yes, we are very much limited as researchers in the time scales we can
directly observe, or observer over, especially the longer ones ... we just
don't live that long, after all, compared to many time scales for social
change, and, almost by definition, for human evolution ...
but we can also collaborate, so that it becomes the organized network of
researchers observing on larger space scales, usually, but potentially also
over longer time scales ... and in the extreme case, continuing, evolving
institutions that carry on research observations and analyses over periods
long compared to one human lifetime ... -- and there are many problems with
this, but the possibility of it needs to be reckoned with.
Yes, too, ART is a very good place to look for ways of representing (think
of this not as referential-truth representing, but more as 'highlighting'
as making salient, making interesting ...) different scales in the same
canvas, condensing motion into momentary images, sculptures ... film has
lots of interesting techniques we ought to examine.
It is difficult to make up short examples of cross-scale intersections from
the larger to the smaller scale, but in a sense these are the moments when
we act as we do now in part because we are part of something larger, some
biographical, or cross-generational process that normally changes slowly
and make little specific difference in this moment or that one (just a
general background presence, the 'normal' role it plays) -- but that just
this once there is an upheaval on the larger scale and we are caught up in
it (dramatic things like going out to join the revolution that started
yesterday and doing things you would normally never have done, becoming
almost a different person overnight0, or less dramatic and common ones like
being affected by an idea that has been brewing for a long time and now
suddenly there is the AHA! and we behave differently right now, or
something we have lived with for a long time (an illness, disability)
suddenly becomes extremely critical in this moment (oh no, not NOW!), or we
read something now and a long history of reading and thinking crystalizes,
catalyzed by/in that sentence or word which reverberates again for a long
time in our lives. We are always part of history and of our own
biographies, we are always part of our communities, but there are moments
when suddently history becomes a part of us, when our life projects intrude
critically now, when the community-scale phenomena (even 'mass hysterias')
take over the individual-scale activity.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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