Cultures of the Future: Habitus, Reflexivity and Capacity to Aspire

Human action, as Schutz observed, is constructed within an imaginative horizon of multiple plans and possibilities. While we move in the temporal domain “with great agility, pirouetting and swiveling to face both past and future, twisting and turning in the knowledge realms of perception, memory and anticipation” (Adam 2009) the sociological understanding of the same  process is far from easy. The analysis of the cultural dimensions of projectivity (Mishe 2009) is a very important task cultural sociology has to achieve to understand action and social change.

The imaginative process of projection requires what Appadurai (2004) calls “capacity to aspire” that is to say the set of cultural resources shaping the ability to project into the future. In this presentation I try to explore the very complex field in which the capacity to aspire emerges as stretched out between the forms of practical anticipation incorporated in the habitus (Bourdieu, 1997) and  the cultures of the future inhabiting the public domain (as produced by technologies, media, institutions). Strongly connected with the concepts of reflexivity and creativity the "capacity to aspire" has to be seen mainly as the ability to project present opportunities using socially relevant narratives. These ideas are explored through the analysis of ca. 200 essays on the future, written by young boys and girls of age 17-18.