A special hello to Jay, whose presence I've missed. Directly to the author
of this months reading, I'd like to say that I enjoyed your paper and find
the development around heterochronicity very useful and insightful. I do
find the adiabatic principle stepping stone distracting and quite possibly
unnecessary. It is perhaps because I am trained as a physicist. I find
too many exeptions to that rule in the physical world alone, and debate its
utility in introducing heterochronicity. Perhaps it is also my impatience
that I'd like to see the real stuff of the paper appear closer to the front.
The more explicit inclusion of time is very important for our thinking of
distributed interaction, and Jay's paper helps us to understand why.
Processes across many traditionally characterized scales of time talk to
each other. Our unexamined assumption about these temporal categories is
that the chaining of events within one scale of time are essentially
independent of processes occuring over a different scale of time. In some
ways, we are already know this is wrong -- after all, this is the mailing
list for *cultural-historical* activity theory, and we entertain
theoretical notions as prolepsis -- but we are still limited in the ways in
which we describe these heterochronic interactions. Our words and
sentences read linearly (except for those who possess the talents of
multiprocessing) and our graphs and diagrams are often static (with one
exception being Yrj=F6's web site). Our re-presentations per se, of this
dynamic world back to ourselves, suffer an unchanging form.
The methodological issue that Jay raises in "it takes a village.." is
enormous. The question arises not only about the re-presentation, but who
is doing it, and thus connecting to the emergent problems of third-order
cybernetics. Immediately one can recognize that WE can't know it all --
all of us in the village, in constant interaction with each other,
communicating what we know, will not be able to describe it all. Neither
will *WE* be able to know it all ever, at any time-- we in interaction with
our selves of the past, building upon our theories, and we in interaction
with our selves of the future, for whom we are building the foundations of
our work.
While there are merits to the eurocultural strategy of 'breaking into
parts', we know the *limits* of that approach -- and the notion of limits
is one thing solid that I take away from Jays paper. It would seem that we
must recognize that we will be constrained in any way that we try to know
ourselves, and it is essential to understand how better to bound our
studies in a way that will better benefit our selves of here and now, and
the future. Can ecosocial studies be bounded in a way that gives us some
purchase on the compelling problems we face today and tommorrow? What are
the best questions that ecosocial researchers can ask?
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]