I should perhaps not have used 'affording' with this xmca audience; it's
hard to find words that don't also have sometimes misleading resonances.
Affordance in the usual sense is I think mainly a focal timescale (N)
notion; it refers to the ways in which an actant may participate in
processes on its own timescale (in itself this is a bit complicated). The
term I usually use for the N-1 to N scale relation is "constitutive". It is
the part of the picture that reductionism got right.
A more thorough and careful formulation of these N-1, N, N+1 relations is
in the previous paper, from which this one derives:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/papers/gent.htm
and the notion here goes back to work Stan Salthe and I did more than 10
years ago now, well described in his two books, cited in the paper.
On the second question, no, indeed, timescales do not index just time: they
index the _processes_ which occur on the characteristic timescale, and
participating in those processes are the semiotic media. What is critical
is how these media participate not only on-scale but also across-scale
(heterochonically), and help to afford the processes and constitute the
possibility for longer timescale processes in which those on the focal
scale are then just 'moments'. As Paul suggests, it can both be the case
that the same medium functions (differently) on different timescales (it is
the same matter, but its meanings/functions differ, rather like Leigh
Star's "boundary objects" but across timescales here rather than actant
subnetworks; of course they also do the latter jobs) AND that processes on
different timescales make use of different, emergent objects as semiotic
media. Though I rather suspect that no medium operates on just one
timescale; no cultural semiotic medium even over just a range of a couple
orders of magnitude in timescale, but that remains to be seen.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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