Existence as a predicament

Abstract

This short critical commentary on the article raises some questions about the authors’ model of temporality and the linear conception of ‘milestones’, while endorsing this conception in cases where people feel deprived of something they might have expected to obtain.

I am wholly persuaded that the authors have identified an often important aspect of the life events which they analyse. I am however less sure about their model of temporality. They admit that for individuals to ‘envisage their trajectory and life-course from projected alternative futures’ is only ‘slightly [my emphasis] different from simply extrapolating likely consequences of significant life decisions. . .’ (p. 9). The prospective dimension is however not as contentious, in my view, as the notion of ‘milestones’ which must, if taken literally, be passed sequentially in a linear progress along a road or track. The authors might reasonably reject this over-literal objection, but it lurks, I think, in the normative language of ‘failure to obtain existential milestones’ (p. 10) and, most drastically, in the suggestion that to ‘recuperate’ a missed milestone, ‘whether by fertility treatment or evening classes’, involves the ‘reversibility of time’ (p. 15). This seems an extreme way of describing someone who did not move seamlessly (or perhaps after a gap year) from school to university and instead attends the latter a few years later as a ‘mature student’, or someone with a doctorate in one field taking a BA or MA in another, perhaps in retirement. A more appropriate image might be what Freud called Nachträglichkeit (Eickhoff, 2006). This includes, in what Faimberg (2007) calls a broader concept, a prospective dimension. As she wrote in an earlier paper of 1998,

What happens in the present (fear of breakdown) is linked to what has already occurred (a primitive agony) by a relationship of meaning. And this relationship is established, as an operation of Nachträglichkeit by means of a construction. I consider this process as an operation of Nachträglichkeit in the larger sense I am proposing and [. . .] not in the sense given by Freud in his letter to Fliess. (Cited in Faimberg, 2007: 1229)

This applies, she suggests, to what Winnicott (1974) called ‘Fear of Breakdown’ and also to an interpretation by Freud in his analysis of Abram Kardiner. As Kardiner recalled it, Freud said that a figure who appeared in one of his dreams ‘. . . was a projection into the future of what you actually feared in the past. What you feared was therefore not what was going to happen but what actually had happened, and which you not only forgot, but feared to recall’ (Kardiner, 1977: 55, italics Kardiner’s). There is thus, she suggests, an anticipatory aspect to Nachträglichkeit (Faimberg 2007: 1233).

Where time reversal does perhaps have a place is in the rewriting or reconceptualisation of history – most extreme in the denial that an event has occurred at all. ‘I never said that’, Trump repeatedly claimed, when the recording was only a day or two old. The law is particularly keen on such procedures, notably in French law with the fin de non-recevoir ¹ and, more broadly, the notion that something is non avenu. Charles II and Louis XVIII, for example, effaced the previous periods of rule by Cromwell and Bonaparte, respectively, in the dating of their accession. When the UK Supreme Court struck down the prorogation of Parliament in 2019, my delight at the government’s humiliation was tempered by a certain doubt: the court’s judgement that prorogation, being illegal, had not taken place, conflicted with the fact that Parliament had in fact been closed down for 2 weeks. ²

The existence theory model curiously recalls a board-game, which was a favourite in my household in the early years of this century, known as The Game of Life, ³ except that this operates with a slightly materialistic model in which the winner is the player with the most wealth on retirement. The choices however are there, beginning with that between going to college or straight into a career. In the description provided:

On your first turn, decide either to start a career, or to start college. College offers more career and salary options, but it takes time–and it puts you in debt! . . .If you decide to start a career, place your car on the START CAREER space, then do the following: Draw a Career Card. . .NOTE: You may not keep a Career Card that says ‘Degree Required.’ If you draw one of these cards, draw again!

Other life events include marriage, babies, house purchase, redundancy, through to speeding fines and ski accidents. In this last case, ‘the Ski Accident space is one of the Doctor’s Career Spaces. If you land there, pay $5,000 to the player who owns the Doctor Career Card’.

More seriously, it is worth reflecting on external events of which you remember where you were when you heard about them: for me, these include the Cuba Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassinations, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the opening of the Berlin Wall and 9/ll. Sometimes, these coincide with more personal life events, even for people far away from them: ex-communists, like refugees, are generationally divided by date of departure (1948, 1956, 1968, 1989) and for many the separation was traumatic.

Memory tends to preserve ‘the first time’ one experienced something, however often the experience is repeated subsequently; indeed, if it is not repeated, the memory may fade. Marriage is an obvious example for existence theory to take as a major life event, though for a Hollywood inhabitant on their fifth or sixth a process of routinisation or Weberian Versachlichung might set in. Conversely, we may suppose that Proust ate many madeleines before and after the iconic one. We certainly need to be reminded of our first word or first step, preserved in the memory of our elders and transmitted much later.

Anticipated retrospection is central to the model. ‘You’ll wish you’d done it before’, says the double-glazing salesperson or, more sinisterly, the doctor diagnosing a disease which one has neglected to report. It is hard to buy a book on-line or a seat on a plane without being told how many are left – the expectation being not that you might decide to splash out and buy several but that you might fear missing out altogether if you do not hurry. It is easy to see how anticipation in this sense might fit with the idea of ‘internal conversation’ (Archer, 2003; Schweingruber and Wahl, 2019); only empirical research would show whether it does indeed take this form. Archer’s own interviews do suggest that this plays an important part:

Very interestingly, most interviewees volunteered that they themselves assumed the practice of interior dialogue to be universal. [. . .] Following that discussion, subjects were presented with ten mental activities, derived from discussion with an informal pilot group. Items from this prompt list were put sequentially to each interviewee, prefaced by an assurance, gleaned from piloting, that not everyone engages in self-talk about each item: Planning (the day, the week or much longer ahead) Rehearsing (practising what you will say or do) Mulling-over (dwelling upon a problem, a situation or a relationship) Deciding (debating what to do, what is for the best) Re-living (some event, period or relationship) Prioritising (working out what matters most, next, or at all to you) Imagining (the future, including ‘what would happen if. . .’) Clarifying (sorting out what you think about some issue, person or problem) Imaginary conversations (held with people known to you or whom you know of) Budgeting (estimating whether or not you can afford to do some-thing in terms of money, time or effort).

The second part of the interview was much more loosely structured and focused on two main areas. Firstly, subjects were asked about their current concerns, that is which areas of their lives mattered most to them at the moment [. . .]

Secondly, once subjects had outlined their configurations of concerns and how these had developed, they were encouraged to look forward and to discuss how their ‘life-projects’ related to remuneration, repute and responsibility (class, status and power); to sacrifices and regrets; to support and satisfaction; and to ambitions, commitments or re-orientations. (Archer, 2003: 161–2)

For the respondents she categorises as ‘autonomous reflexives’, in particular, ‘making our way in the world’ does often seem to be marked by the anticipation of milestones (Archer, 2007, esp. chapter 5). ‘Donna’, a 22-year-old team manager in a bank,

has considerable freedom to plan her future career and, given that she both knows what she wants from employment and also makes this her top priority, it is unsurprising to find her thinking in the long term and also considering various options: ‘I plan to be in a certain type of job by the time I’m twenty-seven; children-wise, I haven’t really thought about that.’ (Archer, 2007: 220)

However, Archer writes in relation to another respondent: ‘Strategic career planning does not have to be the unfurling of some initial design. It can be a series of deliberative responses to the obstacles and opportunities that shape the situations in which people find themselves. . .’ (Archer, 2007: 220)

Where the existence theory model seems most plausible is indeed in the examples with which the authors conclude: the ressentiment of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land, deprived of what they have waited for by queue-jumpers (Hochschild, 2016), the limbo of refugees and migrants waiting in camps, for transport or for inclusion in their destination country and finally those (pretty much all of us) forced to defer or abandon plans by COVID, or, conversely, to bring forward plans to work more from home and/or to move to the country. Visions of a desirable future state certainly play a large part in commercial and political advertising, an example of the latter being the communist ‘radiant future’ (Zinoviev, 1985). It may be however that the most striking examples of the existence theory model concern situations where people have been deprived of something they might reasonably have expected to obtain. If this conclusion seems a slightly negative way to mark the milestone of my completing this review well within the time allowed, it should not detract from the very considerable interest of the existence theory model as presented in this article.