I am certainly familiar with Braudel and quite enjoy his work on the
history of everyday life. I also know and appreciate Thompson's essay that
Paul Dillon mentioned, and there is indeed quite a lot of work also on the
anthropology of time, especially by Africanists and Australianists. I do
not know of any of this work however which concerns itself specifically
with relations among social and natural processes that take place at very
different characteristic time-rates in the sense that I am interested in
these matters. Certainly historians provide us with tantalizing data for
the identification and analysis of longterm historical timescale processes,
and anthropologists and sociologists have long dealt with the general
relations between enduring cultural formations and daily practices. But
there are serious problems, theoretical and methodological, in making use
of this work for my purposes.
Consider Giddens, for example. Paul mentioned his notions of time-space
geographies and time-space distanciation, as did Phil Graham (perhaps in a
private posting, I sometimes lose track of what's on the list and what's
off). The former notion derives from Giddens' reading of Hagerstrand (?)
and others who study the ways people move through time and space, changing
their typical action patterns and mobilizing different cultural resources
in different 'regions'. Giddens considers this 'regionalization' in place
and duree (the cultural meaning-laden equivalents of bare physical spaces
and times) in interesting ways that I generally find helpful, as well as,
to a lesser degree the edges or borders where they 'join' (only they really
don't, except as bare time and space, hence the problem). But there is no
concern that I can see for the issue I am mainly dealing with: integration
across processes that occur at very different rates, or last or cycle on
very different typical durations of time even within the same spaces and
encompassing the same moments of daily life. The same act in the same place
may be part of many processes on different timescales (heterochrony); how
are they integrated? Giddens, that I know, considers only the gross
rapprochment between 'micro-' and 'macro' paradigms in sociology (as I also
do in Textual Politics, chap. 2), though frankly I have never quite seen
just how he would bridge their methodologies in practice. I don't disagree
with his theoretical arguments for the complementarity and compatibility of
models of social practices and models of social structure, but at least
Bourdieu, for me, gives a more substantive indication of how to link them
in actual reseach studies (even if he doesn't do it as well as I, or
probably he, would wish). (I think that Basil Bernstein also gives a rather
more specific account of these matters in general theory, and is quite
underestimated as a social theorist.) I am also beginning to find Luhmann
quite useful in this respect. Giddens, I regret to say, much less so.
Equally or more exciting is the approach of David Harvey, Neil Smith,
Lefebvre, and the new geographers, who also turn their attention to time.
Their concern begins, as does Giddens', with the social production of time
and space (i.e of meaningful place and duree or timespans-for-activity),
and they then move on to considering the entanglement of time and space.
Harvey cites this as a key question for future work. Neil Smith is a new
colleague of mine and I'm looking forward to discussing the issues. The
range of specific processes to be dealt with here does cross timescales,
and there is some suggestion that enduring Places function to some extent
like more mobile semiotic artifacts in mediating heterochrony. Harvey does
not cite Giddens; nor vice versa so far as I know.
Giddens' other potentially relevant approach, time-space distanciation (a
very unfortunate choice of terms, I think), derives more directly from his
reading of Durkheim, and he has developed it into the rather interesting
notion that social networks which span more space and time are more stable.
Presumably this applies both physically and culturally (though whether this
is just my reading or also Giddens' meaning I'm not sure), so that the
diversity of Places and Activities also contributes as such. Indeed, in my
terms, the logical extension would be that social systems/networks that
integrate across more timescales (not just bigger or longer, but with more
intermediate timescales between fastest and slowest constitutive processes
of the system) are less susceptible to disruption. I can in fact argue this
point quite precisely in terms of complex system theory (the Gent paper,
complement to the timescales paper, should give some idea how this argument
would go). But Giddens really seems to mean 'distanciation' or 'extensional
reach' mainly in the physical sense, and perhaps also the cultural, but not
so far as I can see in the mutiple scale sense. I think that on such
issues, Latour's notions of the extension and complexity of sociotechnical
networks (say in his views on how modernism and pre-modernism differ) come
closer to my concerns. In general, Giddens really does seem still to use
relatively structural terms of analysis (cf. regionalization), rather than
dynamic, process-focal ones. Once one's units of analysis are processes,
rather than agents, regions, or structures, the issue of integrating them
across timescales presents itself rather dramatically. Giddens does focus
on processes at the level of human activities, practices on the more micro
scales, but this does not then become a basic principle for genealizing
across scales (i.e. "it's all process", which is my strategic move); by
making the very sensible choice of a complementarity between structuration,
a process, and structure (somewhat really as Bourdieu also does), he can
conveniently shift between them at need. While this is sensible, certainly,
it can also allow us to avoid potentially important driving problems (like
heterochrony) that force themselves on us in less sensible theories like
mine. Giddens in some sense cannot make my move without demoting the
privileged role he wishes to assign to agents and agency for political
reasons. All theories are works of Desire, whatever else they may be.
To return from sociology, geography, and anthropology to history, I would
not be the first to notice the real difficulties of integrating the
historical paradigm and the social-scientific. Very few historians have
dared to identify and analyze really long timescale processes. From
Spengler to William H. McNeil to non-historians like Jared Diamond and
archeologists like Foucault, the mix of long timescales and notions of
material process have proved explosive for the discipline of history and
its practitioners. Diamond, to take a recent case, is a biologist, who is
perfectly happy to see centuries and millennia long processes at work (e.g.
domestication of crops and animals), a sort of micro-co-evolution.
Evolutionary biologists, and Gaia theorists (geo-bio-physicists) are
accustomed to long timescales, and there is considerable debate even there
between the classical epistemology of natural selection (that it is not a
material process, just an artifact of our retrospective analysis; the
actual material processes are on very short timescales, e.g. reproduction,
predation) and the new complex systems theory view (cf. Stuart Kauffman, or
Stan Salthe) which begins to say that actual material processes on long
time scales play a previously unacknowledged role (e.g. the developmental
trajectories of the biosphere as a whole; emergent interactions in complex
ecosystems and their gene pools). Is history just time-series data, with no
actual material processs at very long timescales? or do the larger scale
ecosocial systems and networks have the kind of material reality that
extreme ethnomethodologists deny to them, as proven by the existence of
processes on long timescales that occur only through and across the global
extension of these networks? I am betting on the latter.
Not many historians will stick their necks out so far, given the
professional risks. Historians of technology tend to use a natural
selection sort of model; Foucault cleverly defines his enterprise as
archeology so that the retrospective pseudo-processes of our analyses
become his very object of study! But history will have to confront the
demon in the closet sooner or later. Events and actions (and here I agree
entirely with Giddens) do not happen in a vacuum, there is some longer-term
more stable material context co-determining them. Those 'structures',
however, are not just the results of structuration or structure-making
practices, they are themselves very slowly unfolding processes, with their
own characteristic timescales, and emergent properties, and their material
substrates are vast networks of interdependent processes-cum-participants
(human and nonhuman, people and places and things). History is the
collective autobiography of these long-lived, developing, ecosocial
systems. If the complex systems paradigm hold true, as it has so far, these
systems have typical long-term developmental trajectories, typical of kinds
or types (like the typical successional trajectories of ecosystem
development for different kinds of ecologies), as well as unique histories.
If this sounds frighteningly like the super-organism theories of yore, well
it is; except that it is not the agential organism that is the prototype,
but something more like the ecosystem. History is not fully described by
the the 'natural selection' model of evolution as a pseudo-process that is
really just changing distributions in a population from generation to
generation; it also involves real developmental processes on long
timescales in 'individuals' at the macro-scale. But this view also requires
that we reframe our views of development less as autonomous, internally
guided and driven processes, and more as multi-timescale trajectories with
both lower scale constitutive processs and higher scale constraining
processes (external contexts, artifacts), resulting in emergent collective
dynamics.
Way too much said! but still far too little ..... 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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