Re: Groping toward the future

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Tue, 05 Jan 1999 21:03:31 -0500

I also appreciated your images of the sociality of prospect and retrospect,
Alfred.

One meditation of mine on a theme by Latour in his MCA article a year or so
ago wondered how human evolution (biological and cultural) may have
responded to the need to piece together a model of the wider environment
based on reports from scouts and visitors.

Today I would certainly also be thinking, as you suggest, in terms of
timescales and views forward and back, or should I just say views imagined
and remembered. When we shift from the individual past and future to the
collective past and future, we find that we all participate in a history we
must imagine but cannot remember, and anticipate futures imagined in large
part out of the memories of others.

We can even project elements for the future that are like no one's
memories, in part by interpolating and extrapolating from comparisons
within the collective memory. If we do not imagine for ourselves what has
already been real for another, we imagine from some space of possibles that
we create over such "reals".

It is perhaps worth thinking further about the sociality of time. 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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