Steve, thank you for your response and your article suggestion, which I now
need to read. I appreciate your general point that it would be mistaken to
try to isolate certain variables as "non-time related." Of course they
are. Really this all came about because I was trying to think of what
story I could tell about some phenomena and I realized that it depended how
you looked at it. That is, in certain ways there was some substantial
change in what teachers were trying to accomplish, but in other ways things
stayed the same, in the sense that certain situations seemed to trigger the
same kinds of responses. And, as you said, it is important to understand
these processes as a whole.
And your point about the usefulness of the different timescales is a
helpful one too, in the sense that they are meaningful in relation to each
other, but in isolation not too precise, if I understand you correctly.
I hadn't been aware that diachronic and synchronic were originally
linguistic terms...I know they have also been big with biblical scholars.
Thanks for your comments,
Ben
At 01:09 PM 10/16/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi Ben,
>
>Thanks so much for bringing this up. I have been wanting to understand
>these terms better.
>
>from Dictionary.com:
>Synchronic: Of or relating to the study of phenomena, such as linguistic
>features, or of events of a particular time, without reference to their
>historical context.
>Diachronic: Of or concerned with phenomena, such as linguistic features,
>as they change through time.
>
>Examples might be: a study comparing accents in New York with accents in
>Georgia in 2003 would be synchronic, but a study of the evolution of
>accents in New York 1900 - 2000 would be diachronic.
>
>I believe Saussure is attributed with creating these terms. But I have a
>little trouble with this particular duality, as I do some others used by
>structuralist-minded linguists (such as, for example, the
>competence/performance duality). I see that distinguishing analyses of
>comparisons over space from analyses of comparison over time can certainly
>be useful (as can distinguishing general competence from particular
>performance), but I have trouble seeing the categories, synchronicity and
>diachronicity, as generally viable dualities for dialectical-minded
>scientific analysis, which seeks out the dynamic oppositions and
>transformations processes, and therefore usually needs to track both space
>and time to get a realistic picture. Arbitrarily ignoring time or space
>can be useful, of course, but only in limited ways, as analytical tools,
>perhaps to reveal a special feature for specific analysis, in order to
>better understand its relation to the whole. From this point of view, I
>would hesitate to say that an analysis of "variables (e.g., the subject
>being discussed, the people involved) [that] influence social interactions
>in systematic, predictable ways across time" can be "non-time related" in
>any general sense. Attempts to separate synchronicity from diachronicity
>at the level of general, systematic analysis puzzle me. I think your
>question on how to "weave these two analytic lenses together" is just the
>right way to look at this topic.
>
>Since you bring these terms up, I also have some questions about the terms
>microgenetic, mesogenetic, and macrogenetic levels when they are used as
>something more than just arbitrary conceptual structures to isolate
>specific arenas in a process for analysis. From my observation of these
>terms so far - they are still new to me - they are useful as placeholders
>or shorthand references to compare various levels of time scale in an
>analysis of a complex historical process. Generally speaking, these terms
>strike me as not much different than using relative words like little,
>big, in-between, fast, slow, etc. - they are ways of making quantitative
>distinctions. Again, however, while it seems to me that these
>distinctions can be quite useful for specific examinations, they don't
>carry the power of more the universal dialectical oppositions inherent in
>systems in general that is needed for more general and systematic
>analyses. Dialectical oppositions such as form and content, abstract and
>concrete, continuity and discontinuity, chance and necessity, the
>particular and general among others seem to me to be much more enduring
>across systems and over time and therefore stronger tools at the level of
>general analysis.
>
>On another angle, while these terms don't happen to come up in Lemke's
>article "
>
>Across the Scales of Time: Artifacts, Activities, and Meanings in
>Ecosocial Systems," the article itself is of course very relevant to the
>timescale question, and familiar to many (appeared in MCA in 2000). It
>is online at:
>
>
>
> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke/papers/across_the_scales_of_time.htm
>
>Best,
>- Steve
>
>
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