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 Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between the irreversible time of social practices and the reversible time of analytic models. We use this distinction in the next two sections as we review existing approaches on beginnings. The next section discuss works that have studied beginnings from the perspective of irreversible time. The following section 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.