I would say that Eugene, and all of us, all the time, are nested in
shorter-term activities within longer-term ones. AND sometimes we also
shuttle among same-timescale multiple activities, all of which may be
compatible with the same behavioral setting. Synomorphy does not imply a
one-one relationship, I think. Unless we define the setting "umwelt-wise"
as the setting-as-relevant-to-this-activity, but that does not mean that
multiple such settings cannot overlay one another in the same material
space. This may be one good reason why a notion of material setting is
still useful, though we could also say that the material setting is either
(a) itself a special-activity view (the physicists view, say) or (b) the
sum or product of all the activity-settings that can or do co-occur.
In any case, I think we need to preserve both multiplicity and the
potential relationships among multiple "simultaneous" activities.
JAY.
At 09:07 AM 7/31/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Jay, would you say that Eugene is simultaneously in two chronotopes
>(another word to include in my spell checker!) or that he is rapidly
>switching between them? Again from memory I believe that behavior
>setting theorists contend that you can only be in one behavior setting
>at a time. This raises the question of nesting and hierarchy, a nasty
>knot! And of course the degree of independence/ mutual influence.
>
>Don Cunningham
>Indiana University
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
>Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2003 9:46 PM
>To: XMCA LISTGROUP
>Subject: polychronotopic dynamics
>
>
>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
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
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