Sorry this was written so late, but better late than never.
Among the reasons for my hesitation in participating in the exchange, was due to a certain bewilderment as to what was actually being discussed. This confusion is very similar to that I experienced when first encountering Letrist thought and Lefebvre's theories in the late '60s and early '70s.
For one thing, I fail to see the need for a whole theory of space with a complex ontological framework and a most peculiar kind of aestheticism that combines Durkheimian Idealism, i.e. Absolute space, with Nietzchean culturology. Despite my reservations concerning some of D. Herbert's work, I certainly agree with him that Marx and Engels and other Marxist theoreticians did consider spatial issues in their works.
Second, it is not very clear whether the issue under discussion is the notions of space and time or of activity in space and time. My general impression of Lefebvre's work is that he focusses his attention on the abstracted notions of space , but regularly mixes concepts of space with those of objects and activity in space . Sojo's Third Space, with whom I'm less familiar, appears to completely confuse abstracted notions of space with objects and activity in space.
Third, both Lefebvre and Soja appear to have developed an ontology of thought and practice that resembles neither that of Hegel nor of Marx. For example, Lefebvre proposes the notion of abstract space as a special characteristic of Capitalism. Does this mean that mankind has only developed the capacity to develop abstractions and concepts in the modern era? This sounds like the especially French tendency to divide mankind into primitives without the gifts of reason and the enlightened races of Europe (especially France?):e.g. de Montaigne, Rousseau, Lévy-Bruhl and Claude Levi Strauss. It may be that Lefebvre confuses abstraction in general with Marx's basic definition of Capitalist practice as reification of commodity, and then mistakenly goes on to regard all rational use of space as capitalist appropriation. Very strange to say the least!
Materialist social science asserts that history and social life are subject to the laws of Nature and that their study is restricted to the same epistemologies that govern research and theory in the other Natural sciences. Most human activity is enacted in Newtonian space (the space in which Newton's laws of motion, energy, and mass are evidenced - not to be confused with Euclidean space):
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NEWTONIAN SPACE AND TIME:
"Absolute space in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. ...absolute and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration" I. Newton.
Space and time were taken to be featureless objects which served as a universal and preferred reference frame. A consequence of this is that a given distance will be agreed upon by any two observers at rest with respect to each other or in uniform relative motion, for, after all, they are just measuring the separation between two immovable points in eternal space. In the same way a time interval will be agreed upon by any two observers for they are just marking two notches on eternal time.
The emphasized portion is the basic principle of the potentiality for shared information that is critical for any theory of social organization and practice.
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In contrast to classical and neoclassical economics, Marxist theory has always shown an explicit and implicit concern for the spatial aspects of social life. Their theories of imperialism, ancient and modern, of the effect of uneven development, and so on show a fairly high level of awareness of the role of space in historical processes.
Naturally, inclusion of space and time into a theory of history demands definitive statements concerning space and time. Here's what Engels says about it (1877 AntiDuhring, Space and Time):
And for this reason Herr Dühring sets to work very cautiously; actually it is of course time, but of such a kind as cannot really be called time, time, indeed, in itself does not consist of real parts, and is only divided up at will by our mind - only an actual filling of time with distinguishable facts is susceptible of being counted - what the accumulation of empty duration means is quite unimaginable. What this accumulation is supposed to mean is here beside the point; the question is, whether the world, in the state here assumed, has duration, passes through a duration in time. We have long known that we can get nothing by measuring such a duration without content just as we can get nothing by measuring without aim or purpose in empty space.
In effect Engels is saying that we objectify space and time by filling it objects. This appears to be in direct contradiction with Newtonian space and time which is absolute and unmoved by anything (see above). Actually, this contradiction is only apparent, since a more complete and concrete notion of Newtonian space and time would have to include the instrumentation that fill and measure it. A more concrete version of Newtonian space would then be:
given that two observers pack(measure) space and time with the same objects, they will agree upon the results. And, if the observers pack space and time with objects that can directly or indirectly be used to fill all other objects in space or time, then they have a unitary measure for all fillings of space and time.
Now then what is being objectified here, space, time, or the packing of objects? Actually all of them together comprise a single notion, which leads me to suggest that the singling out of space or time as object, for any but the most abstract physical theory is a gross reification of more concrete and more interesting subjects such as the social and material relations of time-motion research, the restricted smoking areas, and monumental architecture.
Objectified time and space are useful concepts in physics and can be borrowed from it in order to make physical comparisons between material objects and activities. This information is of the highest value for revealing the physical conditions that restrict the historical process. In using these objectifications of space and time we must be very careful to avoid regarding physical measures of space and time as determinating practice. In the concrete material realities of human practice, objective conditions involve far more abstract concepts than those of objective space and time. Take for example Jay's statement:
What if space is not differentiated? '... imagine a spatially homogeneous world ... where every place was more or less like every other, where buildings consisted of identical rooms, identically furnished, where there was no point in going to the mountains or the sea because all landscapes looked the same'
Actually, I know of such a place, the Campus of SUNY Albany. I first saw this architectural desert in 1964 or 65 when it was brand new. By the end of the school year the students had gone a very long way in deconstructing I. F. Stone's geometrically pure design and SUNY Albany administration's regulations for preserving it, including decorating a dining hall ceiling with a dried brocolli stalk. Clearly there was a good deal more to the objective conditions of student life on the Albany campus then the metrics of its campus architecture. (Lefebvre would call this "diversion" while I would regard it as a fairly normal aspect of social activity in academic institutions).
We can also examine as social practice certain activities involving reifications of time and space, e.g. the imposition of teaching schedules by certain groups of education administrators and the making and using of time-motion studies by production managers. Jay's comments on scheduling of school activities:
. Schooled activities tend to be brief and self-contained (i.e. isolated, disconnected), on the order of 5-20 minutes. None that are really coherent over the scale of weeks and months, much less years. Yet I think we know that development, which defines the most important dimension of learning (i.e. learning that lasts), only takes places over these longer scales.and ... In any case, I have serious doubts that much of anything learned in school on short timescales contributes significantly to longterm learning in most people's lives.
might be a good place to start investigation of the contradictions between the needs and interests of students and teachers and the role of objectified time and space in the administrative planning of curriculums and teaching schedules in the realization of the needs and interests of those that make them. Kevin's work is good ethnography (if we regard his references to space as purely physical ones), but does little to enlighten me concerning issues of educational practice.
To regard objectification of space and time as a universal character of all practice appears to me to be a confusion of concepts and a false representation of most social activity.
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Bakhtin's chronotopes and the issues of space and time.
Here's the material from Morson and Emerson's "Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Prosaics" quoted by Phill Chappell on the 27th of last month.
"In its primary sense, a chronotope is a way of understanding experience; it is a specific form-shaping ideology for understanding the nature of events and actions...Actions are necessarily performed in a specific context; chronotopes differ by the ways in which they understand context and the relation of actions and events to it."
and
"All contexts are shaped fundamentally by the kind of time and space that operate within them. Kant, of course, argued long ago that time and space are indespensible forms of cognition, and Bakhtin explicitly endorses this view. But he differs from Kant by stressing that in chronotopic analysis, time and space are regarded "not as 'transcendental' but as forms of the most immediate reality"...time and space vary in qualities; different social activities and representations of those activities presume different kinds of time and space. Time and space are therefore not just neutral "mathematical" abstractions".
Frankly, I'm lost. If time and space are not just neutral mathematical abstractions, then what are they? How are they real?
In light of what I've written above it appears that the statement should first be reversed to different kinds of time and space presume different social activities and representations of those activities and the term presume should be exchanged for the term are implied by: different kinds of time and space are implied by different social activities and representations of those activities. And then what? If the kinds of space and time are implicit in the social activities and their representations, then why not discuss the activities? After all these are the determinative elements of the analysis. I tend to agree here with Phil that the chronotope is a slippery metaphor - and that it is much easier to think in terms of genre and discourse.
Responses? Comments?
Victor
----- Original Message -----
From: Eugene Matusov
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 10:10 PM
Subject: RE: Space and time in chat
Dear Phil and Steve-
First of all, thanks, Steve for your question about chronotope and Phil for your helpful answer.
Phil wrote,
"I agree, chronotope is a slippery metaphor - sometimes I find it easier to think more concretely of genre and discourse."
I have very ambivalent feelings about Bakhtin's notion of chronotope. On the one hand, I'm so excited to read Bakhtin's literary analysis where he used the notion of chronotope but on the other hand, I agree with Phil about "a slippery metaphor." My solution is to use the notion in a concrete analysis of educational (or other) practice like Bakhtin did in his literary analysis.
Below is my uncompleted and very rough draft of such analysis of traditional classroom. I'd really appreciate your feedback.
Eugene
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Chappell [mailto:phil_chappell@access.inet.co.th]
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 6:46 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: Space and time in chat
At 14:38 26/7/03 -0700, you wrote:
In reading through the discussion of Bakhtin etc. by Eugene and Jay, I find
myself struggling with the term chronotope - this notion is not yet sinking
in. I could use some ABC's and a general orientation to grasp the finer
points being made. Jay, Eugene, anyone? Thanks!
Steve,
Let me give my tuppence worth, after consulting Morson and Emerson's "Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Prosaics". I have firstly quoted two paragraphs.
"In its primary sense, a chronotope is a way of understanding experience; it is a specific form-shaping ideology for understanding the nature of events and actions...Actions are necessarily performed in a specific context; chronotopes differ by the ways in which they understand context and the relation of actions and events to it."
"All contexts are shaped fundamentally by the kind of time and space that operate within them. Kant, of course, argued long ago that time and space are indespensible forms of cognition, and Bakhtin explicitly endorses this view. But he differs from Kant by stressing that in chronotopic analysis, time and space are regarded "not as 'transcendental' but as forms of the most immediate reality"...time and space vary in qualities; different social activities and representations of those activities presume different kinds of time and space. Time and space are therefore not just neutral "mathematical" abstractions".
This latter points is referred to by Jay and Eugene in their last turn of Eugene's post.
They (Morson and Emerson) go on further to discuss several properties of the chronotope in relation to Einstein's ToR - a chronotope is a fusion of space and time; there are a variety of senses of time and space: in a sense we are living in a heterochronic universe; chronotopes are historical in that they are dynamically, or dialogically related; chronotopes are the ground for activity rather than simply being present in activity..."the ground essential for the representation of events".
I agree, chronotope is a slippery metaphor - sometimes I find it easier to think more concretely of genre and discourse.
Does this constitute part of an ABC of chronotope?
Cheers,
Phil
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Axiological chronotope of traditional classroom
Eugene Matusov, University of Delaware
To apply the notion of educational axiological chronotope to an analysis of traditional classroom, I will use Bakthin's parallel analysis of the chronotope of the Greek romance (Bakhtin, 1991, pp. 86-110). The traditional lessons are remarkably similar to each other, and are in fact composed of the very same elements (instructional steps): individual lessons differ from each other only in number of such elements, their proportional weight within the whole lesson and they way they are combined. One can easily construct a typical composite schema of this lesson, taking into account the most important individual deviations and variations. Such schema would go something like this (this verbatim is taken and modified from Bakhtin, 1991, p. 87).
The lesson begins with the "all-knowing" teacher and the "ignorant" students assembling in a closed space insolated from the outside world: its noise, demands, and people for a certain amount of time. Classroom walls, classroom door, and classroom windows (to a less degree) are brackets of academic learning from the rest of the world in order not to distract the ignorant students from all-knowing teacher and the teaching. As the lesson going by, the curricular gap between the all-knowing teacher and ignorant students is decreasing as knowledge moving from the "all-knowing" teacher to the "ignorant" students. The ignorant students are moving in the space of curricular knowledge to become like the all-knowing teacher who causes and helps their movements by organizing new knowledge taught in the lesson in smaller bits of information that the ignorant students are able to swallow and digest. The traditional teaching is usually organized in the format of lecturing, modeling, asking known-answer questions to lead, probe, and test the students. After the material is explained by the teacher, the students are required practicing the taught material by applying to learning task in school and during homework. At the end of the instruction that may take several lessons, the students are supposed to "know" the taught material which can be demonstrated on the teacher's demand via exams and tests that finally define good and bad students with regard of the taught material. Although, students are led from grade to grade, from class to class, from subject to subject, from topic to topic, from test to test, from exam to exam, but classroom routine remains very much the same. The traditional school is passing by its students. The students rarely discuss outside of the class what didactically happens inside class and they rarely discuss inside class as part of their lessons that happens in their lives outside of the class. Such is the schema for the basic components of traditional teaching.
Didactic space of traditional teaching
The didactic space defines itself through the following questions, "Where are we didactically in the lesson? Are we in math or in social studies? Are we in fractions or in long division? Are we in presentation of a new topic or in practicing learned skills? How does 'the didactic map' look like? How do the participants perceive the didactic space?" The didactic space is fully pre-designed by the teacher and the whole educational bureaucratic apparatus involving school boards and the state departments of education without much of students' inputs.
The didactic map of traditional teaching has 'hierarchal' and 'topological' aspects. The hierarchal aspect involves nesting levels: like geographical map of a federal country (the biggest hierarchal level) consists of states (the second hierarchal level) which consist of counties (the third hierarchal level), and so on. The hierarchal aspect of the didactic curricular map of traditional teaching involves: 1) the biggest curricular level of academic subjects (e.g., math, English, social studies), 2) the second level of topics (e.g., fractions, long division), and 3) the third level of instructional steps (e.g., presentation of the topic, testing).
The topological aspect of the didactic map involves the issues of location, size, and shape of each of the nesting units. Topologically, the subject units of traditional teaching are unidimensional, linear, and independent from each other (i.e., being on somewhere the 'math territory' does not position one on the 'social study territory' in any way). Thus, unidirectional linear continuum is the shape of the subject unit in traditional teaching. Its size is potentially unlimited as an endeavor of the academic discipline representing the curricular subject (i.e., there is no potential stop in study of math). The curricular topic in traditional teaching is a section of the subject continuum. It has its location in the sequence of other topics-sections on the subject line. It also has its length - duration. Similarly, instructional steps are line subsections inside of a topic-section that have their sequence and duration.
The biggest hierarchical unit on the didactic map is an academic subject: traditional curricula are divided on separate academic subjects such as math, English, PE, social studies, arts and crafts, and so on. The choice of the subjects is shaped by the history of schooling and its role in the society. For example, such academic subjects as teaching dead languages Ancient Greek and Latin disappeared from the curricular space of traditional schooling as it becomes more middle-class oriented rather than upper-class oriented (Labaree, 1997).
The second hierarchical level of the traditional curricular organization is topical. Topics can be hierarchically related to each other (e.g., the Fractions and the Addition of Fraction), chronologically related (e.g., The Civil War and The Reconstruction), loosely related in juxtaposition (e.g., The Integers and The Decimals), or unrelated (e.g., The Phrase and The Writing Persuasive Compositions). The topical organization is dictated by "importance" of the topics for students' future as defined by the three major educational goals shared by the society (Labaree, 1997): democratic participation (e.g., does this topic promotes democracy), social efficiency (e.g., does this topic help promote skills require by the modern economy), and social mobility (e.g., will the topic be on a high-stake test?). In addition, a curricular topic can be chosen to teach just because of a school tradition - it is in the textbook used by the teacher or in the commercial curricular "unit."
The third hierarchical level of didactic topology is intratopical and involves certain instructional steps of "covering curriculum" such as a presentation of a topic, practicing the topic with the students, and testing students' knowledge of the topic.
The first topological level of the didactically spatial organization of traditional teaching is sequential: the sequences of the curricular topics. The topical sequence is often defined by the questions: 1) what topics the students have to know to move to the next topic; 2) what the topics are more fundamental; 3) what the topics are more abstract or more concrete; 4) what the topics are more relevant/familiar to the students; 5) what the topical sequence is developmentally appropriate; and so on. There is a growing realization of a lack of consensus among educators and discipline specialists about the topical sequence in their subject area (Hiebert, personal communication, March 2003).
Finally, the second topological level of the didactically spatial organization of traditional teaching is calendar, durational, and temporal. It is a projection of the curricular topical sequence on the linear time continuum of class meetings and assigned homework: when in the school calendar each topic will occur. This time continuum involves a mixture of both physical and institutional aspects because it involves days, weeks, months, as well as lessons, terms, semesters, academic years, grades (e.g., third grade versus second grade curricula), schools (e.g., elementary school math curricula versus middle school math curricula). It is also about time duration for each predesigned curricular topic both in terms of physical and institutional time: how many lessons, weeks, months, terms, grades, and schools a particular topic takes place. Thus, this spatial level of traditional teaching is essentially chronotopic because it combines the didactic space - the predesigned curricular topics and their sequence - and the local time of traditional teaching - the physical time continuum - as well as the didactic time - instructional considerations for defining the duration of each curricular topic on the physical time continuum the class meetings and homework.
In sum, the external didactic space of traditional teaching designed by the teacher is the abstract-alien world removed by the classroom walls, by rows of the desks directed at the teacher, by Ritalin, by all attention techniques focusing the students on the teacher and the teacher-defined classroom activities from the students' ontological world. Traditional curricula are decontextualized in a sense that they are bracketed from students' ontology, from their life and life experiences, as well as from local classroom contexts of the students and the teacher spending time together in the classroom. This external didactic space opposes the students' (and the teacher's) ontological real space. In the real world, the students set their own goals, develop their own chain of actions, and check the consequences of these actions in the world's response for fulfillment of their set goals. In the didactic space of traditional teaching the students do not have their own goals besides to do what the teacher asks to do, their chain of actions has to follow the teacher's prescription, the consequences of their actions is defined not be the world' response but by the teacher's (often arbitrary) judgment of the students' academic progress. The separation of the traditional didactic space for the local classroom space and from the participants' ontological space leads to its self-containing and irrelevancy.
So far, we were discussing the didactic space of traditional teaching as designed by the teacher externally. Let's discuss how the space is perceived internally by the class participants. The students of traditional classroom often perceive the didactic space axiologically by setting value-judgments and emotional flavors on specific curricular topics they studied: interesting vs. boring, like-it vs. dislike-it, relevant vs. irrelevant, useful vs. "busy work", easy vs. difficult, and so on. For example, this is students' reactions to a statement, "Today we are going to study poetry" - "BORING!" "Yak," "interesting", "Not again!", "exciting." Thus, each curricular topic has some emotionally axiological valency for a student, sometimes even before the topic being taught. The student's emotionally axiological valency to a specific curricular topic is defined by the student's ontological - whole-person - reaction to the curricular topic, its teaching, the teacher, the classroom, and the student's progress of studying it as defined by the teacher, the classmate, and the student him/herself. Unpackaging such student's statement as "I like fractions because I'm good at them" would probably lead us to evidence that the student successfully: 1) fulfills classroom assignments set by the teacher, 2) meets the teacher's expectations regarding learning the topic of fraction, 3) is seen by the relevant classmates as "being good at fractions" (e.g., being better than many other classmates), 4) supports his/her high social status and cultural/academic capital in area of the fractions in the classroom, 5) has his/her positive identity investment in the topic of fractions, 6) has reverberations to the broader activity, status, identity, and societal areas like being good at and in math, school, institutionalized education, societal institutions, citizenship, and so on.
Didactic time of traditional teaching
The didactic time defines itself in the following questions, "What didactically happens in the classroom? Why does it happen? How do the participants perceive it?" The didactic time of traditional schooling can be characterized as "covering curricula" by the teacher. It is a very chronotopic category since the didactic time in traditional schooling defined through didactic space as spreading teaching and learning through it.
The teacher covers curricula through organized preemptive guidance that supposed to cause learning in students. As Bakhtin (1986) pointed out, meaning making process involves answering to questions. Meaning making process in a traditional teaching is organized by the teacher in a series of preemptive question-answers that the teacher asks and answers either by him/herself and/or by the students. Essentially, traditional teaching is modeled after informal everyday guidance when a person seeking information or knowledge asks questions of another person who may know the answer. However, in traditional teaching the person who asks and answers the questions is the same - the teacher. The traditional teacher tries to preempt the students' possible questions by figuring out the questions in advance before the students ever ask the questions. Thus, the nature of the questions is changed: in informal everyday guidance-learning situations, the questions are often asked by the learner and they have the information-seeking nature while in traditional teaching, the questions are mainly asked by the teacher and they have the answer-known nature (Matusov, Bell, & Rogoff, 2002; Matusov & Rogoff, 2002; Mehan, 1979). Thus, the traditional teacher creates an "imaginary learner" whom he or she guides. This imaginary learner asks questions that the teacher replies (or leads actual students to reply).
Covering curricula through a questioning-answering process predesigned by the teacher usually unfolds through mainly three communicative formats (and their mixture): 1) a monologic lecture, 2) a rhetorically interactive lecture, 3) a teacher-students interaction controlled by the teacher. A monologic lecture consists of answers to the imaginary learner's questions that are not present in the lecture. Only answers are present which puts a lot of demands on a listener who in order to make sense of the monologic lecture has to reconstruct the implicit questions that these answers are aimed to address. For example,..
Didactic axiology of traditional teaching
Didactic axiological chronotope of traditional teaching
Local classroom space, time, axiology, and chronotope of traditional teaching
Ontological space, time, axiology, and chronotope of traditional teaching
Unity of didactic, local, and ontological chronotopes in traditional teaching
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