Sociological Forum, Vol. 24, No.

3, September 2009 ( 2009)

DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2009.01128.x

When Futures Meet the Present

Robin Wagner-Pacifici1

In this essay, I respond to Mische’s work on projection and the research of future action. Further, I
suggest a tri-partite framework of mechanisms—one I have termed ‘‘political semiosis’’—that allows
historical actors to materially and figuratively reorient and realign the past, present, and future in
projects of transformation.
KEY WORDS: action; cognition; cultural sociology; projectivity; the future.

I am delighted and honored to have been invited to write a response to

Ann Mische’s (2009) intellectually generative and provocative ‘‘Projects and
Possibilities: Researching Futures in Action’’ essay in this issue of Sociological
Forum. In a world in which a (now former) U.S. president articulates preemp-
tive war as official strategic policy, sociological investigation of ‘‘futures in
action,’’ as Mische titles her essay, is profoundly important. If policymakers
justify actions in the present based on imagined anticipated actions of others
in the future, it behooves us, practitioners of the social science pivoting
around the point where the past, present, and future interact, to engage
overtly with futurity. Sociologists can legitimately lay claim to the future, but
we must be specific about the nature and the scope of that mandate. Toward
that end, Mische has outlined a variety of approaches to the future that are
theoretically and methodologically sound and fruitful. Her approaches, like
those of allied sociologists preoccupied with temporalities (e.g., Abbott, 2001,
2005; Hall, 1980; Jasper, 2006) are productive precisely because they reject the
overly blunt instrument of positivist predictions of specific outcomes of strict
and identifiable causal relationships among variables.
Mische actually has several concerns manifest in this essay that might
benefit from being separately distinguished. (1) How do sociologists and other
social scientists understand and incorporate the future in their work? (2) How
do sociologists analyze other people’s and other organizations’ consideration
of and calculations about the future? (3) What kinds of cognitive and

1
Sociology and Anthropology Department, Swarthmore College, Kohlberg Hall 232, 500 College
Avenue, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 19081; e-mail: rwagner1@swarthmore.edu.

705

0884-8971/09/0300-0031/0  2009 Eastern Sociological Society

706 Wagner-Pacifici

heuristic mechanisms of analysis and interpretation might sociologists utilize

to conceive of ⁄ perceive of future projections? (4) What are the possible links
between cognition (e.g., of the future) and action?
Recognition of contingency in social life is a theme common to all these
questions and concerns. As she has done in important previous work (Mische,
2007), Mische highlights the role of contingency in social life and social action.
In this essay, the concept of contingency is joined theoretically with the concept
of projects, or projectivity, to stake out ways of researching the future(s). Mische
writes: ‘‘I argue that we should refocus attention on the open, indeterminate,
‘‘polythetic’’ perception of the field from the point of view of the actor surveying
the future in terms of multiple possibilities, as opposed to the ‘monothetic’ view
of the actor (or observer) who interprets the decision after it has already been
taken’’ (2009:697). In calling for this refocusing of attention, Mische ushers into
her analysis the critical element of ‘‘point of view,’’ an analytic tool most
robustly developed by literary and art-historical critics. The aesthetic dimensions
of sociological projectivity receive some attention in Mische’s analysis, specifi-
cally in the form of the roles of narrative and genre generally, but she is more
interested in cognitive dimensions of actors’ projects toward the future. She sees
the task of sociologists to be that of ‘‘seeking patterns in the way that particular
cognitive structures lead people to act (or not act) in particular ways.’’ Mische’s
heuristic list of cognitive dimensions of future projections is terrific. These
dimensions illuminate and harness the energy, sinew, and forms that give
projects their vitality (or cut them short). One feels sociology stretching its own
muscles in engaging the concepts of reach, breadth, clarity, contingency, expand-
ability, volition, sociality, connectivity, and genre.
In terms of my own preoccupations with and analytical frameworks for
investigating contingency, situational actions, and transformation in the con-
text of violent events, Mische’s essay has provided me with a cognate set of
categories with which to think. Here, I first briefly describe my own approach,
and then highlight ways I believe Mische and I are mostly after the same
quarry, even as our sociological concerns have elicited different analytical
armatures.
As I have analyzed situations in which actors are entering, responding to,
engaging in, or exiting from violence (Wagner-Pacifici, 1986, 1994, 2000,
2005), I have focused on the difficult and complex threshold moments. Such
moments are pregnant with possibilities and manage transactions with signifi-
cant (often life and death) consequences for the parties involved. The future
looms or beckons or peers out from behind the often literal ‘‘fog of war.’’
Examining these moments closely, I have identified a tri-partite framework of
mechanisms that must be successfully engaged in order to manage the difficult
transitions and transformations in these portentous situations. This frame-
work, one I term ‘‘political semiosis,’’ allows historical actors to materially
and figuratively reorient and realign the past, present, and future in projects
of transformation. The framework consists of performative features, demon-
strative features, and representational features.
When Futures Meet the Present 707

Thus, every transition requires speech acts or their performative equivalents

that materially change the social and ⁄ or political world. The philosopher of lan-
guage, J. L. Austin (1975) identified a particular species of speech acts, perfor-
matives, which literally changes the social world in and through their utterance
(e.g., a judge declaims, ‘‘I find the defendant guilty’’ at the end of a trial).
Second, every transition needs what I will term a demonstrative feature.
Demonstrative terms typically indicate and distinguish proximal and distal
entities and relations (in English, e.g., ‘‘this,’’ ‘‘that,’’ ‘‘these,’’ and ‘‘those’’).
Demonstratives also include the deictical features of speech—pronouns and
adverbs of time and place like ‘‘here,’’ ‘‘there,’’ ‘‘now,’’ and ‘‘then’’—drawn
from the linguistic theory of deictics (shifters or floaters). These are elements
of language that shift in their referent according to who is uttering them in
any given moment of a communicative interaction. The pronoun ‘‘I’’ is thus a
shifter, utterly reliant on context for its meaning. Demonstrative features oper-
ate to highlight possible and necessary orientations within and toward situa-
tions.
Finally, every eventful transformation involves representational fea-
tures—copies of the event, or aspects of the event, need to be generated and
sent outward into the wider world of audiences and witnesses at a distance.
Even the ‘‘original’’ documents signed and stamped and the ‘‘original’’ hand-
shakes beginning or ending such things as battles are, in this sense, copies, as
they take their forms from templates developed in the past and brought to
bear on this emergent event. But more obviously, actors and witnesses gener-
ate copies of ‘‘original’’ exchanges, attacks, signings, and handshakes in the
form of paintings, plays, poems, journalistic renderings, photographs, films,
monuments, and novels. These copies attempt to stabilize and sediment the
historical transition in the face of uncertainty, temporal lags, distance, and
resistance.
Actors and spectators, individuals and collectivities alike must find their
bearings in ongoing situations as relations and identities may be in the process
of transformation—they must determine what is ahead and what is behind,
what is close up and what is far away, what is central and what is marginal.
In other words, every transition requires that the parties to it are oriented in
time and space, and oriented to each other. They need indexing and directions.
They also need material and symbolic objects and focal points to attend to
and to reflect on (as these circulate). And, finally, they need world-changing
acts of promises, vows, orders, declarations, and pronouncements to accom-
plish their identity and relational transformations.
Thus, participants in historical transactions must be brought to attend to
or orient toward situated times and spaces of transition, must attend to
and ⁄ or participate directly in the emergent performative acts of exchange, rec-
ognition, judgment, and transformation, and must be able to refer to and
remember these acts via a (re)reading of its subsequent representations.
There are several ways this framework can coordinate with and be sub-
stantiated by Mische’s cognitive dimensions of projections. For example, when
708 Wagner-Pacifici

thinking about the role of representations in transitional moments, Ann’s cate-

gories of clarity and genre are key—representations copy a (remembered past,
highlighted present, or imagined future) world in a myriad of ways. The
degree of clarity is variable (detailed mimesis or sketchy blueprint) and is use-
fully explored by sociological analysts (Ann highlights the critical issue of
timeframe here). This variability in clarity also invokes the role of the imagi-
nation (an aspect of human experience that, like emotion, has often been
neglected by sociologists). And I would also make a strong pitch for a more
concerted and specific analysis of the generic modes by and through which
representations are constituted—narratives represent worlds very differently
than do pictorial images, for example. As an example, clarity and genre can
both be usefully employed to reflect on the utopian ‘‘future’’ that Marx pre-
sents in The German Ideology, where one can ‘‘do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, [and] criticize after dinner’’ (Marx, 1972:124). Clarity prevails here at
an extreme micro level of description, while the macro context is mysterious.
Further, the lyrical genre is one recuperated from a preindustrial past, thus
making this projected future paradoxical indeed.
The work of the orienting demonstrative features, in my own framework,
can be illuminated by Mische’s categories of reach, sociality, and connectivity.
The powerful impulse to achieve (regain) bearings in situations of peril and
transition, to be oriented, rests on the identifications of time horizons that
determine what is relevant and near and irrelevant and far (reach) and on the
‘‘imagined logic of connection between temporal elements’’ (connectivity). It
also rests on deictical identifications of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ projected into the
future (sociality). As we live through this disorienting period of economic cri-
sis and unfinished military conflicts, we rely on political officials to indicate
how and why their projections will successfully identify relevant intertwinings
of significant others (sociality) and relevant timeframes of short term, middle
term, or long term (reach). Of course, we may respond with alternative sce-
narios.
Finally the performative world-changers might be said to draw from voli-
tional stances taken by actors situated on historical thresholds (volition).
Beyond the mutual illumination of the conceptual armatures of these two
frameworks, and the promise that Ann’s futures projectivity project holds for
all sociologists interested in contingency, there is a fundamental difference of
interest in our two perspectives. Ann draws from the deep well of sociological
pragmatism to highlight the theoretical and practical benefits of the delibera-
tive attitude and of openness toward the future in limning multiple worlds and
multiple pathways to arrive there. Cognition, in all its variable ways of con-
ceiving time, space, and relations, rules the roost in ideations of projects here,
suggesting familial links with strategic thinking and acting. Of course, like Jim
Jasper (2006), Mische’s take on strategy has nothing in common with rational
choice and game theory practitioners, engaging, as it does to great effect, cul-
turalist sensitivities to creativity and context. Despite allied preoccupations,
When Futures Meet the Present 709

my own intervention into the future(s) market in sociology is more precisely

focused on the dynamic interplay between the forms and processes activated
in specific occasions that interplay precisely accomplishing reorientations of
temporal, spatial, and relational frames. And these preoccupations lead me to
expand on Mische’s insight about sociological neglect and inarticulateness
about the future. I would say that a preliminary sociological task is to articu-
late and analyze the present, and that we still have much work to do on that
front. The elusive emergent space of interaction, orientation, exchange, percep-
tion, and action may be as hard a conceptual nut to crack as are Mische’s
projected future(s).

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