If I ever do write a book about Margaret Archer’s work, I’ll focus on the concepts which were neglected within it. If you read her work closely, there are a whole range of concepts which are significant to either continuing the development of her work as a living tradition or to simply understanding the nuances of her approach. An example of the former would be ‘context’ which she admits in a late chapter was a placeholder term but which I would argue has much more micro-sociological significance than she gave it credit for. An example of the latter would be ‘temporising’ which is a concept I’ve been thinking in terms of for years, informed in part by conversations with her, but which is never fully developed in her work.
I understand temporising to be a tendency she identified in her empirical work on reflexivity for people to displace a moment of choice by projecting it into the future. For example here are two instances of her use of the concept in Making Our Way Through The World:
The opportunities and the obstacles need to be taken into account reflexively in conjunction with each other. ‘Defective’ strategists are those who are riveted by one alone. Thus, there are ‘opportunists’, people like Ralph himself, so bent upon never missing a chance for advancement that they are oblivious to circumstances that simultaneously threaten to jeopardise their projects. Equally, there are the ‘prudentials’, those people who are so hyper-conscious about the constraints their projects could encounter that they temporise, unaware that as time passes they are damaging if not forfeiting the opportunities available to them.
Pg 215
Meanwhile he temporises with routine, non-committal, hourly work and is equally realistic about this: ‘I need to eat, I need to pay rent like we all do, so certain decisions have to be taken that I regard as provisional. They’re just taken strategically, but in the bigger scheme of things . . . that’s not the life plan.’ It is Tony himself who introduced the notion of strategic action in relation to a life plan, so it seemed fair to press him on his temporisation strategy and what in his view could bring it to a satisfactory end.
Pg 218
Oddly these are almost the entirety I can find in writing, though I’m certain there are others. It’s also a term I heard her use regularly in discussing biographical patterns. In the first example it’s a matter of strategic waiting, keeping a life project in reserve until circumstances are more conducive to begin to enact it. In the latter case it’s the absence of a project, leading someone to go on in the hope that a project will present itself in time. When pressed he reflects that “I don’t know to be honest what I’m waiting for”. What are we waiting for? It seems clear to me that either form of waiting, for the conditions in which we enact a life project or for the conditions in which we can form one, needs to be understood psychoanalytically even if the empirical expression of the tendency is just as much sociological.
In Ian McEwan’s Lessons the narrator recognises how “he was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained”. This imagines there is a place of fullness just over the horizon, if only someone or something can help us reach it. This relates to the split in our existential experience (the lacking, frustrating, defeating dimension of it) as something which can be overcome in the future. Ironically poeticising the split in this way, as a temporary obstacle we can circumvent with the right support, inculcates a passivity in relation to it. It reifies what Iain Craib describes as disappointment by treating them as objects which might be excluded in the right circumstances, rather than a dimension of experience we can have a more or less constructive relationship with. It forecloses the agency we can exercise in relation to contingent disappointments (rather than the necessity of disappointment as such) by temporising in Archer’s sense, effectively waiting until the right circumstances to fall down from the heavens and deliver us from our suffering.
What does this waiting mean in practice? I’d suggest that in Lacanian terms it entails a particularly self-destructive compromise between drives and desire. The fixation on the future, as well as the sequence of partial objects we imagine will help usher us into this better life before inevitably disappointing us, inclines us towards an alienated relationship to the drives. They do not of course go away simply because we are alienated from them, but they resist the more reflexive engagement which is possible through symbolisation. If we are waiting for something to happen then we will, as the bare minimum, lack curiosity about our present circumstances. What comes from me? What comes from my environment? What am I reacting to in the present? What am I reiterating from the past?
These questions sound portentous when framed in abstract terms. But they emerge from the mundane reality of internal conversation, at least if we have sufficient curiosity to listen and respond to ourselves as we make our way through the world. To temporise tends to shut down these dialogues before they get started, by inclining us towards an Imaginary fixation on the future rather than the Symbolic elaboration which is possible in the present. As an exasperated Lester Freeman says to Jimmy McNulty in the wire: “A life. A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come”. Jimmy’s lack of curiosity about the present leaves him mired in the most destructive circuits of the drives while he yearns for the restoration of justice he sees just beyond the present case. The problem is not desire, but rather relating to desire in a way which subordinates the partial satisfactions of the present to the imagined fullness of a better future: the lost wholeness we imagine we can recover.
Much of life is ‘filler’ when considered in narrative terms: the pattern of regularities which constitute a style of life. As Todd McGowan points out in Capitalism and Desire pg 278 the training montage, “depicting but compressing the labor required for the final victory” illustrates what a complex relationship we have to these regularities. The jouissance of the drives involved in this training, the masochistic impulse to push yourself till you vomit and the violence involved in forcing yourself out into the freezing cold each day before dawn, is flattened out so it is subordinated to desire: the completion which will come with victory. These narratives imply an essentially tractable character to desire, such that we can win our object if only we show the requisite virtues. With the corollary being we have failed if we don’t achieve our object.
Reduced to repetitive myths
Pound for pound with the devil who kicks
I can't stop swinging but it never connects
I throw my whole body into nothing but mist
Face like a plate of raw meat
Screaming I can't be beat
Half dead, ready to drop
Truth is I just wanted it all to stop
I’ve spent enough time in my life in martial arts gyms that I have immense respect for the training required to be a fighter. I lost interest in it for the rather mundane reason that I don’t like being punched in the face and past a certain point training involves a lot of that (plus gyms in north Manchester in the late 90s and early 00s were not a comfortable place to be a queer teenager). I developed my love of the Rocky films during this period in my life and will defend their qualities as films to my dying breath. But I increasingly feel there’s something dark and life denying about the training montage, even as it purports to be an inspirational depiction of achievement. The problem at root is one of process in relation to outcome. The jouissance entailed by the former is eviscerated by fixating on the latter, reflecting and compounding a broader psychocultural tendency to engage in such a prioritisation.
The training montage is superficially different to the temporising with which I began the post. Initially I was talking about people waiting for something to happen, whereas now I’m talking about a (stylised) hyperactive making things happen. My suggestion is they both involve a subordination of the present to the future, with the only difference being how agentive that subordination is. In one case it’s waiting, with the prospect that jouissance can be found in the flow of the before term, whereas in the latter it’s the aggressive pursuit of the object with a misrecognition of the jouissance which drives the process. Much as there’s always one more fight, there’s always some other object which we can attach our longings to if we catch the one we have pursuing.
Desire is metonymic, as Lacan so incisively analysed, in a continual process of displacement from object to object. As McGowan aptly summarises it: “we require the object to be lost in order to enjoy it” (pg 209). The enjoyment inheres in how we relate to the pursuit rather than the putative success we might enjoy. I understand this as at root a point about the affectivity involved in futurity. We cannot suspend an orientation to the future (indeed as Archer points out even temporising can lead to objective costs mounting up as inaction leads to real world outcomes). But we are not slaves to the affectivity tangled up in that interface, even if it might sometimes feel that we are. The problem is not desire, or the fantasies which sustain it, but rather relating to that desire in a way which subordinates the present to the future. The minsdet in which, as Keynes once put it, someone “does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward for ever to the end of cat-dom”. The pursuit is necessary but so too are the satisfactions of the present, even if this will look very different for each person.
The initially depressing but ultimately liberating insight from Lacan is that there’s no way out of this process. For example the idea of ‘healing’ is itself just another object a, the notion that some fuller and freer existence can be found after if only we reach a certain point in the right way. My own desire to master Lacan is itself an example of object a, in which a sense of an elusive truth buried away in his deliberately oracular writing motivates me to keeping grasping at the ideas in order to put them into my own words. The purpose of analysis is not to liberate the analysand from fantasy, facilitating a new depth of engagement with the ‘real’ world, but rather to enable them to relate to those fantasies in less destructive and more life affirming ways.
To use my own Lacanian fanyboyism as an example, my pursuit of that elusive insight has brought new people and new ideas into my life, it’s given me practical ways of thinking about my own existence, new perspectives on cultural forms I value and it’s added a new dimension to my intellectual work. Without a sense of something elusive lurking at its core, accessible to me if only that utter wanker wouldn’t insist on writing so enigmatically (personal contempt for him figures in this as well), the motivational force wouldn’t be there; the intellectual itch which I have felt the need to recurrently scratch, even when it distracts from other things I should be doing. But I’m also finding enjoyment in the process through blogging, finding enjoyable secondary texts, reading groups, applying it in my work, thinking about the ideas when watching films and listening to music. These enjoyments in a sense feel like they relativise my pursuit of the object a, ‘mastering’ Lacan in a way I realise I’m simply never going to and which is changing how I relate to reading theory more broadly, while simultaneously being anchored by it. This I think is quite a good example in a simple sphere of existence of what a constructive peace treaty between drives and desire can look like.
I realise my tendency to read Lacan from a neo-Aristotelian perspective would infuriate many Lacanians. I don’t care because I’m enjoying it and I’m not invested in being an object of their desire. But I also think there is a theory of flourishing latent within the work, particularly in his account of the termination of therapy, which is philosophically fascinating. In parts it is Hegelian in its dialectical sensitivity towards process, albeit without the assumption of a teleology. But there are also fascinating cybernetic influences here as well, in a literature I’ve barely begun to dip into. They converge, I think, in a sense of dynamic stabilisation as a precarious achievement at the interface between discordant elements, abandoning the ideal of adaptation. The clinical concern is how ontological maladaptation plays out, in more or less destructive ways, rather than seeking to overcome it entirely. It’s concerned with rendering tensions productive rather than seeking to overcome them.
In this sense I’d suggest temporising is a destructive way of rendering tensions productive. It finds an accommodation between desire and drive at the cost of our agency, displacing a responsibility for enjoyment into the future. In doing so it opens up forms of jouissance which are disavowed, such as that described by Zizek in Trouble In Paradise, pg 68:
Imagine the following scenario: in the private sphere, I am unhappily married, I mock my wife all the time, declaring my intention to abandon her for my mistress whom I really love, and while I get small pleasures from invectives against my wife, the enjoyment that sustains me is generated by the indefinite postponement of really leaving my wife for my mistress.
This is temporising in Archer’s sense of waiting to enact a life project because the circumstances don’t feel right for it in the present. The existentialist reading of this objective situation would focus, as would have Archer I suspect, on the refusal of responsibility for the situation. But the Lacanian reading would highlight the forms of enjoyment made possible by that refusal, suggesting they are the real reason for the temporising. This suggests to me the imaginary wholeness of the temporally displaced project needs to be read alongside the forms of satisfaction opened up by this displacement. It’s a tangle which opens up at the interface between drive and desire, highlighting again how the problem is not desire itself (the relationship to an object of desire and the imagined completion it will bring) but rather the mode of relating to desire and what that means for the relation to drive. It is easy to imagine how someone locked into such a circuit of desire could feel contemptuous of their own behaviour, at least in reflective moments, even as they continue to engage in it. The fixation on outcome is immobilising, with the jouissance of being so immobilised leading to a destructive relationship to self and other in the present.
Obviously not everyone temporising acts destructively. But what I’d like to explore is under what conditions desire is immobilising (which I think is the defining characteristic of temporising) and how this plays out at the level of drives. It leads perhaps to a splitting of desire and drives, between fantasies of the future and the (often disavowed) pleasures of the present. It’s an escape from grappling with how my conditions frustrate my enjoyments, as well as how I might change those conditions in pursuit of deepening my enjoyment. To ask that question necessarily entails desire, insofar as that it implies an imagined potential future to which we then relate, but temporising simply affects the split without creating the space for agency. In contrast we can start with drive, or rather our (limited) agency in relation to it and use this as an anchor in establishing a productive tension with desire.
Here is Claude’s take on the final point I tried to develop here:
In contrast, starting with drive means taking as a starting point the subject's (limited) agency in relation to the partial and fleeting satisfactions that can be found in the present. This approach involves a recognition of the fundamental lack or incompleteness that characterizes human existence and a willingness to engage with the world on those terms.
When starting with drive, the focus is on finding ways to deepen and expand the enjoyments that are available in the present, even as one grapples with the frustrations and obstacles that arise. This requires a kind of creativity and flexibility, a willingness to experiment and explore different ways of relating to oneself and others.
Desire still plays a role in this approach, but it is not the primary driver. Instead, desire emerges in relation to the actual satisfactions and enjoyments that are experienced in the present. The imagined future completion becomes a kind of horizon or guiding light, but one that is always recognized as partial and provisional, subject to revision in light of new experiences and insights.
The key difference between these two approaches is the relationship between desire and drive. When starting with desire, there is a risk of a disconnection or split between the two, where the pursuit of an imagined future completion takes precedence over the actual satisfactions and enjoyments of the present. In contrast, when starting with drive, there is a recognition of the fundamental intertwining of desire and drive, and a willingness to work with the tensions and conflicts that arise between them.
Ultimately, the approach of starting with drive may be more conducive to flourishing, as it allows for a more grounded and realistic engagement with the world, one that is responsive to the actual conditions and possibilities of the present. By anchoring desire in the partial satisfactions and enjoyments of the drive, this approach can help the subject to find a kind of dynamic stability or equilibrium, even in the face of the inevitable conflicts and frustrations of life.
Mark Carrigan 