This letter went only to Eugene, but it was meant for the whole list.
Ana
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Space and time in chat
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2003 16:39:48 -0400
From: Ana Marjanovic-Shane <anamshane@speakeasy.net>
Reply-To: anamshane@speakeasy.net
To: ematusov@udel.edu
References: <005301c3538f$f7960a60$af00a8c0 who-is-at CC427207B>
Hi Eugene and Jay and everyone,
I am looking at the Stanislavskii's "Stanislavsky on the Art of the
Stage" (1961, Hill and Wang, New York) which contains his "System and
Methods of Creative Art" and two other works. Stanislavski, of course
never used the term "chronotope". And the whole notion of chronotope is
not something he discussed in any technical terms. But in the whole
"System" as well as many other writings he constantly stressed the
importance of:
1. understanding the "character" (dramatis persona): becoming
educated about the life of that character including his inner
feelings, motivations and wishes and outer circumstances,
particular events, etc. (this is what Eugene called "the
chronotope of play ("didactic chronotope" in school)";
2. Stanislavskii insisted very strongly on the crucial importance of,
in Eugene's words: "2) chronotope of scene (here-and-now) (cf.
"local chronotope of the classroom")". For Stanislavskii, the
chronotope of scene is the social group of the people who are
getting together on a project: actors, directors, writers, and all
others who work together on creating a dramatic production. In
that sense, Eugene's "local chronotope of the classroom" is a
great analogy. In addition, in Stanislavskii one can repeatedly
see the crucial importance of the state of the affairs in this
"chronotope" for the production of the art work, i.e. the
relationships among the participants, the ability of the actors to
feel safe and accepted, their ability to experiment and to make
mistakes without being punished. For instance: "How is one to
create this enchanting magic carpet of life's truth on the stage?
.... Once you have chosen the path of creative stage work, you can
obtain results only if you become one happy family" (ch. IV of the
System and Methods of Creative Art"). Thus, if the "here-and-now"
chronotope of the dramatic production can be compared to the
chronotope of the classroom, and the chronotope of the play with
the didactic chronotope, one could immediately see that the social
relationships between the participants in the process of education
are, in fact, going to impact on the "educational product", i.e.
students' learning and acquired knowledge. In addition, the world
of the theater, this "chronotope" of the here-and-now scene, must
be connected and "in sync" with the
3. "chronotope of the actor's past experiences (cf. "ontological
chronotope" although I think that ontological chronotope is not
only about past experiences, but it is also future oriented)".
That's right. In fact, for Stanislavski, it is the WHOLE life of
the actor. "They (the actors) may have their own private life
which has nothing to do with their life on the stage, and indeed
they may have a score of other interests in which their family may
share to a larger or smaller extent. But the true artist is the
man to whom the theatre is the be-all and end-all of his entire
life. His affairs are part of the business of the theatre." (ch.
IV of the System and Methods of Creative Art").
What is important in Stanislavskii's System is the connectedness and
harmony between these, let's call them "chronotopes". In his "Work of
the actor on himself" ("Rabota aktera nad soboj"), he said (and I am
attempting a secondary translation: from Serbian (and not Russian!!)
into English): "A life of a man or a role, it is a continuous succession
of objects and "circles of attention": jumping seamlessly from the real
life, to the life on stage, to the imagined reality, to memories of the
past, to imagining the future... This unbroken continuity is of the
utmost importance for an actor and you have to strengthen it in your
inner self."
Bakhtin's "chronotope" is without doubt a unit of analysis which can
bridge the gap between the level of the activity as a social system and
the activity as an individual understanding, and personal history and
development within a given social activity system.
I very much agree with Jay when he says "the chronotope does I think
offer us an important extension of our ways of characterising activity
systems at the collective and social-historical level, not just in
reminding us of the importance of space as well as time, but also in
defining a unit of analysis at this level, in which we cannot say what
sorts of things people typically do without also saying what those
actions mean..."
and even more when he adds the part about meanings "...we need to think
of feelings in this sense as fully a part of meanings. We have all long
ago agreed that we have to characterise actions and activities in terms
of what they mean for the participants ... and we still need to remember
that such a sense of meaning must include also how we are feeling about
what we do. No meaning without feeling"
What do you say?
Ana
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ana Marjanovic-Shane
215-843-2909 (home)
267-334-2905 (mobile)
Eugene Matusov wrote:
> Hello Jay and everybody-
>
>
>
> Thanks, Jay, for your reply.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 10:19 PM
> To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
> Subject: RE: Space and time in chat
>
>
>
>
> I was very happy to see Eugene's message about chronotopes and
> educational ethnography. It is just one of the topics that I raised at
> the recent Ethnography in Education research conference at the U of
> Pennsylvania. (I was asked to do a keynote address.)
>
> Unfortunately I did not do a full paper, but my notes are linked from
> my website at:
> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/new.htm
> <http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ejaylemke/new.htm>
>
> Thanks, Jay, for the paper!
>
> The html powerpoint may only work if you have a very recent version of
> your web browser, but the ppt file itself should work fine.
>
> My major point was that ethnography increasingly has been emphasizing
> the multiple sites of people lives and how we move among them, while
> educational ethnography, for practical reasons but also because of not
> seeing schools as tightly integrated into the rest of students' lives,
> has tended to stay within the classroom or within the school. I linked
> this to my notion of traversals and timescales, more or less saying
> that learning that matters has to be, and is, learning that extends
> along the larger trajectories of our/students' lives, and that these
> are never confined to classrooms or school.
>
> To add some flesh to the bones, it seemed to me that the notion of
> chronotope can usefully unite the spatial traversals and the temporal
> pacings, interruptions and resumptions, etc. of both
> activities-in-situ and activities-across-places.Characterising the
> chronotopes of learning, in schools and across home-school-elsewhere
> can be a rich project for educational ethnography, and hopefully for
> formulating alternatives to school-obsessed and classroom-myopic views
> of education.
>
> Eugene usefully reminds us that Bakhtin, especially in his earlier
> essays, always added the value dimension to his characterisations of
> how novelistic worlds portray our human lives. This is still strong in
> his work on heteroglossia (ideational and axiological unite to define
> a "social voice": what we say of the world and how we feel about it).
> We lose something in social science when we attempt to make value-free
> or value-neutral descriptions of how people live ... even the effort
> to say simply what people do and when and where they do it is
> misguided if it neglects to also say how people feel about what they
> are doing. This is a very deep insight in Bakhtin, and it is not
> surprising that it comes from his literary-humanistic sensibility,
> which we appropriate today into social science.
>
> I just talked with Ana Marjanovic-Shane in "meatspace" (we both live
> in Philadelphia) and she reminded me work by Stanislavskii (famous
> Russian theater educator). Stanislavskii also focused on (at least)
> three chronotopes for actor's work that roughly correspond to three
> chronotopes of schooling that I described. Actor chronotopes are: 1)
> chronotope of play ("didactic chronotope" in school); 2) chronotope of
> scene (here-and-now) (cf. "local chronotope of the classroom"), and 3)
> chronotope of the actor's past experiences (cf. "ontological
> chronotope" although I think that ontological chronotope is not only
> about past experiences, but it is also future oriented). Ana promised
> to bring references from Stanislavkii.... (thanks, Ana!)
>
> Take this in its strong form: there is no valid characterization, or
> even description, of activity without a concern for evaluative
> orientations or how people feel about what they are doing (good/bad,
> bored/surprised, proud/guilty, enthusiastic/reluctant, etc.).
>
> Yes. That is why is should be called "axiological chronotope" to
> include value. Although, the term becomes a bit too long and awkward.
>
> To some extent we also tend to lose sight of this key dimension of
> activity when we abstract to the level of social-cultural activity
> systems, which are of course very important to characterise. But it is
> easy to wonder how at this level do the elements of feelings and
> evaluations enter? For they are not the same for all participants, and
> indeed there are not often general rules to assign value orientations
> to particular participants roles. The distribution of value
> orientations may not be systematic when the activity as such is the
> unit of analysis. Bakhtin's suggestion here is heteroglossia, as
> sociologically re-interpreted to mean that the distribution of value
> orientations becomes systematic in relation to participants social
> positions in a larger system, across activities as well as in them.
> (Bourdieu makes much the same point about habitus.)
>
> I think we need to unpack the notion of "voice" (any help can be
> highly appreciated). My students, preservice teachers, become so
> excited when I stated that, in my view, the purpose of teacher
> education is to develop their teaching voices. That seems to liberate
> them from any standardized judgment that does not take their personal
> agency into account in changing their performance. However, they
> challenge me, as an educational researcher, to develop the same
> "voice-oriented" approach to all academic areas like math, science,
> English... They said that it is easy for them to see open-ended voice-
> and person- oriented approach in teacher education, art education,
> even English education but it is more difficult to see it in math or
> science education. What is a math voice as personal agency? What can
> be personal in 2+2=4?
>
> So, I'm on the mission from my students to find answers to their
> questions. I'd appreciate any help from XMCA community.
>
> So far, I contacted Paul Cobb and Ellice Forman, as great math
> educators and researchers, whom I tremendously respect. From reading
> they suggested, I've come to a conclusion that constructivist folks
> avoid this question by avoiding "teaching facts" (like 2+2=4).
> Although I understand that educational priority can be on teaching
> concepts rather memorizing facts, I think we should not surrender
> teaching facts to educational decontextualists...
>
> Of course activity theory wants very much to retain a humanistic
> perspective, and at the level of the individual-in-activity, this is
> done. But at the level of the activity system, we find ourselves with
> a notion of social norms of activity, and that characterizes for us
> the possible and typical attitudes and value orientations -- but not
> necessarily how they are distributed among actual and possible
> subjects engaged in the activity, especially differentially, or why
> the distribution is as it is.
>
> Yes, and I think we should get away from mono-chronotopic view of an
> activity system.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Eugene
>
> So the chronotope does I think offer us an important extension of our
> ways of characterising activity systems at the collective and
> social-historical level, not just in reminding us of the importance of
> space as well as time, but also in defining a unit of analysis at this
> level, in which we cannot say what sorts of things people typically do
> without also saying what those actions mean, not just in relation to
> an object or to typical social norms, but with respect to our value
> orientations quite generally. Here again is an important case where we
> need to think of feelings in this sense as fully a part of meanings.
> We have all long ago agreed that we have to characterise actions and
> activities in terms of what they mean for the participants ... and we
> still need to remember that such a sense of meaning must include also
> how we are feeling about what we do. No meaning without feeling.
>
> JAY.
>
> PS. I think Kevin's article is faithful to this conception in the many
> ways that it tells us how the students feel about activity that takes
> place, or move them, from one place and space to another, which has a
> different kind of meaning for them.
>
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