Jay, would you say that Eugene is simultaneously in two chronotopes
(another word to include in my spell checker!) or that he is rapidly
switching between them? Again from memory I believe that behavior
setting theorists contend that you can only be in one behavior setting
at a time. This raises the question of nesting and hierarchy, a nasty
knot! And of course the degree of independence/ mutual influence.
Don Cunningham
Indiana University
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 9:46 PM
To: XMCA LISTGROUP
Subject: polychronotopic dynamics
I chose a subject line for this message that combines the two bits I
wanted
to comment on --- how we live in the midst of multiple chronotopes (as
with
Eugene's sagas of xmca, garage politics, and family life) and how to get
more dynamic rather than static representations (Bill's concern).
These are both rather large and difficult issues, of course. So just a
few
ideas.
I think that multiple chronotopes are the normal case in real life. In
literature as Bakhtin analyzes it, there is some dominant chronotope
that
structures the work on its longest timescale, and I think he sees the
chronotope of the work as encompassing both this overall chronotope of
the
genre and the more specific ways in which a particular work fills out
the
generic chronotope outline with various literary ways of construing
place
and time in action. In life, I think there are also definitely longer
timescale chronotopes, and these have some structuring effect on the
shorter-term ones, but not so neatly as in literature. In life the
salience
of the different chronotopes can conflict and compete, and there may not
be
any neat shape to the whole. But the principles of chronotopic analysis
are
still useful.
So Eugene very nicely describes some of the salient features regarding
placement, timing, and values that guided his actions in three
activities,
each with its own recognizable chronotopic pattern. We also get a sense
of
the conflicts among them, which is what makes the story interesting. If
he
had just engaged in each of the activities separately and sequentially,
or
on different days (writing to xmca, getting the car in time, going home
to
commune with his family) it would not be so interesting for us, or so
fraught for him. It's the ways in which the multiple activities get
thrown
together in time and space that adds the important FEELING that Eugene
experienced. Moreover, that feeling itself has a trajectory in time and
changes, from first realizing that the deadline is approaching as he
writes
to xmca, a feeling which then persists, and also thinking about how late
he
is and how long it takes to get home (that sense of being late, of not
getting on the road soon enough ... each aspect has its own duration,
salience, etc. and these change too with time during the night until he
is
at home). I particularly liked his footnote that he talked with his
family
by cellphone in the car ... making him "virtually home" while still on
the
road ... and so the urgency of the earlier experience carries over into
the
satisfaction, and the motivation, for the cellphone conversation ... and
in
the car Eugene is again living two chronotopes at once: that of the
road-trip home, and that of a cellphone conversation, and these two now
have their own spatial and temporal relationships. Again, it would be
less
interesting if these two activities had happened in completely different
times and places.
So there is clearly a connection between multiplicity of activities and
the
dynamics of the life trajectory ... a complex and mutable connection.
But
it is equally clear how much the dynamics matters: how the mutual
interdependencies and conflicts of activities-in-time-and-space generate
a
trajectory of events and a traversal of genres, institutions, meaningful
places, activity types, etc.
Like Bill I have also often fantasized about high-dimensional
representations of the complexity of lived activity, a sort of marriage
of
semiotic representation (one dimensional axis for each salient or
criterial
feature of an activity) and phenomenological felt-realism (the sense in
which no representation ever encompasses everything that we feel in
actually living through an experience; all representations extract just
some features). I did actually sketch once (at the ISCRAT in Denmark a
few
years ago) such a high dimensional representation of gender/sexuality
dimensions of activity and identity construal, to show how impoverished,
and therefore susceptible to ideological manipulation, our trivial ideas
that there are just two genders or two sexes really are. Bill also
suggests
that we want to perhaps be able to multiple such spaces by each other
(for
configurations of activities), and more importantly (and Kevin also
makes
this point, drawing on Lefebvre and others) that we ought to be able in
some ways to also include in the account of dynamic activity the
multiple
ways in which space and time (like gender location) are constructed out
of
activity, rather than being some background givens as they are in
classical
physics.
There are a lot of fascinating possibilities here. In dynamical systems
theory one kind of representation imagines a point that moves in time
through the high-dimensional space, describing a "trajectory", and so
representing change and dynamics. We could also imagine that a person
(or
any social unit) is represented by a cluster of points, and that points
in
the cluster move, somewhat but not entirely independently, representing
our
engaging in multiple activities. One could even show in a sense how the
different activities constrained or influenced one another, in this way.
But time itself would still be being imposed from outside the dynamics
in
this way of representing change. What we would really need would be to
include the aspects of activities by which we construct, or construe,
time
through action as part of the big space of features of activity. One
could
do the same for space/place. And then we hope that if we have got enough
of
it right, that like some simulation model, it will "come alive" and
start
to "move", i.e. generate its own, varying, time (and places). In fact
one
way that I would be convinced that such a model was really working would
be
if it had more than one time-rate or time-stream, and if each of these
was
not steady (with respect to our observer clocktime, or internally one
stream vs. another), but slowed and speeded up.
Newton said that time is that which flows equally and evenly (steadily)
everywhere. That defined the time of physics, the time that clocks are
designed to keep. Phenomenological time clearly does not fit this mold,
and
getting some sort of semiotic representation or simulation model of just
how and why it doesn't would be a great step forward for an account of
the
social that wanted to compare itself favorably with natural science.
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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