ABSTRACT
What is the future? This simple question masks a complex of issues. For example, do we mean by this the substantive, content-ful future - what specifically will happen in time, subsequent to where we find ourselves now? Or, do we mean the formal future - what is meant by the ‘future’ experientially? As Adam (1990) has shown in exploring the possible roles that time and the temporal might play in social theory, time (let alone the future) is difficult to pin down. Time can be seen to be passing, a stream in which we are caught, periodised into our familiar units of seconds, minutes, hours and so on and so forth. But this is one particular and peculiar version of time. It is what Adam calls ‘clock time’ - spatialised, abstracted, mathematicised - and it is linked, in part, to industrialisation. It is a time of its time, so to speak. Now, this sort of representation of time certainly structures our experiences not least in that it resources, for example, our biographical narratives (see Freeman, 1993). However, it can be contrasted to being ‘in time’ - or ‘lived temporal duration’ as Adam, glossing Bergson, puts it (1990 p.4). According to this latter view, the past, the present and the future are not situated on a line, that is to say, linearly spatialised. Rather, ‘the past and the future... are constantly created and recreated in a present’ (p.24). Thus Adam, glossing Mead, tells us the ‘locus of reality is the present’ (p.39) - past and future are not beyond the present but representations within it. The ‘real past, just like the real future, is unobtainable for us, but through mind is open to us in the present’ (p.39). Put rather too simply, we are only in the present, and in ‘managing’ in the present we deploy representations of the past and the future.
