The Environmental Apocalypse and Social Constructions of the Future

• In Event: 289 - Theory Section Invited Session. Future-Making in Sociological Theory

Abstract

Sociologically, to consider the future, we need to think about the ways in which people, in concert with one another, understand and make sense of it, and how these understandings resonate with their actions. People can only act in the here-and-now, but the ways in which people act have the effect of constructing alternative social temporalities, including the future. To make sociological sense of hermeneutic alternatives, this paper uses a “structural phenomenology” to examine alternative contemporary constructions of the future in relation to social controversies about global climate change, which is, after all, an inherently temporal conceptualization. Structural phenomenology relocates Bourdieusian field theory within a broader institutional framework that identifies various empirical social domains of action that operate within, span across, or hybridically combine alternative registers of temporally structured meaningful action. The paper identifies characteristic textual constructions of social temporality in four distinctive domains concerned with global climate change – scientific/state policy analyses, political skepticism and denial, geopolitical security approaches, and ecological social movement orientations. As the paper shows, ironies, contradictions, disjunctures, and aporias result from how the future is constructed in these four domains through varying inflections in relation to social meanings grounded in diachronic, strategic, and apocalyptic temporalities.

Author

• John R. Hall, University of California-Davis