Neurophysiologic Origins of Mathematical Cognition – Individual Differences in Resource Allocation

Elke van der Meer

Objectives. Mathematics comprises different domains such as arithmetic, algebra, geometry and many more. Mathematical cognition is biological work and involves the allocation of cognitive resources. Resource allocation in such tasks depends on characteristics of the task as well as on cognitive abilities of the individual. In this study, we investigated whether the superior performance of individuals with high cognitive abilities rather results from the allocation of more cognitive resources or from more efficient processes (allocation of fewer resources).

Methods. We examined 11^th-graders differing in cognitive abilities (intelligence, working memory capacity, attention) on a simple choice reaction time task, a geometric analogy task, and a task involving the simplification of algebraic expressions. We measured behavioural parameters (speed, accuracy) as well as pupil diameter as an indicator of resource allocation (cf. Just et al., 2003).

Results. Behaviourally, individuals of high cognitive abilities outperformed individuals of average cognitive abilities in all tasks. While in the choice reaction time task, pupil diameters were not dependent on cognitive abilities, individuals with high cognitive abilities displayed higher pupil diameters in the analogy and algebra task. Thus, in elementary tasks individuals with higher cognitive abilities profit from a higher cognitive efficiency, while superior performance in the more demanding mathematical tasks results from greater resource allocation. Furthermore, individuals with high cognitive abilities displayed a greater pre-experimental pupil baseline. These findings indicate that individuals with high cognitive abilities tend to scan the environment for a task of interest when no demand is at hand and tune their cognitive system to the respective demand when given a sufficiently interesting task (cf. Aston-Jones & Cohen, 2005).

Conclusions. The study provides insights into the neurophysiologic origins of mathematical cognition. It may help to understand why some students perform better in high-level cognitive tasks, such as geometry or algebra. The presented neurophysiologic evidence suggests that individuals with higher cognitive abilities achieve superior performance through stronger task-orientation and the allocation of more cognitive resources in processing the task. The evolutionary background of these findings will be discussed.

Supported by: German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (NIL-I/II), Berlin Neuroimaging Center

THE HUMAN TEMPORAL CONDITION BETWEEN MEMORY AND HOPE

Steve Ostovich

Scholars and public intellectuals are showing renewed critical interest in the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s work provides resources for coming to terms with a traumatic past and betrays the limits of these resources. This paper will first of all describe Arendt’s understanding of the temporal dimension of human existence and explicate her thought in terms of the origins and futures of what J. T Fraser calls “sociotemporality.” Arendt takes seriously our embedded-ness in time, writing about the human condition rather than an atemporal and unchanging human nature typical of philosophy. She coins the word “natality” to describe the essential freedom of human action: humans give birth to or are the origin of new things in the world. These actions assume reality in the presence of others, and Arendt offers what might be called a political ontology of the acting subject. Memory is the basis for the identity and responsibility of this actor. But is memory an adequate response to the nootemporal problem of death? Giving direction to action, a nootemporal necessity, is a matter of promising: promises are an indication of an anticipated future and hope. But does promising make sense in the face of the unpredictability of free human action and our consequent lack of control over the future? Memory is fragile and hope seems irrational. These are the kinds of nootemporal problems that push us into sociotemporality. In response to this condition, this paper will move beyond Arendt and advance an eschatological understanding of time as the key to making sense of memory and hope as rational activities.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT TIME

Mark Aultman

While our ideas of time are clearly conditioned by human language, the origins of time precede humans and language.  In a recent book, The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker considers human language and what it reveals about human nature.  Words are not only tied to reality but are tied to human experiences of causality in the world.  For purposes of World Trade Center insurance policies judges considered whether "9/11" was one event or a series of different events involving different airplanes.  Language is amazingly flexible, permitting us to flip conceptual frames to focus on different aspects of time. 

The model of time that underlies language, says Pinker, is not the constant ticking of a clock, but roughly packaged stretches of time into instantaneous events, ongoing processes and culminations.  The part of the mind that interacts with language keeps track of these snippets of time with before, after and at-the-same-time.  A language's tenses chop time into segments, the specious present (a minimum duration or a "now"), the indefinite future, and the history of the universe until the moment of speaking.  While there may be subdivisions of past and future into near and far with respect to the present, language systems do not reckon time from a fixed beginning (such as the Big Bang) nor use constant units like seconds or minutes. 

Our evolution, language and ability to think and act no doubt condition us to experience time through causal connections, consequences and intentionality, connected by memory of past to present and future.  Social complexity may render some of the causal preconceptions of language (such as objects as "things") less useful, and increase unintended consequences, but the reality of time and consequences remains. 

Epic as the Human Grand Narrative of Origins

Frederick Turner

Jean-François Lyotard’s well-known critique of grand narratives, especially those that impose a “Western” epistemological framework on nature and on the disparate experiences of different cultures, is often taken to include traditional epic narratives.  Lyotard and other postmodernist critics  deconstruct grand narratives as Eurocentric, logocentric, and phallocentric means to justify the hegemony of the dominant class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation over the weak, untrustworthy, sinister and subversive Other.  One consequence of this view has been the relativizing of different cultural claims about the nature of nature itself—nature as science sees it as just one more cultural narrative.

But the human universality of epic, as scholarship now reveals it, suggests that the West is not the only tribe that has fought, conquered, ordered the world, and subjugated nature.  The parallels among such culturally-diverse epics as Gilgamesh, the Mayan Popol Vuh, the Indian Ramayana, the Odyssey, the Mandinka Sundiata, the Volsungs Saga, the Hebrew book of Genesis, the Japanese Heike, the Inferno, etc, refute the postmodern notion that different culture-worlds are mutually untranslatable and incommensurate.  Profound thematic elements, such as the beast-man, the underworld journey, the hero’s exile and return, the great flood, the founding of the city, the sacrifice, the dangerous encounter with the divine woman, the fall from an earlier innocent world, etc, are shared across the world.

This paper will integrate the material of over thirty world epics into a hypothetical grand narrative, and argue that this narrative recounts in metaphorical terms humanity’s account of its own origins in nature and the evolutionary crisis-laden process by which we became human and walked all over the world.  The symbolic language of this narrative, handed down from ancient ages in oral and written forms, can act as a guide and a source of testable hypothesis for the study of human evolution.

J. B. Priestley and His Time Plays

Carol Fischer

J. B. Priestley (1894-1984), a  prolific English writer, lived through two World Wars and the 20^th century’s particular mix of physics and metaphysics, sociology and psychology.  He integrated into the plots of his plays a particular understanding of Time distilled from the concepts of J.W. Dunne: multidimensional time, infinite regress (which Priestley negated), and serialism as published in An Experiment with Time (1927). Dunne claimed that dreams with pre-cognitive value were clues that time was ultimately not linear but a dimension-whole whose “future” parts could be accessed. Priestley’s opus, Man and Time, explains his conclusions about the nature of time as they emerged from his own collection of people’s dreams and experiences. Time has three orders: “time One” is linear, everyday experiences from birth to death; “time Two” is the fuzzier “shape of things to come” accessed through night dreams; “time Three” is something more ethereal “in which purpose and action are joined together and there seems to be an almost magical release of creative power.”  Priestley used playwriting to explore these variances of Time.

I am proposing a paper that analyzes Priestley’s Time plays. Time and the Conways has a middle act placed twenty years into the future that belies the anticipation in Acts I and III, making fools of some of the characters and giving others melancholic trepidation as they, dream-like, glimpse the future. I Have Been Here Before includes a character who journeys to a certain inn at a certain time to prove the reality of a dream, and then experiments to see if the future situation for the people there can be shifted because of his foresight. An Inspector Calls creates meaning through each character being confronted with his/her lack of social responsibility in their ill use of a young woman who has died horribly, but is precipitated by the closing revelation that the woman was not yet dead during the inspector’s visit, but died shortly after he left. In Johnson Over Jordan, “Everyman” Johnson dies and finds himself in the fourth dimension that is time without space - memory and experience without body.  Priestley might say that the phrase “Origins and Futures” is a misnomer of our true experience of Time. My paper will address the place of Priestley’s plays in dramatic history, and the insights that his theories and dramas might offer towards the human experience of time.

Continuous and Discrete Time: The Cognitive and Scientific Possibilities

Carlos Montemayor

There is a long philosophical tradition, an instance of which is intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics, which states that our immediate acquaintance with time is the source of our notion of continuity, formalized by the representation of the real numbers. In physics, time (more accurately spacetime) is also assumed to be continuous in special and general relativity. Thus, it would seem as though continuity is a feature of one of the most primitive psychological representations or experiences (our immediate acquaintance with time) and also of the most fundamental physical structure of the universe (spacetime). But what is the evidence for these claims? How could experiments confirm or reject these hypotheses?

The possible combinations of how scientific evidence (from physics and cognitive science) could confirm the ‘continuity hypothesis’ are: a) physical and psychological time are continuous; b) physical time is continuous, but psychological time is discrete; c) physical time is discrete, but psychological time is continuous; and d) physical and psychological time are discrete. Of these possibilities, I will argue that a) and c) are the most probable and that c) could be one of the most dramatic examples of a case in which something thought to be metaphysically fundamental turned out to be psychologically fundamental.

I will explain what does it mean for psychological time to be continuous and what is the evidence that confirms that psychological time is in a continuous-analog format. After assessing the psychological evidence on our immediate acquaintance with time, I will offer some thoughts concerning the continuity of spacetime, and argue that the possibility that spacetime is discrete should be taken very seriously until there is conclusive evidence against it. This suggests that the continuity of time can only be confirmed in the psychological realm. I will conclude by presenting some implications of the possible mind-dependence of continuous time.

A Spatial-Temporal Odyssey: Origins and Futures

Helen Sills

The history of an art form provides fruitful insights into its social and cultural contexts. It also records the progress of significant areas of human consciousness. The important landmark developments in the history of European music, for example, reflect a journey of exploration into spatial/temporality and time awareness, which contributes valuable information to our cognitive ‘maps’ of these areas. The route which these important developments take, reveals both the characteristics which originate in the human psyche and continuously reappear, and also the stimulating innovative ideas which develop into future paths.

This historical journey into spatial/temporality begins with the earliest known written examples of European music and continues, noting dates and locations, through the contrasting creative worlds of Gregorian chant and znamenny chant, to examples of spatial/temporal form building from more recent and familiar periods of musical history. Music’s apparent progress towards an ever fuller musical ‘space in time’ manifests itself in certain specific ways, as seeking: 

a) a larger mental space in which to wonder at mankind’s place in creation

b) a deeper, mor flexible mental space in which to reflect on the personal  meaning of life

c) a more transcendent mental space in which to move towards a spirit or force greate than ourselves, or a quality of life more fulfilling than our present worldly existence.

Music’s advances into spatial/temporality and speculative interest in time in particular, increases exponentially in the  20th century, exploding into a profusion of techniques and construction methods which are interesting in the light of recently discovered knowledge of how the brain functions. 

Tales of Time and Terror

Marcus Bullock

The more closely we examine the experience of terror, the more clearly we come to understand it as a particular way of shaping time.  Though our normal usage of words often fails to distinguish between terror and other forms of fear and fearfulness, the concept of terrorism reveals an important difference.  Terror permits that kind of deliberate application in the purpose of controlling others because it transforms the time in which they live.  We know terror as an affective state arising from a distinct origin, usually from a specific shock that we have suffered in the past, that imposes its power over us by the threat of its return in the future.  Terrorism describes the purpose of an act perpetrated in order to establish the quality of time within which it binds its victim.  The act is not complete if it merely persists in the horror of a memory.  It has to persist quite distinctly in the potential to return.  Thus it encloses its victim in the continuing movement of time between these two framing points of origin and future. 

This structure of framing between an opening and a closure also corresponds to the way time is shaped in narrative.  This paper will explore the relationship between terror and narration by looking at the intrinsic opposition between the two as competing forces in the articulation of time.  Terror sections up and dominates time by capturing us between an origin and a future before which we are reduced to passivity.  Narrative segments time by a comparable pattern of opening and closure but bases this articulation on the opposite process of establishing action, choice, and development of the protagonist’s character to constitute the beginning point and an endpoint in a story’s temporal structure. 

The argument will be largely new because of the way it looks first at the relation between lived time and fictional time.  The methods currently practiced among literary scholars treat narrative as a genre, defining its essence by enumerating generic characteristics without a fully developed reference to lived time.  This presentation considers the founding structure of narration as a means by which we respond to and master the terror that arises from either natural or human threats.  I will illustrate how this approach works in both cases by examples that can be easily followed by a general audience, drawn from stories by Edgar Allan Poe.

Dante on the Temporal Horizons of the Human Person

Dennis Costa

Dante’s Commedia elaborates an anthropology in terms of which human beings are both radically contingent and self-determining, both self-projecting and someone else’s project.  Humans seem determined by virtue of their being immersed, from their origins and along with all other contingent beings, in space-time; but, in any given act of volition or judgment, humans proceed to determine upon a variety of numeric, linguistic, artistic and cultic measures of time’s horizons for them, of time’s occasioning for them an apparent infinity of (even personal) futures or destinations.  (In this formulation, I am responding, in part, to Herve’ Barreau’s recent “re-reading” of St. Augustine in KronoScope.)  For Dante, any truth-bearing event in mathematics, language, art or ritual is ‘rooted in’ or ‘continuous with’ an event that is occurring outside of space-time.  As Beatrice puts it to Dante-pilgrim, “ . . . I’m telling, not asking,/ what it is you desire to hear, because I have seen it/ there where is knit together every where and every when” (“ . . . Io dico, e non dimando,/ quel che tu vuoli udir, perch’io l’ho visto/ la’ ‘ve s’appunta ogne ubi e ogne quando” --Paradiso XXIX. 10-12).   For both the species and the individual, the paradox of the human future is that it remains truly open-ended and distinctly implied in its origins.  The having-come-forth from God (exitus) is already a being-on-the-way-back to God (redditus). 

This paper would interpret the details of two specific cantos as a way of explicating a powerful 14^th century model for human origins and futures.  Purgatorio XXV narrates what we might term the ‘natural history’ of homo sapiens.  It focuses upon the period of gestation in utero—including both developments that are barely noticeable and real ‘singularities’ that produce new and unique things in the world.  Paradiso XXIX represents the origin of the cosmos (and of time) as being already a “discourse,” the first ‘word’/instant of which is neither a bang nor a whimper but a verb, a sympathetic statement that is meant to be received and understood.      

Secrecy and Timeliness in the Historical Record: “Original Sins” and Future Consequences in American Foreign Relations

Katherine Sibley

As the Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln audaciously launched the first and still the only full-scale historical documentation effort of any government, the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series.  State Department historians ever since have compiled a record of the origins and evolution of U.S. global interactions which has also served as a guide for understanding future policies and practices.[1]  In 1995, President Bill Clinton added a new wrinkle to the production of FRUS: time.  To promote greater transparency, all government documents were to be declassified on a twenty-five year schedule.[2]  A vast backlog of materials has continued to complicate this laudable goal; more recently, mismanagement of the Office responsible for FRUS has also created delays in its output.[3]   This is not the first crisis faced by the series.  Back in the 1980s, volumes appeared that overlooked Cold War interventions in Iran and Guatemala.   Such gaps were more than an embarrassment; the origins of these covert operations also had a bearing on future events.  The current Iranian regime’s own antecedents in the late 1970s were largely a reaction to the American imposition of the Shah in 1953, for example.

Today, established agreements permit fuller discussion of covert operations.[4]  But timely dissemination of documentation on the roots of American foreign policies and practices, especially as they relate to the evolving course and future of America’s professed ethical values, is also vital; the recent debate over waterboarding, or the expulsion of former residents of the U.S. military base in Diego Garcia,[5] are cases in point.    As J. T. Fraser has pointed out, “Historians must construct the story of the past … and assess its details in terms of ever-changing value judgments.”[6]  This paper will examine the issue of timeliness in historical documentation as it relates to a fuller discussion of the origins and futures of principled behavior in American foreign policy.

“The Origins of Language and Narrative Temporalities.”

Rosemary Huisman

J.T. Fraser has described the evolution of six integrative levels of nature, with their different causalities and temporalities, all of which, from the point of view of human existence, continue to coexist. However, the origins of human language emerged in the context of human experience (the human umwelt) of only the last three evolved worlds: the physiological world of biotemporality, the mental world of nootemporality and the social world of sociotemporality.  It is unsurprising then that when functional linguists have modelled the representation of experience in natural language they describe a differentiation of meaning compatible with these three worlds, even while maintaining a monosemous understanding of ‘time’. Admitting Fraser’s polysemous understanding of time into the language model particularly augments  the explanatory power of narrative studies, for (to quote H. Porter Abbott): “narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time.” (2002: 3) Narrative study had typically assumed a singular sense of time, comparable to that of biotemporality, with a coherent sequence of chronology. Now it is possible to ask how narratives can be told with different temporalities and principles of sequence and, using the functional model, study the different representations of experience in the language of those narratives. Even further, we can look beyond the last three evolved worlds in which language originated to the extended human umwelt of contemporary science and ask how, if at all, natural language can tell narratives of those worlds, narratives of atemporality, prototemporality and eotemporality, to use Fraser’s terms.

In this paper I describe the compatibility between J.T. Fraser’s model of natural worlds and M.A.K. Halliday’s model of natural language, and then, as time permits, illustrate narratives of different temporalities by reference to Western literary narratives from different historical periods.

References:

Fraser, J. T. (1999) Time, Conflict, and Human Values. Urbana & Chicago: Illinois University Press

Halliday, M. A. K., rev’d Matthiessen, C. M.I.M.  (2004) An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3^rd edn. London: Arnold.

Porter Abbott, H. (2002) The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ON THE SOCIAL ORIGIN OF TIME IN LANGUAGE

Walter Schweidler

The question how time is related to human consciousness is one of the deepest philosophical problems. Immanuel Kant’s explanation was that time is constituted by consciousness. One decisive problem of that idea is however that, if time is “constituted” by a living being’s consciousness, then the origin of living beings themselves cannot be understood as an origin in time. The consequence was the Kantian distinction between our temporal existence as a mere phenomenon and the “transcendental” subject in us which is absolutely timeless. But again, given that distinction, the origin of our consciousness as temporal but reasonable beings becomes unexplainable. Phenomenology has always attempted to reinterpret the Kantian “transcendental subject” in anthropological terms. The phenomenological alternative to the Kantian topic of “constitution” can best be characterized by Max Scheler’s term “Daseinsrelativität” (relativity of being). Time is not constituted by our consciousness but “daseinsrelativ” to it (relative to its being): that means that time would not be “time” if there were no conscious beings, but it does not mean that there was no content or substance of time before the origin of such beings. The origin of time cannot be thought as a totally creative starting point but it must be seen as a specific movement of transformation, a turning of a pre-temporal reality into the consciousness of time. But also in that view the question of the origin remains a problem. How can the “turning” of something into time have had a temporal origin? There must be some aspect of that turn which is leading not from the past to the present but on the contrary: a turning of our present existence into an origin in which the consciousness of that existence is still emerging. Here we face the paradox of the repetition of the unique and therefore unrepeatable beginning. The anthropological thesis which I will discuss in my presentation is that to deal with the paradox of the repetition of its unrepeatable origin is exactly the task which human societies claim to fulfil by the cultic or religio-cultural renewal and reawakening of their origins in time and that the essential element of that claim is the reconnection (in a culteral and temporal sense) of our cultural identity to a specific kind of language which cannot be translated but only recreated by the poetic word.

Endings as Origins: the Double Logic of Narrative

Sabine Gross

At first glance, the direction and progression of narratives seems unambiguous: we generally read texts from beginning to end, first line or page to last; and at the level of plot, events similarly progress from their origins (some initial complication that sets things in motion) to their temporal conclusion and thematic resolution. But there is actually a “double logic” (Jonathan Culler) in effect in texts, whose most intriguing aspect is a confounding of origin and destination and the establishment of a reverse causality.  For the reader, causality develops sequentially, from apparent cause to apparent effect: events have to be motivated and made plausible as they occur, based on what has gone before. Yet for the author, the effect – the outcome of a plot development – is frequently the cause of what precedes it in the text, and her/his work proceeds in reverse: events, characters, and details are introduced with a view towards the role they play for the future development, outcome, resolution of the plot, so that the “virtual future” presented in the textual turns out to be the origin of its own foundation in a paradoxical loop. “Realism” can be defined as the successful camouflage of the structural determination by an overlay of verisimilitude and apparent coincidence as well as plausibility. Edgar Poe offers a – staged – model of writing “backwards” from the conclusion of a text in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” for his ballad “The Raven”. Another text by Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” will offer an example of the particular role the double temporal/causal logic of texts plays for mysteries and detective stories. – a genre that manages to simultaneously confirm and unsettle, to employ and uncover the workings of this double logic in the mind of the reader.

"Big Science": marching forward to the past.

Michael Crawford

“Big Science” projects are unusual for their temporal focus.  Normally, Basic Science and Applied Science/Technology look forward although they differ in fundamental ways.  In Applied Science, recent knowledge is marshaled to assemble new application-oriented projects that can be exploited for profit in the immediate future: “how can I use this now?” By contrast, although Basic Science also relies upon prior knowledge, the work encompasses a historically broader span, and the enterprise develops hypotheses that will lead to program  advancement over a more lengthy future. As an unusual category of Basic Science, “Big Science” projects occupy a uniquely dichotomous space.  Huge costs are justified by the enlargement of future potential for hypothesis building and Applied Science spin-offs. However, despite political representations that emphasize the futuristic and long-lived utility of the knowledge being sought, these programs tend to focus upon ancient, even originary states. “Big Science” asks big questions: the initial phase of cataloging is vast and is followed by a period of hypothesis development and testing that asks “how does this/we work?” The culmination is the question “how did this/we originate?”

Examples? The $6 billion Large Hadron Collider at CERN will recreate conditions that existed immediately following the Big Bang.  The Hubble, Herschel, and James Webb Space Telescopes will literally look back through time to the early days of the universe.  The Human Genome Project has expanded to include comparative genomics: what is the evolutionary origin of genes and multi-cellular organisms such as ourselves?  Even futuristic sciences like Exobiology (what does extraterrestrial look like and how will we recognize it?) are looking retrospectively to evolutionary origins for inspiration.  In Biology, the Post-Genome era is moving towards comprehensive studies of genome products (the Transcriptome, and the Proteome), and how each interacts with the other and with the environment (the Epigenome).  Taking the example of Epigenome studies as a likely candidate for a new “Big Science” project, I will outline how the first few reductionist and future-oriented steps in “how does it work” science coalesce to a comprehensive cataloging that inevitably focuses upon the far distant past.

Racine and the Roots of ‘Untragedy’ in Mozart’s Mitridate

Katharina Clausius

In his monograph Sur Racine (1960), Roland Barthes writes of Racinian tragedy as a “blind space,” suspended between clarity and obscurity. Racine’s Mithridate operates within a symmetrical dramatic structure that resists the conventional progression of tragic events; the protagonist’s two deaths (the first is erroneously reported) frame the play and open an intermediary space of limited dramatic action, and by extension, of suspended dramatic time. As Barthes discusses, the absence of significant “events” in Mithridate results in a tragedy of ironic language seeped in “la mauvaise foi,” an obscure, insincere discourse that destabilizes the possibility for tragic action. Paradoxically, Barthes’ dialectical theory proposes that this absence of temporal movement admits a more poignant, transparent form of human interaction: the roots of “untragedy.”

Despite preserving the radical central void of Racine’s drama, Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto, an opera seria based on an Italian translation of the 1673 tragedy, reinterprets the play’s “unity of subject” and establishes the tension between clarity and obscurity at the foreground of the plot. Tracing the evolution of his new protagonist, Mitridate’s son Farnace, Mozart uses Racine’s central space of suspended time to explore the violence of his character’s metaphoric blindness and revelatory apotheosis. Farnace’s final aria performs a conclusive function, resolving plot tension in a strikingly touching and prolonged moment of enlightenment that immediately overshadows his father’s final defeat and suicide. This affirmative ending represents a second type of “untragedy,” one with origins in the work’s internal space of suspended time. For both Racine and Mozart, inaction inspires new dramatic possibilities; for the playwright, poetic language defers action in order to express real human pathos; for the composer, musically vibrant characters pursue enlightenment from within a promising temporal space. Racine’s radically symmetrical, stagnant tragic structure becomes the origin for his own conception of “untragedy;” a century later, this same narrative form becomes the roots for a young Mozart’s equally inventive reinterpretation of classical tragedy.

Theorizing the Modernist Flight from Origins: The Case of Painting and Theatre

Claudia Clausius

Modernist painting sought to escape its origins in order to distinguish itself from other arts and to forefront the methodologies unique to its own medium. In 1960 Clement Greenberg articulated the mandate of such art as non-representational and anti-sculptural. Emphasizing flatness and pigment – surface and texture - such painting rejected all forms of narrative and mimesis. Ironically, despite its iconoclasm, modernist art soon became ‘classic.’ More than this, complementing all other aesthetic styles, it came to define the timelessness of ‘modernism.’ Its cool aloofness, its inaccessibility, its indifference, indeed, its ‘purity’ moved this art into a realm seemingly beyond influences and evolution.

Other critics interrogate modern painting in terms of de-figuration. The human aspect is first “abstracted” – made grotesque through various means (Karl Ballmer, Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Bacon, Louis le Brocquy, etc.) – and then finally excised altogether. Michael Fried conceives of pictorial modernity as anti-theatre. Rather than an invisible fourth wall through which an attentive spectator makes sense of the proceedings on stage, modern art closes itself off, stages its methodologies, and claims autonomy. Such art becomes not only anti-historical, but also other-worldly.

Modernist painting’s commitment to reduction and minimalism preceded other art forms such as sculpture, literature, and theatre. Samuel Beckett was deeply influenced by what he saw as abstract art’s “obligation” to confess its own “failure” towards representation. Beckett wished to displace language and cognitive affirmation. Embodying specific modernist qualities, his minimalist dramas excise narrative, characterization, setting, etc. However, they do so not with a view towards purity and autonomy but in order to admit to a lack of human independence.

Beckett’s works too have become ‘classics’ of the theatre. But to what degree is the ‘classic’ reputation of modernist art similar to that of a canonical dramatist? This paper will compare these modernist performances with the competing claims of time and history.

"Daylight Saving Project"

Emily DiCarlo

Knowing that ISST is renowned for its interdisciplinary flare, I wish to propose an artistically driven presentation on the topic of time and duration through the vehicle of my contemporary art practice. I am an interdisciplinary visual artist and have based my entire conceptual framework on both the objective concepts of time and on the subjective experiences of temporal passing.

Not only do I aim to use time as the medium, through the use of video, performance, photo-documentation and ephemera accumulation, I also implicate time as the primary thematic subject. I am very interested in the dichotomy found between the subjectively lived temporal experience and the objective world understanding of time. By encouraging and directing collision within this dichotomy, I aim to “over-come” time by manipulating its structural elements to produce new perspectives on duration. The idea of time-travel being possible by crossing time zones or that humans can re-live the past by turning their clocks back an hour during Daylight Saving, are all conceptual re-organizations.

In addition to giving an artist talk, I hope to present a video installation project. Ideally, I am proposing to present a three-channel video installation called DST Project (2007-08), which would require three white walls in one room with projectors (television sets can act as substitute).

The project is comprised of two sets of source material. Part 1 is rooted in the act of turning our clocks back to adhere to Daylight Saving regulations. The source material is documentation of a two hour-long performance, in which one continuous shot captures the artist simply existing in time and space. Upon the end of the first hour, at 2AM, Daylight Saving practice is put into affect and the clock is turned back to 1AM. The artist must re-live the past hour in déjà vu. In post-production, the two hours are split, installed parallel from one another, and played simultaneously. The conceptual impossibility of one individual existing twice within the “exact” same time frame becomes possible.

Contrasting the lengthy durational Part 1, the second collection of source material is from six months later, when DST standards require all clocks to be pushed one hour ahead. While Part 1 concentrates on the layering of time, Part 2 focuses on its absence. It is a single shot, one minute long, which captures a computer clock automatically skipping from 1:59AM to 3:00AM. This absence or displacement of time is then looped for the duration of one-hour. This is a gestured attempt to “fill” the missing hour and to acknowledge the time that has been lost.

Crusoe’s Foe, Foe’s Cruso, and the Origins and Future of the Novel

Jo Parker

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe has traditionally been regarded as one of the first novels, Defoe himself often called a “father” of the genre.  Certainly, in the nearly three hundred years since its publication, his novel has functioned as an origin, a rich source of other texts (from children’s stories to action-adventure miniseries) that draw upon its motif of the shipwrecked sailor who rebuilds civilization on the desert island he inhabits.  One of the most poignant responses to the mythic power of Crusoe, J.M. Coetzee’s 1986 Foe explicitly highlights the colonialist assumptions upon which Defoe’s novel is predicated.  In part a purported urtext to Crusoe, Foe features a female castaway who lands upon Cruso’s island (Coetzee’s spelling) and a Friday who has had his tongue cut off.  Unsurprisingly, many critics have examined Coetzee’s text as a postcolonial critique of Defoe’s, focusing on the gender and race issues it foregrounds.  There has, however, been little focus on Coetzee’s re-vision of Crusoe’s temporal structure.  Crusoe follows an almost oppressively linear time-scheme, one in keeping with its protagonist’s obsession with accurate time-keeping and one that implicitly reinforces the key colonialist assumption that the forward arrow of time leads to progress and fulfillment.  Yet rather than imagining a Crusoe whose industrious labor over a 28-year span enables the (re)creation of civilization, Coetzee imagines a Cruso disinterested in time-keeping or progress, and Foe, through its provocative temporal structure and the philosophical musings of its characters, explores and models the reshaping of the past—the origin––in service of an ideological purpose while it envisions in the present time a future (including a future of the novel genre) that would both take into account the injustices of this past and move beyond them.

High Cultures: Emergence, Sociotemporality, and Fate

Dieter Rathjens

This paper considers the possibility of applying J.T. Fraser's level-specific "temporality determined by global socialization" to the symbolic system of a high culture in the Spenglerian sense. It suggests that, of the various philosophies of history, Spengler's proposed non-linear, discrete high cultures, which have the organic hallmarks of genesis, development, maturation, and decline, might profitably be viewed as exemplars of sociotemporality in situ. This could provide an epistemology of the origin of our culture, as well as indicate its future based on its current state. Both Fraser and Spengler have similar descriptions of, but offer diametrically opposing explanations for, the systemic dysfunctions evidenced by the currently dominant, globally reaching Western Culture.

Proceeding from a semiotic concept of culture as shared clusters of significant symbols, we note that its expression is the trafficking in these symbols by large communities of minds. Those who act according to those symbols evidence its ethos. That ethos, based on those symbols, is unique to each high culture. Spengler's cultural phenomenology underscores this uniqueness with examples of the time-related attitudes and expressions of previous high cultures.

"Civilization" connotes a world of consensual and contractual relations, of rational exchange; it is the world of cities. Consistent with this is Spengler's denotation as the latter half, the decline of a culture, taking place solely in metropoleis. Both Fraser and Spengler attribute the term "Faustian" to this culture/civilization, remarking upon the dualism at its core, its unbounded striving, and its emphasis on science and technology. This last extender and amplifier of human ability, initially viewed as an emancipator from toil, became an agent of Western man's will; as such, it is the substrate of so-called 'globalization.' When, in combination with the pervasive ascendancy of symbolic financial liquidity, its application is ever-less informed of the culture's ethos, the results are ever-more unintended, even paradoxical. Examples of this abound, and are viewed by Spengler as typical of a devolving culture, by Fraser as indicators of an emerging higher level of complexity.

High cultures, including their civilizational phase, are consistent with the principles underpinning the integrative hierarchical levels of reality. And Fraser's posited sociotemporality is not inconsistent with Spengler's category of high culture. Despite the difficulties of level-constrained understanding, these theories, when thought of as complementary, might bring about mutual clarification.

Brain Asymmetry

Evelyn Rivera

An important issue in modern neuroscience is that of asymmetry of brain function and its evolutionary origins.  An asymmetric or lateralized brain is a one in which one side (hemisphere or other brain region) is structurally different from the other and/or performs a different set of functions.  In the human species, the production of language and speech is a function controlled by the left hemisphere in a majority of individuals.  In contrast, the right hemisphere seems to be mainly involved in a variety of spatial and emotional functions.

In the recent past, it had been speculated that brain asymmetry was a key step in the evolution of the human species, providing us with advantages that other animals lack.  Today, however, it is generally recognized that brain asymmetry, in structure and function, is widespread among vertebrates. Whether this finding reflects basic homology or parallel but independent evolutionary histories is still unclear.

There are survival benefits to the lateralized-asymmetric brain.  For one, it allows us to process many things at once.  This advantage was tested in fish where one strain was bred to have asymmetric brains like most vertebrates, whereas the other strain was bred with fish with symmetrical brains.  Both fish groups could handle a single task equally well, such as catching shrimp.  But if another component was added to the mix, a predator, the symmetrical-brained fish took twice as long to catch their prey, having to divide their attention between catching their meal and watching for prey.  The asymmetric cousins, on the other hand, could focus on both tasks at once.

Chicks have been a useful model for the study of lateralized brains, since their lateralization can be manipulated experimentally.  They were tested in a task requiring them to find food grains against a distracting background of small pebbles and at the same time to attend to a model predator overhead.  Lateralized chicks were better able than non-lateralized chicks in discriminating the grains from the background and in monitoring overhead for a model predator.

These and other examples suggest that cerebral asymmetry enhances brain efficiency in cognitive tasks that demand the simultaneous but different uses of both hemispheres.

TIME BEING

Chris Gallagher

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” - Saint Augustine

I propose to present my recent film “Time Being” as a special event for the conference, perhaps as an evening presentation rather than in the context of a normal “paper”.  It could be followed by a question and discussion period during which I could present my motivation and strategies for the many ideas raised in the film.

The passage of time is probably the most basic facet of human perception; we feel time slipping by in our inner most selves in a manner that is uniquely intimate and unlike our experience of other fundamental properties such as space or mass. Time is compared to the flight of an arrow or the flow of a stream but as accurate as these images feel there is nothing in physics that corresponds to the passage of time. Some regard time as a human illusion; there is only now and nothing else.

The motion picture is a unique medium for the study of time.  As we generally experience time by observing change or difference, similarly, in film, motion is only perceived by observing the small changes or differences from one frame to the next. Paradoxically, the film image must come to a complete stop to be projected on the screen in order to create the illusion of movement. Similarly, our ability to perceive time seems to be only possible when we stop to observe it.

Time Being is essentially 88 short films and even though each shot or sequence is exactly the same length, the viewer’s subjectivity determines how long each unit feels. The structure of the film subverts conventional temporal expectations and gives rise to the perception of a continuous present tense in the film.

Time Being originates on film, as the mechanical apparatus of the motion picture camera is a metaphor for the mechanical definition of time by a clock mechanism. One's perception of time then is deliberately linked to the mechanical, physical, analogue world in which humans operate. Perhaps time needs space to exist in the same way an image needs to depict space, in order to exist. Time Being depicts timespace to see the clock ticking in the movement of everyday life.

Time Being is essentially 88 one-minute sequences; it is an epic journey that takes one gently down the stream of consciousness to revel the wonderful paradox that is time.

The project has received support from The Canada Council, British Columbia Arts Council and UBC Research Services. 

The Past-Future Asymmetry

Friedel Weinert

It is a commonplace that we possess records of the past but not of the future, that we can influence the future but not the past, that on many accounts, we cannot travel into the past. Hence there exists a past-future asymmetry in a temporal sense in a way, which does not exist in a spatial sense. Space is isotropic but time is anisotropic. We can return to the same location an indefinite number of times but we cannot revisit a past event. Why not? A commonsensical answer is to say that the past no longer exists; it has become a record of frozen actuality whilst the future is still pregnant with potentiality. But this commonsense answer is at odds with a scientific worldview, inspired by the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Under certain interpretations of these theories, the physical world lacks a temporal dimension, and the passage of time is a product of human awareness, like the perception of colour. This answer only intensifies the puzzle: how is it that so many areas of human experience demonstrate the past-future asymmetry when fundamental physics, under certain approaches, rules it out? Unsurprisingly, many physicists and philosophers have tried to solve this puzzle. The aim of this paper is twofold: a) to critically review the main solutions to this puzzle and to analyse the supposed atemporality of the physical world, according to fundamental physics; b) to propose a unified answer to this puzzle in terms of the universality of the entropy relation in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. According to the entropy view, the past-future asymmetry exists objectively in the physical world because the energy balance of past stages of the world exists at a different level of ‘spreading’ than present and future energy balances. Consider this thesis according to a banking analogy: Imagine you are rewarded a sizeable research grant and the money is deposited into your account on the credit side. As you begin to spend the money, your expenses are listed on the debit side. Sadly, your debit side increases as your credit size decreases. At any stage during this time you can add up the debit and the credit sides to find that the total amount remains constant but the sums on the debit side will no longer be available to spend. As no new money will be paid into your account, you will never be able to return to a past balance. Hence you cannot revisit your ‘banking’ past but, fortunately, as long as there is money on the credit side, there ‘is a future’, i.e. the potential to spend more money. If you replace ‘money’ by ‘energy’ the analogy illustrates why the past-future asymmetry exists.

Bachelard’s “Discontinuous Bergsonism” in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat”

Patricia Engle

The essential growth dynamic of the universe is the productive interplay of contrary impulses.  Origins and futures interact along similar lines, meeting and mingling in transactions that seal our destinies while shifting the coordinates of our pasts, as our minds strike at causal connections to fix as the “true north” of what is real, relevant, and useful.  These transactions occur within a curved continuum that folds back on itself to form a marvelous membrane externally finite but internally fathomless.  Far from a sealed orbit of repeated turns toward pre-determined outcomes, though, time presents itself to human experience as a dynamic circuit, riddled with hidden chambers of possibility that expand in response to many variables, including human activity that is willful and creative, untainted by fear, malice, or greed.   To access such chambers is to experience “pure time” — Bergson’s “duration,” the only condition permitting the performance of “free act[s]” by “definite person[s]” (165) — and Bachelard was right when he pronounced duration “a work we create” (55) by activating “the rhythm of creation and destruction, of work and repose” (29), and described such activity as “primordial” (59).

What I propose to present to the 2010 ISST conference is a scholarly paper demonstrating the workings of Bachelard’s theory of “discontinuities” as the “decisive centers of time” (54) in Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat.”   The classic strategies of feminine resistance that Delia, the protagonist, uses to allow her abusive husband to be his own undoing (the snake he brings into the house to kill her kills him instead) align not only with traits of female time-experience but also Bachelard’s prescription for initiating duration. In fact, Delia adds to Bachelard’s model one critical ingredient: a Buddhist sort of non-attachment, interested only in the growth to both that the “marrying” of contrary impulses can bring. Her goal of complementarity, dynamic of reciprocity, and operational base of “agape” — love without self-interest — fire her time-rhythm inducements and disruptions into one of the strongest examples of productive duration I have encountered. 

It is entirely likely that Hurston the anthropologist, who embodied the interplay of contrary impulses her entire life and openly reveled in time’s “beneficent moods” (Dust Tracks 322), purposefully infused this character Delia with truths she had learned about human time-experience. 

Partial list of works to be incorporated:

Bachelard, Gaston.  The Dialectic of Duration. 1950. Trans. Mary McAllister Jones. Manchester: Clinamen, 2000.

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. 1889. Trans. F. L. Pogson. 1910. Minneola, NY: Dover, 2001.

Garcia, Irma. “Femalear Explorations: Temporality in Women’s Writing.” Trans. Eva Goliger Reisman. Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives on Temporality. Oxford: Pergamon, 1989.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. 1942. 2^nd ed. U of Illinois P, 1984.

--. “Sweat.” Literature: A Pocket Anthology. Ed. R. S. Gwynn. New York: Penguin Academics, 2007. 138-49.

A Musician's Guide to Time

Rosemary Mountain

Over the years, I have been working to develop ways to articulate aspects of time and temporal art to students and colleagues in music (composition, performance, analysis, history) and other disciplines (film, dance, theatre; perception & cognition; and diverse other backgrounds in the context of music appreciation courses).  Composers and other temporal artists especially need to think about and discuss issues such as the rhythm and pacing of a work, and the way in which a sound or moving image might be designed to evolve over time.  This has led me to produce diagrams and digital images which present succinct overviews of the various strategies and perspectives of the musician dealing with time.  A particular favourite is my probing of popular analogies for time (the arrow, the river, the onion skin, etc.) through drawings which provide a much higher level of detail and literality than usual - provoking amusement and further reflection.  Other images illustrate the notions of the "zoom level" at which the music is conceived, heard and studied  (often a characteristic of the particular musical style); creating and perceiving the illusion of multiple layers of events in a musical work; and the composer's and performer's need to use clock time notation to convey a sense of psychological time.  For this conference, I propose to present a dozen of these images and diagrams, with an explanation of their contexts and implications.  In acknowledgment of the "origins and futures" theme of the conference, I will also comment on how I see these perspectives shifting with historical periods and different cultural backgrounds, and how the musician's daily involvement with frequencies and large-scale formal patterns can contribute to a deeper understanding of the behaviour of cycles, waves, and forward movement. 

YESTERDAY’S TOMORROWS

Marge Devinney

“The future isn’t what it used to be.”

The ramifications of scientific discovery seem to invite speculation on the effect of these discoveries on the future of society. One fruitful example of this can be found in the popular culture of America in between 1850 and 1969.

Especially during this period, in response to the explosion of scientific discoveries and public awareness of the potential influence of these discoveries on everyday life, visions of the future gained credence in the American belief in progress.

This presentation will focus on three cultural genres (literature, film, and popular magazines) that most often enthusiastically hailed scientific innovation as the catalyst for an optimistic, successful, and leisure-filled life. Images from a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition, “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future,” along with some more current examples, will help illustrate the vision of those past futurists.

The rather unavoidable conclusion of almost any study of visions of the future shows that predictions are extrapolations of present knowledge, circumstances, and even preferences and prejudgments. And given myriad possible interim developments, getting it right, so to speak, is as much a product of chance as of one’s fertile imagination. Thus, visions of the future, with their roots firmly planted in the present—any present—prove to reveal more about the engendering culture than the projected future. Thus the corollary: “The future isn’t what it used to be.” Arthur C. Clarke.

Golden Past and Eschatological Future – Religious Exoticism in the Writings of Guillaume Postel (1510-1580)

Vincent Masse

The description of lands ‘newly found’ by Europe in the 15^th and 16^th centuries (America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Indian Ocean, Far East) is a privileged setting in which temporal models are remarkably exposed and tested. The junction of  the Canary Islands with the mythical Islands of Blest, as an example, brings about a temporal equation in which spatial otherness is conflated with temporal and primitive otherness, resulting in a ‘foreign’ Golden Age abundantly celebrated by 16^th century poets. On the contrary, the Franciscan dream of a Mexican Iglesia indiana [‘Indian’ Church] as the nexus of a renovatio ecclesiae [ecclesiastic renewal] which would anticipate universal conversion to the Christian doctrine, and thus mark the advent the Millennium foretold in the Bible, uses exoticism as a mean to idealize the adjacent future, rather than some long foregone past. The twin Grand Narratives which correspond to those two examples, Decadence and Renaissance, are simultaneously complements and contradictories, and jointly help to set in motion discursive devices and commonplaces such as the Noble Savage on one hand, and on the other various discourses on ‘Progress’ – the latter, in the 16^th century, being as much concerned with eschatology and with Christian ‘Revelation’ as with discursive and technological inventions such as printing, gunpowder, and geography.

I will analyze a few examples of the contradictions and assemblages of those temporal regimes, as they can be observed in the printed and manuscript production of the French orientalist and ‘prophet’ Guillaume Postel (1510-1580), especially in his descriptions of Europe’s ‘New Worlds’. The ‘discovery’ of Japan by the Jesuits, as an example, enables him to predict the imminence of a millennial renovatio mundi, while reports from Portuguese India are put into service to prove that Hinduism is a degenerated form of Judaism – Brahmins ought to be called ‘Abrahamins’, says Postel, on account that they used to be Abraham’s disciples. Postel’s frenzied and often contradictory theories are at the forefront of the invention of temporal schemas that will grow in importance over the next centuries, such as the orientalist fetishism for long bygone eras – which often goes on a par with disdain for contemporary ‘Orientals’, deemed to be decadent – or the utopianism and messianism shared by millennial and colonial ideologies alike.

“Origins, Futures and Being Human”

Robert Daniel

Time is an Arrow.

The second law of thermodynamics and the constant expansion of the universe offer hints that within the physical order of things, time is – or can be – unidirectional.  Human experience, likewise, gives us the strong impression of irreversible temporal flow. Interpretations of geological and biological data, including Darwin’s theory of evolution, generally posit temporal sequencing wherein past events leave discernible, legible traces that persist into differentiated futures.

Time is a Crucible.

This “flow” of time allows the organization of life processes and of higher-order brain functions.  Different states of being and the sequencing of biochemical and physical functions take place over time.  Indeed, temporality allows life to manage and maintain itself. At the cellular, biochemical level, it is the present moment, the “now,” that stages the play of neural interactions, those evolving brain-states that interpret, stock and inscribe passing phenomena and events as memories.  “Now,” however, is little more than an instance of past moments being interpreted and remembered for future uses.  Our impression of surfing the crest of a continuously progressing wave is a function of the moment of lag during which the brain does its work.  It is this “soft now,” this fraction of a second of lag time, that allows complex brain functions to occur (like perception, emotion, categorization, modeling, anticipation, imagination), which collectively make “humanness” possible.

Time is a Stage.

Acutely aware of our temporal finitude, we are agents impelled by memory and emotion, by imagination and anticipation, by desire and regret, all of which arise out of receding origins and point toward potential futures.  We act out.  In so doing, we lurch into being whoever we are.  We present ourselves within a previously-constituted social fabric, seeking anticipated approbation or applause.  In going from recently-traveled roads to future paths, we perceive and we pursue the good, the beautiful, the just, the desirable.  We seek to redeem or valorize, to justify or fulfill ourselves. We move forward from who and how and where we were.

Time is a Foundation.

It is all of these things in their dynamic complexity that create and sustain the human being, that allow our being human.  Past moving to future.  Memory linked to imaginative projection.  Reflex and anticipation.  Emotional experience leading to the life of the mind.  The “present” is a flex point, a ripple in the great, wide, thick, complex and rich fabric of being human.  We are less of the “now” than shaped by origins, turned toward futures.  Both at the level of the individual’s experience and at the level of the noetic collective, humanity is fashioned by the parameters of Alpha and Omega, past and future, origin and what is to come. Indeed, following the thought of J.T. Fraser, inflected by that of Teilhard de Chardin, passing through recent observations in the neurosciences and citing varied literary works, I will argue that it is our drive, our leap, our stumbling from origins to futures that allow us to construct and reaffirm humanity.

Directions in Space-time

Anthony Crabbe

This paper presents the case that the relative positions of physical events in Minkowski’s space-time are properly mapped by reference to the light velocity parameter ct, which forms the boundaries of Minkowski’s ‘light cone’, rather than by reference to its t axis (a succession of observer’s clock readings visualised graphically as a continuous line). The observer who takes the time coordinates of events from his/her t axis is naturally inclined to view his future and past as zones extending “north” and “south” from the origin o of his spatial coordinate system x,y,z. Accordingly, any single place o appears to be “extended” across every successive moment along t, with earlier events in an observer’s history always appearing south of his present position and later ones always north.

If however, observers choose to view their light cones from the “top down”, then t disappears to a point indistinguishable from o, and the invariant time coordinates essential to any relativistic account of events are given by the parameter ct, which records the increasingly distant places reached by the spherical wave front w of an electromagnetic pulse propagating across free space at a constant rate c from any origin o. The propagation of electromagnetic signals from place to place in Euclidean space then provides the sole system of clocks required for measuring every other rate of change in relativistic terms. Accordingly, space-time has no need of a secondary clock system t, and since ct is actually the measure of any displacement dw, both the distance and time intervals separating events can be measured solely in light metres. Consequently, the notions of earlier and later may better be explained by the order in which electromagnetic signals propagate from place to place, rather than by the direction they follow relative to the graphic construct t.

Futures of August 6^th 1945; a case of ‘peaceful utilization’ of nuclear energy in Hiroshima

Masae Yuasa

On September 30^th in 1999, a criticality-caused nuclear accident occurred at the uranium-processing plant in Tokai village. Neutron radiation was emitted to the residential neighborhood and 666 people were exposed to high radiation. Mr. Ohish, one of the victims, passed away with his whole body covered with white gauze, as his skin had not regenerated. The radiation destroyed his chromosomes and erased gene information, which was the ‘blueprint’ for his body and the memory of several hundred million years of evolution, passed on to him. Japan has actively developed nuclear power technologies as national policy since 1954. The firm commitment to nuclear energy has never wavered even after the 1986 accident of Chernobyl or continuous domestic troubles and accidents, including the case above.

This paper sets August 6th 1945 as an ‘origin’. It was the time when the A-bomb devastated Hiroshima. The aim of this paper is to explore ‘futures’ this origin contains. One ‘future’ Japan has chosen is to live with nuclear weapons and energy. ‘The first nation that was the victim of the A-bombs’ and has officially stated ‘no more Hiroshima/Nagasaki’, has never questioned the legitimacy of nuclear weapons under the US ‘nuclear umbrella’. Furthermore, Japan has been firmly committed to the ‘peaceful utilization’ of nuclear power. This optimism seems enigmatic. The contradiction is acute especially in Hiroshima.

In 1982, a Hiroshima-based Chugoku Electric Company proposed to construct a nuclear power plant in Kaminoseki, a small fishing town in the Seto Inland Sea, planning to send the generated power to Hiroshima, 82 km away from it. After 27 years of enduring local protest, the company at last acquired the site. But why have people in Hiroshima who are supposedly sensitive to the nuclear issue remained silent for so long?

This paper explains how a modern linear time concept regenerated by the A-bomb plays a role in this Hiroshima enigma. It also argues that the Iwai-island protestors, who have chosen to live in circular time, have the potential to shake the dominant time concept, by critically questioning the meaning of ‘anti-nuclear peace’, the slogan of Hiroshima. Their struggles create a chance to regain the bygone past, August 6th 1945. Here, another ‘future’ might arise from the ‘origin’.

Origins and Futures: Speaking of the Universe

Edward Devinney

In the last decade, cosmology has made remarkable discoveries about both the past and the future of the universe.  Ever larger telescopes, space-based observatories and new theoretical insights allow us for the first time to speak with considerable confidence about the beginning and end of the universe.  What is revealed is an Alice-esque story – a story  getting curiouser and curiouser.   It tells us there is matter we can’t see and energy we don’t understand.  Neither of these is part of today’s known physics. 

As we grapple with this strangeness we seem forced to consider models, which not too long ago would be called outrageous. To begin with, observational data makes no sense without the postulate of some mysterious dark stuff – actually, two forms of dark stuff.  While we know the Universe is expanding, the origin of this fact is shrouded in mystery, and moreover, the expansion is accelerating.  It has been further determined that only a very special set of circumstances present in the early Universe would permit the formation of life therein.  So strange are these ideas that there is significant argument about whether these models represent physics or metaphysics.  What’s going on?!

 Let’s dive in and have fun anyway!

Ancient Origins & Future Visions:
Towards A New ‘Architecture of Time & Space’?

Dellé Odeleye

The ancient cultures that spawned the ‘urban revolution’ –Gordon Childe’s phrase for its socio-political drivers –appear to have relied just as heavily upon approaches / templates arising from cosmological worldviews of their ‘place’ in the world (i.e. in space and time) –generating idealised methods of place modifications. Such approaches to location and layout are known to have been used in ancient Egypt, China, India and many other traditional cultures around the world –until the globalisation of modern town planning and urban design in the twentieth century.

Modern planning / urban design rejected such approaches as archaic or nostalgic, and these roots are rarely mentioned in scholars’ accounts of the history of urbanisation –their portrayal implying that ‘rationally planned’ towns mean an orthogonal, grid-based layout. Yet, current Government policy’s ‘place-making’ objectives are (unwittingly) derived from appreciating the organic qualities of many earlier towns often produced through such ‘archaic’ approaches.

This paper argues that our emerging scientific understanding of the nature of cities as complex systems, no longer supports the simple reductionist assumptions underlying modernist portrayals. It shows that a number of postmodern urban design studies support key qualitative experiences implied by complexity and ancient approaches.

And that converging lines of evidence from these and other fields –ranging from anthropology to biology, and from psychology and linguistics, to urban morphology and computation –suggest how a reconciliation might be effected between urban design knowledge, our yearnings for a more appropriate ‘sense of place’ within the built environment, and aspects of ancient approaches that may be contemporarily useful.

It thereby proposes a new, geometric interpretation of the structure of time and space.  Its ‘Conceptual Architecture’ and implications for the emergence and transitions of form are outlined –enabling a ‘Generative Re-framing’ of mechanisms for stability, change and diversity in urban morphogenesis –possibly relevant to other fields, for which a new vision of spatio-temporal structure is a likely pre-requisite for addressing similar problems involving ‘form’.

Temporal Aspects of Popper’s Critique of Historicism

Friedrich von Petersdorff

Karl Popper, in his book “The Poverty of Historicism”, outlines and examines in detail the question if there is any reason to claim that by reading the past in a specific way it would be possible to foresee a pattern of events to come. Popper analyses the various arguments put forward by supporters of the philosophical views he describes as historicism. It is his purpose to outline these arguments as detailed as possible as he intends to clarify that the aims of these philosophical concepts are, for logical reasons, not achievable. He, therefore, argues in “The Poverty of Historicism” (and elsewhere in his publications) that there is a distinct line to be drawn between interpretations of past events and possible conclusions concerning any future course of history. The questions Popper discusses refer, therefore, to epistemological aspects of historical understanding. I argue, however, that Popper’s analysis is equally important regarding discussions of temporality, i.e. in this case the question how future and past are related to one another. Popper himself does not refer to a specific concept of time as he relies on logical reasoning for his disapproval of historicism. Nonetheless, it appears to be worthwhile to clarify the underlying concept of time as a thorough understanding how epistemological boundaries between past and future work is an important step to achieve a better understanding of temporality and time.

In my paper I, therefore, interpret Popper’s findings in order to present the decisive aspects of temporality included in his critique of historicism – as I argue that his analysis of the limits of historical and future knowledge is also of decisive importance when discussing and analysing questions of time and temporality.

Origins and Futures in the Works of N. Scott Momaday and Linda Hogan

Ann Bush

This paper explores the use of origins and futures by N. Scott Momaday and Linda Hogan, two Native American authors, in their journeys for self identity by focusing on their use of myth and legend in their respective works, The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. 

In the first chapter of his work, Momaday begins his discovery of who he is by recounting the Kiowa creation myth, his people coming out of a log into the world.  He continues with an instance of tribal history about the naming of the tribe, first as Kwuda and then as Tepda, which both mean “coming out.” He finishes with his own memory of coming out to see the plains, during which he first perceived just a large expanse of land, but gradually sharpened focus and came to distinguish specific animals, plants, and a river.  Each subsequent chapter knits together origin and future by showing the self encompass personal history, tribal history, and myth or legend.  Three voices—identified by Momaday in the Preface to Rainy Mountain as “ancestral voice,” “historical commentator,” and voice of “personal reminiscence”—really tell one timeless story presenting one self, Momaday’s.

Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw, also uses myth, tribal history, and personal recollection of her own life experiences to present origins and futures of the self.  However, in her opening chapter of The Woman Who Watches Over the World, she goes beyond the origin of the Chickasaw to the origin of the world, “Our stories began not just with our grandmothers, our ancestors, but maybe four million years ago in the dark matter of some distant edge of earth or corner of space.  Who knows where we enter?” (12).  Through the memoir, she does not limit herself to the myth and history of Chickasaw, but includes the stories of other tribes, and she also connects her own life history with the experiences of individual Native Americans other than Chickasaw.  Hogan ties her self-identity to the origin and identity of all beings of the earth. 

The paper will show that although Momaday’s and Hogan’s motives and writing styles differ, they both use myth and legend along with tribal and personal histories to project the relationship of self, origin, and future.

A presentation of slides will accompany the reading of the paper.

Hogan, Linda. The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. New York:  W.W. Norton, 2001.

Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico,  1969.

The Horizon of Poignancy

Michael Flaherty

In his book, Being and Time, Heidegger famously asserts that human nature reflects the essential fact that we are “thrown” into existence.  With this paper, I argue that, subsequent to being thrown into existence, the crucial fact of human nature is a self-conscious awareness that all forms of existence are falling away.  This uniquely human knowledge of finitude and mortality makes every moment precious—whether it be directly experienced or in some recorded format (e.g., photographs and video).  All manner of human enterprise springs from what Alfred Schutz called “the fundamental anxiety” (e.g., monuments to one’s accomplishments and burial of the dead), but, in this paper, I will focus on the ubiquitous falling away of human existence as the origin of poignancy.  Our experience of poignancy—an emotional experience—represents our self-awareness that each passing moment is irretrievably lost.  No matter how mundane a given interval may be, then, the inevitability of its incipient loss creates a horizon of poignancy around our every moment.  Among other things, this conceptual framework helps us to understand our fascination with antique objects as well as old photographs.

Origins and Futures of Common Chemicals and Their Effect on the Environment

Jean Smolen

The lifetime of anthropogenic chemicals in the environment plays a significant role in their effect on the future of life on planet earth.  For example, one of the important consequences of carbon dioxide is that it has a lifetime in the atmosphere on the order of one hundred years.  Manmade pesticides such as DDT and other organochlorines may not persist nearly as long, but their breakdown products and bioaccumulation have caused long-term effects that we are still experiencing today.  Since these issues were revealed, newer pesticides have been developed with an eye towards shorter half-lives.  However, in the cases of some compounds, breakdown products, which are less clearly understood, may be just as problematic. The issue of time also comes into play when considering the storage of nuclear waste.  In examining alternatives to fossil fuels, there is a renewed interest in nuclear energy.  We have yet to solve our current nuclear waste issues without taking into account future uses. 

It is necessary for there to be an appreciation of the state of the earth over millennia and also 50 years or less into the future.  It is clear that our actions today have long term effects for decades or centuries to come.  In the field of environmental chemistry, there are ongoing discussions about “emerging compounds”.  Emerging compounds are not new compounds but are newly of concern for toxicity and other issues.  Pharmaceuticals in natural waters and bisphenol A (BPA) are current and well-publicized examples.  There seems to be a repeating cycle.  Chemical compounds are discovered or created that have very useful properties, such as pesticides, freons, PCBs.  Over time, we discover the deleterious effects of these compounds. Looking forward, perhaps we as a society can improve our approach with the development and use of future generations of chemicals.

Discrete and continuous concepts of time – the origins of social beings.

Joed Elich

The concept of time to describe modern societies and human beings is very much linear numerical. We talk about decades, centuries and in modern times even shorter time spans.

Our study of ancient societies is bound by ideas of evolution, development, change and progress. When we restudy ancient societies conceptually, we might come up with a different view on these themes.

In her book ‘The Atlas of Early Man’, Jacquetta Hawkes has tried to describe prehistoric societies using modern concepts. Evolution is seen from a very different perspective and not so much as progress along the way.  The problem is that we do not have many ‘artifacts’ to study ancient people. And we rely on the artifacts only. Does it make sense to do a “thinking experiment” like we do with ‘future science’ and predictions, but then backwards into history?

Two recent findings triggered this interest:

A 35,000 year old flute was found in Germany last September 2008. Until then, flutes have been found which were between 19,000 and 30,000 years old.  It is often said that nature is able to surprise us again and again with things we never thought about. But that is true for the study of society as well. We did not know that 50,000 years ago people made music. Because of the lack of material from 35,000 years ago, we tend to omit those periods from our study of societal structures and culture. If people made flutes, then there must have been free time where people did not need to gather food and shelter.  We try to reconstruct ancient societies by way of artifacts, but never by way of time. Time units to study society have decreased over the centuries. and traditionally we talk about hunting peoples and gathering peoples, but still we are discussing thousands of years. We read about people devouring meat and fish, about building shelters. We don’t read about organization, relationships, hierarchy, autonomy, domination and discussion.

In South Africa pieces of rock with engravings have been found that are 70,000 to 100,000 years old.  “In their culture, the Neanderthalers made some striking advances towards full humanity’” Jacquetta Hawks writes in ‘The Atlas of Early Man”.  She is talking about 35,000 BC.  Do we now have to rethink our history of societal development?

This paper looks at efforts to describe societies older than what we commonly read about: what can we say about emergence of societies, about extinction and what about the concept of time. We tend to study societies in ‘eras’, ‘centuries’, ‘decades’, but are those valid concepts?

Emergence: The Origin of Novelty

Kathleen Duffy

What causes social behavior in insects? How does a chemical clock work? Why do galaxies form in spiral patterns? What is the origin of the order we see in the cosmos? Since the coming of the digital computer, many scientists have begun to dedicate themselves to attempting to understand in new ways the origin of order and novelty in the universe. As these scientists move away from linear and reductionist methods of analysis to nonlinear and self-organizing models of behavior, they are discovering clues that might someday unlock this puzzle. For one thing, it seems clear that matter is inherently self-organizing. Emergent properties, properties that arise in the new system that are not found in its component parts, seem naturally to find ways to stabilize once they are achieved. Using simple computer models, scientists such as Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman among others have shown that novel patterns can result from the application of local rules and simple feedback processes to simple systems.

This fairly new science of complexity unifies the previously independent fields of science in interesting ways. Since the emergent character of nonlinear systems is characteristic of many open systems, complexity theory tends to find connections among systems studied by seemingly disparate areas of science from astrophysics to evolutionary biology to neurobiochemistry to economics. From the very beginning of the universe, no matter in which direction we look, matter seems to display an inherent ability to generate new forms and interesting patterns, a phenomenon which is only amplified in the living world.

In this paper, I will present a brief overview of complexity theory. I will then give some explicit examples, including some computer simulations, from several areas of science of the way these interesting patterns appear, disappear, and stabilize in the becoming of things.

The search for origins: A philosophical evaluation

Christian Steineck

As Wolfgang Marx rightly pointed out, the original motivation for the human notion of time lies in the anticipation of the future ­- which designates it as a future present, and the present, as a future past. Consequently, the search for origins, pervasive in so many human cultural endeavors, may best be explained by looking at what the origin is supposed to mean for the future. The figure of thought most commonly operative in the search for origins is that in grasping (or discursively controlling) the origin of our object of (theoretical or practical) desire, we grasp its destiny, and therefore, its entire existence, including the future.  The intuitive power of this mode of thinking has been explained by  sociologist Günter Dux through the logic of action that marks the initial stage of individual and social logical thought. As a search for first principles or an original being, the search for origins has also dominated much of modern philosophy, from rationalism to  existentialism, from materialism to idealism. In his 1910 masterpiece „The Logical Foundations of the Exact Sciences“, Paul Natorp most succinctly exposed its limitations in critical reference to Hermann Cohen's „judgment of origin“ (where the „origin“ had already been transformed into the „request for / possibility of cohesion“). Natorp demonstrates how the „origin“ of knowledge derives its meaning from the cultural fact of science and its highly differentiated contents, which cannot be derived from, or attributed to, a single „source“. In non-speculative theory, which has no reason to attribute destinies to its objects, what remains of the search for origins is the search for historical determinants that may restrict future developments and choices to some, rarely predictable, degree.

Embracing the Tension between Continuity and Change:

Penn State Brandywine’s Approach to Strategic Planning in Times of Uncertainty

                                                                Sophia Wisniewska

The times, they are a changin’.  Almost overnight we have moved from a familiar expanding economy to a time of uncertainty, having to navigate in risky, uncharted waters. Planning for the future has indeed become difficult. Clearly, however, it is how we deal with change and risk that will determine the success of our college campuses in the months and years to come.

We have been told that it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. This would suggest that now is not a time for ‘battening down the hatches’ but rather a time for more planning and better planning, a time to embrace uncertainty and examine it in detail to discover where hidden opportunities may lurk.

This paper is based on the notion that the key to thriving as a campus—to our survival and success--depends on finding the appropriate mix of continuity and change, of tradition and innovation.

I will first draw on the history, experience, and planning processes of Penn State to identify the key drivers of our institution and to determine what has changed and what hasn’t; to identify the sources of our competitive advantage; and to outline the challenges that have emerged.

Second, I will address the importance of exploring various planning scenarios.   For example, what would happen if enrollment declined by 10 percent or if state appropriations disappeared or if a key goal lost its University support? By recognizing these possibilities and designing strategies to deal with them, our campus will be better prepared if such scenarios do, indeed, occur.

Finally, I will consider the benefits of planning for future risks, engaging faculty and staff in establishing priorities and marshalling resources, so that when opportunities arise they can be exploited; likewise, when threats emerge, the capacity to respond will be greater, quicker, more effective.

Exploring Time Dimensions of Sexual Assault Definitions

Michelle VanNatta

Sexual assault has typically been defined by antiviolence workers as a violent, non-consensual sexual act perpetrated by an individual or group during a discrete interval in time.  This conceptualization leaves out more diffuse patterns of sexual violence which play out over extended timeframes, such as dynamics of sexualized power and control which exist pervasively or repeat cyclically, and which may not involve the gratification of an individual perpetrator.  Rape crisis centers have generally neglected to address the sexual violation of women in prison, as some forms of prison sexual violence are not discrete, individual assaults bounded in time.  Some incarcerated women report experiencing prison strip searching as a form of sexual assault by the state itself.  The prisoner’s experience of violation is partly rooted in the ongoing power relationship between herself and the state, rather than deriving chiefly from the specific behavior of the guard conducting a particular search.  The sexualized violence of the strip search takes place in a pervasive atmosphere of state control of the prisoner’s body, extending through time, so that the continuity of power and the repetition of the act of searching constitute the violence in a unique way. 

Some prisoner rights advocates have argued that incarceration itself constitutes a form of sexual violence because of how imprisonment controls prisoners’ bodies, constraining and damaging their sexuality.  The time dimensions of the sexual violence of imprisonment have not been explored in prior research.  Relying on interviews with rape crisis workers about their conceptualizations of sexual violence, examining prisoner lawsuits against correctional facilities, and analyzing accounts of prison sexual violence in writings by formerly incarcerated women, this paper considers how definitions of sexual violence are shaped by particular time boundaries.  This paper also analyzes how acts which by themselves may not be defined as violence can come to constitute serious violence in the context of longterm situational inequality and cyclic, repeating acts.  These types of violence are more difficult to prosecute since criminal legal statutes focus on discrete acts of violence, and such statutes fail to address unequal power relationships and routine practices that extend over time.

Memory that Makes the Future: The Temporality of Forgiveness

Karmen MacKendrick

I would like to propose a paper on the temporality of forgiveness, particularly as a theological concept played out in ordinary experience. In the experience of forgiveness, the future as the temporal dimension of unknown possibility is re-created by a remaking of meaning in memory. In the theological version, this connection goes further; futurity (again as the temporal dimension of the unknown and the possible) actually antedates origin, where origin is understood as creation.

I begin with an analysis of everyday forgiveness as the inverse of trauma. Trauma forecloses the future by rigidly imposing on it the form of the past, so that the future is foreknown and repeated rather than open with possibility. Forgiveness, on the other hand, remakes the meaning of memory (reinterprets the original transgression) to open the future to possibilities other than traumatic repetition, including possibilities of interaction or relation. Forgiveness transforms or restores futurity to time; in most experiences of forgiveness, this is the future of a particular relation or connection between people, which may be quite complicated (if, for instance, one of them is dead or otherwise unavailable). To forgive or be forgiven is a revelation; it reveals the future as future, as not the past again. It re-originates futurity.

I link this to the question of theological forgiveness by looking at some Jewish and Christian interpretations of creation myths. The more canonical analyze the creation of world out of formlessness--a formelessness which is itself, I argue, pure possibility. The pseudepigraphical readings more directly argue for the making of forgiveness prior to the creation of the world that will need it.  The two are on this matter closer than they might seem: if forgiveness is the opening of the future, then it is built into the structure of time itself, as the meaning of futurity: the open and possible dimension of time. The future is made not by forgetting, but by remaking memory’s meanings, by going back before the origin such that the first is a newness again, and the future again unknown, always re-begun.

Living Memory, Embodied Ancestors

Luisa Del Giudice

Ethnography, Oral History, and Spiritual Direction all train the (inner) ear in varieties of listening through oral communication.  In auto-ethnographic research settings, extreme empathy or “radical reflexivity” (Davies)—the blurring of boundaries between “I” and “other”—becomes a potential hazard, as endless reflection on reflection and discourse about discourse, causes “objective” truth to vanish and subjectivity to endlessly chase its tail.  The time correlative to this process of collapsing boundaries may enduce us to become or embody our ancestors, for memory to live in and through us.  Our sense of personal and collective origins therefore, may seamlessly link us to our future through the conduit of our present lives.  This paper examines such hauntings and ancestor embodiments in the personal experience of this ethnographer/oral historian/spiritual director, and explores the use of such “mediumship” to effect social change.

Challenges in Integrating Scientific and Humanistic Perspectives on Cosmic and Human Origins

Todd  Duncan & Paul Harris

In this presentation we will discuss the challenges of telling a story of our cosmic origins that is scientifically consistent but also invites connections to subjective experience and human values. Our particular focus is pedagogical–we have both faced difficulties in attempting to integrate courses on Cosmic and Human Origins into university curricula.

The primary obstacles to disseminating such a narrative attest to the two-cultures divide still persistent today: scientists resist treating science as narrative and incorporating humanistic interpretations into their pedagogy and scholarship.  Conversely, humanists resist granting science a significant or formative role in core education.

Despite the challenges, such courses can be successfully integrated into curricula. By weaving together knowledge from many disciplines into a coherent and meaningful story, these courses play an important role in providing students with a sense of perspective and relevance for what they learn. In our presentation we will explore the following as a structure for thinking about how to address the challenges and build courses that bridge the two-cultures divide:

First we will articulate a broad narrative of the scientific story of how humans came to be (“our cosmic history”) that provides a solid framework for a careful reconnection of science and values. There are two main components to this synthetic work: 1) making a clear case that a scientifically accurate cosmology need not preclude a place for subjective experience and values; 2) offering a narrative interpretation–a scientific worldview–that welcomes meaning and a connection to values.

Secondly, we will examine how cosmic histories convey an ethical dimension, and how Cosmic and Human Origins Courses could better raise ethical issues. The challenge here is to balance scientific content with questions of meaning and values.

This Carnal Coil: Temporal Entrapment and Sociocognitive Functioning in Young and Old Adults

Raluca Petrican

In three studies we explored the sociocognitive correlates of perceived entrapment in a temporally linear existence (PETLE). We found that higher PETLE predicted the greater salience of “the present” in an age-traditional university sample in Study 1, even though high PETLE scorers did not report feeling more connected to the present or perceiving the present as objectively larger in measured units of time. Guided focus on either temporal endpoint of one’s physical existence – that is, conception or death – eliminated the relationship between higher PETLE and an expanded sense of the present, however. In Study 2’s large university sample, higher PETLE was associated with: a) a cognitive-perceptual style typified by the tendency to see "special" meanings in random events and personalize the observed conversations of strangers, in line with previous findings that a lack of control is associated with a tendency to perceive patterns in random eventsequences; and b) an increased willingness to manipulate others for one’s own ends, consistent with previous research linking failures of self-regulation to a focus on the present at the expense of (especially) the future. Finally, in Study 3’s elderly married sample, high PETLE scorers evidenced relatively impoverished episodic accounts of both past and future autobiographical events, suggesting that the excessive salience of the present documented in Study 1 may be linked to reduced capacity to engage in “mental time travel” among high PETLE individuals. Moreover, conceptually replicating Study 2, elderly high PETLE scorers tended to overattribute meaning in response to random animation sequences and showed relatively greater disregard for their spouse’s wellbeing. Taken together, these results suggest that the (in)ability to transcend the inherent experiential limits of linear time may have substantive implications for how one perceives the world and relates to others.

Self-continuity and the Phenomenological Intransigence of Consciousness

Christopher Burris

The motive for self-continuity – that is, to establish a sense that one transcends the limits of one’s existence as a temporally and spatially bound individual – is arguably a fundamental human striving. We suggest that this motive originates, in part, from the experience of consciousness qua consciousness as timeless and dimensionless. We will present the results of five studies that explore the link between self-continuity and this phenomenological intransigence of consciousness (PI). In Study 1 we presented people with statements concerning the perennial nature of their own existence and asked them whether they had ever felt this way or believed this to be true, and we showed that the experience of (not belief in) PI predicted greater aversion to spatiotemporal limitations (ST). In Study 2 we refined our PI measure, replicated the relationship with ST, and showed that PI predicted interest in a variety of activities – both mundane (e.g., constructing a family tree) and esoteric (e.g., going on a vision quest) – that facilitate transcendence of boundaries of the individual self. In Study 3 we enhanced the experience of PI experimentally through optical-acoustic brain wave stimulation and showed that resulting increases in self-reported PI were associated with an increased desire to anchor oneself externally (i.e., to social groups) rather than internally (i.e., to the body or one’s personal history and traits). Finally, we made the limits of physical existence salient experimentally by having people reflect on either their own conception or their own death. We showed that – relative to existential reflection that was irrelevant to the self – people responded to this increased salience by seeing reproduction as more sacred (i.e., germane to a realm beyond time and space; see Study 4) and by intensifying their beliefs concerning post-mortem continuation in disembodied form (see Study 5).

The Simultaneous Present: North and South American Indigenous Time

Sharon Sieber

The trade route between the two hemispheres of the Americas has been more important in the simultaneous development of cosmologies of time than has been previously realized.  Although the linguistic diversity amongst native peoples in the North and South was extreme, there is evidence that the “contact” among indigenous peoples before Columbus discovered the New World was extensive, and affected not only commerce but the development of shared mythologies. Post-contact and post-conquest literature in both hemispheres demonstrates similarities in the treatment of time. While North American indigenous literature is written by indigenous peoples and begins to affect mainstream tradition in the 1970s and 80s, South American indigenous tradition has been part of mainstream literature as a more diffused influence, since many Latin American authors have an indigenous heritage although no identification with a particular tribe.

The two Americas have followed diverse trajectories in their discrete journeys toward the phenomenon known as postmodernism.  Both literary traditions manifest a difference from the Old World in the way that time is represented and perceived, representing a new kind of time: the modern phenomenon of simultaneity. Simultaneous time as a foundation for 20th century literary representation is a way for New World inhabitants to re-define and re-vision human psychological experience in both its manifestation and its representation in the literary and the visual arts. This new kind of time finds its correlative in quantum physics, chaos theory and parallel worlds, and heralds an understanding of time that will change the way scientists and scholars regard time in the modern world.

I examine several North and South American authors in relation to simultaneous time: Miguel Angel Asturias, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez and Elena Garro from the South and N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and James Welch from the North.

“In the Big Time”:  The Metaverse as Everyday Life

David Wittenberg

This paper considers both arcane and routine senses of “meta-universal” or “metaversal” narration, asking how and why human beings may appear to “step out of time” while constructing temporally consistent stories and histories, and how, in turn, they come to consider “time” itself an object.  I examine texts as diverse as Einstein’s correspondence with Schrödinger over quantum complementarity, Joseph Frank’s essays on “spatialization” in modernist literature, science fiction and experimental fiction by Jack Williamson, Fritz Leiber, Rudy Rucker, Toni Morrison, and Shelley Jackson, and recent theoretical works on “multiple universe” quantum physics by writers such as Michio Kaku, Fred Alan Wolf, and Richard Gott.  I argue that, even more than theoretical or experimental texts, popular fiction, especially time travel and historical fantasy, offers an ideal case study of the structure of “metaversal” narration.  I analyze the odd situation in which one considers the question of time or history “as a whole” — a situation in which one appears to occupy a perspective or viewpoint “outside” any particular temporal or causal sequence.  The situation is hardly as rarified as it may at first seem, nor does it represent an especially unusual type of storytelling or historiography.  Any narrative circumstance exhibiting the structure of “meanwhile...” or “at the same time...” positively requires a meta-temporal or meta-universal viewpoint to allow the juxtaposition of simultaneous sequences or plots.  Such circumstances literally depict our uncanny, but also utterly quotidian, capacity to occupy counter-logical or unphysical frames of reference as we construct or consume narratives.  Ultimately, I propose that narrative theory provides the most useful terms for the interdisciplinary synthesis required to understand our access to metaverses, those extra-temporal “regions” that (broadly speaking) structure possible inquiries into time or temporality as an object, rather than merely as a phenomenological background or medium.

From the Arche to the Archaic:  Reflections on the Origins and Futures of Presence in Theatrical Praxis

Erica Magnus

Elsewhere I have suggested that western theatre appeared in answer to psychic needs engendered by a new experience of time and space in the 5^th century BCE.  The space and time of the individual, which first found voice in the lyric poetry of the preceding century, obtained observational selfhood in the bodies of the actors in the theatron, literally the “seeing place.” There, through both performance medium and the thematic concerns of the plays, the tolerances of individualism were measured in relation to the demands of collective as well as cosmic concerns.  My overarching contention is that theatrical praxis is, in Foucault’s phrase, a “technology of the self” through which human beings learn the parameters of identity and personal action.

A revolution of comparable consequence to that which took place in the Greek phatries is occurring in the 21^st century through the proliferation of digital technology and the internet.  These technologies continue to influence a radical change in the quotidian experience of time and space. N. Katherine Hayles suggests that people in technologically developed settings are “literally being re-engineered” through their interactions with media. If so, how are we being refashioned?  What might be the repercussions in terms of the human psyche or, more particularly for my field, with regard to our fictive needs and proclivities?

In light of present societal imperatives the performing arts, rooted as they are in presence, seem somewhat archaic. Presence in our modern experience is deferred through email, video conferencing, robo-calling and texting. Presence is obfuscated through multi-player venues such as Second Life, MMORPG’s and chat rooms. The proliferation of blogs seems to infer presence but, in effect, eerily mimics the perpetual negotiations of the “hive mind.”

This paper engages these questions:  Is the technology originated to arbitrate the exigencies of individual ontology suited to emerging ideas of selfhood and community? Is theater today merely a vestigial form in a world whose stock-in-trade appears to be the deferral of presence?

Origins and Futures: The Evolving Spatiotemporality of Organizing

Dawna Ballard

When personal computers were first introduced (about 1981), the lifespan of the average PC was about a decade, most of the planet had not heard of the internet, and mobile phones were used primarily by doctors on “call.”  A little more than a quarter of a century later, the lifespan of the average personal computer is two to three years, email is a global communication medium, and young children carry mobile phones to kindergarten.  Indeed, the times they are a changin’.  As we consider organizing and communication, these fundamental shifts in the global environment have recast what it means to organize as well as the form of our daily interactions.  The boundaries between work and leisure have blurred, and, importantly, so have the (communicative) boundaries of the organization itself (Ballard & Gossett, 2007). 

From a practical perspective, our pace of life, communication load, and relationship to time and space have changed (Castells, Fernadez-Ardevol, Qui, & Sey, 2006).  From a theoretical perspective, these changes now demand a similar recasting in our approach to studying the challenges and opportunities of organizing.  Notably, the message flows associated with organizing—via time and space—have changed.  As McPhee and Zaug (2000) indicate, “these [message] flows are arenas in which organizations do vary and can be changed in their fundamental nature…” and attention to any of these four flows gives us a “template by which to detect, diagnose, and assess novel organizational phenomena” (¶ 13). Organizational message flows now occur outside of organizational time and space, offering an infinite extension of organizations’ time and space into members’ lives.   The intention of this essay is to pay attention to these message flows as a means to detect important changes that must be accounted for in contemporary theories and models of organizational communication. 

References

Ballard, D. I., & Gossett, L. M. (2007). Alternative times: The temporal perceptions, processes, and practices defining the non-standard work arrangement. In C. Beck (Ed.), Communication Yearbook, 31(pp. 269-316). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Castells, M., Fernadez-Ardevol, M., Qui, J. L., & Sey, A. (2006). Mobile communication and society: A global perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

McPhee, R. D., & Zaug, P. (2000). The communicative constitution of organizations: A framework for explanation. The Electronic Journal of Communication, 10, Article MCPHEE V10N1200. Retreived August 16, 2002, from http://www.cios.org/getfile\McPhee_V10n1200

The Search for Origins as Mystery Story: Tropes of Detecting in Accounts of Origins in Fiction, Film, Physics and Evolution

Paul Harris

This presentation will examine how the search for origins across a number of fields is presented in ways that enact essential elements of detective fiction.  The paper begins by elucidating the structural components of detective fiction, in which a narrative depicts a process whose goal is to clarify an enigma by reconstructing a linear, causal account of events that led up to and explain the event.  The mystery is thus the origin of the story, in the sense that it sets the narrative in motion, and the ‘end’ or object of the text, the element that must be interpreted correctly and given causal explanation.  The detective story thus represents a search of a text to coincide with its own origins, a process with an inherently double trajectory, whose apparent resolution simultaneously reveals many factors (textual, psychological, socio-cultural) that render the apparent resolution of the mystery only the beginning point or origin of further mysteries presented in the process of closing the investigation,

This model of the detective narrative will be demonstrated through brief treatments of paradigmatic fiction (by Poe and Chesterton) and film (Vertigo).  This model then will be used a lens through which to read scientific theories of the origin of the universe (cosmology) and life (evolution), in which the search for absolute or fixed origins involves reconstructing a causal account through interpreting clues.  These narratives reveal, on closer examination, similar aspects of double trajectories and uncanny encounters that render solutions only the origin of further mysteries.  Scientific texts to be treated include Primack and Abrams, The View from the Center of the Universe, the NOVA series Origins and accompanying book, and Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent.

Beyond the Metaphysics of Tense: Rhythm: The Form of Time

Jonathan Carter

Over a century ago, J.M.E. McTaggart distinguished between tensed and untensed series, a distinction that has governed analytic philosophy of time ever since. For him, untensed time lies at the intersection of tense and number. It receives direction and change from the former and quantity from the latter. Result: number is real but time is not; number is noumenal, time phenomenal. I argue that both tensed and untensed series are numerical and directional in their own right. So time is real if number is real and not otherwise. I further maintain that both tensed and untensed series display two distinct sequences: one recurrent, invariant and continuous, therefore predictable; the other not necessarily so. For tense, there are definite and indefinite presents, respectively, as Husserl suggested. For the untensed, there are times and events, likewise respectively. Moreover, in music, meter is the musical instantiation of times and rhythm the musical instantiation of events. Which is to say that rhythm per se is the form of time, inside or outside music. Underlining untensed time in this way also serves to challenge Continental theorists such as Bergson, Derrida, Deleuze and Lefébvre, all of whom remain to varying degrees within the purview of tense.