Early in the pandemic I got preoccupied by a throwaway line from Zizek’s Ticklish Subject where he talks of “float[ing] freely in his undisturbed balance“. His point was that this narcissistic fantasy was defined by a “precarious imaginary balance” plagued by threats; in conceiving of myself as pure presence operating in my own gravity, I simultaneously experience myself as assailed by constraints. The dastardly character of what shows up in my context reflects the grandiosity of my self-conception. It is only because I am caught in the fantasy of being free that I experience myself as enchained. This line of thought set me on an interpretive pathway which, coupled with the pandemic itself and events in my personal life, led me to grapple with my own classed and gendered privilege for the first time. It wasn’t that I ever felt comfortable in my own balance but rather that I had internalised from my context that this was a reasonable expectation, even if for contingent reasons I felt further away from it than seemed to be the case for others who shared my background.
To be forced to confront this as a fantasy was something I experienced as a shattering loss. This was the common thread through a whole series of events over three years: the destruction of Corbynism in the 2019 election, the Covid-19 lockdowns, being forced to leave a place I loved living and the breakdown of my marriage. It was in trying to build something new amidst what felt like the rubble of my life that I started to see the reparative possibilities inherent in this crumbling of fantasy: hope is optimism with a broken heart, as Nick Cave recently put it. Safely out the other side of that exceptionally shitty period of my life, it is clear to me that this crumbling was in reality an intensely liberating experience. To the extent that I was bound up in the expectation of ‘floating freely’ there was a rupture in my lifeworld: the gap between my expectation of what should be and the reality of what was led basic features of human interdependence to show up to me as pre-problematised. There was a latent impulse to be controlling festering in that gap, manifesting in how I related to myself, the people I care about and my context. As well as an existential frustration which kicked in if I curtailed the control.
To be attached to this “precarious imaginary balance” makes it impossible to inhabit yourself but it also forecloses reparative relations to the world, if not necessarily acts. If you experience your context as a panoply of obstacles to your imagined autonomy*, things will tend to show up for you as impediments to be avoided or resisted rather than things which you ought to try and mend because you care about them. Even if you do in fact care. There can be reparative acts motivated by the impulse to repair something so that it can resume a role it played for you. Though perhaps we should describe this as ‘fixing’ rather than ‘repair’. Whereas I think reparative relations involve repairing something because of its inherent worth, with the care respecting that rather than being an expression of self-interest.
There’s a risk of overgeneralising here but the claim I’m making is a specific one: there is a structure of fantasy developing around the disjunct between one’s imagined and actual agency, which manifests itself phenomenologically in ways which impede our moral-existential development. The problem is that being socialised into that fantasy, then iteratively trying to close the existential gap as a biographical motor, leaves you without moral practice. You struggle to establish reparative relations because there’s a great deal of practical reasoning involved in this which by its nature is skilled. This includes recognising what cannot be repaired. Or should not be repaired. Furthermore it involves becoming articulate about what matters to us in the first place, as well as the action warranted by this and how it ought to be balanced alongside the other trajectories of action to which we feel called:
We learn what place in our individual and common lives to give to each of a variety of goods, that is, only through a discipline of learning, during which we discover what we have hitherto cared for too much and what too little and, as we correct our inclinations, discover also that our judgments are informed by an at first inchoate but gradually more and more determinate conception of a final good, of an end, one in the light of which every other good finds its due place, an end indeed final but not remote, one to which here and now our actions turn out to be increasingly directed as we learn to give no more and no less than their due to other goods.https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/on-having-survived-the-academic-moral-philosophy-of-the-20th-century/
On a few occasions recently I’ve found myself frustrated when I perceive something as needing to be repaired in a way that others seemingly don’t share. What feels to me like a fundamentally positive impulse shows up to others as a negativity about what we are doing, that I then struggle to respond to constructively. I’m writing this post in part to help distinguish between interpersonal challenges in acting on this impulse and the impulse itself. The latter seems to me fundamentally positive even if in itself it doesn’t provide a trajectory of action. Much of what I’ve been drawn to poetically and philosophically in the last couple of years speaks to the nature of this underlying impulse. From John Dewey’s account of not subordinating the present to the future:
When preparation is made the controlling end, then the potentialities of the present are sacrificed to a suppositious future. When this happens, the actual preparation for the future is missed or distorted. The ideal of using the present simply to get ready for the future contradicts itself. It omits, and even shuts out, the very conditions by which a person can be prepared for his future. We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.
To Rilke’s description of the ‘single, urgent task’ which we are faced with:
There is only a single, urgent task: to attach oneself someplace to nature, to that which is strong, striving and bright with unreserved readiness, and then to move forward in one’s efforts without any calculation or guile, even when engaged in the most trivial and mundane activities. Each time we thus reach out with joy, each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us, weave it into the pattern of our existence, and dissolve the foreign body of pain whose exact composition we ultimately do not know.
The Gospel of Thomas:
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
To Kae Tempest’s Holy Elixir:
I was on my knees then
Begging for pardon
I was old and clothed in white garments
In a vast red desert
Where the rocks were dark blue and varnished
And a voice said
“This is the garden
Now you better start sowing
Or there won’t be a harvest”
Or stoic philosophy as expressed by Marcus Aurelius in particular:
In a meandering and overly-intellectualised way I’ve been trying to understand the reparative capacity I’ve felt opening up in my experience as I’ve changed. Its existential character seems increasingly clear to me: an orientation rather than a course of action, an openness to the potentialities of the present, the need to express care in constructive acts, trusting the potential for growth within you. But it’s curious these contours of moral agency are only opening up to me in my late 30s. There are various personal factors which might explain this but I’d suggest it also reflects a hedonistic and nihilistic streak in the culture I was socialised into. I feel out of my depth intellectually with analysing how these fantasies of control grow at the intersection between gender, race and class. But it seems equally obvious to me that these provide the conditions in which that fantasy can be experienced as plausible and expected, constituting the parameters of experience in the absence of social subordination and perpetual microaggressions.
As Lauren Berlant writes in their superb On the Inconvenience of Other People “no one was ever sovereign, just mostly operating according to some imaginable, often distorted images of their power over things, actions, people, and causality”. The wounds left in that sovereignty by the events of recent years are playing out around us with catastrophic results, with psychological damage matched by socioeconomic deterioration. To live well with that damage, to recognise that what’s lost was never possessed in the first place, entails a fundamental acceptance of the inconvenient character of our relationality which will unavoidably define our experience:
The “ontological misery” of being a person as such comes from the violent pressures to resolve the irresolvable, to underdetermine what overwhelms, but also from the expectation that if things like worlds and people were just, living would be simpler … Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple, in the sense of resolved once and for all.
On the Inconvenience of Other People, pg 10
But these are the days When I felt the days Rise in my body And I took them in hand These are the days When I feel the days Rise in my body And I take them in hand
*This is not to deny there are obstacles and threats. Or that they are distributed unevenly. It’s to suggest there is a peculiarly privileged form of hypersensitivity prone to regarding normal features of human existing as constraining, which would be far more difficult to sustain if your context is full of unambiguously objective obstacles and threats.
Mark Carrigan 