I am actually getting very excited now about the possibilities of extending
the notion of chronotope to make it even more useful as a key organizing
concept for characterizing activity in a sociocultural framework.
Just in the last few days, in correspondence with Kevin Leander, and
thinking about some of our discussion here, I am beginning to see ways to
bring together the notions of multiple timescales of activity, the role of
differentiated, meaningful spatiality, and the way we feel as make our
traversals through lifespaces (and virtual multimedia worlds, including the
web and many online media).
Let me give my sense of chronotope, starting from its Bakhtinian
inspiration, and then developing it just a bit further.
I do not think that B. meant chronotope merely as a more specific focus on
the context of action in the novel. Rather, its origin lies perhaps closer
to the notion of genre, or the classical rhetorical notion of the "topos".
Topos in Greek means "place", but in rhetoric it acquired the sense of
"common-place", i.e some shared way of making meaning that an orator could
count on his audience being familiar with. Topoi can be figures of speech,
grand analogies, well-known stories, etc. The notions of genre that B.
would have inherited in the traditions of east european stylistics
(famously Propp's work on Russian fairy-tales) had a sense that a
particular kind of writing (or also speech genre in B.) followed a
predictable trajectory (e.g. introduction of time, place and characters;
initial situation; complicating events; help in overcoming obstacles toward
a goal; climax and resolution; final state of affairs), and that different
genres mobilized the resources of narrative and language to produce
different sorts of trajectories.
The chronotope is a specification of certain key aspects of a genre
trajectory: the typical expectations that in certain kinds of places, at
certain sorts of times, people in the narrative will engage in activities
of particular kinds that will move them along a relatively familiar kind of
trajectory. B. makes chronotope somewhat more abstract than this because he
is interested in historical changes in the forms of narrative trajectories
in the novel, and so he comes to some rather general ways of characterizing
how authors in different periods, writing different kinds of novels (or
precursors of novels) put time and space together as expectable ways that
action can unfold.
Many of you may be familiar with Aristotle's famous dictum from the
_Poetics_ that a classical Greek tragedy should have a unity of time and
place. In fact the action was supposed to take place in one town on one
day, between sunrise and sunset. Bakhtin sets out to classify and analyze
novelistic genres according to such simple matters as whether they are
supposed to take place in only a few familiar locales or range widely
across many exotic ones, and whether they take place over short periods of
time or epic, multi-generational scope. But he takes this much further,
considering every aspect of the writing that creates a sense of time and
place, and movement across places, and the pacing and vicissitudes of time.
His ultimate interest, however, is how the different historical genres use
their constructions of time and place to define a view of human nature
through the kinds of actions people take on their trajectories through the
space-time of the novel.
How do novelists tell us about people, about ourselves, about our feelings
and values, our beliefs and actions by situating us in places and times and
following our interesecting lifepaths, with their typical and unique
rhythms, cycles, pacings, and unpredictable accelerations and doldrums? In
trying to answer this question B. uses the notion of the chronotope: (a) to
indicate the unity of space/place and time/pace in the creation of a
fictional world, and (b) to characterize typical genres and unique
variations in the ways in which human action and feeling is revealed
through trajectories across space-time.
I would caution against too close comparison with Einstein's space-time. B.
himself says he's appropriating the term mostly as a metaphor, and the key
element in common is probably just the notion that one has to consider
space and time as intimately interrelated, as two aspects of the same
phenomenon. But B's "time-space" (as the translators wisely put it to
distance the term a bit from Einstein's) is also explicitly not Kantian,
not an a priori; it is a careful narrative construction.
As I've written here often enough before, I see the multiple timescales of
the different levels of organization of activity as a key to understanding
how what happens (slowly) in-the-large, at the macro-social and cultural
scale, affords and constrains, and is in its turn constituted out of, what
happens (more quickly) in-the-small, at the scale of human action and
interaction. One important linkage across scales is provided by material
artifacts that have semiotic read/write-ability as well as persistence over
time (including the human body itself). But in the large, there are also,
for example, architectures, landscapes, and cityscapes (as the new critical
geography, e.g. D Harvey, E Soja, emphasizes) that are written upon by
human action and which serve as texts and contexts that afford different
kinds of actions for people who are differently positioned socially,
culturally, and historically. What affords the possibility of, and makes
expectations more or less likely for, a particular kind of activity, is not
just the subjects, objects, and tools (material and symbolic) that are
available, but also the larger architectures and landscapes, the built and
planted and wild ecosystems within which we act.
Even before my interest in timescales, I was trying, along with Arne
Raeithel and Alfred Lang, and many others, to more effectively unite
considerations of evolving-developing-dynamic material-ecological-social
systems with accounts of the kinds of cultural meaning that get made in
these systems and which profoundly influence what activities are done,
where, how, and with what results.
So here is the notion of the chronotope, presenting itself as an organizing
concept for characterizing not just fictional time-space worlds that reveal
human meanings and feelings in action, but also for ethnography (as in
Kevin Leander's MCA paper) that tries to make sense of people cross-site
trajectories and what kinds of activities invoke and involve various
placings and pacings ... and so then also for the virtual worlds, fictional
but more "evolutive" (Alfred's term) than narratives are, in which we also
live and create trajectories (or traversals as I've been calling them) of
action, meaning, and feeling.
What are the critical ways in which space and place play a role in
activity? How are they united with the temporalities of activity (pacing,
interruption, duration, acceleration, etc.)? And how to do they play a role
in the meanings and feelings that we make along the traversals and
trajectories that our activities create for us and for others?
How do they do so similarly and differently in different cultures and
subcultures? in different historical epochs? and according to whether they
do so as represented in fiction (novels, films), as enacted in daily life,
or as created in our interaction with virtual worlds presented by new
interactive technologies?
I have some ideas about research methods to explore these questions, but
there is also a lot more to be done to flesh out this initial inspiration.
Many thanks to Kevin and xmca for catalyzing another germinal project!
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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