Short abstract

I develop an explicitly semiotic account of future-making as a process of distributed, enacted sense-making. Countering the widespread analytic ‘semanticization’ of futurity, I examine how futures are enacted and acquire performative agency in socially organized contexts of action.

Long abstract

The question of how social actors imagine, construct and coordinate futures has attracted more and more empirical and theoretical attention in recent years. As future-making has developed into an object of inquiry in its own right, futurity has increasingly been problematized in epistemological terms. In this paper, I aim to develop an analytic vocabulary for conceptually re-embedding future-making in collectively organized contexts of action and a more relational analysis of social agency. To counter the slippage into an analytic ‘semanticization’ of futurity, I draw on insights and concepts from semiotics, linguistic anthropology, ethnomethodology and cognitive science to develop an explicitly semiotic account of future-making as a process of distributed, enacted sense-making. I theorize futures as 'complex objects' (Suchman) that acquire practical objectivity and performative agency within enunciative networks of social relations. I develop an analytic framework for understanding how the enunciation of futures is shaped by the social and narrative grammars of interaction available within 'organized social contexts' (Emirbayer/Mische). whose architecture of social relations defines a narrative grammar of future-making. In doing so, I seek to not only contribute to the literature on future-making, but to link this conversation back to the underlying analytic problems of theorizing how culture and meaning shape social agency and processes of social coordination. Specifically, I seek to shed light on the question of how the imaginary and creative dimensions of future-making are coordinated with the need to re-embed futures into the practical structure of action available for eancting them.