look backward, angel

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Tue, 29 Dec 1998 22:15:44 -0500

That Benjamin story of the retrograde angel sounds familiar --- didn't
someone quote it a while back when we were briefly talking about _African_
cultural views of past, present, future ... I think I had quoted from a
dissertation on contemporary African music and ritual I was reading, to the
effect that one faces toward the cumulating past which gives meaning to a
present moment only as it, too, joins that past ... what meaning can the
future have except what the past gives it through us? The African model
seems to be built also on quite a different time scale than our modern
Western one: seasons and generations, the cohorts of those initiated in the
same year, back ... or shouldn't I say FORWARD through the ancestors to the
present generation, whose status and obligations derive/descend from theirs.

On my current hobbyhorse of multiple timescales, perhaps we should give
some thought to the possibility that we take different orientations to
past/present/future depending on the timescale in focus ... the proleptic
orientation of european parents toward their children's futures has a very
definite ladder of timescales, with very interesting assumptions about how
the next few moments might make a difference decades hence. Not many
people, or institutions, think this way about futures centuries hence, or
millennia. On the long timescales, don't we also mainly face backwards? and
can we relate this to our 'horizon of control'? that we look to the future
only insofar as we are concerned about controlling it, or think we can or
must control it (influence it, contribute to it) ... whereas when our
concern is with meaning, with the hermeneutics of experience, we face
backwards on timescales short (as in Mike's example), and very, very long...

Which can take us to issues of identity .... the retrospective narration of
our past to make ourselves the protagonists, actants with qualities that
matter to us and others ... as we do with history, just as much as with
autobiography, projecting an identity by identification: we Americans, we
Europeans, we inheritors of Greece and Rome, ... but we do not LIVE
narratively; and indeed for purposes other than simple story identity,
perhaps we are weavers of hypertexts rather than tellers of tales ... and
facing to our Future, yes, we fashion possible stories, but these too we
tell ourselves as if looking backwards from a future time after the
present's future has become past again ... our real future orientation, and
the futurist component of identity must be something different, if anything
at all.

So, to stir the pot -- do we not have different identities, even
narrative-actant identities, on different timescales? and is not the notion
of identity meant to encompass more than just narrative identity? what
notions of identity would be suggested by the paradigm of the hypertext
weaver rather than the tale-teller? and what basis is there for notions of
identity that derive from our efforts to control the we-to-be? Foucault
mentions some ideas about the technologies of the Self, and they are not
all retrospective ...

Is there any OTHER basis for the construction of identity THAN values ??

jay.

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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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