In Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity, the notion of contextual incongruity plays a crucial role as a driver of meta-reflexivity. In contrast to contextual continuity (a stable environment) and contextual discontinuity (a changing environment) I’ve often found the notion of contextual incongruity more difficult to pin down. In the Relational Subject Archer and Donati define it as “the inability of the parental generation to supply relevant guidelines to their children for establishing a satisfying and sustainable modus vivendi in the society that now confronts the younger generation” (pg 142). I’ve tended to think of it in a more narrowly micro-social way in my empirical work, as someone not finding the cultural resources they need in their natal environment to begin to give shape to their life.
It could be seen for example in the first sociological question I think I ever asked when I found myself fascinated by why 75% of my year group at college all simply crossed the Pennines to move en masse to the University of Leeds whereas myself and a few others were desperate to get to London. it’s something I’ve written about in relation to asexuality which I’ve never published: how searching for something can be a motor of biographical change without the person being clear about what they’re searching for. They just need more than they can find within their current socio-cultural horizon. These are two examples of what I think contextual incongruity means in practice when applied to empirical cases.
The notion was developed further in Archer’s third empirical project on reflexivity, alluded to in the reference to parents above. I disagree with this restriction in scope because I think it obscures the role of the cultural system (e.g. which books are encountered, which ideas about how to live, which parts of the internet are within reach) and the peer context (e.g. what friendship networks are available through school and neighbourhood) in constituting contextual incongruity. One can have cultural resources through civic society and the internet which contribute viable resources and diminish, if not eliminate, contextual incongruity.
But it’s interesting to recognise the real and obvious contribution that parental dynamics make here, particularly for someone like myself increasingly interested in the relationship between reflexivity and the psyche. To talk of parents not providing adequate guidelines for action, to talk as Archer (2012) does of endorsing or rejecting parental values or of there not being a value consensus to endorse or reject, brings us into the terrain of psychoanalysis. It left me curious about the connection between Archer’s contextual incongruity and what Lacan described as the hysteric’s discourse, described by Mark Bracher pg 66:
The hysterical structure is in force whenever a discourse is dominated by the speaker’s symptom – that is, his or her conflicted mode of experiencing jouissance, a conflict manifested (in experiences such as shame, meaninglessness, anxiety, and desire) as a failure of the subject ($) to coincide with, or be satisfied with the jouissance underwritten by, the master signifiers offered by society and embraced as the subject’s ideals.
The hysterical structure involves a refusal to embody the position available to them in their present context, as well as an inability to move beyond it. In this position there is a “solidarity with master signifiers” which “manifests itself in the quest of desire for an object that will satisfy it, the wish of anxiety for security and stability, the search of meaninglessness for a meaning or identity, and the urge of shame to coincide with the ideal” (pg 67). The other is expected to provide a master signifier which could underwrite an enjoyment that makes life worth living. If this other can’t or won’t give us access to this enjoyment then perhaps we can find another other who will.
The therapeutic trajectory for Lacan involves the production of one’s own master signifier from the position of the analyst (which I increasingly think is an overly elaborate way of expressing the truism that successful therapy means internalising the figure of the therapist) to secure the needed existential horizon of meaning but doing so in a way that avoids what Craib calls the myth of the perfectly analysed person. It’s an open-ended process informed by the recognition that, as Bracher puts it, “there is no transcendent meaning to be found for one’s existence, no ultimate object that will satisfy one’s desire, and no single, fundamental jouissance that will of itself make life worth living.” (pg 72)
I suggest this process overlaps with Archer’s account of how a subject comes to meta-reflexive and then shapes a life in a way dominated by this modality. The clinical skew of Lacan’s account means it refers to a subset of those who undergo this process in a particularly nuanced way, but the mechanism here in both cases is coping with contextual incongruity and then finding a mode of being which doesn’t reproduce that incongruity elsewhere. Archer’s concepts are sometimes read as objective circumstances but this framing highlights the relationality of them e.g. contextual incongruity is a relation between the subject and their context over time, rather than being an objective description of the context.
Contextual incongruity is not a new experience. Baer’s introduction to Rilke’s letters captures the experience beautifully, as well as the creative response it gave rise to:
Like all major writers, he creates from an inchoate awareness of the inadequacy of all available explanations of the world but does not allow this frustration to become the focus of his inquiry and thus drown out the world a second time. Nothing that Rilke read made sufficient sense of his life for him. As a consequence, he wrote a guide to life himself. So much has been written (both well and poorly) about things that the things themselves no longer hold an opinion but appear only to mark the imaginary point of intersection for certain clever theories. Whoever wants to say anything about them speaks in reality only about the views of his predecessors and lapses into a semipolemical spirit that stands in exact opposition to the naïve productive spirit with which each object wants to be grasped and understood.
The point Archer is making concerns the generalisation of this experience, its implication for the formation of agency and the second-order consequences as these agents act in ways shaped by that formation. It’s interesting that Bourdieu talked about ‘hysterersis’ as a mismatch between habitus and field, but my understanding is here that it was an analogy from natural science rather than being of psychoanalytical origin.
Mark Carrigan 