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This summer's discussions are really great and very important for the
paper I am writing on Imagination and the concept of time. I am grateful
for the ideas and suggestions I got from all the replies to my sketchy
late night note.
Jay Lemke wrote:
> 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.
The concept of 'allegory' is precisely the one I used in my doctoral
thesis "Metaphor Beyond Play". But I used it in a very particular way -
to distinguish between the "full" metaphor (defined as a comment upon
reality which originates in the fictive plane of play) and allegoric
play content which may but also may not directly refer to the present
"reality". I think it is a two step process in which the first step
consists of building a play world (fictive plane). The play-world does
not necessarily involve a transfer back to the reality, although it is a
"model", a "map", a "scenario" or a "script" by its very nature of being
a deliberate construction. At that point I think, we can call it a
potential allegory, although the motivation to construct it may not
involve a deliberate wish to comment upon the present (real,
experiential, visible). But once created, the play world affords the
next step: making a comment upon reality from the ficitve/play world.
And this affordance, I think, is its allegoric or metaphoric potential.
Jay captures this beautifully in saying:
> 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.
>
Exactly! The paradoxes arise because they were trying to establish what
they (you) cal the "physical time" assuming that their measuring devices
are material signals - when that is only partly relevant. What is more
relevant is the choice of the material signals over other equally
relevant material signals but of a different order. Einstein of course
became very sensitive to the existence of different "bodies of
reference" (or coordinate systems) which can have different velocities
and trajectories relative to each other. But in another sense, they
(bodies of reference) were all of the same "physical" nature and the
only relevant difference between them was the difference in velocity and
trajectory. However, you can also have different co-ordinate systems
which in addition to the velocity and trajectory differ in the nature of
the material signals you use for measuring time. So when we speak of
phylogenetic development and ontogenetic development we have two
different scales or bodies of reference in which what differs is the
nature of measurement itself, although both use finite material signals.
In the first instance, we are measuring time by "counting" relevant
genetic and behavioral changes across organisms of a species, looking at
what point we may assume that a "new era", a "new species" appears. We
are trying to define a phylogenetic time scale not by the number of the
rotations of the Earth around the Sun (although this enters a picture as
a bridge to other relevant phylogenetic time scales) but by events which
are relevant for the phylogeny itself. In the second instance -
ontogenetic development - we are using another kind of a time scale or
of an event scale with totally different material signals relevant for
this referential system. Here, too, the number of the physical rotations
of the Earth around the Sun may enter a picture again as a bridge toward
other relevant aspects of ontogeny.
Physical time is a concept (forged in imagination and used to describe
"reality") which is relevant for understanding physical behavior of the
universe. It is REAL because we can do so much with it and because it
can be used as an universal means of exchange between other different
time scales. The paradoxes occur when it becomes the only measuring
device disregarding differences in the nature of the "blimps" (finite
material signals) and using only the velocity and the trajectory of a
body of reference. (This must sound very confused, but I don't know at
the moment how to put it in better words).
Eva, your clinical example is a beautiful illustration of the
constructed quality of the "past", "present" and "future" events.
Eva wrote
> It is more interesting to note how the past-in-the present co-constitutes
> the present as THIS lived present, if I may play another variation of the
> theme introuduced by Ana
>
> >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). (JAY)
>
> As the quality of the present changes, it involves a corresponding change
> in the past. On the personal plane this is pivotal in psychoanalysis and
> any number of other techniques of reflective work on our existence: change
> the present by changing the past. See past relationships differently and
> get leverage for being-in-a-new-way.
>
> I _think_ that it works similarly even in un-reflective modes, when we
> don't NOTICE that our past changes along with our present -- as when happy
> times get that extra nostalgic sheen by present circumstances...
>
This is an issue I am trying to understand. It seems that there are two
ways (modes) of reconstructing the past/present/future. One is more
un-reflective as you put it, another is more reflective. Or, in another
way, one is more like looking at a distance, looking from here (present)
into the past/future as if they were "physically" distant and
untouchable. (Like you can not undo breaking the favorite glass in
1977!). The other is more involved, more like actually "walking through"
the past/future, "being there". And although you cannot "undo" physical
events that transpired or you cannot know tomorrow's winning lottery
number, you can still "do" a lot. It is the same as constructing the
play frame and actually playing it (not just planning it). What it does,
this "walking in time", is that it allows us to re-conceptualize and
re-relate to some events. And that actually changes our present. What is
less apparent (because of the concept of the physical time we
religiously believe in) is that this process of constructing the
past/future and walking in them is always a SOCIAL activity. I cannot
elaborate here, but you hit it right in the center by mentioning Slavoj
Zizek's work:
> Slavoj Zizek has some interesting ideas of how it works on a collective
> level, how nationalism returns to the traditions of a past that never
> was... but now IS, in present practices. (It may be in "The sublime object
> of ideology", or in "For they know not what they do: enjoyment as a
> political factor" -- I'm not sure, cause I heard him in lecture.)
>
Much of my thinking has been based on the same issues that Zizek
addresses. Watching and "living" the developments throughout the war in
Yugoslavia made me absolutely certain that the "past" is not just a
collection of "facts" or something that REALLY happened. It is even more
relevant how these "facts" seem to be relevant or significant for the
"present". A mere knowledge (memory) of the past does not exist without
its significance in the present. The "same" facts affect the present in
a completely different way depending on what Zizek calls "ideology"
(even Bakhtin/Voloshinov calls it "ideology") - or let's say a
mind/body/belief-set one uses. And what becomes strikingly apparent is
the redefinition of time scales. The war in Yugoslavia (or the wars in
and around Yugoslavia) has at least three significant time scales: (a)
The Serb - Croat war is about events that took place 70 and 50 years
ago: the nature of the creation of Yugoslavia as a kingdom and also the
events during the WW2; (b) the Serb (Croat) - Muslim war is about events
during the past 600-100 years ago - the Ottoman occupation of the
Balkans; and finally (c) the Macedonian/Serbian - Greek - Albanian war
is about events at least 2,000 years ago: who are the indigenous peoples
in those lands and who has a right to call themselves "Macedonian" and
use the symbols of Alexander the Great.(This is just to illustrate the
issue of the measurement of time by different "finite signals" and
different time scales which somehow do not correspond completely to the
physical time measured only in the number of years - rotations of the
Earth around the Sun).
Finally, Rolfe Windward wrote about yet another very relevant issue: the
apparent "slippage" between the 'spiritual' and the present, and I would
be grateful for more elaborated references. (Edelman, Bergson,
references on Zen).Another also very significant matter is the
"self-organizing" of the emergent systems. This I think is just another
way of addressing what Eva mentioned as "un-reflective" changing (or
looking at) of the past and a more deliberate one.
> On the related issue of motives, the idea that these are emergent and
> contingent, somewhat akin to what Sartre meant by projects, seems
> right to
> me but there is also the issue of observer ascription concerning what
> motives or goals any self-organizing system may have (including, one
> could
> assume, the self). The biologist, Robert Ulanowicz (in Growth and
> Development), illustrates this delightfully in his version of '20
> questions.
> In that version the group picks no name at all. The person who is
> guessing
> (animal, vegetable, mineral) is said to be correct (or not)
> arbitrarily by
> the first respondent. The next respondent also answers true or false
> arbitrarily but must be bound by the first respondent's response and
> so on.
> Gradually the item the group supposedly had in mind (but really
> dynamically
> constructs) emerges without anyone having deliberately picked it. The
> point
> of theory (or modeling) then being not so much what is the correct
> answer --
> there really is none, or more precisely there are likely to be many --
> but
> what explanation best fits the collective reconstruction of what has
> occurred.
However, Rolfe's example somehow also ties with what I said before -
that construction of the imaginary (past, present, future, anything) is
a social process. I will try to elaborate on this at some later time. It
looks like a whole big task in and of itself. Let me just say that the
20 questions game seems to incorporate more and more constrictions at
any point - answers depend on the previous ones etc. What it
incorporates even more is negotiating the social relationship between
the players, how do you use the ever growing constrictions to "trick",
"surprise", "entice", "induce", "help", "guide", "ask for help" ,
"anger", "make one laugh", "flirt", "threaten" etc. (the list is
endless). It wouldn't be worth playing just for the sake of the
"written" rules.
And on that note, knowing that it only opens more questions, let me stop
with this message.
Ana
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This summer's discussions are really great and very important for the paper I am writing on Imagination and the concept of time. I am grateful for the ideas and suggestions I got from all the replies to my sketchy late night note.
Jay Lemke wrote:
I think we have often here written about our basic sense that one of theThe concept of 'allegory' is precisely the one I used in my doctoral thesis "Metaphor Beyond Play". But I used it in a very particular way - to distinguish between the "full" metaphor (defined as a comment upon reality which originates in the fictive plane of play) and allegoric play content which may but also may not directly refer to the present "reality". I think it is a two step process in which the first step consists of building a play world (fictive plane). The play-world does not necessarily involve a transfer back to the reality, although it is a "model", a "map", a "scenario" or a "script" by its very nature of being a deliberate construction. At that point I think, we can call it a potential allegory, although the motivation to construct it may not involve a deliberate wish to comment upon the present (real, experiential, visible). But once created, the play world affords the next step: making a comment upon reality from the ficitve/play world. And this affordance, I think, is its allegoric or metaphoric potential. Jay captures this beautifully in saying:
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 theExactly! The paradoxes arise because they were trying to establish what they (you) cal the "physical time" assuming that their measuring devices are material signals - when that is only partly relevant. What is more relevant is the choice of the material signals over other equally relevant material signals but of a different order. Einstein of course became very sensitive to the existence of different "bodies of reference" (or coordinate systems) which can have different velocities and trajectories relative to each other. But in another sense, they (bodies of reference) were all of the same "physical" nature and the only relevant difference between them was the difference in velocity and trajectory. However, you can also have different co-ordinate systems which in addition to the velocity and trajectory differ in the nature of the material signals you use for measuring time. So when we speak of phylogenetic development and ontogenetic development we have two different scales or bodies of reference in which what differs is the nature of measurement itself, although both use finite material signals. In the first instance, we are measuring time by "counting" relevant genetic and behavioral changes across organisms of a species, looking at what point we may assume that a "new era", a "new species" appears. We are trying to define a phylogenetic time scale not by the number of the rotations of the Earth around the Sun (although this enters a picture as a bridge to other relevant phylogenetic time scales) but by events which are relevant for the phylogeny itself. In the second instance - ontogenetic development - we are using another kind of a time scale or of an event scale with totally different material signals relevant for this referential system. Here, too, the number of the physical rotations of the Earth around the Sun may enter a picture again as a bridge toward other relevant aspects of ontogeny.
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.
Eva, your clinical example is a beautiful illustration of the constructed
quality of the "past", "present" and "future" events.
Eva wrote
This is an issue I am trying to understand. It seems that there are two ways (modes) of reconstructing the past/present/future. One is more un-reflective as you put it, another is more reflective. Or, in another way, one is more like looking at a distance, looking from here (present) into the past/future as if they were "physically" distant and untouchable. (Like you can not undo breaking the favorite glass in 1977!). The other is more involved, more like actually "walking through" the past/future, "being there". And although you cannot "undo" physical events that transpired or you cannot know tomorrow's winning lottery number, you can still "do" a lot. It is the same as constructing the play frame and actually playing it (not just planning it). What it does, this "walking in time", is that it allows us to re-conceptualize and re-relate to some events. And that actually changes our present. What is less apparent (because of the concept of the physical time we religiously believe in) is that this process of constructing the past/future and walking in them is always a SOCIAL activity. I cannot elaborate here, but you hit it right in the center by mentioning Slavoj Zizek's work:It is more interesting to note how the past-in-the present co-constitutes the present as THIS lived present, if I may play another variation of the theme introuduced by Ana >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). (JAY) As the quality of the present changes, it involves a corresponding change in the past. On the personal plane this is pivotal in psychoanalysis and any number of other techniques of reflective work on our existence: change the present by changing the past. See past relationships differently and get leverage for being-in-a-new-way. I _think_ that it works similarly even in un-reflective modes, when we don't NOTICE that our past changes along with our present -- as when happy times get that extra nostalgic sheen by present circumstances...
Much of my thinking has been based on the same issues that Zizek addresses. Watching and "living" the developments throughout the war in Yugoslavia made me absolutely certain that the "past" is not just a collection of "facts" or something that REALLY happened. It is even more relevant how these "facts" seem to be relevant or significant for the "present". A mere knowledge (memory) of the past does not exist without its significance in the present. The "same" facts affect the present in a completely different way depending on what Zizek calls "ideology" (even Bakhtin/Voloshinov calls it "ideology") - or let's say a mind/body/belief-set one uses. And what becomes strikingly apparent is the redefinition of time scales. The war in Yugoslavia (or the wars in and around Yugoslavia) has at least three significant time scales: (a) The Serb - Croat war is about events that took place 70 and 50 years ago: the nature of the creation of Yugoslavia as a kingdom and also the events during the WW2; (b) the Serb (Croat) - Muslim war is about events during the past 600-100 years ago - the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans; and finally (c) the Macedonian/Serbian - Greek - Albanian war is about events at least 2,000 years ago: who are the indigenous peoples in those lands and who has a right to call themselves "Macedonian" and use the symbols of Alexander the Great.(This is just to illustrate the issue of the measurement of time by different "finite signals" and different time scales which somehow do not correspond completely to the physical time measured only in the number of years - rotations of the Earth around the Sun).Slavoj Zizek has some interesting ideas of how it works on a collective level, how nationalism returns to the traditions of a past that never was... but now IS, in present practices. (It may be in "The sublime object of ideology", or in "For they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor" -- I'm not sure, cause I heard him in lecture.)
Finally, Rolfe Windward wrote about yet another very relevant issue: the apparent "slippage" between the 'spiritual' and the present, and I would be grateful for more elaborated references. (Edelman, Bergson, references on Zen).Another also very significant matter is the "self-organizing" of the emergent systems. This I think is just another way of addressing what Eva mentioned as "un-reflective" changing (or looking at) of the past and a more deliberate one.
On the related issue of motives, the idea that these are emergent andHowever, Rolfe's example somehow also ties with what I said before - that construction of the imaginary (past, present, future, anything) is a social process. I will try to elaborate on this at some later time. It looks like a whole big task in and of itself. Let me just say that the 20 questions game seems to incorporate more and more constrictions at any point - answers depend on the previous ones etc. What it incorporates even more is negotiating the social relationship between the players, how do you use the ever growing constrictions to "trick", "surprise", "entice", "induce", "help", "guide", "ask for help" , "anger", "make one laugh", "flirt", "threaten" etc. (the list is endless). It wouldn't be worth playing just for the sake of the "written" rules.
contingent, somewhat akin to what Sartre meant by projects, seems right to
me but there is also the issue of observer ascription concerning what
motives or goals any self-organizing system may have (including, one could
assume, the self). The biologist, Robert Ulanowicz (in Growth and
Development), illustrates this delightfully in his version of '20 questions.
In that version the group picks no name at all. The person who is guessing
(animal, vegetable, mineral) is said to be correct (or not) arbitrarily by
the first respondent. The next respondent also answers true or false
arbitrarily but must be bound by the first respondent's response and so on.
Gradually the item the group supposedly had in mind (but really dynamically
constructs) emerges without anyone having deliberately picked it. The point
of theory (or modeling) then being not so much what is the correct answer --
there really is none, or more precisely there are likely to be many -- but
what explanation best fits the collective reconstruction of what has occurred.
And on that note, knowing that it only opens more questions, let me stop with this message.
Ana
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