Some pieces that I think fit into this puzzle:
1. Time-scales are associated with spatial scales and energy-matter scales,
but the scales can slip out of a strict hierarchy that keeps them aligned
(bigger on one is/isn't also bigger on the others).
2. Networks, and two-dimensional sheet-like models (lamina) of systems,
have a different topology from the usual
smaller-spheres-within-bigger-spheres model of systems theory. Two events
in 3-dimensional space, or in time, can be near one another in a network
but not be more likely to interact than two other events widely separated
in space and time. This fact vitiates many intuitions we have about how
systems behave (for example that they collide at the peripheries before
they can, or never do, intersect at their centers). Most importantly it
allows events on very different spatial scales, and so time scales, to
directly interact without being mediated by intermediate scale phenomena.
3. Tangled hierarchies of scale, where very different scale phenomena
directly interact, can be modeled in terms of non-linear dynamics and
renormalization theory. They offer opportunities for event-scale acts to
tip the course of history, and for longterm historical processes to appear
in momentary interactions. They seem especially common in dynamical systems
where 'meaning' plays a role and is 'attached' to bodies, artifacts,
environmental objects; these can behave as 'black boxes' that under special
conditions 'open up' and instead of behaving like units on a smaller scale
suddenly behave in terms of their histories, trajectories, biographies on a
much longer time scale (and over a much larger space scale).
4. In well-behaved, classical scale hierarchies, where each level of
analysis is homogeneous in scale, the N-1 level provides constituent
affordances, and the N+1 level appears as larger-system constraints, on the
level (N) in focus, the much higher or lower levels are 'filtered' by the
intermediate levels and can be more or less ignored. But if there is
scale-heterogeneity in the system, then a much higher or lower level has a
direct effect; this is rare in simple physical and chemical systems,
becomes more common with rising complexity of dynamical coupling of diverse
constituents, happens a fair bit for biological systems (organism and
ecosystem scales), and is normal in ecosocial systems (ecosystems with
meaning-making processes integral to their dynamics). Semiotic artifacts
usually mediate cross-scale intersections.
5. If we assume that TIME is itself a notion that must be derived from
process or activity, that interactions and processes are fundamental, there
is no _a priori_ time, then time is generated by processes, is only a
parametrization useful in linking across processes, and time is no longer
'punctual'. That is, there are 'quanta' of time (perhaps even for simple
elementary physical systems, but I'm speaking here about much longer
time-scales normally), what Salthe has called 'cogent moments' for various
processes. Some processes have a single such scale, others have multiple
scales. These are quanta in the sense that it does not make sense to
analyze the relevant process or phenomenon on scales shorter than this
(perhaps also not on longer scales, a different matter having to do with
the definition of trajectories). So time is not point-like; it is not true
that only the instantaneous present has a material reality, that instant is
not even meaningful for such processes. Instead, the time units specific to
some process always extend, from the viewpoint of our dominant cultural
model, from a past through the present to a future, or more simply, there
is a finite present that has irreducible extension in (a priori,
mathematical) time. In each instant of physics time, a living organism is
not alive but dead (if frozen into that instant it would not be living);
life is a process or phenomena that requires some minimal finite extension
in time to exist.
6. So imagine that an event on some time-scale is a whole on that scale,
and a constituent of a larger-scale process on the next scale in a
well-behaved hierarchy of processes (scale-homogeneous), but it is also a
'moment' of many other still larger-scale processes (trends, developments,
evolutions). Normally in the usual models information from those much
higher scales does not count, does not 'make a difference' at the
scale-levels in focus. But in a tangled hierarchy, one with
scale-heterogeneous processes and cross-scale intersections, this need not
be true. The distant past can speak through the event/object to the
present. More strangely in terms of our cultural models of time and
causality, so can the future -- for this aspect of the future is not an
as-yet-uncaused one, is not subject to infinite contingency in the
intervening time, because there is no intervening time, that aspect of the
future already exists now, overlapping our present; we are as much in that
future (or past) as we are in the present. We need to distinguish between
the past we represent to ourselves (a fallible reconstruction) and the past
that is alive in us now; between the futures we imagine as (contingent)
extrapolations, and the future-in-extended-present we are already a part of.
7. There are no small finite number of levels of analysis for ecosocial
systems, or human/nonhuman behavior in such systems; there are many, many
such levels on many intermediate scales. For some processes they keep in
their places (no tangling, no cross-scale intersections, only N+1 and N-1
directly relevant), and for other, especially semiotic-artifact mediated
ones (but bodies and natural objects can also be semiotic artifacts), there
are typical patterns of cross-scale intersections. These are what
_relevantly_ link or integrate across, say, event-scale,
institutional-change-scale, social-history-scale,
ecosocial-evolutionary-scale, etc. -- (also downwards toward
neurophysiological scales in some cases).
8. So, it is not the case that all scales are always relevant; in some
kinds of social-interactional-historical processes they are, and in other
they are not, and we expect to find various kinds of typical patterns of
cross-scale linkages -- finding these is the job of research. Which levels
link, under what sorts of circumstances, and how? We may also be interested
in the complementary, more normal question: how are much higher and lower
levels influences filtered out under other circumstances? (The general
argument is that fast things go by so quickly that higher level processes
have evolved to be sensitive only to time-average values of these over the
longer time-scale, while slow trends do not present enough difference over
the focal time-scale to make a difference. But some fast events are
catastrophic and blast their way through the filters, lie outside the
evolved parameters for averaging (e.g. fast but also very high energy), and
some slow trends just happen to reach a critical, qualitative branching
point on the focal time-scale of now.)
9. An interesting example, suggested to me by some analyses Stanton Wortham
is making. We usually say that retrospective interview accounts of how
someone came to construct their identity (oral history, life history) are
fallible since they are created from the filtering perspective of the
present identity of the teller. But the telling-to-someone is itself a
life-event in which identity is being constructed (renewed, maintained and
probably only a little bit changed or innovated usually), and so in the
telling, analyzed as a now-interaction with the interviewer, on display
will be many of the typical, accumulated, quasi-stable strategies of
identity construction of a life trajectory. Thus the now-accounting, as
opposed to the account-of-then, which are the same data event seen
differently, can count as an instance of a larger time-scale, more slowly
changing, past-present-future practice. And it can happen in this telling
(cf. psychoanalytic interviews, transferences, etc. obviously) that there
is an intersection of scales: a conversational event in which the present
telling creates a token (a word, a memory) that 'resonates' with a
longer-time-scale process (still ongoing in the body, or the situated-body,
or the body-in-community, etc.) at the same time that it functions here and
now in creating a text about the (fallibly reconstructed)past (which may
have been told many times before, and have a history, such as how people
have reacted to the story before), and functions in the interpersonal
interaction of teller and interviewer (so that the interviewer's reaction
may also resonate with the trajectory of past reactions to a story), and
all this may happen as an instance of a relatively stable personal strategy
for identity construction in face-to-face situations of this sort.
10. In this quasi-example I have only sketched the time-scale dimensions.
Obviously one could also trace out the processes at the larger relevant
scales into their ecosocial networks: family history, worklife history,
etc. with their potential links to critical events that changed family
interpersonal relations, or opportunities on the job for use of some
identity-construction strategy. And this raises the critical methodological
question of at what levels to focus in order to be most likely to discover
cross-level linkage patterns that may be typical in a community (rather
than purely idiosyncratic, if anything is). Here I think I agree with Mike
Cole's proposal in _Cultural Psychology_ and elsewhere that one needs to
start from a core interest or focus at a middle, or mesogenetic level,
which means some sort of institution-with-a-history ('sustainable'), within
which one can look to the level of social (-artifactual) interactional
events, and around which one can look to larger social-material-political
ecologies (network links to other institutions, constraints from legal
systems and governments, etc.). And culture as a notion, like history
(trajectory) as a notion, applies to all levels; moreover, as the notion
that centralizes the role of semiotic processes in human behavior,
'culture' is best positioned to help foreground and articulate the typical
patterns of cross-scale linkages that characterize meaning-making ecosocial
systems.
-- these are still just pieces in the puzzle; I still need to imagine
clever ways to get around the basic obstacle which the normal (untangled)
scale-hierarchies place in the way of cross-scale research: people don't
live long enough to study longterm processes directly; only the creation of
(an evolving) institution on the same scale as the longterm processes
themselves might allow this to happen in some sense (know any examples?)
... but the (also normal) tangled hierarchies of cross-scale linkages
should allow a (partial) solution ... to do something like Stanton's trick
at the mesogenetic level (what Mike is trying with the 5thD, Martin in
Michigan, etc.) ...
-- with thanks to all those mentioned already, and to Bateson, Heidegger,
Latour, and the second half of the 20th century ... :)
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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