Communicative reflexivity relies on interlocutors to complete and confirm internal conversations. However doing this in a sustained fashion necessitates the interlocutor is sufficiently similar and familiar to enter into these deliberations in a meaningful way. We are all capable of expressing our internal speech to external others but what matters is the nature of the understanding produced in such speech acts. Not only does communicative reflexivity necessitate that the other understand the literal content of the deliberation (“I’m trying to work out what to do about X given Y and Z”), it’s necessary for them to understand why the deliberation matters (the biographical emergence of Y and Z as concerns) and have a sufficient degree of knowledge of the subject and their social context to help complete the deliberation rather than simply being a sympathetic listener. As Archer puts it, communicative reflexivity requires “people who can understand and enter into the subject’s concerns and preoccupations to such an extent that they can complete and confirm their friend’s tentative thoughts by their talk together” (Archer 2012: 147). This reliance on trusted others for the completion and confirmation of deliberation entails a form of normative conventionalism, as the articulation of tentative projects to others also opens up those projects to scepticism, censure and hostility at the planning stage.
Archer observes “a manifest lack of enthusiasm, blending personal uncertainty and sometimes apprehension with a countervailing desire to make their parents or a parent proud of them” amongst the communicative reflexives at their time of entry to university (Archer 2012: 130). This is a consequence of their investment in the home life they were born into, which they value and seek to reproduce to varying degrees. In such cases “the generation of sufficient trust and mutual concern for some family member to become an interlocutor upon whom the subject could rely to complete and confirm the distinctive reflexive pattern of ‘thought and talk’” led, in turn, to an identification with the conditions which gave rise to this state of affairs. This concern for the relational goods encountered in their home life (e.g. love, reliance, caring, trust) and the reproductive projects to which it led “acted as a filter, sifting friendships, social activities and leisure pursuits to ensure congruity with their families’ normativity” (Archer 2012: 99). However this identification with the natal context poses an immediate challenge for subjects who go to university:
Thus, the first impact of the reflexive imperative is that these subjects must deliberate about the practical means of staying close. As communicative reflexives, whose interlocutors mostly now live over a hundred miles away, the desire to maintain these relations is strong,as will be shown. In other words, the ‘identifiers’ have to devise ways and means of sustaining the familial bond, despite the effort and expense involved and in the face of new counter-claims for their time and attention. The leitmotif of what follows is that maintaining close relations at a distance is hard work, undertaken reflexively and with effects for reflexivity. (Archer 2012: 141)
Furthermore, entry to university unavoidably entails confrontation with contextual discontinuities, as the mundane conditions of daily life unavoidably change, albeit to varying degrees depending on their choice of university e.g. the discontinuities encountered in attending a local university while continuing to live at home are minimal in comparison to moving away from home to attend university hundreds of miles away. It also entails contextual incongruity, as the transition involves, to a greater or lesser degree, the confrontation with possibilities which their natal context has not and could not have equipped them to respond to in any sort of routine way:
It represents an exposure to ‘contextual incongruity’ because those with different views and experiences, if not living in the next room, will be sitting in the same seminar; because of the numerous university societies badgering them to participate; and because of the options for travel, work experience and future careers encountered through university. In other words, they are all confronted with the necessity of selection and, much as this sub-group seeks to retain continuity with their natal contexts, this must be part of the active enterprise of shaping a life because it cannot be a matter of passive reproduction. (Archer 2012: 126)
However these new experiences can be incongruent with the relational goods encountered in their natal context, with the changes subjects undergo as a consequence of embracing this variety working to disrupt the ‘similarity and familiarity’ upon which communicative reflexivity depends. the emergence of self-censorship, as certain topics became ‘off limits’ in some way to familial interlocutors, generates a tendency towards the practice of another mode. So too can new forms of evaluation, directed at friends and family alike, as the “subject’s occupancy of a new context … interrupts practices that could otherwise have solidified into habitual action” (Archer 2012: 142). The intersection between this contextual incongruity and their prior investment in their natal context manifests itself most strikingly in the tension between ‘home friends’ and ‘uni friends’. The practical activity required to sustain continuity with significant others from their pre-university life unavoidably restricts how they respond to the opportunities university offers them, even if these opportunities may be in themselves valued:
On the one hand, their many weekends away and the time devoted to maintaining home contact detracts and deflects from experimenting with new activities. On the other hand, nearly every member of this sub-group volunteers that she is a ‘people person’, becomes absorbed by her new friends and keeping up with her old ones, prefers to do things in a group of ‘similars and familiars’, and generally sees the ready array of possible university activities as something she should make an effort to try but never does because her interpersonal relations always make it inconvenient. (Archer 2012: 145)
The tension here arises because of the inevitable tendency, no matter how doggedly communication is sustained with home friends and family, to seek new interlocutors amongst those encountered at university. Yet in this new context ‘familiarity’ and ‘similarity’ become more approximate than was the case in their home background, particularly given that the main filter on who is encountered are contingent accommodation decisions and choice of degree course/modules. Under such circumstances, friendship becomes something that has to be worked at (approached in a way which generates the trust necessary for successful interlocution) rather than simply encountered. Finding oneself with networks of ‘home friends’ and ‘university friends’ which one values necessitates selection:
They may well not see it in these terms, they may only become aware of it when met by reproach or a realisation of differences, they may experiment with compartmentalisation or combination, but they ineluctably confront the necessity of selection in acting: with whom do they spend most time, who they phone, for whom do they make efforts and, above all, to whom do they turn as interlocutors? (Archer 2012: 148)
This leaves a small number of options: giving priority to home friends, seeking to maintain two friendship groups or giving priority to university friends. The first option is most conducive to the preservation of communicative reflexivity but is by no means certain, given that the friends in question may themselves change and/or the relation might be transformed by the subject’s own changes. The second option poses immense practical difficulties, addressed through strategies of compartmentalisation or prioritisation, unless the two groups of friends can be integrated in some way. The third option introduces differences into home relations because “new friends cannot be ‘similars’ let alone ‘familiars’ in the way home friends are: usually with shared biographies, a common fund of local references, some intertwining with significant others in the same background, and a commonwealth of mutual knowledge” (Archer 2012: 149). The identification with this new group therefore complicates the subject’s prior identification with their natal context, not necessarily leading to the abandonment of the latter but relativising it through the adoption of an independent source of valued relational goods. The deeper problem emerges if this division of labour is unsustainable, leaving insufficient time and energy so sustain continuities with either group to the extent needed for successful interlocution. This tension needs to be resolved in some way because the negative relationality underlying it will leave them tending towards inertia over time, able neither to abandon the replicatiory project arising from the investment in their natal concern or embrace the possibilities for shaping a life afforded by the variety they’ve encountered:
The obvious solution to being pulled in two different directions through their ‘thought and talk’, namely to reject family relationships in favour of the one(s) newly acquired, was (as yet) undertaken by no one. Because these relational goods are precious, owing to the time required to build them, the reciprocity involved and the amount of self-investment entailed by the adoption of an interlocutor, they are not readily shed […] when communicative reflexivity continues to be practiced with incongruent interlocutors, the result is progressively to immobilise the subject who is caught in the cross-current. Instead of their distinctive form of internal conversation being their guide to action, they decline the responsibility of active agency and resort to passivity. In going with the proximate flow, in awarding themselves time out, in discounting the next year or decade with a promissory note to return to their replicatory project ‘afterwards’, they decline to take any governance of their own lives and become people to whom things happen. In the worst-case scenario their reflexivity itself is compromised and as ‘impeded reflexive’s they can neither determinedly seek to replicate what they consider of worth from their backgrounds nor take advantage of the situational logic of opportunity. (Archer 2012: 165)
Mark Carrigan 