Re: chronotopes and Eugene's garage

From: Jay Lemke (jaylemke@umich.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 19:17:12 PDT


I do hope Eugene's car did not get locked in the garage ... and the
pressure of urgency to his action in finishing his message to us and going
off to get the car, shows both that clock-time is indeed used as a system
of regulation and control of behavior (in conjunction with other tools and
powers) and that how we feel about the pacing of an activity (pressured and
anxious, or indifferent - if it didn't matter whether the car got locked
in, say) is a semiotic effect, depending on our interpretation and its
contexts, but still one that influences how we respond.

Kevin's point of course is that it's not all about time ... locking a
garage is much more an issue of the spatial aspects of the chronotope (and
of course this is a recognizable cultural chronotope: the rush to get
something done before a deadline, where the constraints arise from distance
or spatial access, etc.), or at least the effect is only produced jointly
by the coming together of the temporal (closing time, clocktime, short time
left) and spatial features (how far to the garage, garages as places that
can be closed, cars as objects that move in space, but only if there are no
barriers, etc.).

Bakhtin explicitly says in his discussion of chronotopes that he is going
to focus on time. I am sure that he must have planned, and maybe even
wrote, some other piece on the space-and-place aspects. He does touch on
these in relation to time, e.g. in the genre of the adventure or travel
novel, and the differences between stay-at-home chronotopes and
see-the-world ones. Still, Kevin is right that a lot of work still remains
to fully spatialize the ways we use the notion of chronotope.

Ron and Suzy Scollon have a new book in press on "geo-semiotics" in which
they generalize their work studying the placement of public signs in
streetscapes around the world to consider some of the many ways in which
place matters to meaning, particularly to linguistic meaning. They however,
while recognizing the complementary importance of issues of time, do not
really deal much with the temporal aspects. At one place they write: "We
might think of each type of social interaction as having preferred, if not
obligatory, time and space requirements." The notion they are developing
there is rather close to synomorphy, I think. Their view of social
interaction types comes from Goffman. But it sounds a lot like a chronotope
to me!

There was also a question about Bakhtin's literary objects of study vs.
issues of everyday life activities, same and different. We can look at
literary materials, I think, both as data and as theory. As theory, we are
imagining that the author was providing some insight into what matters in
human life and activity, and how it matters. I rather think that authors
like Proust or Dostoevsky were quite as good at this as any social
theorists we cite. And I think Bakhtin treated Dostoevsky in this way. On
the other hand one could argue that with Rabelais, the texts are taken a
bit more as data about the culture of an earlier epoch, or even as data
about how an author of that time interpreted human life (as we might also
do with, say, Chaucer). Shakespeare seems to count both ways, as theorist
of the human condition and as exemplar of his age, and of course one really
treats all authors in both these ways, to varying degrees. Popular culture
studies tend to look at, say, television programs, more as data; but you
never know when you're going to find a theorist in there!

Taken as theory, rather than simply as art, even though many features of a
narrative or drama are very different from those in everyday life, we read
the literary work as having something to say about the principles which
organize our lives meaningfully. After all, the genres of our social
theories are not very much like the phenomena we study, either. It is
particularly when we look at literary materials as data, not about
literature, or even about culture in a time and place, but as
representations of life, that we have to also focus on the differences. I
think it was Alfred Hitchcock who said that films were like life, but with
the boring bits left out. Of course from the point of view of social
theory, the boring bits may be critically important. Nevertheless, the
point of theory is not to give detailed exegesis of endless videotapes; it
is to identify some principle learned from analyzing a lot of real-life
data. Such principles can clearly be articulated in art as well as in
academic writing. From our side, we need to formulate the principles
foregrounded in literary work, and take them as hypotheses. I don't know
whether literary writers read us, but Katherine Hayles has made the case
that sometimes they do.

I'd be willing to bet that there are a lot of insights into the chronotopes
of everyday life in literature, and even more to be found regarding the
various ways in which place and time come into our meanings and feelings.

JAY.

At 09:11 AM 7/29/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Have been reading the conversation on chronotopes with a great deal of
>interest and have enjoyed how Jay, Eugene, and others pushed the
>conversation toward value, ideology, and considering the qualitative
>differences among time-spaces a la Bakhtin--putting to work on the
>institution of schooling and schooled practices the kind of analysis that
>B. put to work on literature.
>
>Eugene's note about his car and the university garage (in the middle of
>the conversation) reminded me of how Bakhtin talks about chronotopic
>motifs--the sense in which an entire time-space can be called up by an
>image, briefly sketched scene, or typified action (e.g., strangers meeting
>on the road). Eugene's car getting locked in the university garage is an
>example--an image that calls up institutional control of schedule and
>space, Eugene's traversals to home or other spaces, etc.
>
>I wonder how others on the list conceive of limits of the chronotope as
>Bakhtin has developed it. In my thinking, Bakhtin's notion of time-space
>is overly dominated by the temporal/historical and a thin on the spatial,
>the simultaneous, the dispersed, or rich notions of place. He seems
>primarily interested in the relation between the chronotope and
>characters' (historical) development (or lack thereof).
>
>I also don't think that Bakhtin gets us far along in thinking about the
>relations between semiotic and material chronotopes. He certainly
>recognized that the chrontopes of the work (e.g., novel) and the
>chronotopes of the reader's world come together and interact, but beyond
>this, I sense we need to go elsewhere to develop a more rich theory of
>time-space production across "perceived spaces" and "conceived spaces"
>(Lefebvre).
>
>But, would love to hear more reflections and arguments on Bakhtin or
>otherwise.
>
>Kevin
>
>
>
>
>
>>Dear Mike and everybody-
>>
>>I'm risking my car being locked in the University garage but I want to
>>briefly reply to your question,
>--
>Kevin Leander, Ph.D.
>Assistant Professor, Teaching and Learning
>Vanderbilt University
>www.vanderbilt.edu/litspace

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



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 01 2003 - 01:00:09 PDT