Rethinking the Time's Arrow.: Beginnings and the Sociology of the Future.

Monica Brito Vieira; Filipe Carreira da Silva

Rethinking the Time's Arrow. Beginnings and the Sociology of the Future.

Monica Brito Vieira, Filipe Carreira da Silva

Politics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This article asks: What is, sociologically speaking, a beginning? And why has sociology so relatively little to say about beginnings, that point of discontinuity between past meaning and future meaning? We answer these questions in four successive steps. First, we suggest that the existing literature on beginnings can be organized in light of Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between the irreversible time of social practices and the reversible time of analytic models. We use this distinction in the two next sections as we review existing approaches on beginnings. Section II discusses works that have studied beginnings from the perspective of the irreversible time. Section III analyses approaches that centre on the perspective of the reversible time of the observer, that collapse the two, or that distinguish them in purely methodological grounds. Building upon the foregoing, we advance a sociological conception of beginnings as a future-oriented duration involving a non-linear succession of temporalities.

Original language	English
Journal	Time and Society
Publication status	Published - 20 Feb 2020

Bibliographical note

This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.

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Cite this

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title = "Rethinking the Time's Arrow.: Beginnings and the Sociology of the Future.",

abstract = "This article asks: What is, sociologically speaking, a beginning? And why has sociology so relatively little to say about beginnings, that point of discontinuity between past meaning and future meaning? We answer these questions in four successive steps. First, we suggest that the existing literature on beginnings can be organized in light of L{\'e}vi-Strauss{\textquoteright} distinction between the irreversible time of social practices and the reversible time of analytic models. We use this distinction in the two next sections as we review existing approaches on beginnings. Section II discusses works that have studied beginnings from the perspective of the irreversible time. Section III analyses approaches that centre on the perspective of the reversible time of the observer, that collapse the two, or that distinguish them in purely methodological grounds. Building upon the foregoing, we advance a sociological conception of beginnings as a future-oriented duration involving a non-linear succession of temporalities. ",

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