Accounting for the Obstructive Activity of Experience: Aspiring, Projecting and Agency Development in a Context of Adversity

This article approaches the mystery of preference formation – a blind spot in the capability approach – from the angle of aspiring. I argue that aspiring – actively engaging with desirable representations of potential futures – can be helpful to analyse the social processes involved in preference formation under two conditions. Firstly, we need to clarify the conceptual confusion around aspiring that can be found in the capability literature and beyond. Secondly, we need to consider the social and temporal embeddedness of aspiring, which can be done by examining the relationships between aspiring and people’s lived experiences. Building on a critical discussion of the contribution of sociologists Alfred Schutz and Pierre Bourdieu to the study of projecting, I propose a framework to (a) analyse why aspiring may happen to lead to conceiving conservative aspirations despite adversity – thereby aligning with adaptive preferences in the sense of Sen, A. 2002. Rationality and Freedom. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press and Elster, J. 1983. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press – and to (b) envision the pathways along which aspiring could, alternatively, lead to emergent aspirations, i.e. geared at enhanced well-being.