Liquid Perception and Event and Nursing

At the start of academic nursing in the United States, nurses philosophized. And they did it grandly. So grandly in fact that this entire period (beginning in the mid 1900s) has been called the era of grand nursing theory. Grand nursing theory attempted to express the conceptual side of nursing but struggled, not least in confusing philosophy with theory. Nevertheless, grand nursing theories are still actively promoted in nursing education, practice, and research, suggesting there is something to them that continues to resonate with nursing. This resonating something can be made more consistent when connected to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze philosophy is not a tracing of the actual in terms of theory. Rather, every actuality involves a 'shadowy and secret part,' which is its conceptuality, and which is the work of philosophy to construct. It is this conceptuality that speaks the shadowy part of an actuality, and which Deleuze calls an event. An analysis of a 2008 paper by grand nursing theorist Margaret Newman and colleagues demonstrates that they were trying to speak an event of nursing through creative gestures such as 'rhythmic fluctuations' and 'oscillating possibilities' and 'experiencing the infinite,' but were using outdated theory structures to formalize them, which made for distortions and denaturing effects. Reconsidering their creative gestures through a Deleuzian philosophy premised on movement and variation (rather than stasis and standardization) a concept of liquid perception is developed to express how nursing can be conceived as bearing witness to an event and counter-actualizing its emerging possibilities in the context of healthcare. It involves gaining a capacity to bear affects and thereby pass to different and more expansive thresholds of perception, which Deleuze defines as becoming subjected to an action, and affirms Newman and colleagues claim that 'relationship … emerge[s] as the central focus of the discipline.' Liquid perception expresses this relationality in terms of a practice of making actionable more and other things across more and other dimensions, thus expanding the very scope of what can become related, thus expanding the very potentiality of nursing. Importantly, liquid perception has nothing to do with putting forth a new grand theoretical truth of nursing. It constitutes a dynamic conceptualization that makes nursing visible without making prescriptions. Liquid perception is not a fact about nursing-it is a speaking of what remains shadowy and secret in nursing, which involves nursing's unique efficacy, and becoming worthy of its event.