Milestones and cornerstones: Queering the life course

Abstract

Rather than refuting or challenging the claims by Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama to originality, the objective of this commentary is to flesh out “existence theory” by extending its repertoire of examples and by expanding on its classical and philosophical sources. Drawing on precedents in canonical statements by Vico, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Marx, this response poses questions about the model’s implied assumption of a time-line that traces a “straight” path from the past to the present and future by invoking the alternative imagery of a circular history, cyclical time, or “queer” life course. To support this argument, contemporary queer theories are invoked to supplement the concept-metaphor of “existential milestones” with that of “existential cornerstones,” which do not always suggest that human development follows a single path or a binding timeline. The civil institutions of religion, marriage, and burial, as discussed by both classical sociologists and queer theorists, for instance, may be defined by a sense of necessity and inevitability but also by contingency and coincidence.

Mid-20th century intellectual life in the western world was distinguished by the remarkable ambition to create grand theories, often in the form of totalizing historical narratives and comprehensive explanatory models. This theoretical energy drew inspiration from late 18th century ideas on the connection between reason and freedom along with 19th century commitments to social change through political revolution. For the rest, it was driven by the need to respond to the contemporary cultural chaos and psychic disorders emerging from world war and colonial capitalism. One of the most influential of these intellectual movements, existentialism, was actually more of a “moment” lasting just a few decades. It was less a school of thought than a philosophical conversation led by intersecting circles of more-or-less public intellectuals. The bedroom and the seminar room, the urban café and university department provided scenes of intense discussion and debate, and splits among existentialists were political and ethical (Sartre and Aron) as well personal and institutional (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) (Bakewell, 2016). Despite its brevity, this moment is instructive in explaining how modern intellectuals rise in prominence and decline in influence:

Whether within the academy or outside it, intellectuals operate within competitive arenas, struggling over symbolic and institutional recognition and scarce financial resources. It makes a lot of sense, therefore, to recognize the extent to which their interventions – whether through books, articles, or speeches are an integral part of this power struggle rather than an expression of some deeper self. By emphasizing how intellectual production and the struggles over scarce resources are intertwined, we take it as essential to establish a critical distance vis-à-vis the way in which most intellectuals portray themselves to their audience (Baert, 2015: 162).

What we learn from the existentialist moment comes less from the validity of its theses, the content of its convictions or the self-presentation of its leading figures than from its enabling institutional conditions and performative styles of argumentation. By aspiring to a theory of everything, existentialism left us with an unusually clear picture of what makes some critical ideas succeed and how intellectual fashions fade.

Responding to the formidable challenge of existentialism, Baert et al. (2021) propose what they call ‘a new approach to sociological theory and research’, ‘a new theory of social behaviour, and ‘a new sociological perspective’ (pp. 6–7). Building on classical sociological traditions left aside by many existentialist philosophers, what they call “existence theory” entails a grand synthesis of life course inquiries into individual and group level experiences with large-scale socio-historical investigations into the structural dynamics of power relations and wealth inequalities. Their approach focuses on the intersection of personal and collective journeys through life as they strive to overcome obstacles in the quest for integrity and wholeness. Where the horizontal dimension of this theory attends to “‘existential milestones’ [. . .], events that are so essential to the individuals involved (and their immediate community) that without their achievement those lives will be experienced as somehow incomplete,” the vertical dimension envisions “an ‘existential ladder’ whereby each existential milestone is a prerequisite for obtaining the next ‘rung’ up” (Baert et al., 2021: 8, 11). In each dimension the emphasis is less on the existential coordinates of the social space in which these emergent experiences occur than on existential points of passage that define the timeline of the life course.

My aim here is to flesh out existence theory a bit more, to supplement its repertoire of examples, and to expand on its classical and philosophical sources, rather than to refute, challenge, or even qualify the claim to novelty or originality. In particular, I want to question the implied assumption in this model of a timeline that traces a straight path from the past to the present to the future, in part by invoking the image of a circular history or cyclical time that cuts diagonally across these vertical and horizontal trajectories. In this regard, a key precedent of the concept-metaphor of “existential milestones” is Vico’s idea in The New Science of the civilizing things or institutions (cose)—what I call “existential cornerstones”—that mark the passage out of bestial savagery into the recurring process (ricorso) of humanization:

We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, keep these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead. And in no nation, however savage and crude, are any human actions performed with more elaborate ceremonies and more sacred solemnity than the rites of religion, marriage, and burial (Vico, 1744/1968: 97, para. 333).

Institutionalized rituals and ceremonies constitute the building blocks and cornerstones for the world of civil society made by humans. They can therefore be discovered among the modifications of the human mind, including the lands, labors, and languages that make up the materials of civic culture. Under the sway of Lucretius’s figure of the swerve or clinamen (O’Neill, 2020: 178), and anticipating Durkheim, Vico conceives the elementary forms of religion not on the model of an edifice (kurakon, Kirche) that encloses its members and fixes them in place, but rather as a moral community or assembly (ekklesia, église) that gathers periodically to reaffirm common bonds and collective values. Since “a religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden” (Durkheim, 1912/1955: 44), the secular (in the sense of rituals that are repeated through the ages) is folded into religion, just as the profane world (in the sense of what is outside its domain) is presupposed and not merely punished by sacred decrees. In contrast to the strait time of millennial redemption guided by milestones pointing in one direction, Vico and Durkheim inadvertently offer us a glimpse into a kind of queer time of cyclical epiphanies where cornerstones turn around and through the world in multiple ways.

In referring to queer time I mean to acknowledge how normal time-consciousness may be skewed or “bent” away from the existential milestones of coupling, children, and careers in ways that are not necessarily experienced as trauma, stigma, or shame (Baert et al., 2021: 9). Cultural theorist Elizabeth Freeman points out how the “chrononormative assumptions” and “teleologies of living” that animate these conventional life stages are reproduced through social techniques that make institutional forces appear as “somatic facts” and to thus to feel necessary and “natural” (Freeman, 2010: 3, 5). Viewed from this angle, Vico’s second universal civil institution, marriage, can also seem queer insofar as it is defined not just positively, in terms of legal recognition or moral prescription, but also negatively, as the right not to be so recognized or the freedom to refrain from complying with such prescriptions. As anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has argued, the culture wars between progressives and conservatives over “gay marriage” or “same-sex unions,” for instance, obscure this dimension of the potential queerness of kinship by “mutually defining [their positions] within straight time” (Boellstorff, 2007: 232). Drawing on the analogy of seasonal celebrations that fall on different dates of normal calendar years (including superstitious events like Friday the 13th), he suggests that the queer time of coincidences disrupts the “future anterior” of what will have been seen as inevitable or normal—through chance encounters, improbable occurrences, unexpected interactions, and unlikely relationships; or, to take the example of homosexuality, through the experience of “coming out” as a lifelong or generational process rather than a once-in-a-lifetime event. Far from designating the mere opposite of what is straight and normal, “the term queer itself marks this stance of being always already within, in bed with, complicit and contaminated by, the normative with which it engages” (Boellstorff, 2007: 241).

Vico’s third universal civil institution, the rites of burial, draws our attention to what Baert, Morgan, and Ushiyama refer to as the “existential urgency” that is felt when the timeline for climbing the existential ladder approaches the deadline (real or imagined) for the attainment of certain existential milestones—an educational degree, a professional promotion, home ownership, a family inheritance, and so on. What I am calling “existential cornerstones” refers not just to moments where timelines are joined or spaces converge but also to significant qualities that make certain things possible or crucial features on which other things depend (Abend, 2020). They are also often the “steppingstones” that facilitate entry into power dynamics or “touchstones” for judging inequalities that either block or enable access to existential milestones (Baert et al., 2021: 6, 15–18). As with my comments on Durkheim above, here too we might offer an unexpected twist on a canonical question posed by a classical sociologist, namely Weber: “what chain of circumstances led to the appearance in the occident, and here only, of cultural phenomena which – or so at least we like to imagine – lie in a development direction having universal significance and value?” (Weber, 1920/2009: 205, translation modified, emphasis added; cf. Kemple, 2014: 1–8). To consider one of Weber’s examples in light of the coronavirus pandemic discussed by Baert et al. (2021: 19–20), the separation of household from business enterprise in the early modern period was as historically contingent and culturally specific as the fusion of home life and professional workspace has become for many people over the past year. In neither case can the unintended consequences of short-term asceticism on long-term accumulation be projectively imagined or accurately predicted in any obvious or clear way. In the contemporary context of late capitalist America, frustrations in the face of persistent impasses are perpetuated by attachments to the promise of realizing “a life of one’s own” or the fantasy of achieving “the good life,” which affect theorist Lauren Berlant describes as “cruel optimism” experienced as personal ambivalence or angst rather than structural failure (Berlant, 2011: 2–3; cf. Baert et al., 2021: 13). In this sense, we often feel compelled to bury our dreams along with our dead.

Rather than replacing the notion of milestones, I am raising questions about the teleological assumptions that give such turning points a unidirectional meaning and sense of finality. Simmel’s metaphysical reflections on the problem of fate and death are useful in this respect, since they move against the grain of the conventional image of an endpoint and are informed by his sociological insights into the cultural forms that give shape to individual and social life:

In every single moment of life we are beings that will die, and each moment would be otherwise if this were not our innate condition, somehow operative within it. Just as we are not already fully present in the instant of our birth, but rather someone of us is continually being born, so too we do not die only in our last instant (Simmel, 1918/2010: 65; Kemple, 2018: 160–166).

In contrast to the conceptualization of death as a moment of completion or terminus ad quem on the journey of life, Simmel recovers the ancient, classical, and premodern meanings of death as inherent in human sensemaking practices that define our existence as mortals. As he states in The Philosophy of Money, the human is “the indirect being” that follows a circuitous route through life, rather than a straight path from birth to death, by way of the aberrant objects of our desire and wayward intentions of others (Simmel, 1900/2004: 211; Kemple, 2018: 185–187). In this sense, Simmel inaugurates a kind of “queer phenomenology” which accounts for the disorientations and detours, the regressions and errors built into the sense of the order and disorder of human experience.

The body emerges from this history of doing, which is also a history of not doing, of paths not taken, which also involves the loss, impossible to know or even to register, of what might have followed from such paths. As such, the body is directed as a condition of its arrival, as a direction that gives the body its line (Ahmed, 2006: 159).

Like feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed, Simmel is concerned with how embodied subjects make their way around objects and along winding paths that lead beyond vertical slopes and behind horizontal tracks. Speaking more directly to the argument of existence theory, phenomenologist Gabor Cspregi has also described how certain unexpected, life-defining, and transformative moments—an encounter with a foreign culture, a decision to break away from an oppressive situation, an act of spontaneous generosity in everyday life—unfold through the play of active intentions and passive occurrences: “destiny depends on my engagement, fate befalls me” (Csepregi, 2019: 125). Ordinary and inevitable events in the life course of an individual (such as puberty) as well as extraordinary and contingent episodes that define the existence of a people (such as migration) are often felt less as normal and sanctioned than as obscure and opaque.

These examples of existential milestones and cornerstones are not experienced by everyone equally but rather are patterned by the unequal distribution of wealth and the asymmetrical exercise of power. Such large-scale political and economic dynamics expose how apparently simple matters are actually experienced as complex and confounding. Marx provides a paradigmatic method for tacking back and forth between these manifest and latent dimensions of the basic building block (Elementarform) of capitalist societies: “A commodity appears at first sight as an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very queer thing [ein vertracktes Ding], abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx, 1976: 162, translation modified). Marx’s point is that, in practice if not always in theory, we cannot always trace a straight line from the production of a commodity to its sale, purchase, and consumption, and even less between supply and demand. At each stage, use value skews the circulation of exchange value in the direction of human needs and wants, putting a drag on the forward march of expanding reproduction and accumulation. As we now know, the production and consumption of commodities can also be disrupted by recycling or repairing, fair trade or bartering, and various ways of slowing down or reversing the apparently relentless trajectory toward profit and reinvestment. Likewise, while the routines of leisure time and labor time tend to follow the temporal line of the clock, where events build and experiences accumulate, they also meet resistance in the recursive cycles of the seasons, where moments happen without notice or things emerge out of many different rhythms. Feminist methodologist Dorothy Smith has elaborated on this lesson from Marx in her work on institutional ethnography. When persons and groups are assessed by the capitalist market, as in the wage relation, or interpellated by the bureaucratic state, as in the birth certificate, they are made legible within the ruling relations of institutions that coordinate people’s activities through ordinary talk and text: “Moving to the more inclusive conception of coordination, the social might be conceived as an ongoing historical process in which people’s doings are caught up and responsive to what others are doing; what they are doing is responsive to and given by what has been going on; every next act, as it is concerted with those of others, picks up and projects forward into the future” (Smith, 2005: 65). Smith’s method of inquiry entails cultivating an ethnographic sensibility concerning how institutionalized relations of power and privilege are not just imposed on but also built into the milestones and cornerstones of everynight/everyday life and work.

In expanding on the classical sociological sources of existence theory while supplementing some of its guiding assumptions through the perspectives of queer theory, I have tried to outline a complementary hermeneutic of social life rather than an alternative concept of social order (Baert et al., 2021: 22–24). In other words, I think the concept-metaphor of “existential milestones,” interpreted through its horizontal and vertical dimensions, can be productively extended to include the concept-metaphor of “existential cornerstones,” through which we might intuit a multitude of elliptical or oblique facets of being. The latter may mark a convergence of trajectories or indicate a condition of possibility for subsequent occurrences or coincidences which do not necessarily lead in the direction of any one expected outcome or specific imagined project. My concern is with the process by which a mere tendency, a slight inclination, or a contingent orientation may ultimately be consolidated into a dependent path, a binding timeline, or a confining space. I am even more concerned with how the anxiety or fear over not achieving socially sanctioned milestones can overwhelm the joy of discovering or constructing life’s cornerstones. The distinction that literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick makes between a paranoid hermeneutics obsessed with detecting “bad surprises” and a reparative mode of reading that relishes in the unexpected is pertinent to the argument I propose here:

The monopolistic program of paranoid knowing systematically disallows any explicit recourse to reparative motives, no sooner to be articulated than subject to methodical uprooting. Reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (“merely aesthetic”) and because they are frankly ameliorative (“merely reformist”) (Sedgwick, 2003: 144).

How then can we combine a mode of sociological interpretation which is not merely suspicious or even paranoid about lost lives and missed experiences with one that is reparative as well as appreciative of the worlds in which we do or may yet live? The answer, I suggest, may lie in how we merge the intellectual urge to reconstruct our grand theories with the mundane concern to recover our sacred customs and redefine our civil institutions.