Concerning time and academic knowledge and mediation and who knows what else:
For many years I have been lucky to teach in the Communication Department here at
UCSD where the idea of human action/activity as mediated is a central idea, so I have been
allowed, even required, to think a lot about the process of mediation.
One day I was talking with a colleague about an idea that had come to me in the course of
my teaching on the topic. I had the idea that human beings, unable to experience the future
directly, should be thought of as walking backwards, holding hands with their neighbors,
straining to turn their heads, while chattering with those around them about what was happening,
what had just happened, what was coming up. My intuitive understanding of the idea that
meaning is retrospectively constructed. A colleague, Robert Horwitz asked me, "Do you
know Walter Benjamin's little essay about the "Angelus Novus?" I didn't. So he gave it to me.
Here it is, from his book, *Illuminations*
A Klee painting, "Angelus Novus," shows an angel loking as though he is about to move away
from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings
are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught
in his wings with such violence that the angle can no longer close them. This storm irresistably
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward. This storm is what we call progress (p. 257-258).
Which leads us into a discussion of alienation, a topic for another occasion. Here I want to
focus differently in a way that links back to academic versus non-academic sources of
knowledge. The other day, Bill Blanton, who knows my fondness for meditations on
time and human experience, sent me a message that summarized traditional
Quechua notions of time and human experience. Darned if it was not a
rephrasing of Benjamin, or of my awkward intuitive demonstration (I saved
Bill's message, but can't find it in the heap of stuff at my feet!).
Assuming Bill's info
about Quechua notions of time is accurate, fundamental intuitions about human experience
can be found across a very broad range of human cultural conditions. Sandro Duranti's
article on Wittgenstein and Samoan theories of language is another.
Somehow, this idea pleases me. That I should have an intuition that is shared
by such diverse people as Benjamin and anonymous Quechua adults makes it seem
like it might almost be worthwhile.
It also serves to demystify academic knowledge.
mike