It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come… – The Gay Science
When I was a 17 year old student it felt urgent that I found my way to London as quickly as possible. I didn’t know why, it just did. In contrast the vast majority of students at my college were trying to stay as near possible to Manchester. Indeed many of them went to Leeds en masse and it seemed, until I deleted Facebook, many of them remained connected. Why did I want to break apart and why did they want to stay together? It was the first sociological question I ever asked and it’s one which in many ways I’ve spent my entire career circling around. It’s an exemplar of what Margaret Archer terms the problem of reflexivity: why do people in similar circumstances nonetheless make different choices? There’s a whole conceptual vocabulary she developed which speaks to that initial question in rich and sophisticated ways. It wasn’t that I hated my environment, in the sense in which I needed to get away. I was already drifting towards a life in central Manchester, away from my college, finding a community in the anarchist movement. In this sense I wasn’t what she termed in The Reflexive Imperative a rejector but rather a disengaged in the stance I took towards this context:
“They manifested a critical detachment from their parents and dissociation from the modus vivendi in which they had been reared. Reviewing the dissensus characterizing their parents’ way of life, these subjects’ evaluation was that ‘there must be better than this’ and an avowed desire that their own would indeed be different.”
I didn’t know what I was looking for but I knew I couldn’t find it here. I was experiencing what in her earlier work she described as contextual incongruity: a mismatch between nascent aspirations and the cultural resources of my environment. It’s one of the least well developed concepts in her framework but I think one of the most salient. It’s not simply the fact of social change, novel situations which intergeneration socialisation can’t prepare someone for, but an active incongruity between the existential challenges raised by those situations and the cultural resources offered by the environment for thinking them through. It’s not just that you can’t identify a way of knitting together concerns into a mode of life within the environment, it’s that you can’t find what you need to see how to do this. There’s just a diffuse sense that something more is needed. The horizon needs to expand in some way. This immediately takes us into terrain which is more characteristic of philosophy and psychoanalysis than sociology, even if I think the dividing lines between these fields are more porous the tends to be assumed. There’s a preverbal element to it which I went through a phase of describing as a discursive gap, which is a theme I explored through my asexuality research.
I found myself reflecting on this in late December because I suddenly had the urge to read Nietzsche for the first time in years. Almost a decade in fact, since I read the Gay Science and Ecco Homo after finishing my PhD in 2014. In the preface to Human, All Too Human describes what he terms “the great separation”:
“For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out – it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in the senses.”
What he describes as “a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy” is, I think, a particularly forceful response to what Archer calls contextual incongruity. In his description of “this first outburst of strength and will to self-determination, self-valorzation” we can perhaps begin to excavate the philosophical richness of the predicament that Archer addresses in a sociological register: if I don’t have what I need here, where do I go? Indeed what is it that I need and for what purpose? The way Nietzsche describes the retrospective illumination of these questions, in which one “begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory” speaks of (meta)reflexivity in Archer’s sense:
“You had to gain power over your For and Against and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment.”
You have to learn what matters to you. Which is hard. Harder I think then Archer often seems to suggest, sympathetic though she is to the difficulties of her research subjects. As Nietzsche puts it “Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present”. We know we need to do something but we’re not yet sure what that is. Or if we know what matters to us, we cannot see how to live in a way that expresses this. This is where Archer’s fondness for Taylor’s ‘unity of a life’ (which I concur with ontologically but which increasingly strikes me as psychoanalytically untenable) leads to a smoothing over of the messiness of this process. However when I read this alongside Nietzsche’s Ecco Homo I’m struck by the utterly quotidian way in which he talks about this challenge. He’s articulating a craft of living, the way to better or worse decisions in real world situations, in a way that would sound almost Aristotelian if you changed the mode of expression somewhat. I wonder how many people have tended to overlook the almost fussy quality of Nietzsche’s observations here, regarding them as empirical fluff alongside the philosophical substance.
Mark Carrigan 