Time & Perspective Quote by Juliet Mitchell

Mitchell’s line is a scalpel aimed at one of modern culture’s favorite comforts: the idea that the future can be pictured, planned, and then dutifully reached. Coming from a psychologist with deep ties to feminist theory and psychoanalysis, “a fixed image” reads less like innocent optimism and more like a psychic defense - a way to freeze uncertainty into a manageable poster. It’s the mindset of manifestos and five-year plans, but also of personal fantasies: if I can just see it clearly enough, it will stop being scary.

Calling that “in the worst sense ahistorical” is a pointed charge. History, for Mitchell, isn’t a timeline we move along; it’s a messy field of power, rupture, and unintended consequences. A fixed future pretends that contingency doesn’t exist, that conflicts won’t rearrange the map, that new actors won’t appear, that old structures won’t mutate. It smuggles in an ideology of inevitability - usually the ideology of whoever benefits from things staying legible. “Ahistorical” here is not just inaccurate; it’s politically suspect. It wipes out the very forces (class struggle, gendered labor, collective movements, backlash) that actually make change happen.

The subtext is also psychoanalytic: the fantasy of a stable future can function like denial, foreclosing grief, anger, and ambivalence - emotions that, in Mitchell’s work, are often the engine of both individual and social transformation. By refusing a fixed image, she isn’t rejecting hope; she’s insisting that real futures are made in motion, through conflict, memory, and surprise.