Prolepsis and Fireworks

A few years ago I was visiting some friends in Portland, Oregon on the 4th of July. I’ve never been a big fireworks person – they’re loud and so I tried to focus on the barbecue. But my friends of course went nuts. So shortly after sundown I walked out with them to a local park with a public tennis court and we proceeded to light off large amounts of incredibly illegal and unbelievable explosives.

Shortly thereafter some cops on the other side of the park pulled up in their big cop car and brought it to a slow idle. The message seemed to be pretty clear: “come on guys, we’ve got a really busy night. Take it somewhere else where it’s not so obvious, or else we’ll have to get out of the car and hassle you and nobody wants to go through the trouble of doing that.” It didn’t take long for us to get the message. We dropped what we were doing and made our way unceremoniously towards the bushes. Everyone else but Jim, who stood there, staring contemplatively at the massive, artillery like firework that lay at his feet. “Jim? Jim! Come on! What are you doing?!” we asked urgently.

“I’m trying to decide whether I want to possess,” he said.

My brain exploded.

Why?

Jim was a Federal DA, which meant that he spent most of his time defending bank robbers and marijuana growers. He was trying to decide whether to take the fireworks with him or not, but was keenly aware of the difference between being found in the possession of illegal fireworks as opposed to just being caught by the cops running away. What is the difference, legally? I have no idea. Perhaps their different infringements under the law? Maybe they’re violations of the same law, but you have a stronger case in the judge’s eyes if you didn’t actually have them on you when you were caught. The only person who really knew was Jim because – and this is the point – he was imagining ‘what is happening on the tennis court’ from the point of view of a future series of events in which people reflected on ‘what happened on the tennis court’.

I’m calling this ‘prolepsis’.

Understanding how people understand the present from the point of view of what we’ll say about it in the future is something that we do all the time. Lawyers, as I’ve indicated, do this professionally. Sometimes – when you’re negotiating with them, for example – you get the feeling that what they’re really doing is toeing the line that an imaginary future judge would want them to. Presidents brood on their legacy and how they’ll be viewed in ‘history’. And at some level, we all go about our daily lives with some sense of the forward leaning slope of our biography – we don’t just enroll in College to get a good job someday, we unscrew the top of the mayonnaise jar because we anticipate putting the knife into the mayonnaise as part of a proleptic, forward-looking sandwich-making project. But the particular linguistic and interactional way in which people interact with each other in the present with an eye to future descriptions of the event is something that is stirring in the air here in my department. I’m not sure exactly how it’ll shape up – right now we’ve just got one professor and a couple of the more, shall we say, indoctrinated students. It’s something I’m interested in, since I study lawyers and negotiations, where this sort of stuff happens all the time.

It’s an interesting problem because in the last thirty years anthropologists and linguists have gotten very very good at understanding how people work together in conversation to create a coherent sense of ‘what happened’ in interaction that can be described and redescribed and narrated and renarrated. So we know about how to imagine and reimagine our present from the point of view of what has come before, and the uses to which we put the past in the present. There’s been a ton of stuff written about that.

Now at some level these two things – the imagination of how we’ll view the present in the future and how in the present we imagine and deploy the past – are just two sides of the same coin. And its most general, human life is all about the creative deployment of our past lives in our attempts to shape our future together. But still, I admit: prolepsis.

Anyway, that’s why my head exploded.