Such a phenomenon is not restricted to sport. We see, at least sense it, in politics, business, strategic military planning, diplomacy and in the constant manoeuvres and counter manoeuvres of committee-men, careerists, power-brokers, and the otherwise innocents forced into such activity to defend their interests against the machinations of others. We all engage in anticipating. No mode of social life, however simple, exists without the regular operation of such future projections: we all have some idea how we will cope with the day’s problems, or how friends are likely to react to an item of news. But the astute anticipate the future more successfully than the rest. Innocent parties are bewildered at what comes about unexpectedly or at how effectively they are out-manoeuvred by more astute colleagues or enemies who quietly position themselves to deliver an effortless but fatal coup de grace. Bloodless victories for some; unexpected and embarrassing defeat for others.

The dictionary helps us appreciate its many facets: ‘prior action that “prevents”, provides for or precludes the action of another; assignment to too early a time, hence, observance in advance; occurrence in advance of the due time (hence in music) the introduction in advance of part of a chord which is to follow; intuitive preconception, a priori knowledge; the formation of opinions before examining the evidence; the action of realising a thing before it occurs.’ (Shorter Oxford)

The French dictionary, Le Petiti Robert, further embroiders: ‘a movement of thought which imagines or sees an event in advance; the anticipation of an act in advance; in literature of anticipation such as fantasy which borrows from the supposed realities of the future. In economics, for example, a subjective hypothesis, either optimistic or pessimistic about the future which acts as a factor in economic fluctuations.’

That anticipation is considered non-rational and non-logical is emphasised by Chateaubriand: ‘The heart anticipates the pains which menace it.’ And it is not an attribute absolutely admired or encouraged. ‘Let us not anticipate, let us not overtake events, let us respect the order or mistime the eventuality of things – thereby, mistaking the appropriate response. But we cannot stop from calculating the future, from forecasting what and when something may happen, and accordingly, from deciding what our best response out to be.

Le Petit Robert reminds us of both sporting and wider applications of anticipation; ‘to forecast the reaction of the adversary and to prepare oneself to respond to it’. This is what talent is about. This is what we admire; what distinguishes the ultimate winners from the rest. Most associations have a positive ring, throwing up images of mental alertness, of being sensitively tuned to its environment, of possessing a fine sense of others’ likely behaviour and predilections, of some intuitive notion of the probable consequence of things. Clearly beyond the rational, but qualities we normally admire, and often envy.

But the notion is not limited to mental attributes; anticipation implies action, effective action. It combines prescience and intervention as well (and we normally infer the prescience from the intervention). The meaning in sport (‘sensing the next reaction of the opponent and getting oneself ready to respond to it’) captures it for most other activities as well. So, we are not dealing here with those people we may otherwise extol, such as a dreamer or a poet but, equally certainly, not with people who ‘crash through or crash’.

Anticipation is refined activity. An exemplary perspicacity. And notice the ‘social’: we are not dealing here with some private psychology. Such an efficacious quality of anticipation is something we do not all possess in equal portion. In this count alone our personalities and talents differ. Are there cultural dispositions towards more or less ‘anticipatory-skills’ (to coin jargon)? The active, interventionist, practical, even instrumentalist quality of it could suggest it ‘fits’ certain popu­lar images of the modern world, specifically the western world. At least one observer of the modern West, a Moroccan, Muhammad As-Saffar, Secretary to the Governor of Tetuan, as part of the first Moroccan embassy in Paris in 1845-6, was struck by this attribute. Of the French he wrote:

They have no special strength in their bodies that other do not have; perhaps they are even weaker than others. But they have a concern for organisation and an aptitude for putting everything in its place. They construct all things on the firmest basis possible, and anticipate things before they happen. (my emphasis).

The French lack of physical strength, he believes, is compensated by their talent to look ahead, to see what is coming, and thereby to be prepared. To organise, to get things together in time, to be ready, and by such means acquire a strength one otherwise would not have. To anticipate, by disposition and training, increases one’s power; it is a resource to call upon, an attribute overcoming otherwise superior oppositional forces. A deceptive, even gentle strength. To empower the otherwise weak.

Has As-Saffar pinpointed a western attribute – a confirmed inclination and talent to ‘regard’ the immediate future for signs of significant change, thereby being prepared to best cope with events as they emerge – and at the same time highlighted one of the West’s strengths which has received little attention, in comparison with the talent for organisation so often marked upon? The two complement each other: being prepared, in order, and anticipating eventualities, together constitute readiness and an efficient utilisation of time and other resources. A feedback is generated, almost a tautology – to organise means preparing in time for some future, anticipated eventuality. Have we come close, accidentally, to a neglected, major analytic of modernity?

But why do we not all equally utilise this potential? Some appear content to do nothing other than wait for events to erupt. Some, not others, are taken by surprise. But then, even if we learn to anticipate, nothing guarantees we read future signs correctly. And, even if we succeed in that goal, we are not always in a position to prepare ourselves appropriately. Are there prerequisites for the prerequisites? What is actually entailed in being ready?

What anticipation involved can be further appreciated by considering what it is not. Le Petit Robert provides two antonyms. One is differer, to defer. To put off, to postpone, to hold over. The decision not to act or to intervene for the moment. A psychology of deferring points to notions like ambivalence, uncertainty, doubt, hesitation, fear, anxiety. If anticipation emphasises positive moves, even if premature, this opposite highlights their absence, a postponement of intervention. But perhaps we have moved too fast and anticipated too rashly. Deferring is not necessarily an antonym of anticipating – the one holding hack, the other projecting forth. A deferment may be an anticipation’s actual outcome. We may positively decide to postpone doing something because we anticipate that to do otherwise would lead to error or some other undesired outcome. A decision not to act is still, as Gregory Bateson reminded us, a decision. Just as a non-response may well be a response, and a responsible response, as Derrida has helped us see.

Anticipation, in other words, encompasses an intricate and subtle range of initiatives. We ought not to restrict it to images of decisive interventions catching others by surprise. Anticipation goes beyond the split-second recovery and amazing physical alertness of a John McEnroe at the net. It may include the tactical retreat before an expected enemy offensive; even the fortifying drink before an ‘inevitable’ confrontation; or a judicious decision to postpone, again, that talk with the boss. So ‘defer’ needs qualification: it need not be anticipation’s contrary.

The second antonym is revenir (sur); to retract, go back on, hark back to, to retrace, crop up again. Here the opposition is more temporal in its bearing. Where anticipation is forward­looking (in time), revenir conjures up going or looking back. Forms of repetition. And in that sense, also ‘negative’, like deferral.

The two sets of associations conjure up Freud. The first, to return to the same – the repetition compulsion; the second, to again postpone – the constipation of ambivalence, of crippling doubt. Pathologies of human behaviour. No longer is the actor alert and in charge of his future, anticipating others and timing responses accordingly – rather the person is acted upon, being in no way in control of his or her destiny. Notions of timing fade, as do any ideas of a future. Instead, the individual remains a prisoner of either the past, regularly revisited, or the present, constantly unable to surrender. The contrast seems sharp – but is it?

One may, for example, be alert to the future, ever ready to step in and alter the course of things and yet still be tied to the past. Indeed, the degree of repetition compulsion we all experience goes a long way in preparing us to face the future – in roughly the same way every time. Responses are patterned, not different each time. The need of repetition, in other words, is as much a thing in front of us as behind. It shapes what we are likely to do in response to events undreamed of at any moment. We are, in a way, ‘caught’ each time by a disposition to anticipate optimistically or pessimistically, rashly, prematurely, over-defensively, in a paranoid fashion, cautiously, or aggressively. Done well or not, it will, to some degree, repeat how we have always done it. A skill or disability in timing is not something constantly varying for each of us; on the contrary, over time we hone and perfect our particular style, admirable or not. The past and future are again shown not to be the obvious opposites our language and conventional thinking encourage us to expect.

Even the notion of deferral is linked to forms of anticipation. Freud’s understanding of the operation of the unconscious undermines conventional notions of causality and time – the two being linked over time. The ‘scene of writing’ is such that actions are not triggered at the time of their ‘first’ cause (or indeed, their ‘latest’ cause), that is, when we would commonly expect them to occur; they are deferred for future occasions when they are called up again from our inerasable memory, the ‘mystic writing-pads’ to use Freud’s imagery. So, our actions of anticipation are less reactions to some future foreseen even than re-actions of some deferred past. Our allegedly keen prescience may be more an unavoidable reminiscence. We anticipate by déjà vu. To pre-see what is coming may well be a timely warning, but the chain of causality is not expected; the ‘warning’ we receive is that from another time and the coincidence of the times. We are moved by a timely reminder. By such a coincidence we ready ourselves to face the future by facing the past. There is little difference; each helps to constitute the other. McEnroe hones his skill by constant practice over time.

So once again, what we commonly take as exclusive oppositions turn out to be necessary elements of each other. To anticipate, to defer and to hark back to are not so much separate, let alone contrary motions, but distinctive aspects of each other without which none can exist. Each being a requisite part of the other we can no longer say that the past causes the present, or that the present causes the future. The linearity of time collapses. What remains is timing, successful or otherwise, and that has no direction, spatial or temporal. Despite the rigour and authority with which physicists and biologists like Stephen Hawkins and Ilya Prigogine defend the traditional notion of irreversible time, and which gets supported by our common-sense, a strong case exists for rejecting that belief in favour of one awkwardly characterised by both or neither reversibility and irreversibility. The intricacies of anticipation force such a redefinition. And another common-sense supports this change.

To anticipate an event does not, however, necessarily highlight timing. Whether something is likely to occur today, tomorrow, or next month may be irrelevant compared to the specificity of the thing expected. One may dread the event of feel euphoric about it irrespective of its due date. In anticipation we often fantasise about future; one that we live over and over again – psychologically, even physically. The future is present. And when it finally comes, we may experience a shock of the real. An athlete was asked, after the women’s marathon of the Barcelona Olympic Games, about the horrors of the Montjuichill; ‘the anticipation was worse than it was’, the Australian bronze medallist replied. The article continued, with welcome irony: ‘For Australians, the outcome of the Olympic women’s marathon was exactly the opposite. The anticipation was so much better than the result.’ The is, emotions also enter the scene; they contribute as well to our future scenarios. We invest in the future, at times heavily. Thus our fears, suspicions, paranoias as well as our daydreams of glory, and our secret rehearsals of handling that expected moment of triumph or embarrassment or pathos. We may dread the future we are convinced we are about to witness; in pain we experience it before its time. We may exalt the coming moment of glory. The banal reality when it finally arrives can be disconcerting. To many athletes, Montjuic hill was a pleasant surprise on the day.

‘Let us anticipate, let us not overtake events, let us respect the order and succession of the things.’ (Le Petit Robert). We all recognise that sentiment, sometimes expressed in admonitions like ‘don’t rush things; don’t be in such a hurry.’

Such expressions warn us against moving too fast, or against speculating too much about the future. There can be a tendency to anticipate too much; to let imagination run riot and, accordingly, to mistime our response. We can tilt at our own windmills. A caution to slow-down allows a ‘reality principle’ to emerge.

 But the stricture carries a deeper message as well. It urges a re-orientation: a look to the present not the future. And this for two reasons. It discourages a utopian belief that by looking and planning ahead we can always influence the course of things. Western man seems especially prone to such faith: it is part of the Enlightenment heritage. The tradition teaches us that, with keen application, we can determine more and more of our future. Unlike the superstitious and religious older times or of other cultures, (this heritage continues), we moderns do not leave things to fate; rather, using rationality and technology, we plan and change the course of things. Without ‘anticipation’ we deny our very cultural being as modern westerners. Remember the Moroccan’s observation.

The admonition against anticipation challenges the heritage and returns to earlier and other times. It suggests we deceive ourselves in this entrenched belief, and it remind us that, whether it suits us or not, there is ‘an order and succession’ to things which hold sway. We need to appreciate and respect this necessity – call it ‘fate’ or not. Such a challenge argues that the world is not as human-centred as we have learned during the last few centuries. We are objects as much as subjects of our histories.

This warning carries also a positive message. It suggests that only by such an appreciation can we time our moves more appropriately. In the fundamentals of life, timing is more complex a matter than the impressive skills of a talented tennis player. Being timely ought to be the endeavour to ‘fit’ an order of things beyond our control. We can, in other words, become part of what is due to happen. This would be perfect timing – and more humble. Any other cavalier attempt to retard, hasten or redirect the order of things is doomed to fail. ‘We must live as though we were free’, it has been said.

The opposition between the two viewpoints is not an exclusive one. There is a time for anticipation and intervention; there is also a time for quiescent surrender to things beyond our control. Nothing could be more timely than to be open to both, to learn to know when to act one way or the other. The ultimate anticipation.

There are certain things which proceed, as it were, according to ‘natural’ rhythms: a bodily healing or a psycho­logical mourning cannot be ‘unnaturally’ accelerated. Patience more than inter­vention is called for. But many human circumstances do not follow a determined path of development, natural or otherwise. Here, reproof of intervention is unwarranted and conservative. We can and do expedite many things by keen anticipation and appropriate response. All activities involving competition, as in politics, business, military engagements and sport call for such anticipations and attempts to redirect the order of things more appropriate to one’s own interests.

However, contrary to current ideologies, every aspect of life is not a competition. Nor can humanity ever dictate the order of all things.

The second reason for the admonition is also critical of the West. It is that modern, ‘western man’ spends so much time anticipating the future that he no longer appreciates the present – both a cause and effect of a contemporary human malaise. A contemporary over-concern with the future and with what can be done to determine it feed on a discontent, an ambition, a selfishness, an arrogance, and a hubris, perhaps beyond historical precedent. A person who denies being centre of all things avoids these particular anxieties and compulsions and is, accordingly, ‘ready’ to enjoy life at the moment. One should live, it is said, neither bound to the past nor geared to the future. Being timely is therefore, being of the times – contentedly. Ever since Nietzsche (who was influenced by Indian thought), most western therapies urge this as a necessary condition of’ mental health’. It is, nevertheless, rejected by many as too other-worldly.

But we face a paradox. The Nietzsches of today would insist on attacking conventional beliefs. They would argue that a philosopher should always be against the times. Whether they fail in their teaching, or whether societies reject them at the time, certain people are needed to say and do things which anticipate future times, and which are appreciated, if ever, only later. All conventional wisdom has a history; at one time it was merely hinted at, dreamed of, broached tentatively. To be timely may require being untimely presently.

In scientific and cultural thought, for example, history is peppered with ‘precursors’, creative minds of their times. Diderot, to limit ourselves to one illustration, is said to have ‘anticipated the typewriter’ in his fascination with gadgetry as well as allegedly ‘anticipated Darwin and identified the Oedipus complex before Freud’; and also ‘wrote technically brilliant novels which seem closer to the nouveau roman of the 1950s than to fiction of his own day’, according to one commentator.

Such anticipations lay the ground for future developments: not in a deterministic way, but by providing a readiness from which others may take off. As if a prototype had been prepared, to lie dormant, eventually to stimulate others to refine and elaborate it to a new conceptual level. Anticipatory moves set the scene for one particular future path rather than another to be followed. Planting the seeds for a specific, novel dissemination of ideas. A conceptual readiness. A trivial yet revealing illustration is provided by Peter Ellingsen in Watching the Windsors come apart.

What set the pattern for events to come was a decision in 1968 ... to allow BBC 1V unprecedented access to the private world of the monarchy ... The film Royal Family attracted an audience of 22 million. It had nothing to say about the royals’ personal lives but opened up to the public gaze an institution that had long been shielded. What Royal Family did provide was the context in which their later misdemeanours would be judged … It meant that the public was ‘conceptually ready’ – even if the royals were not – for pictures of the Duchess of York topless in St Tropez.

Anticipating the future is obviously chancy and easy to get wrong. As distinct, presumably, from knowing the past. But Robert Grudin, for one, questions whether ‘hind­sight’, yet another apparent antonym of anticipation, is all that it’s cracked up to be.

The ironic phrase ‘wisdom of hindsight’, meaning an opinion after the event which is correct but futile, is based on the almost universal assumption that we know more about things after they have happened than before ... there are reasons for doubting that this assumption is completely justifiable. After an event, we normally know at most what happened; not what might have happened, had one or more of its innumerable circumstances been altered What we ‘understand’, in other words, is the result of a single configuration of variables, rather than the sum of what these variables were capable of producing. And we understand each circumstance only in the sense in which, conjoined with others, it produced the happening, rather than in terms of its full potentialities. Moreover, deluged in details, we miss the nobler and simpler view of forms and purposes we had when looking into the future. Finally, the fact that retrospective analyses, as opposed to prior strategies and predictions, hold little danger (they need only be plausible) often renders us more careless and self-indulgent in making them.

However, anticipation is not, as we have seen, the inno­cent opposite of retrospective study. And ‘carelessness and self-indulgence’ intrude anywhere: in a hasty anticipation of the past as in an impulsive forearming for some future. Kundera reminds us how easily we slip into facile interpretation:

Man proceeds in a fog. But when he looks back to judge people, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their far away future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back he sees the path, he sees the people preceding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them – Heidegger, Mayakovsky, Aragon, Ezra Pound – were all walking in fog, and one might wonder: who is more blind? – Mayakovsky’s blindness is part of the eternal human condition. But for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky’s path is to forget what man is, forget what we ourselves are.

We easily ‘forget what we ourselves are’ – as we forget that our past is not something simply left behind us. We may even forget what the future holds and demands, because our human time is not grammatically tensed. To construe or misconstrue the one bears heavily on the appreciation of the other. Our ability to anticipate is not temporally anchored to the future; it is diffuse and general. Derrida exemplifies this well when, at the time of Louis Althusser’s funeral, he warns against premature misjudgements of that author and calls for patience in understanding his times and its possibilities:

I dream of addressing those who come after him, or after us already, and whom I see (alas, by several signs) as too much in a hurry to understand, to interpret, to classify, fix, reduce, simplify, close off and judge, that is, to misunderstand that, here, it is a question of an oh-so-singular destiny and that the trials of existence, of thought, of politics, inseparably. I would ask them to stop a moment, to take the time to listen to our time (we had no other one), to patiently decipher everything that from our time could be ratified and promised in the Life, the work, the name of Louis Althusser.

And Derrida urges this care not only because ‘this destiny should demand respect’ but also ‘because the yet open wounds, the scars or hopes, will certainly teach them something essential of what remains to be heard, read, thought and done’. We best anticipate the future and know what can and should be done, the better we know the past.

So, anticipation should not be seen as a simple matter of speed, but as readiness. To anticipate is not to ‘go off half-cocked’, but to know something in advance and accordingly, to be appropriately prepared. Once again, a simple linear notion of time misleads. Acting prematurely, precipitately, is nothing more than a question of ‘length of time’ – being faster or earlier which can result in being too fast or too early – or just too wrong. Anticipation, on the other hand, is a question of quality, of timing, of being so appropriately prepared that one ‘meets’ what is coming. Derrida seems to have something like this in mind when, in another work, he distinguishes anticipation from precipitation: ‘To anticipate is to take the initiative, to be out in front, to take (capere) in advance (ante). Different from precipitation, which exposes the head (prae-caput), the head-first and ahead of the rest, anticipation would have to do with the hand. To talk appreciatively of anticipation, and appropriate readiness, rests on a specific notion of time. It is that some form of repetition rather than linear newness forms time. If we were destined to experience nothing but constant original­ity we would hardly bother considering the question of timing. Under such circumstances, whether we timed an event well or badly would be entirely arbitrary. We would exist in an environment of constant surprise and chance. A life dictated by nothing other than the permanent ‘shock of the new’ would hardly engender human curiosity about the qualities of timeliness.

If time were an exact duplication of a past we would be little concerned about our various states of preparedness. We would long past have mastered . the one, required key; life would contain no surprises. Only when time reproduces a form of repetition which is the same yet different are we motivated to consider the idea of timing. We learn from what

has happened already, but that learning can never provide the answers, because no answer exists. At best we can prepare to be ready. We can anticipate, with knowledge, skill and luck, and meet the future as best we can.

Cultures are as much future investments as they are past treasures, Derrida argues in his ‘reflections on today’s Europe’. They anticipate their ‘becoming’ as much celebrating their ‘being’ or what ‘they once were’. And, in anticipating, they have always two choices, both of which they have to follow to some degree, Derrida continues.

All cultures have some identifiable telos, both a memory and a promise which they need to persist in anticipating. A telos is in no way ‘once and for all’, ‘given’ and ‘identifiable in advance’. So, what is in part anticipatable is the ‘unanticipatable’, the ‘non-identifiable’, ‘that of which one does not yet have a memory’.

A danger to any culture, he says, lurks in both necessities. We need to be ‘suspicious’ of complacent and deadening ‘repetitive memory’; but likewise suspicious of the ‘absolutely new’, ‘the surprising, the virginal and the unanticipatable’ because ‘We know the “new” only too well, or in any case the old rhetoric, the demagogy, the psychology of the “new” – and sometimes of the “new order”.’

The dilemma has no simple answers; resorting to a rule of thumb is irresponsible. So much depends on the time and timing. Each answer must be related to which ‘today’ is being considered. Derrida constantly stresses the importance of contingency. Each time we anticipate we are at risk of the future; but responsibility begins with appreciating both the ‘double-binds’ within which we need to operate.

Thus for instance, to learn from the example of Althusser ‘something essential of what remains to be heard, read, thought and done’. Derrida ends with Althusser’s words:

‘We eat the same bread, experience the same angers, the same revolts, the same deliria, – not to mention the same despondency over a time that no History can move. Yes, like Mother Courage, we have the same war on our doorstep, a hairsbreadth away, even inside us, the same horrible blindness, the same ashes in our eyes, the same earth in our mouths. We possess the same dawn and the same night: our unconsciousness. We share the same story –and that is where everything begins.’

This is where we begin. This is where we being to feel the future.