Fwd: Anti-topes and anti-chrons

From: anamshane@speakeasy.net
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 10:26:11 PDT


-----Original Message-----
From: anamshane@speakeasy.net [mailto:anamshane@speakeasy.net]
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 03:31 PM
To: 'Mike Cole'
Subject: Re: Anti-topes and anti-chrons

Mike,
I have to renew my Barker knowledge beyond the text you sent. I remember some of his research - "a day in life of a boy" -- following a particular person throughout the whole day in their life and trying to record everything. However, I don't remember much in greater detail that will allow me fine tuning. Barker was highly influenced by Lewin's field theory and as far as Lewin was concerned, time was a very important but also a totally constructed dimension. In other worlds -- everyhting in the "past" or "future" were just fields in the present life space: "fields" for Lewin were a product of construction -- not the actual physical time/space. In other word: there may exist a dynamic interplay between the actual fields in the life-sace at any particular time -- but there is no possible interaction between Time one and Time two. In effect he tried to keep the distinction between physical time/space continuum.and psychological life-space composed at any moment from various fields, some of which may "refer" to past and others to future among other things.
We should also look up Vygotsky's critique of Lewin in "Language and Thought" (somewhere in the opening chapters -- I don't have the book with me at work). This was probably written after Lewin's visit to Moscow.
I don't know if you are familiar of the direct exchange between Lewin and Vygotsky (both through their students and in person when Lewin visited Vygotsky in Moscow in 1933). But my impression was always that there was a real conceptual connection between the two -- although also a lot of disagreements. I think that it was Vygotsky who pointed out the lack of dynamics (read: time) in Lewin's concept of life space. At this moment I don't know if Lewin's article about the role of time in life-space (it think in the: "Dynamic theory of personality", but I'll look up the exact reference tonight) was written after their meeting in Moscow or before.
Barker was definitively a "field theorist" -- and in that sense had a connection to the same concepts we are playing with today. The multiplicity of time scales both as different scopes to look at phenomena (phylogenetic, ontogenetic, mesogenetic, microgenetic time scales) and as different "contexts", "worlds", "chronotopes" or "synomorphs" is fascinating to me. Just even conceptualizing them. One of my personal fascinations was always the transition between across and between them and possible carry-overs. As well as the management invested in their coordination -- for instance, "will I forget to go and by vegetables for dinner while I am at work"??
To Kevin: Don't you think that Eugene's "garage episode" is trully a dramatic chronotope in the real life? :-)
Ana
This was also meant for the whole list
Ana

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Cole [mailto:mcole@weber.ucsd.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 01:10 PM
To: anamshane@speakeasy.net
Subject: Re: Anti-topes and anti-chrons

Ana-- I interpret Barker as trying to establish relationships between
synomorphs. My impression, fromt he discussion, that time actually
less important in Barker than Bakhtin, but that may be selective reading
on my part.
mike



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