Great analysis, Jay! I think we should switch from "how to take into account
situations with multiple chronotopes" to the notion of a chronotopic system.
Do we have ever a situation when there is one chronotope at time?
What do you think?
Eugene
PS Please do not forget that I'm xmca outcast and include my email address
in the reply... :-(
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 10:46 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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