I think we have often here written about our basic sense that one of the
great powers of semiotic mediation (inseparable from material-technological
mediation) is that it allows us to overlay the absent-imagined upon the
present-perceived. This happens in play insofar as play-events and
play-acts have _meanings_ that go beyond, that build on top of, their
immediate and present-time interactional forces. In play, a consistent
second-meaning world, a 'conceit' or 'allegory' for the present and visible
actions is built on top of the first-meaning world. What matters is having
BOTH, i.e. the implied relation between them (the sign relation, in fact),
and the way in which having the second-world breaks the time barrier: the
possibility of multiple 'presents' is the medium through which we make
'pasts' and 'futures' that are meaningful for a present (as Ana S. clearly
articulates).
I am not yet sure how we should speak of the relation between such
meaning-time and what is called physical-time. We can know ABOUT the latter
only through the former, can define it only through semiotic-material
mediations. Personally I think it merely a religious faith to say that
physical-time has a prior and independent reality apart from our
construction of it as a frame of reference, but I do NOT want to debate
that sort of issue again. What matters to me here is that we can understand
physical-time (i.e. our construction of what we call p-time) better if we
look precisely at how it is constructed, mediated, and used. This is after
all what Einstein did. He looked at how time measurements and simultaneity
of clocks were actually established by signalling procedures, by material
mediation. His principal results were based exactly on the fact that the
signals which mediated "timing" had to be material signals (not mental
ones, or ones we think we can imagine -- such as instantaneous or
infinitely rapid ones) which were known to have a finite maximum velocity
(the speed of 'light' but also of other kinds of possible maximally fast
signals). Bohr, and Bohr v. Einstein, spent many productive years analyzing
the actual constructions of meaning-realities with semiotic and
technological mediations. The foundations of both relativity and quantum
theory are based on this kind of analysis.
But what Einstein and Bohr did NOT consider (because in fundamental physics
it seems irrelevant) is the role of past and future in relation to present;
the kind of questions that Ana Shane is turning us toward. Those issues did
come up occasionally because of the paradoxes that arise when a
micro-physics where past/future is irrelevant has to meet a macro-physics
(laboratory technology and people using it) where they are not at all
irrelevant.
When we shift from physics to biology (ontogeny and phylogeny), to history,
to biography, all these questions re-occur. But they will not have the same
answers, because the ways in which we make pasts and futures relative to
different time scales are profoundly different in their precise mediational
means.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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