On Monday 28 July 2003 8:53 pm, Eugene Matusov promulgated:
> Dear Jay and everybody-
>
> I think that the idea of multiple times is bigger than multiple temporal
> scales (although it is also a very important idea!). Let me elaborate.
IMHO i think the problems of multiple time scales and Eugene's qualitative
transformations come about from traditional notions of time as we live by and
measure the passage of people's lives. Instead, there is the possibility of
characterizing what happens, not with the ticking of a clock, but instead, by
the passing of, or better phrased, the enactment of, actions. In your mind's
eye, imagine a web whereby an action is represented as a node. It is the
confluence of many other prior actions and in turn branches to many other
subsequent actions.
For lack of a better name for this interconnected non-linear web of
happenings, it could be termed "action-space". In as much as a child's
development is only crudely correlated with the passage of time, so could be
"action-space". But the Semiotic Ecology described by Alfred Lang and the
Mind as Action approach by Wertsch seem to me to move ideas in this
direction, as well as Activity Theory, of course, and the Ecological
Psychology of Barker . Units of analysis are no longer bound to a person or
a group or a physical space, but rather are determined by the density of
relations, characterized by interactions, among people and things. As such
units could be flexibly ascribed to where interactions "cluster", e.g. "a
meeting" or "an institution" or "a partnership" or "a lesson" or "a
classroom", or "a discussion", with "or" being used here in the inclusive
sense i.e. not the logical "xor". In analysis, one could simultaneously
look at multiple clusterings in "action-space" that span these traditional
units. It is explicitly anti-space and anti-time in as much as it is also
inclusive of both these categories implicitly. Configurations of people and
things materially make possible the "action potentials" for "events" yet to
happen.
But this is a highly abstract way of thinking . So. It is way out there as
far as I'm concerned and for it to become a theoretical framework it needs a
symbolic form, a kind of "action-algebra", not a necessarily quantitative
algebra, but one that can express qualitative durations and transformations
with the non-linear dynamics of humans. It needs a methodology to relate
these symbolic forms to what can be observed. Consequently, this is yet a
radically divergent dough on both sides. I hope it's not too gauche to post
some fiction to xmca.
bb
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