or do not realize this potential (of becoming). Yet

[i]n the mere continuum there are contrary potentialities; in the actual world there are definite atomic actualities determining one coherent system of real divisions throughout the region of actuality.’’ Thus, a distinction must be made between the abstract notion of potentiality, as that which informs the process and creativity of the universe (i.e., the mere continuum), and the region of

actuality. For it is the latter that comprises the contemporary actualizations of

such potentiality within which the creation of actual entities occurs. This

means that although Whitehead posits an unlimited potentiality throughout the universe, the real actualizations of such potentiality occur in reference to a world that is in some way bounded. (ibid., p. 66, emphasis added)

This is notable in relation to the proposition that becomings on the foldings of the outside (or virtual or extensive continuum) are capable of overcoming binary power structures. When two series meet on the ambiguous non-place of the in-between, ‘something from each’ is being released, which not only ‘’facilitate[s] transformations in the identities that constitute it’’ (Grosz, 2001, p. 93), but also impairs the binary structure. Yet becomings can nevertheless only be actualized through a transformation in the system they are part of. The system – that is kept in a state of metastable equilibrium by power relations – will need to lose its balance for a moment. Simondon addresses this process via the notion of ‘dephasing’, which in thermodynamics stands for a change in the state of a system, and which is also how

Simondon understands the process of becoming (Combes, 2012, p. 4). This is why the energy that allows for a becoming to take place is called potential; ‘’because it requires a transformation of the system in order to be structured, that is, to be actualized in accordance with structures’’ (ibid., p. 3). The limits of the structure in relation to endless potential refer back to the man vs. woman equation, and the application of a phallic paradigm (which is common in psychoanalysis) in which the woman is ‘’not-all’’ there (Ragland, 2013) in relation to man. Yet it is not the case that she is not-all in general, she is only considered not-all in the phallic paradigm. In fact, she trespasses this paradigm infinitely, and trans-subjectively, but the way to see and allow this to happen is through the process of ‘metramorphosis’.

Borderlinking through metramorphosis

Bracha L. Ettinger approaches phallocentrism and the role of the feminine from the discipline of psychoanalysis. She criticizes several philosophers who have not (properly or only very late in their careers) acknowledged the role of the feminine in psychoanalysis, such as Freud, Lacan and Levinas. She starts from the basic principle that the woman is the begetter of life, whereby the womb is central as a place of becoming, and the ‘’borderspace between not-yet-living and life’’ (Ettinger, 2004, p. 73). Although this can be taken literally, Ettinger applies notions such as the womb, the fetus and pregnancy as thinking apparatuses, just as, in psychoanalysis, the male sexual organ is a support to conceptualize the ‘’phallic-Oedipal field with its castration complex, but the phallus is not to be identified with the penis’’ either (ibid., p. 78). On the basis of this tradition, Ettinger employs sex difference, and in particular her idea of the matrix, as a way to circumvent the phallic paradigm and address the importance and potential of the feminine.

In psychoanalysis the phallic paradigm is omnipresent, and that which is other than man is considered lacking, or castrated. ‘’From the phallic point of view, the elimination of the archaic m/Other is the sacrifice necessary for heroic male sexuality to become productive’’ (ibid., p. 71). This works as follows:

‘’In the field of vision, and in the dimension of the scopic drive and the desire to see, in the move from Thing to Object and into representation, the Woman-Other-Thing is in fact constituted as a fetish, like an inanimate object, first absent and desired and later inspired, by some imagined breath, to come to life, like a Golem, now present and possessed. In accessing or creating the object as fetish, it is to the evacuation of the archaic m/Other-Event-Encounter that the artist-hero owes his genius. Facing the art-object-fetish, the gaze of each subject, whether artist or viewer, is constituted upon her ruins. The subject is moved into a controlling of voyeuristic position in relation to any visible object, Other or Woman conceived inside this frame.’’

(ibid. p. 72)

This brings us back to problems we encountered before: The fetishization of the object in order to exercise control over it, and the other in the binary relation being disabled for the sake of the one. Yet for Ettinger the m/Other cannot be discarded

and fetishized like that, because ‘’all human beings must differentiate themselves first from the m/Other, and establish their particular modes of differentiating within this archaic first relationship’’ (ibid., p. 71). This means that rather than pertaining to the prevalent ‘’phallic subjective structure’’ and ‘’sexual phallic difference’’ (both disguised as neutral), we need to acknowledge the female difference from woman to/from woman and the I to the non-I (which is the fetus). The only way to accomplish that is to look beyond the phallic borderline and stop disqualifying everything as ‘’mystical or psychotic’’ that lies beyond it. It requires us ‘’to grasp that the borderline itself can become transgressive and should not be perceived only as a castration, a split and a bounding limit’’ (ibid., p. 73). What lies beyond is the matrixial sphere (a term coined by Ettinger herself in her book ‘The Matrixial Gaze’ (1995), as apposed to Lacan’s phallic gaze). It pushes phallic effects of castration and separation, not by opposing it, but by introducing ‘’separation-in-jointness’’ and ‘’distance-in-proximity’’ within the matrixial womb (ibid., p. 76, original emphasis):

The matrixial sphere is modeled upon intimate sharing in jouissance, trauma, phantasm in the feminine/pre-birth sphere, and the matrixial womb stands for a psychic capacity for shareability created in the boderlinking to a female body – a capacity for differentiation-in-co-emergence that occurs in the course of separation-in-jointness, where distance-in-proximity is continuously repeated. I(s) and non-(I)s interlace their borderlinks in a process of metramorphosis, created by and in turn creating relations-without-relating – by and together with matrixial affects – on the borders of presence and absence, in the in-between sphere of matrixial pre-absence. (ibid., p. 76)

The matrixial womb stands for an in-between where becomings take place. There is overlap between notions that, outside of the borderspace of the womb, exist separated from each other, for example presence and absence forming a pre-absence. Such overlaps are in fact not so contradictory and perhaps easier to imagine through Ettinger’s example of pregnancy. In the process of a fetus growing in the mother’s womb, there is a process of ‘co-naissance’ (‘’being born together’’ (ibid., p. 77)) at play. The mother and fetus are co-emerging, however in difference. They are simultaneously in the process of joining and separating. On the one hand they are connected by means of their reliance to become (a mother or child) on the (same) womb. Yet on the other hand, the growth of the fetus also implies an

impending separation at birth. This process of metramorphosis (which is also coined by Ettinger: the notion of metamorphosis which is intertwined with the metra, a synonym for the uterus, or womb), or the matrixial difference, ‘’conceptualizes the difference of what is joint and alike yet not ‘the same’, of what is uncognized yet recognizable with-in a shared trans-subjectivity. This is not the difference of that which is opposite versus that which is the same’’ (ibid., p. 78, original emphasis). Rather, it represents a non-oppositional difference.

Both male and female subjects perceive the matrixial sphere as an outside, ‘’out of chronological time and of appropriated space’’ (ibid., 77). Yet for women the womb is also an inside, harboring potential actualizations. They experience it ‘’as an inside and future-site as well, as an actual, potential or virtual space and as a future and possible, or potential, posterior time. Whether they are mothers or not, this time out-of-time is a potentiality for repetition which might be actualized in the Real. […] Thus female subjects have privileged access to this paradoxical time where the future and past meet, and to this paradoxical site where outside meets inside.’’ (ibid.) Ettinger however stresses that we should not only see this as a female privilege, but also as a ‘’surplus-of-fragility’’, since the impossibility of not sharing with the other in the matrixial borderspace has a fragilizing effect on the I and non-I that are creating a relation-without-relating (ibid.). But although men and women have a different relation to this site of virtuality and potentiality (since for women the relation is also established through their bodily experiences as an inside), ‘’[m]en, however, enter in contact with the matrixial time and site through transference relations and via art, when they are affected, like women, by joining-in-difference with others (see Ettinger, 2002a)’’ (ibid., p. 77-78).

What also distinguishes the process of metramorphosis from the phallic paradigm, can be understood by looking at Lacan’s ideas about ‘’the intra-psychic registers’’: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary (ibid., p. 83). He pictures them as a braid of three stems, woven into a knot. ‘’For Lacan, the idea of a ‘knot’ articulates the feminine and leads us to think of a knowledge independent of the signifier’’ (ibid., p. 84). According to Ettinger, this proves that Lacan tried to understand the female beyond phallic claims made of her. He nevertheless kept on seeing her as a ‘radical Other’, or ‘not-All’ in relation to man, which shows that even his idea of the knot of intra-psychic registers, by which he tried to make room for ‘’supplementary femininity’’ (ibid., p. 85) did not work, because this attempt never broke open the phallic framework, but produced a failing of the construct of the knot:

‘’When the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic intercoil around a feminine encounter according to the parameters of the Real, the knot, says Lacan, ‘goes wrong’ […] The phallus fails, or this feminine-other-thinking fails but only in the phallic order. […] It is this failure of the phallus in/by the feminine that Lacan calls a ‘sinthôme’’’ (ibid.). Despite Lacan’s efforts, the woman cannot merely be described as a failure of the phallic system. The word ‘sinthôme’ (meaning symptom) also only addresses the relation of a woman to a man, a subject to an object, even though Ettinger believes Lacan was opening up to ‘‘a knowledge independent of the signifier’’ (ibid., p. 84 & 86). This is why, in the words of Ettinger, the sinthôme needs ‘’a matrixial twist’’, so that the ‘’woman-to/from-woman difference’’ can surface (ibid., p. 86) as this has no place in the phallic-paradigm.

What is required to acknowledge and create a feminine relation between ‘women’, is ’’swerving and borderlinking. It takes metramorphosis. We then discover that a ‘woman’ is not confined to the One-body with its inside and outside’’ (ibid.). By means of the metramorphic weaving in the matrixial sphere, another kind of braid appears. It is ‘’a braid that interlaces stems and traces arriving from different individuals’’ which makes the matrixial braid, other than Lacan’s knot, trans-subjective. She is not confined to ‘’the One-body’’ because she fragilizes herself in the process of metramorphosis as she connects in separation (because they never become one and the same) to other identities. Metramorphosis is therefore highly similar to the process of becoming as described by Grosz (2001, p. 68-69), and to the elimination of the signifier-signified equation.

Liminality and communitas

In order to also place the concept of the in-between in a societal perspective, I would like to look at Victor Turner’s account of liminality, structure and what he calls communitas. These notions come to the fore in his study of what Arnold van Gennep initially called the ‘liminal phase’ of rites de passage. Rites of passage mark the transition of people moving from one phase or position to another within their social group, by means of traversing through a state of liminality. This could take shape in a youngster transitioning into adulthood, or a member of a group becoming its leader and being initiated as such. These movements go upwards on the social ladder; it is a transition from a lower to a higher state of being in accordance with the standards of this society. And in order to reach the next phase or level, one has to cross the boundary that lies in-between. I will elaborate on Turner’s account of the rite of passage to shed yet another light on the boundary or in-between and to understand these notions from a perspective of human transference through a liminal or in-between state.

According to van Gennep, rites of passage consist of three phases. First, there is the symbolic behavior of the separation of the individual from the group, as he either detaches himself from a fixed point in the social structure he finds himself in, or from a state of being by coming loose from cultural conditions, or both. (Turner in Lambek, 2002, p. 327) This will take him to the liminal phase, wherein the characteristics of the ‘passengers’ become ambiguous. In this phase the passengers will be brought back to a uniform condition and anchored in their material being, made aware that ‘’in themselves they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society’’ (ibid., p. 332). The next phase entails the reintegration back into society, wherein the passengers take on society’s accompanying form and start to behave according to the system at work on the other side of the passageway (ibid.). The question is however if this can be called ‘the other side’. When considering that boundaries are foldings of a limitless outside, creating insides that nevertheless consist of the same ‘stuff’ as the outside, perhaps no division can be made between ‘the one’ and ‘the other’ side of the boundary, since what is ‘on either side’ is no more or less than the regulative ‘system’ of, in this case, society. By going through this ritual, people re-negotiate their relation toward others, which then manifests afterwards as they are re-imprinted with a (slightly) different societal form.

Turner addresses the ambiguous state of liminality as ‘communitas’, which is Latin for community. Communitas surpasses the living side by side, because for Turner it represents living with one another and a strong relation between the one and the others (ibid., p. 328). Within the liminal period, society is an ‘’unstructured or rudimentary structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals’’ (ibid.). Outside this mode of liminality there is society as ‘’structured, differentiated and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of ‘’more’’ or ‘’less’’’’ (ibid.). The main difference between communitas, what Turner calls an ‘’open society’’, and structure, a ‘’closed society’’, is that communitas ‘’is potentially or ideally extensible to the limits of humanity’’ (ibid., p. 336). The passage through liminality and the transformation this causes in terms of the re-inscribing of society’s form onto people is ultimately ‘’a matter of giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society’’ (ibid., p. 328).

This bond becomes apparent as ‘liminal entities’ find themselves together but alone in a liminal state and have no status. They cannot be distinguished from each other and are in fact a tabula rasa, which contrastingly also connects them in lacking any type of characteristic. These ‘’threshold people’’ are outside classifications, they are ‘’neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’’ (ibid., p. 327). They are also in and out of time, just as the conceptualizing of the womb simultaneously represents a potential, actual and posterior time. Chronology and linearity are not at play in the liminal phase. Next to time and place, the notions high and low, and more and less (which in Turner’s account of rites of passage are parameters by which men are separated in societal structures), are addressed in the experience of liminality, but in such a way that their actual workings are discarded. This is important, because ‘’[l]iminality implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low’’ (ibid., p. 328). Yet the way this is made into an experience is not only by ‘’stripping [people] off of preliminal and postliminal attributes’’ (ibid., p. 331), it is also by allowing the passengers to experience the blurring of boundaries between the high and low, the here and there and the then and now. In the process of liminality, ‘’the opposites, as it were, constitute one another and are mutually indispensable. Furthermore, since any concrete tribal society is made up of multiple personae, groups, and categories, each of which has its own developmental cycle, at a given moment many incumbencies of

fixed positions coexist with many passages between positions. In other words, each individual’s life experience contains alternating exposure to structure and communitas, and to states and transitions’’ (ibid., p. 328). This shows that the experiences one has in communitas and liminality are experienced differently by every individual and are supposed to have a lasting effect on the passenger. As in the process of metramorphosis, borderlinking leaves traces on the selves as they are sharing amongst each other through fragilization. According to Ettinger, these experiences turn into a kind of knowledge, on which one can rely when the phase of liminality comes to an end or the non-I has turned into an I, or subject, and one undeniably finds oneself in a (phallic) structure again. Because ’[i]n practice, of course, the impetus [of communitas] soon becomes exhausted, and the ‘’movement’’ becomes itself an institution among other institutions’’ (ibid., 336). Despite the potential that lies in communitas, metramorphosis and becoming, there is no permanent state as such, with the exception of the institutionalizing of liminality in religious monastic orders (ibid., p. 333).

Although Turner looks to rites of passage and the liminal through the lens of preindustrial societies, he stresses that the usefulness of these notions does not end there: ‘’[I]t becomes clear that the collective dimensions, communitas and structure, are to be found at all stages and levels of culture and society’’ (ibid., p. 336). Communitas however does not only manifest by means of the notion of liminality. Communitas emerges all around and throughout structure: ‘’Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority’’ (ibid., p. 338). Communitas and its openness, potential and relationally are not going to do away with structure, because it needs structure to manifest itself. That is why it will not permanently reach the ‘limits of humanity’. Just like a becoming can only actualize in relation to an in some way bounded world, so does communitas stand in an undeniable and unbreakable relation with structure: ‘’There is a dialectic here, for the immediacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy of structure, while, in rites de passage, men are released from structure into communitas only to return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas. What is certain is that no society can function adequately without this dialectic’’ (ibid.). ‘’Communitas cannot stand alone if the material and organizational needs of human beings are to be adequately met. Maximization of communitas provokes maximization of structure, which in its turn produces revolutionary strivings for renewed communitas. The history of any great

society provides evidence at the political level for this oscillation. […] But together they constitute the ’human condition,’ as regards man’s relations with his fellow man’’ (ibid., p. 339). Or woman’s relation to her fellow woman. Or even better; as constituting a relation from man to man, man to woman and woman to woman; each alike as individuals, but (non-oppositionally) different.

Conclusion

Not too long ago, I was waiting at a busy crossroad in Amsterdam. As I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green so that I could cross, a woman and a young girl, each on their own bikes, crossed the crossroad at right angles in front of me. The girl cycled ahead of her mother, and as she reached the other side of the crossroad, she was about to cycle straight onto the car lane. The lane designated to bikers was in fact a bit more to the right. The mother, who saw this happen, yelled ‘’bike lane, bike lane’’ to her daughter, who then quickly turned her steering wheel to the right and only just in time made it there before she would indeed be cycling in the car lane. This yet again mundane example made me realize that the systems we apply (such as traffic rules and the design of roads) to navigate through our ungraspable complex world, require a certain obedience in order for them to carry out the task they are made for, namely to keep unpleasant and especially unexpected surprises from happening. That which falls in-between the lines of categorization and order will be considered dangerous. This is not because it is dangerous per se, but because it threatens to cause uproar in a certain type of organization. The things that cause this are called taboos, as an attempt to render them harmless (Douglas, 2002, p. xi).

In his account on matters of fact and matters of concern, Bruno Latour recognizes a similar problem, namely in (social) scientists’ attempts to pin down scientific objects as either a fetish (and therefore a taboo) or ‘pure’ fact. In practice this means that either the object of study fits in the system of categorization and gets a place appointed in that, or it does not and is outcasted (and made harmless on its way out). Latour pleads for a fairer treatment of objects, as he believes that they are far more complex, layered and intriguing than this type of treatment makes us believe. By introducing the ‘matter of concern’, he gives us a tool to move toward a more encompassing way of perceiving and understanding the world around us, than through the use of matters of facts. Facts however do not need to be discarded altogether, they should rather be placed back in the gathering they came from, so that they can productively be approached like a matter of concern. This shows that the problem of shortsightedness (for example in social sciences) does not lie in what reality is and what it is not, but rather in how we approach it, experience it and consequently act upon those (un)conscious decisions.

This led me to take this to a more fundamental level, namely the concept of the boundary that delineates (matters of) facts and has a key function in any type of

categorization, system and order. In order to come to a sound understanding of how systems and categorizations in our societies work, I considered it of importance to shed light on this intriguing notion of the boundary that both establishes and threatens it. By means of Elizabeth Grosz’ account on the in-between, I learnt that the in-between, or the boundary, is a paradoxical non-place. It defines itself by means of the outside of the identities that constitute it, by taking shape as a fold of the outside, by which an inside (made up out of the same ‘stuff’ as the outside) appears. It finds itself in a virtual state: ‘’Every boundary is present everywhere, potentially’’ and actualizes in the act of crossing (Massumi, 1993, p. 27). This means there is no division between an inside and outside, and no transgression of boundaries, ‘’only a field of exteriority, a network of more or less regulated passages across thresholds’’ (ibid.). In its virtual state, the boundary harbors endless potential becomings. Even though such virtual entities are not yet existing, they are just as real as actual entities are. Virtual entities are interrelated on the basis of an unlimited potentiality that can manifest into the move of the virtual into the actual (Halewood, 2005, p. 69). Yet this is where the paradoxical comes in again, for there remains a peculiar division between the endless abstract and virtual potential present in (folds of) the outside which informs creativity and becoming, and the actualization thereof that can only happen in accordance with a regulated system. This means that the unlimited potentiality of the universe (elaborated on by Whitehead for example) can nevertheless only turn into actualizations ‘’in reference to a world that is in some way

bounded’’ (ibid., p. 66, emphasis added).

For Bracha L. Ettinger, the relation between the finite and infinite, or limits and endless potential, lies in the difference between the application of a phallic paradigm on the one hand and the feminine sexuality as a thinking apparatus on the other hand. She responds to Lacan’s ‘intra-physic registers’ of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary and his attempt to, through these registers, move away from the signifier-signified divide by which the second hand term (for example man vs. woman) cannot stand alone. He nevertheless did this from a phallic point of view, in which the feminine, or the sinthôme, could only appear as a disruption. This is why Ettinger introduced the concept of metramorphosis, creating space not only for the man to woman difference to exist, but also for the difference from woman to woman to be recognized, which is a non-oppositional difference (Ettinger, 2004, p. 89). In metramorphosis the ‘borderlinks’ of I’s and non-I’s interlace, which opens up to a place where oppositions and fusions are finally overcome, due to the fact that she

weaves the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (anew) (ibid.). In this process she takes on

a certain fragility as she literally fragilizes herself in the process of relations-without-relating to a non-I. This ‘’differentiation in/of/from the feminine’’ leads to the question of ‘’how we are to give meaning to our difference-in-jointness that precedes and coincides with my being One-self’’ (ibid.), all of which takes place on the borderlinks between I’s and becoming I’s.

From the phallic and matrixial paradigm, I moved to an analysis of Victor Turner’s account on liminality and communitas, by which the topic was brought back to societies as a whole. Through this yet again different perspective on a form of an in-between in which there is no fixity, categorization or structure, it became once again evident that the potential that lies in the in-between (and is in Turner’s view extensible to the limits of humanity), can only exist in relation to structure in order to manifest itself. The passing through the in-between is also the only place to (re)negotiate one’s place in society and the relations one has amongst each other. It opens up to transformations which allows for people to move higher up on the ladder of society and, in a broader picture, to the continuation of the world in which we live.

For on the basis of these processes, our world has a future. When these disruptions are halted in order to optimize the present, we will perhaps temporarily find ourselves in what some would call a utopia, but this will soon turn into a dystopia, as the future’s openness is blocked and vital developments are prevented from happening. It is key to all the (seemingly) fixed systems and structures we have created to help us deal with the complexity of the world – by categorizing the look of it – to be threatened, shaken up, disrupted and changed; time and time again. This is not to create chaos, but for the productive oscillation between structure and what Turner calls communitas to take place. Luckily this already occurs on a daily basis and on many different levels, which is underlined by the fact that this came to light in the act of studying a productive way to deal with that which is considered factual, the meaning of abstract notions of becoming, the overcoming of binaries by means of metramorphosis and rites of passage, all of which was sparked by an observation of the Dutch garden in the downright mundane. What these topics undeniably have in common is that they all speak of how structures and categorizations on the one hand allow for transformations to actualize and for us to see otherwise unperceivable virtual potentialities. On the other hand, structures and systems always block the perspective of what spills over its edges. The boundary however represents and forever harbors exactly that: that which does not fit in and cannot be pinned down,

because if it would, our world as we know it would end today. Ambiguities, paradoxes and contradictions bind our world (and our sanity) together. And that is why, as a matter of fact, the concept of the boundary is a matter of great concern in the navigation of our open yet bounded world.

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Douglas, M. (2002). Purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and

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!http://www.lacan.com/symptom14/?p=290

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