Re: polychronotopic dynamics

From: Ana Marjanovic-Shane (anamshane@speakeasy.net)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 21:28:09 PDT


Hi,
Now that they removed Eugene from our chronotope, what are we to do??
Does this removal have anything to do with our discussion or maybe the
fact that Eugene was having too many chronotopes going on at the same
time, so the computer (the obscure "weber" or the Wizard) computed that
he would be better off if he does not leave his car in the garage at
night at the UDEL because of his participation in this XMCA chronotope??
Did you ever watch a movie "Icicle Thief" ( Ladri di saponette)
<http://us.imdb.com/Title?0097702> by the Italian director/actor
Maurizio Nichetti?? There are four worlds there (at least) that slowly
start to melt into each other. One has to see it to believe it. The
movie addresses the same issue we are discussing: how do these
chronotopes get constructed and how they interact? It will definitely
give you many ideas. And it is done in a way opposite to a stereotype of
teaching mathematics.

Ana

(Jay I have a lot of questions: How do chronotopes interact besides
being simultaneous or proximal in time and space? What are the
"significant" interactions as opposed to coincidental?? Can we ask that
question? How does one navigate between them and what are typical (or
atypical) navigational errors? -- Those are just a few.
Ana

Jay Lemke wrote:

>
> 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
>
>



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