In an article reviewing the use of temporality in social movement theory, McAdam and Sewell (2001) concentrate on long-, medium-, and short-term processes.
According to the authors, scholars of social movements have used two temporal templates: "long-term change processes" and protest cycles. The first template refers to processes like industrialization, urbanization, and state-formation, and has been employed by a wide range of scholars from classical social theorists through to McAdam's political process model. The second template, protest cycles, is a term coined by Sidney Tarrow (1989) and has been used to define the most active phase of a movement. Protest cycles get at the cyclical rhythm of mobilization with a focus on the medium-term, whereas long-term change processes focus on effects of historical developments and processes. McAdam and Sewell (2001) offer two new temporalities for the study of social movements and revolutions. The first is transformative events,
which embody a different temporality than the previous two. It is a short and punctuated temporality, where contingencies and the sequencing of actions may have durable and structural effects in the long run (p. 102).47 The second is what McAdam and Sewell (2001) call “cultural epochs of contention”. Like Charles Tilly’s (1977) repertoires of collective action, some forms of contentious politics remain available for long periods of time, being mobilized in times of transformative events (p. 112-113). In their short review of temporalities in social movement theory, McAdam and Sewell go from long-term change processes to medium-term protest cycles, to the short-term, punctuated temporality of the event, and end with another long-term temporal concept, the epoch.
The treatment of temporality in social movement studies has been limited to long-, medium-, and short-term processes or their effects. Even though we see references to temporality throughout the literature, they remain mostly implicit. From social movement framing to narratives, from strategies and tactics to the political process model, from identity to emotions, the literature on social movements takes into account past, present, and future orientations and goals; diagnosis as well as prognosis. Yet, temporality runs in the background of these theories rather than being an explanan, the thing that does the explaining.
Ann Mische, one of the first social movements scholars who called for a temporal approach to study action (2009), employs temporality as a major element for explaining social movement phenomena. She offers the concept of the “project”, or
“projectivity”, to go beyond the static, overly instrumental, or overly structural (Goodwin & Jasper, 1999) undertones of social movement theory. She argues that the concept of the project implies a more dialogical understanding of the processes under
construction in social movements, as well as “a more or less open-ended horizon of possibility, culturally structured through existing narratives yet still implying orientation, mission, even vocation, in a self-conscious engagement of a changeable future” (2001, p. 139). Indeed, activists can be defined as agents who are actively and purposefully involved in the making of the future, a future that is changeable, regardless of how they anticipate it to be. The past, as Mische also acknowledges, plays into this process as culturally structuring narratives, and I would also add, as organizationally structuring repertoires and interpretive frameworks. She gets at this point when she writes, “the process of project-formation also entails the capacity to interpret and coordinate one’s actions in accordance with the motives and projects of other actors” (p. 139). It is the interplay of future projections, or the imaginative engagement with the future, and the coordination between different actors on which I aim to elaborate in this paper.
I use the language of imagination because it denotes a) the construction of a mental image of a society that is not (yet) in existence and b) the construction of a relationship with others, whether individuals or institutions, whom one does not know and who may or may not exist in the present. The classic example for the first aspect would be utopian futures in the form of science fiction or intentional communities.
Examples for the second include Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" and Charles Taylor's "social imaginary". These two elements do not exclude each other;
imagining a future society takes into account how people and institutions would relate to one another and imagining relations might involve thinking about alternative ways of relating. I highlight these two aspects separately because the scholarly use of the term tends to give weight to one or the other. Actors who strive for change are usually thought of as striving for a better future. For instance, Baiocchi et al. (2014) have
coined the term “civic imagination” as “the ways in which people individually or collectively envision a better political, social, and civic environment, and work toward achieving that future” (p. 20). They argue that the type of imagination that groups foster affects action, recognizing that it changes with changing circumstances. To take another quotation where they recap what they mean by civic imagination: “Civic imaginations underpin the processes of identifying problems and solutions, envisioning better societies and environments, and developing a plan to make those visions of a better future into reality” (p. 55). Imagining as an act of understanding, of interpretation, of “identifying problems and solutions” as they call it, resonates well with how I use it. Still, the concept does not account for situations where opportunities are shrinking and the drive for action is not a better, but a worse future. In such situations, the question becomes how people continue to act when they imagine the future to be worse, not better. And what if the future is so uncertain that they cannot make plans?
Taylor’s (2004) “social imaginary” gives weight to the second, relation-oriented aspect. He explains: “I am thinking […] of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (p. 23). It is “what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (p. 2). He uses the term to elucidate the rise of Western modernity which requires undertaking a historical project, where “historical” alludes to the past and covers the present. But what about how actors imagine their social positions in the future?
My use of the term imagination combines these two points: based on past and present experiences, activists imagine their social and political environment in the
future in a bid to understand what is going on which they then use to prevent a dreadful scenario from coming true. However, “the future” is not one big chunk of temporal imagery. I find the different dimensions of future projections that Ann Mische (2009, p. 609-701) has identified useful when dealing with the more intricate properties of imagination. For example, as social movement scholars have acknowledged, actors engage in long-, medium-, and short-term imaginings (reach). But there is more to temporality than reach. Imaginings involve different levels of detail (clarity), different ranges of possible scenarios (breadth), and varying degrees of considerations about relationships with and between other actors (sociality); the future can be seen as fixed or dependent (contingency), contracting or expanding (expandability), moving toward or away from us (volition). I will be using this language to look at how, during a time of rapid change induced by regime change, variation along these dimensions affect the way activists make sense of the situation and make decisions on which to act.
Making sense, making decisions, and action do not resolve themselves automatically, especially in times of crisis when the future is opaque and ambiguous.
David R. Gibson (2012) in his study of the Cuban missile crisis uses conversation analysis to understand how crisis-related talk shaped and was shaped by the machinery of conversation and the relationship between decision-making and wider external circumstances (p. 10-11). He describes the crisis John F. Kennedy and the ExComm (his advisors) faced as one in which all options were bad options, where no option seemed better than the others. One of his key findings is that the most important activity the ExComm engaged in was what Gibson calls “foretalk”, or talk about possible future scenarios in the form of stories of events that have not yet occurred.
These stories are different than stories about the past (p. 33): There is no “epistemic authority”, meaning, no one has “been there” before; conditional assertions (if...then
statements) are commonplace which shift the criteria for plausibility from what happened to the causal relationships between events; and closely related to the last point, narratives become path dependent and contingent, making them extremely sensitive to the sequencing of each moment/event in the story. These elements complicate the processes of sense-making, decision-making, and action. In my field site, we will see that this was also the case especially when the issue at hand was concerning the near future. It was extremely difficult for participants to predict what was going to happen, when, in which order, and the effects of their actions. Agreeing on all of this required coordination through foretalk.
Iddo Tavory and Nina Eliasoph (2013) call the process by which “actors orient each other toward their futures”, “coordinating futures” (p. 909). They identify three modes of future coordination that might fuse, disentangle, or clash with one another in everyday interaction. Two of these modes are particularly relevant to my work:
trajectories and temporal landscapes.48 Trajectories refer to the series of moves actors make, often with a shared assumption of where they are going (p. 913), situating themselves within an extended time frame and taking their next steps accordingly. As I understand it, trajectories are located at the level between the immediate future (that would be what Tavory and Eliasoph call “protentions”, the level I leave out) and even farther horizons, or “temporal landscapes”49. The authors distinguish temporal landscapes from trajectories by its degree of naturalization: “People usually experience this kind of future as so naturalized that it forms the bedrock on which other future-oriented trajectories are being performed” (p. 916). In times of
large-48 Protentions is the third mode that I am not using. It refers to the moment-by-moment anticipations that actors usually take for granted. This level of analysis, however, risks being stuck in the moment and does not tell us much about the wider environment which I focus on in this paper.
49 The term “temporal landscape” implies spatiality although I am not sure if this is intended, as their
scale, historic change, the temporal landscape starts breaking down and is denaturalized. They suggest that in times like this, the relationship between trajectories and landscapes changes. Rather than being unable to make sense and know which trajectories to expect, people start glorifying individual projects (p. 928).
The point at which the glorification of individual projects begins, if it begins at all, gives us insight into the relationship between trajectories and temporal landscapes. In this study, I use events as critical turning points that define the changes in this relationship. As we will see, the referendum was one such event, but not the one that led to the individualization of projects. It is also useful to think about Tavory and Eliasoph’s work in tandem with Mische’s dimensions of future projections. The differences between trajectories and temporal landscapes might be their scope (the near future versus the distant future) and the degree of naturalization, but they also differ in their level of clarity, range of possibilities, or volition, for example. Events as turning points marking the different stages of regime change alter the various dimensions of future projections, thus affecting trajectories.
The ongoing regime change during my field work is the historic change that corresponds to a shifting temporal landscape. To use the spatial analogy implicit in the word “landscape”: the ground on which activists stand is snatched from under them.
What is, under stable circumstances, routine and predictable becomes irregular and unreliable. The most glaring example, and the one that is debated in the meetings that I use as data in this paper, is the electoral schedule. Some of the uncertainties include questions like, “will we have elections? Local or general/presidential? When? Will they be rigged? Will the government start a war, domestic or abroad? Will they pass new laws to legalize their actions? Will we be allowed to win? What would be the consequences of a win? What is the political significance of the next elections?” The
transformation of the temporal landscape leads to these practical but politically charged questions, which are directly related to the trajectories that can be conceived as available at a given moment in time.
In this formulation, we see a particular relationship between the anticipated temporal landscape and possible trajectories. One might assume that when the temporal landscape, and the process leading to it, looks almost the same for everyone, it would be easier to agree on trajectories (what to do next). But that is not the case. In a transitional period during which the dreaded future seems more likely to be realized than the reversal of its implementation, there is nevertheless still some leeway for change, for reversal. However, after the referendum, in the absence of a structural opportunity in the near future, the trajectories to choose from were multiple and highly dependent on expectations about the sequence of events, as well as their pace.
Therefore, the direct relationship between the temporal landscape and trajectories that could otherwise be assumed was broken, and activists were faced with the problem of coordinating futures, or in other words, the coordination of expectations about the near future. This is where foretalk comes in.