Modes of engagement with the future in everyday life

Introduction

Desroche’s (1979) metaphor of the rope has frequently been referred to in the literature (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Mandich, 2017; Mische, 2009; Weigert, 2014) because it powerfully embodies the idea of projection; that is, of the going forward that the future as a cultural dimension entails since modernity. Desroche’s metaphor of the rope is based on a typical miracle of fakirism occurring in many religious traditions.

In this rite, the officiant throws a rope like a lasso in the air. The rope rises higher and higher in the air. It should fall down. But the officiant assures us that it has mysteriously anchored itself somewhere and to prove it, he or his disciple climbs up the rope. The rope does not give way. It holds. And it carries the weight of the man as he climbs. (Desroche, 1979: 1)

Moreover, it allows us to understand not only what makes the rope hold (if it ‘attaches itself to a cloud’ or ‘descend[s] from the sky’, as Desroche says cfr. p. 2), but also to question where on earth the rope is fastened. Out of the metaphor, we must consider the fact that the way we project into the future, and the resources we need to do so are not unrelated to the way we engage with social reality through social practices. This issue is the specific focus of my article. The idea that social action is not only oriented towards the future but that it simultaneously makes the future, or in other words, produces futurity (Adam and Groves, 2007), is a widely shared one. As Bourdieu emphasised, ‘events (or practices) do not only take place in time, but they also – more significantly – make time’ (Atkinson, 2018: 355). Acknowledging this idea involves a reconceptualisation of human agency as a temporally embedded process (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998), thus emphasising the multidimensionality of agency and the interrelated multifariousness of temporality and futurity (Mandich G, 2017). How it is possible to position future-oriented agency, and what type of assumptions regarding social practices and agency are embedded in how we conceptualise temporality and the future, are still matters of debate (Cook, 2018; Cook and Cuervo, 2019; Mische, 2009, 2014; Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013).

This paper intends to contribute to the discussion working from the idea of modes of engagement with the future as a development of the French sociologist Laurent Thevenot’s concept of regimes of engagement. I will try to show that the advantages of using the idea of engagement in relation to modes of projectivity are twofold. First, the ‘pragmatic versatility’ that regimes of engagement describe is a very good starting point to reflect on the multiple forms of projectivity emerging in sociological thinking on futurity. Second, Thévenot’s idea that we have to consider the ‘cognitive formats’, characterising the actor’s access to reality (accordingly to a quest for a ‘guaranteed good’ that makes it possible to assess what is relevant to know), which helps us to deal with the sensitive theme of the future’s reality status. I contend that, just as the ‘relevant reality’ is different depending on the regime of engagement that we are involved in, the nature of projectivity also varies. The future is ‘made and measured’ within a logic of probability in the regime of a plan, within a logic of possibility, within a regime of justification, within a logic of practical anticipation in the regime of familiarity and within a logic of discovery in the regime of exploration.

This paper’s main aim is to embed projectivity in the practical and cognitive relationship held with reality in different situations of everyday life, within different regimes of engagement. Everyday life is intended as the site of modes of engagement. Thévenot (2001) locates pragmatic regimes in everyday life emphasising the ‘pragmatic versatility required in everyday life in contemporary society’ (65). According to this perspective, everyday life has to be defined, not only as the routine and ordinary, but more generally as the site of social practices and the locus of social experience (Sandywell, 2004). As such, it is ‘characterised by ambivalence, peril, puzzle, contradiction, accommodation and transformative possibilities’ (Neal and Murji, 2015: 812). After a brief account of Thévenot’s idea of engagement and of the nature of the different regimes, I focus on developing the specific modes of engaging with the future that are implied within each regime. I will start with the ‘engagement on the plan’ as pivotal both in Thévenot’s development of the idea of pragmatic versatility and in the discussion of modes of projectivity. I will then discuss familiarity, exploration and justification as different steps from the most private to the most public forms of engagement.

In my argument, I suggest that the framework of regimes of engagement allows us to better frame different forms of projectivity already emerging in futurity theoretical studies and research literature and organise them into a coherent structure. This paper is not intended to be a critical appraisal of Thévenot’s theory. Rather, it represents an alternative view of temporality within different regimes of engagement.

Thévenot’s regimes of engagement

As discussed above, the main aim of this paper is neither to fully analyse Thévenot’s theory for its contribution to the field of practice theory and pragmatic French sociology nor to scrutinise the subtleties and shifting of his conceptualisation over time. Moreover, it does not set out to review the critiques of these conceptions, which would require significantly more space than this article allows and divert the attention from the main focus. ¹ Rather, the aim is to use the concept of engagement to outline the different regimes as distinct fields of the coming into being of different modes of engaging with the future. ² However, a brief account of Thévenot’s concept of regimes of engagement, positioning it within Thévenot’s larger sociological itinerary, may be useful for readers who are not familiar with these concepts.

Thévenot’s sociological work is mostly known for its contribution to what has been defined as a ‘sociology of critical capacity’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999) or, in short, ‘pragmatic sociology’ (see also Blokker, 2011). Other labels include ‘convention theory’ and ‘French convention school’ (Jagd, 2004, 2011). Boltanski and Thévenot’s most important book, On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006), stems from the purpose of constructing a critical sociology to confront the hegemonic Bourdieusian structuralism in 1980s French sociology. The authors propose different ‘orders of justification’ as the most legitimate types of argument that people use when ‘debating public issues to appeal to common interest’ (Lamont and Thévenot, 2000: 5):

Orders of worth’ govern criticisms and justifications that claim legitimacy (1) on the grounds that evaluations of worth ascribe qualifications for the common good and thus benefit all; and (2) on the condition that these qualifications are not permanently ascribed to persons as statuses but rather be put through an in-situ reality test. (Thévenot, 2014: 8)

Later, Thévenot developed pragmatic sociology further, building upon his idea of ‘regimes of engagement’ as:

… three grammars of constructing commonality in the plural, i.e., the grammar of plural orders of worth, the grammar of individual choices in a liberal public, and the grammar of personal affinities to a plurality of common places. (Blokker and Brighenti, 2011: 384)

Thévenot (2007: 415) uses the term engagement rather than possible alternatives, such as ‘action’ or ‘practice’, ‘ … as these focus attention exclusively on the human agent’. The term engagement, on the contrary, is intended to emphasise the way in which an individual’s choices relies upon the environment, which varies according to the type of guaranteed good that is valued, what is relevant to know (by means of a certain cognitive format), the specific type of mastery or power that characterises the actors and subsequent forms of coordination. Each regime orients the ways in which reality is grasped and specifies the format that ‘constitutes relevant information, and discursive language is used to assess reality and produce coordination’ (Thévenot, 2007: 415).

Thévenot defined four regimes of engagement: familiar engagement, the plan, justification and exploration. ³ The first regime – familiar engagement – upholds a personalised and localised good: feeling at ease. The peculiar relationship between a person and a milieu within this regime can be defined as ‘intime’ (Thévenot, 1990: 49) and belongs to the class of ‘act(s) of care’ (Thévenot, 2009: 803), which are concerned with attachments that guarantee an ease of familiarity. Thévenot’s conception was based on a practice theory idea of embodiment and an adjustment to social reality as well as a more dynamic (phenomenological) idea of familiarisation as a process. As Thévenot (2007: 416) suggested, the ‘good’ involved in familiarity ‘is more than a fixed habit because it involves a dynamic relation with an immediate milieu that is experienced’. Familiarity thus expresses a basic grasp of the world around us (Merleau-Ponty, 1945) and implies a process of quotidianisation, in other words, the way in which social reality is daily included in our experience (Begout, 2005). ⁴ In this regime, information rarely circulates through extended communication, and discursive language is largely replaced with body language as the intimacy of the familiar is more barely conveyed through the spoken word (Thévenot, 2007: 416).

The second regime is engagement in a plan. Thévenot emphasised ways in which this regime corresponds to so-called ‘normal action’ or the ‘normal format of action’ (Thévenot, 2007: 417). The vocabulary used in this regime is that of ‘needs’ and ‘utility’; the good is where the will of an autonomous individual is exercised, and the mode of assessment is based on a plan of execution, concentrating attention on the capacity of the human agent to plan in relation to the environment in a format of instrumental–functional capacity. Thévenot (2006) develops his idea of a variety of regimes of engagement from the critique of this supremacy and thus of a mono-dimensional conceptualisation of social agency.

The third regime (developed later by Thévenot) is the regime of exploration (Thévenot, 2014, 2011). This regime focuses on creativity and innovation in engaging with the world. This stems from Dewey’s attention to experience, with its links to Joas’s creativity of action, along with inspiration from Auray’s ideas (2007, 2011). Thévenot designed a regime based on the excitement of discovering something new, linked to strangeness and novelty. The grammar characterising this regime of engagement is not that of an autonomous and wilful individual, but is based on what Auray defined as ‘tâtonnements et affinités’ or a continuous redefining of the relevant characteristics of the environment at each step of the process of discovery (Auray, 2011: 330).

The fourth regime, justifiable action engagement regime is, ‘ … oriented by demands of a public order because the evaluation must be valid for a third party and is characterised by generality and legitimacy’ (Thévenot, 2001: 417). In this regime, the relevant reality is ‘ … grasped according to a cognitive format that is grounded in the conventional qualifications of people and things’ (Thévenot, 2001: 417) and involves a specification of the common good: market competition, industrial efficiency, public renown, civic solidarity, domestic trust, inspiration (Thévenot, 2001: 417). Moreover, the discursive language in this regime is distinctly separated from the commonplace language used to convey planned action. This regime implies skilful use of the vocabulary constituting conventional standards assessing objects in terms of their legitimate traits.

The most critical point in Thévenot’s theory is that there is not just ‘one reality’, in relation to which actors’ behaviour must be evaluated. There are different forms of relevant reality, depending on the ways in which one ‘takes hold’ of the environment (cognitive formats). Thévenot adopts a pragmatic approach to always ‘acknowledge actors’ realisms, meaning the plurality of ways they engage with an appropriate reality to put their capacity into action’ (Blokker and Brighenti, 2011: 394). Engagement with the world is a reality test, depending on how the agent captures the world within a certain type of format (e.g. publicly conventionalised, functional and familiar). Thévenot (2002: 57) said:

The argument runs so: different “investments of forms” generate different “forms of the probable”, different constraints on what can be proved and offered as relevant evidence. For instance, statistical probability is quite different from evidence based on proximity to a prototype. But both rest in part on material evidence and the involvement of objects even if what counts as relevant evidence is quite different in the two cases.

Therefore, in the regime of the plan, the good of this engagement stems from the assessment of planned execution, and reality is comprehended according to the positive realisation of the plan. As Thévenot put it:

In justifiable action engagement, the relevant reality is seized according to a cognitive format that is grounded in the conventional qualifications of people and things. As suggested, information differs from one level of worth to another by qualification, for example, market value and the statistical measuring of performance and fame. (Thévenot, 2007: 417)

Engagement in a plan, agency and the future

As aforementioned, the centrality of the plan intertwines, in Thévenot’s opinion, with a judgement regarding the realism of an individual’s engagement with the future. According to Thévenot, the plan is the central dimension of social agency and constitutes the assessment of the actor’s realism. As Thévenot (2007: 417) emphasised, engagement in the plan is ‘often called very simply the actor’s “realism” though this designation fails to take into account the specific format for apprehending reality that produces information in this engagement’. The centrality of the plan mirrors a conceptualisation of the future as a field that can be occupied by human agency (as something that is there and simply has to be reached). As such, it refers to a cultural dimension developing and establishing itself as a character of modern society. A ‘decontextualized future emptied of content, which is open to exploration and exploitation and calculation and control’ (Adam and Groves, 2007: 2) or as Giddens (1991: 125) suggested, ‘a future to be colonised as part of an individual’s life-planning’. The same idea has been expressed by Archer through the concept of ‘autonomous mode of reflexivity’ that is peculiar to modern society as characterised by the capacity to manage new circumstances and seize the ‘situational logic of opportunity’ (Archer, 2012: 38). Although Thévenot (2007: 417) criticised the reduction of agency in the regime of plan, he then considered the future as a dimension that is exclusively related to the idea of plans. Through a plan, actors can ‘project successfully into the future’. This view is present in many conceptualisations of social agency and implies a mono-dimensional view of reflexivity (the means-to-an-end reflexivity or autonomous reflexivity in Archer’s terms).

Notably, the entanglement of meaning, temporality and agency that makes ‘normal action’ and its form of projectivity a critical feature of the theory of action can be better understood by referring to Schutz’s theory. As Tada (2018: 4) points out, ‘Schutz and Luhmann stand out for their consistent and explicit ways of making temporality a central theoretical focus in connection with the problem of meaning’. Action is, according to Schutz, always ‘future-directed’ (Schutz, 1967: 62). However, it is possible to project an action only if we think it as if it is already over, as already done, that is to say, as an act. Schutz refers to the future act as the one being anticipated in the Future Perfect Tense, modo futuri exacti (Schutz, 1962: 69). Therefore, because meaning is the product of the intentionality inherent in the reflective act, Schutz can state that ‘the meaning of any action is its corresponding projected act’ (p. 61). As Tada emphasises:

The meaning of an action that an actor subjectively thinks of is determined not by a common normative value for example, but rather through her/his own inner time: the meaning of an ongoing action (Handeln) is the act (Handlung) projected as an aim in the stream of consciousness. (Tada, 2018: 1)

The centrality of the plan has been thoroughly questioned in the contemporary debate on futurity. For instance, according to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002), the growing uncertainty in contemporary societies makes it impossible to plan the future; Adam and Groves (2007), on the other hand, criticise the narrowness of the idea of the plan as based on the assumption that there is an open future ready to be colonised; more recently, the critique of neoliberal ‘regimes of anticipation’ also emphasises the limits of the logic of probability (distinctive of the plan) against a logic of possibility (Amsler, 2015). In addition, empirical studies have criticised the exclusive focus on short-term goals and plans (Cook, 2018) because dichotomous thinking is produced. As Woodman (2011: 113) asserts in relation to the field of youth studies, ‘Yet I believe progress is impeded by this recent focus on planning, or not planning’. Without the planning strand, projecting into the future may be impossible (the present becomes prevalent), and this projection becomes non-realistic (hopes and dreams) or assumes the character of presentification. The critical assessment of the centrality of the plan needs new conceptual tools to explain the variety of forms of anticipating the future people use in coordinating with oneself and the others in everyday life. I contend that multiple types of projectivity (as intertwined with the past and the present) can be found discussing how temporality emerges in each regime of engagements developed by Thévenot.

The future without knowing it in the regime of familiarity

According to Thévenot (2014: 13), the past is the more relevant temporal dimension in a regime of familiarity: ‘Engaging in personal familiarity reassures through past habituation, this ease being warranted by customized personal belongings and a personalized environment’. The current understanding of habit is thus a product of the past and is formed through previous experiences. The primary locus of agency, what Emirbayer and Mische defined as the iterational dimension, is in the schematisation of social experiences (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 972). However, the sphere of experience within a regime of familiarity contains a more complex definition of temporality that Thévenot failed to reveal. This dimension emerged implicitly in Thévenot’s (2002: 11, 2009: 799) discussion of the domestic order of worth. The idea of ‘domestic time and space’ as opposed to ‘industrial time and space’ resonates with the concept of ‘lived time’ and ‘lived space’, which is a critical dimension in the phenomenological tradition (Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Minkowski, 1933) and relates more to the present than to the past. In other words, it is a particular way of experiencing the past and future in the present.

As depicted recently by Tavory and Eliasoph (2013), the future dimension in a regime of familiarity can be described as protention. Following Husserl’s (1960, 1991) terminology, protention is defined as the socially located ‘feel’ for the immediate future. This element of anticipation has important roots in the phenomenological tradition and in Bourdieu’s practice theory. Husserl and Schutz’s conceptualisation of protention emphasised the flow of lived experience as tension towards the following instant:

First of all every action is a spontaneous activity oriented towards the future. This orientation towards the future is by no means peculiar to behaviour. It is on the contrary a property of all primary constituting processes, whether these arise from spontaneous activity or not. Each such process contains within itself intentionalities of lived experience that are directed towards the future. (Schutz, 1967: 57)

A final and less commonly emphasised aspect is the emotional and affective character that ‘feeling the future’ implies. Bourdieu strongly emphasised the role of emotions embedded in practical anticipation. Forth-coming has an immediate visibility as a present property of things. This property becomes evident, according to Bourdieu, in the case of emotions:

…  fear for example, which, as is testified by the reactions of the body, especially its internal secretions, similar to those be provoked by the situation that is anticipated, sees—the threatening dog, the onrushing car—as something there, irremediable (“I’m done for”, “I’m a goner”). (Bourdieu, 2000: 208)

As Cook emphasises, quoting Snyder (2000), hope ‘has often been equated with the absence of clarity, unrealistic optimism and the denial of material realities’ (Cook, 2018: 108). A recent development in social sciences’ thinking with respect to focusing on the future testifies to the emergence of fear and hope as matter of concern in sociological thinking (Amsler, 2015; Back, 2015; Coleman, 2017; Cook, 2018). Corresponding with Bourdieu’s view, this perspective emphasises how:

Drawing on the studies that have been considered thus far, it appears that hope need not simply be the product of a denial of difficult realities. Rather, it often appears to be used as a strategy for coping with uncertainty. (Cook, 2018: 111)

Fear is also a dominant character of contemporary society as Brian Massumi (2005) emphasised through the idea of the pervasiveness of the pre-emption of the future operating through fear. Fear is a powerful emotion because it destroys the immediate and intimate relationship with the future that familiarity makes possible and because it questions the ‘feeling at ease’ in everyday experience. Familiarity must grasp not only the present but also the inescapable possibility of protending to the future.

Discovering the future in the regime of exploration

Means of anticipating the future that can easily fit into Thévenot’s regime of exploration (based on creativity and imagination) are at the core of contemporary societies. Thévenot emphasised how the regime of exploration is exclusively present-oriented (Thévenot, 2014: 15). However, the focus on the ‘value of surprise’, the ‘unflagging rejuvenation of the environment’ and the ‘shock of newness’ imply a projection into the future that appear to be key elements for the definition of this regime. Analysing the worth of ‘inspiration’, Thévenot emphasised:

Inspired qualification places value on the temporality of a disturbing break as well as on the revelation of the general significance of surprise and strangeness. Inspiration generates highly critical tension with the time orientation of the Industrial qualification, which is primarily assumed by standardization. (Thévenot, 2009: 799)

To better clarify the idea of engagement with the future through exploration, it is important to emphasise the differences from the context of the extended present, suggesting that lived experience is restrained in an all-encompassing here and now. According to the latter concept, when changes happen so fast that the future never seems to come, the traditional line to progress is broken (Nowotny, 1994). People become incapable of thinking about the long-term or planning for it (Nowotny, 1994: 58). Exploratory projectivity goes beyond the dichotomy of a short- and long-term future, rather it is a future in ‘process’. This development of a reversible and provisory temporality focuses on creativity and imagination rather than ‘normal action projectivity’.

Following Thévenot and Auray’s exploration implies a reflexive projectivity that is different from the means-to-an-end projectivity ordered around the rationality of the plan in which the future is considered as a ‘defined field of opportunities’. Exploratory projectivity discovers the future through agency, makes opportunities appear, is processual by nature and develops through a non-linear modality. Imagination and creativity are essential features of this mode of anticipation. This mode of engaging with the future resonates with the idea that Mische advocated: the process of projectivity comprises creative and wilful foresight. Mische suggested the following:

… I argue that we should refocus attention on the open, indeterminate, ‘‘polythetic’’ perception of the field from the point of view of the actor surveying the future in terms of multiple possibilities, as opposed to the ‘‘monothetic’’ view of the actor (or observer) who interprets the decision after it has already been taken. (Mische, 2009: 696)

Regime of justification: Future narratives and the capacity to aspire

The future implied in the regime of justification is the future as we describe it when we must discuss issues according to forms of evaluation that must be valid for a third party and are characterised by generality and legitimacy. It is a future that is a matter of public discussion. This discussion is fuelled by discourses produced by the media, informing policy documents and politics addressing the future implicitly or explicitly. Today’s critical sociology focuses on the future as a central topic in contemporary society that must be addressed through public debate. From this perspective, many reflections are developing regarding various topics and fields of study. In the field of research on the youth condition (Leccardi et al., 2018), a strong call to focus on the ‘right to aspire’ within an intergenerational equality frame is developing. In addition, education studies aim to build educational practices that facilitate the development of helpful attitudes and investigate methodologies capable of disclosing not-yet-visible potentialities and generate possibilities (Amsler, 2015; Amsler and Facer, 2017; Facer, 2011).

New utopian thinking (Cooper, 2014; Levitas, 2015) contends that utopia should be an essential issue in sociology. Sociology (as utopia) should focus on the process of imagining ourselves and our world otherwise by drawing attention to unfamiliar possibilities. John Urry (2016) focused on social futures that is to say futures that are the result of collective debate within society. He emphasised how a key question for the social sciences is who or what owns the future because this capacity to own the future is central to the ways in which power works in contemporary society. For this reason, agreeing upon a productive manner of developing thinking and practices within ‘democratic’ futures are of the utmost importance.

All these approaches agree on the need to redefine the future within a public debate and to acknowledge that the future cannot be conceived, as in modern and neoliberal societies, as an exclusively individual matter. So, while within the regime of familiarity, we just protend un-reflexively towards the future; in the regime of the plan, we see the future in terms of probability within a means to end form of agency; in the regime of exploration, we discover the future while we experience the social world; in the regime of justification, we have to account for the idea of possible futures framing our agency in a public discussion. Regimes of critique and justification force sociology to manage the problems of power and capacities (Thévenot, 2011). Notably, one relevant concern is the capacity to communicate in a public space and to be able to competently frame a discourse (for instance on possible futures) within a definite order of worth (e.g. market competition, industrial efficiency, public renown, civic solidarity, domestic trust and inspiration, as in Welch et al., 2017). As Thévenot suggested, investments in coordinative forms (e.g. classifications, standards and rules) governing regimes of worth produce:

… when individuals or social classes capture them, strong asymmetrical powers over other people. Coordination may become direct subordination or, more subtly, coordination powers involve cognitive and evaluative formats that turn out to be quite oppressive of other formats and their users. (Thévenot, 2014: 10)

Conclusion

Many empirical studies have emphasised how what is usually called an ‘imagination’ of the future takes diverse forms and meanings (Cook, 2018). Different possible narratives of the future coexist in our daily lives in a bumpy, semi-conscious and occasionally tense dialogue with one another. I argue that in order to understand this variety, a proper discussion of the relationship between these modalities of social action must be detailed, together with a sensitive empirical analysis.

My use of Thévenot’s theory of regimes of engagement adds to the growing body of literature addressing these questions. Baumann (2001) and Bourdieu (2000: 219) have reminded us that projecting into the future is unlikely to occur in people who have no hold on their present. However, the different ‘holds’ on the present depend on how we inhabit social reality. Thévenot’s perspective offers a useful context with which to understand the ways in which the various situations in social life imply different modes of engaging with the future. The use of the term engaging with the future allows us to stress how the future is not simply something we look at but is deeply entrenched in social practices. We make the future as we differently engage with social reality in our everyday practices. The ‘pragmatic versatility’ required in everyday life, according to Thévenot, also means versatility in our constant relationship with the future throughout all social practices we are involved in. Moreover, the link that Thévenot emphasises between forms of engagement and modalities of assessing reality is particularly relevant for our understanding of the forms of projectivity. Just as the ‘relevant reality’ is different depending on the regime of engagement that we are involved in, the nature of projectivity also varies. The future is ‘made and measured’ within a logic of probability in the regime of the plan, within a logic of possibility, within a regime of justification, within a logic of practical anticipation in the regime of familiarity and within a logic of discovery in the regime of exploration.

Expanding Thévenot’s regimes into modes of engagement in the future can thus help to overcome the one-dimensionality and oversimplified views regarding the way in which the reality status of the future is accounted for. The reality status of the future has always been a matter of debate. The future has been perceived, for instance, as a domain that is there and simply has to be reached or occupied by human behaviour (as in the modern conception of the open future; cf. Adam and Groves, 2007; Giddens, 1984). By contrast, the future has been conceived as a sphere that does not exist and does not have a reality status (Weigert, 2014) and thus cannot be studied. Both views tend to posit the future outside the social realm: in the first case reifying it, on the other disconnecting it from social experience. From another perspective, oversimplified and dichotomic judgements have often prevailed in the research on individual orientations to the future: people’s views of the future are easily identified as realistic or non-realistic (Cook, 2018; Woodman, 2011), flattening the interpretation of the extremely varied results that empirical research offers. Thévenot’s (2007: 409) idea that engaging with the world within a certain regime orients ‘how reality is grasped and specifies the format of what constitutes relevant information’ helps us to better understand the reality status of the future. Practical anticipation, probability, discovery and possibility are all realistic forms of anticipation of the future as far as they are embedded in different regimes of engagement.

To conclude, it must be acknowledged that, although regimes of engagement are a very useful frame in outlining the multiple modes of engaging with the future, Thévenot’s view of the temporal nature of each regime must be reassessed. In the first place, the primacy of the plan sharply criticised by Thévenot comes back as the plan is considered to be the only dimension of social agency oriented towards the future. More importantly, Thévenot’s idea that each regime has a primary temporal dimension (e.g. past for the regime of familiarity, future for the regime of engagement with the plan and present for the regimes of justification and exploration) cannot account for the varieties of form of projectivity characterising our engagement with the world. Neither does take into account the way projectivity intertwines with the temporal dimension of the past and the present. In my argument, I emphasise instead ways in which investigating the complex temporal nature of each regime is more productive. We involve the present, past and future in everyday practice. From this perspective, the future (in connection with the past and the present) is always there even if projectivity takes different forms. As we engage with social reality through specific formats, we also do so with the future.