Dear Bill and everybody-
I agree with Bill except I could not understand why he think I was arguing
for "traditional notions of time". I was arguing exactly against clock time
and common time denominator. I also do not understand why "anti-space" and
"anti-time"? Just because space and time are constructed through actions,
activities, and practices? What makes them "anti-"? In what sense? Please
explain. I also do not understand "action-algebra".
However, I think cultural rely on physical clock time in many Western
cultures is a very recent historical event and worth of investigation. I
really learned a lot from reading the following book recommended to me by
Ray McDermott:
Zerubavel, E. (1985). Hidden rhythms: Schedules and calendars in social
life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Also I found very refreshing this old book:
Sorokin, P. A. (1943). Sociocultural causality, space, time; a study of
referential principles of sociology and social science. Durham, N.C.,: Duke
university press.
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Barowy [mailto:wbarowy@attbi.com]
> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 10:58 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Anti-topes and anti-chrons
>
> On Monday 28 July 2003 8:53 pm, Eugene Matusov promulgated:
> > Dear Jay and everybody-
> >
> > I think that the idea of multiple times is bigger than multiple temporal
> > scales (although it is also a very important idea!). Let me elaborate.
>
> IMHO i think the problems of multiple time scales and Eugene's qualitative
> transformations come about from traditional notions of time as we live by
and
> measure the passage of people's lives. Instead, there is the possibility
of
> characterizing what happens, not with the ticking of a clock, but instead,
by
> the passing of, or better phrased, the enactment of, actions. In your
mind's
> eye, imagine a web whereby an action is represented as a node. It is the
> confluence of many other prior actions and in turn branches to many other
> subsequent actions.
>
> For lack of a better name for this interconnected non-linear web of
> happenings, it could be termed "action-space". In as much as a child's
> development is only crudely correlated with the passage of time, so could
be
> "action-space". But the Semiotic Ecology described by Alfred Lang and the
> Mind as Action approach by Wertsch seem to me to move ideas in this
> direction, as well as Activity Theory, of course, and the Ecological
> Psychology of Barker . Units of analysis are no longer bound to a person
or
> a group or a physical space, but rather are determined by the density of
> relations, characterized by interactions, among people and things. As
such
> units could be flexibly ascribed to where interactions "cluster", e.g. "a
> meeting" or "an institution" or "a partnership" or "a lesson" or "a
> classroom", or "a discussion", with "or" being used here in the inclusive
> sense i.e. not the logical "xor". In analysis, one could simultaneously
> look at multiple clusterings in "action-space" that span these traditional
> units. It is explicitly anti-space and anti-time in as much as it is also
> inclusive of both these categories implicitly. Configurations of people
and
> things materially make possible the "action potentials" for "events" yet
to
> happen.
>
> But this is a highly abstract way of thinking . So. It is way out there
as
> far as I'm concerned and for it to become a theoretical framework it needs
a
> symbolic form, a kind of "action-algebra", not a necessarily quantitative
> algebra, but one that can express qualitative durations and
transformations
> with the non-linear dynamics of humans. It needs a methodology to relate
> these symbolic forms to what can be observed. Consequently, this is yet a
> radically divergent dough on both sides. I hope it's not too gauche to
post
> some fiction to xmca.
>
> bb
>
>
>
>
>
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