At 01:43 AM 5/31/99 -0800, you wrote:
>i have been writing, and trying to locate the historical
>as a spatial entity as opposed to temporal - why?
>
>Well, it seems to me that temporality, and concepts of time lack substance
>and so lack a meaningful relation to history.
>don't you find? we say the historical this and historical that,
>but i am acutely aware that these lack relationality because they lack
>meaning or substance outside of the numerical values of time, the functions
>of
>counting...
Time, in our modern view, has no materiality. It's a linguistic (and
mathematical) sleight-of-tongue for talking about PROCESS, about doing and
happening "over time", but of course time is not "there" already ... it is
MADE by the doings and happenings, or more honestly, it is an aspect of, a
way we look at those doings and happenings.
>
>to speak of the "historical" in meaningful ways is
>crucial, of course:
>
>I was thinking thaat as spatial entities, for example, time occupies the
>body; where as time as temporal occupies the clock, or calendar, or
>artifact that temporalizes time for the ever-useful shared social
>reality...(insert sarcasm here(
There is also a tendency to hide the reality behind time (i.e. process)
with a trivial version of what time is: time as place-in-time, as
day-of-the-week, as time-of-the-clock ... when the important aspect of time
is TIMESCALE, or duration, or characteristic time-it-takes for various
processes to occur (begin, repeat, complete, effect something, change ...)
So in this sense the spatiality of time lies in the materiality of the
happenings that ... endure ... dure? durate? and so in the participants in
those happenings, not as discrete entities, but as aspects of an
interaction among them which _is_ the process ... and which thus fills some
space, usually in fact pushes into some space ... which again was not there
before, is not there apart from processes and things participating in those
processes (things defined only through such
participations-interactions-processes) ... so things get pushed aside, or
pulled in, or twisted about, or diffuse and spread and flow ... and this is
what makes spatiality, too.
History includes long-time scales, i.e. processes over long durations
compared to a human duration, as well as all the shorter-scale processes
that make up the longscale ones. And so it has a corresponding range of
spatial scales as well, from the largest networks involved in the longest
scale processes to the shortest ones of the most local and quick happenings.
Bodily, breathing is time, heartbeats are time, and
time-as-material-in-space means cell-time and organ-time (the heart, the
circulation, the muscle contraction, the brain alpha rhythm cycling) and
organism-time ... and being-with time: being with an other, being part of a
place, doing in/with things and others, being part of larger scale
happenings and processes ...
>
>i have been looking closely at Wittgenstein' Tractatus... hard to follow;
> however, in my handy-dandy Wittgenstein For Beginners, Heaton and Groves
>go to great lengths to describe the actual composition of writing the
>logico philosphico whatever-oh - now this is bloody interesting:
>
>Wittgenstein wrote during WW1, a crisis - i.e., turning, shifting, moving;
>and wrote in the tongue of a crisis mode of thinking: no doubt afraid (he
>was a kid) he turns to the comfort of logic to sanity, order in the chaos:
>
>thus the writing is all propositional, because he didn't want to lose track
>of what was taking place in his words: so, he surrendered to language and
>turned away from needing to own the meanings of the sentences - i think
>this is
>fantastic. as a method for dealing with ideology and conceptual tricks
>that so easily seduce;
Wittgenstein over the course of his life takes many different kinds of
relationship to language, to his own language and his use of language. That
early stage tries to control language as a tool, to objectify it so as to
be able to use it perfectly, to know its meanings totally and completely
... the modernist fantasy, of course, _desperate_ in the WWI crisis ...
grasping at straws because it knows, intuitively, that the whole cosmos
it's tried to believe in for four centuries is crashing down around it (the
cosmos of the inevitable victory of Reason over every human ill). .... By
the end of his days, Wittgenstein is much wiser, is one of the first true
post-modernists: he understands that we are _inside_ the language games of
our community, that we cannot formalize and objectify and perfect and
control them because they constrain us, not the other way around; their
processes and durations are longer than ours, their networks bigger than
ours; we are their products, not the other way around. (Actually, we play a
constitutive role, from our smaller scale as speakers and writers and
language innovators, in the change of language and language games; but
still and only within their longer-term constraints on our intelligibility
to ourselves and others.)
>
>could one write in "crisis," that is, not trauma but in movement, however
>slowly it may be, and at the same time describe the movements through
>theory, ideas, history, i mean, histpry of men up until 1980s; a crisis in
>a crisis, embedded
>shifts that are trapped really, caught in the other - like knowledge and
>identity, as collapsed concepts, whoa. doesn't anything change? or is that
>
>just ok? (ah yeeeep i remember when epistemology and ontology collapsed,
>heh heh, heard a noise and thought yer nanna had fallen off the bidet
>again... what a mess...)
Generally dating the collapse from the trench warfare and phosgene gas and
smallpox ... probably would have made nanna's bidet seem like the Crystal
Fount ... and Modern Man collapsed on his butt for sure, the butt end of
philosophy, firmly planted fundamentum of realist ontology and empiricist
episteme, right then and there. What a stench!! but then again, the war
metaphors perhaps take it all too seriously, as men are taught to do, in
order to take ourselves more seriously ... better to have a laugh with nanna!
>
>
>I wonder if writing in the instant of writing can be a method for turning
>away from what meanings might prewrite - if that makes sense...
>
>i am trying to find a way to writing where the method of wording is a
>language practice for tracing language as a movement distinct from thought
Writing language, perhaps even more than speaking it, does allow it to
become "distinct from thought" in the sense that new timescales are added,
or intervene, beyond those of the body bare: now also those of the
implement and the medium, the second motor route (beyond speech center,
articulations), the second perception (visual on top of aural or
inner-aural): the time-loop of looking back at what we've written, and
writing over in its space,
... of looping our trace-trails back in space-for-time
... of gaining the freedom of the writing space: all those extra processes
links, all those more timescales, all those ways of linking them across
process and scale... or not.
>-
>if historical materialism, and the time machine that is the leaking messy
>human body, are spatially located, then it is possible to turn continuously
>from one
>to the other, without ever imposing temporal passages, ya?
Without imposing them, by simply being in them, being carried in passages
in which we are both part of history and part of breathing ... in
multiscale processes that are only multiscale after the fact and in an
imaginary being _outside_ them to measure and scale them ... but being
_inside_ them ... there is a poly-reality, a thick consciousness, a texture
to Being ... which is the sort of thing that _can_ be externally described
as multi-scale ... when it's dead and etherized upon the table ... but that
_living_ is just our body rolling over as history.
>
>for example,
>in spatial language, i could relocate the same historical body writing
>here, in this space of this moment of sudden GUILT i should be doing
>something else...
>
>and move to a memory-space which is actively being retrieved, i am thinking
>now of k.d. lang, it is occurring as i write; i shook her hand, and scared
>her publicist - but the point is, the space my body fills is both constant
>and dispersed as i recall and move mentally to other temporal moments,
>
>surfing my first wave - there time stood still: just as shaking k.d.'s hand
>is a frozen moment, i can move from this space of writing and writing with
>an active awareness of the writing; how many layers until i write so close
>,
> to the flesh of humanity that i draw blood ?
Truly beautiful to give words to this kernel of immortality ... outside
temporality, through _memory_, which is the body's own writing, through
_language/sign_ that palimpsests a second meaning-reality on any first (and
a third on any second, and on ... as Peirce describes perfectly), through
the _tool-artifact-text_ and our Batesonian loops through it, through
"perfect action" (like the karma yogi of the Gita) that stands outside
causal-consequential time because we act inside the the inner horizon of
the possibility of time itself.
>
>i am mired in this method of writing, because i think it is a way to write
>that can express the historical character of identity, without temporally
>dispersing it to "the past" -
>that, too, is a crisis because the turning to the past is only done halfway,
>so many get stuck in memory and nostalgia and pretend - but
the dark trick of retrospective recounting, the past tense ... the lie at
the heart of every narrative truth-telling ... the infinite gap between
experiencing and retelling ... the academic weakness of substituting the
tale for the experience as the object of attention.
>
>the spatial body fills time, can be in time and in the past within that
>same time, the mirrors facing the other - ultimately, what is missing is a
>language
>of identity that is humane - fleshy and not ashamed, hard or soft but not
>hooked on endorphin rushes...
The material body is the nexus of all times, and the consciousness it
supports can not only be in multiple times, but Be on multiple timescales
... even those beyond the organism's since we are also part of even the
largest Process ...
Our fleshly Self speaks itself in many languages, the LEAST of which verbal
language ... though that too in the sensualities of sound, the
form-patterns of script, the feel of the 'bouche' , the hexis of the
calligrapher writing ... sensualities which mean, too: the meanings of
degree that care not what "kinds" we also construe there. But the languages
of touch and scent are MORE complex than verbal language, for all that
logocentrism denies them. And most of all, the languages of motion and
visual trace, bodily forms formed by and from bodies, ours and others' and
of all material ... with all the resource of verbal language, and
infinitely more besides ... and infinitely more frightening in their
potential to remake what it is to be human.
>
>bah!!it is the hardest work, to work with ideas - mebbe that's why i seek
>the body-context, because the body is a time machine that does not speak,
>but if we could listen to it, and understand how we are spatiality related,
>as an object that occupies a social existence and also fulfills a social
>relation;, there may be a way to re-invest our sociality
>with meaningful bodies of flesh and identities rather than meaningful ideas.
Ideas are creatures of "kinds", thin grids on the continua of degree that
are our bodies' natural languages for making us be ... there is more
identity in our degrees than ever possibly in our kinds ...
... so maybe we should not be so quick to look down our noses at Dr. Freud,
who said all this quite clearly, in a no longer fashionable language.
>
>and now for my closing irony: i'm actually a hermit! a recluse!
>a social clod! a loner. funny eh?
>
Me, too. JAY.
>best regards
>diane hodges
>
>""""""""""""""""""""""" """""""""""""""""""""""""""""
> When she walks,
> the revolution's coming.
> In her hips, there's revolution.
> When she talks, I hear revolution.
> In her kiss, I taste the revolution.
> (by Kathleen Hanna: Riot Grrl)
>******************************************
> diane celia hodges
> university of british columbia
> faculty of graduate studies,
> centre for the study of curriculum and instruction,
> vancouver, british columbia, canada
>
>email: dchodges who-is-at interchnage.ubc.ca
>
---------------------------
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>
---------------------------