Narrative Temporality Research Articles

Observations about Music and Decentralized Environments

This paper discusses temporal narratives and musical action, focusing on the decentralization trends in models, means, objects, knowledge and objectives of artistic creation on the Net. In a widespread cognitive environment, diachronic and spatial communication values have to be adapted. The development of linguistic flows, codified according to digital models, leads net users to interact in a different way. In a decentralized environment, many conditions for composing and listening to music may be subordinated to the conception of creative thought as a combination of recursive, connective, and systemic processes, which redefine not only the concept of musical object and sound space, but also that of music itself.

Introduction. Time and medicine.

Although historians work with the record of events in public time, they have not developed an explicit understanding of lived time. To set the stage for the other essays in this issue of Annals, this introductory essay explores how an understanding of lived or "private" time began to emerge in the early 20th century in the works of that era's major thinkers: Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, Emile Durkheim's social time, Sigmund Freud's five psychoanalytic temporal narratives, and Eugene Minkowski's exploration of lived time. This essay then considers the reaction against the burden of history that began with the great 19th-century historicizers: Comte, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Spencer. It reflects on the effort, beginning in those years, of modern artists and intellectuals to focus on the personal past in place of the overbearing burden of the historical past. New ways of experiencing the present, made possible by new communication technologies, including the telephone and telegraph, have centered on the experience of simultaneity. Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, Marshall McLuhan's globalism, and the Internet have further transformed how both the medical and lay communities experience past, present, and future, as well as near and far. The discussion concludes with consideration of Eurotransplant, an Internet-based information and action network used by physicians to coordinate organ transplantation; it is a system that integrates cybernetics, globalism, and the Internet in an everyday, real drama of the electronic age of simultaneity.

The future's foundation in a contested past: Nostalgia and dystalgia in the 1996 Russian presidential campaign

This article investigates nostalgia and public memory in the 1996 Russian presidential elections. I argue that Gennadii Zyuganov and Boris Yeltsin offered condensation symbols that made either nostalgic or dystalgic appeals to the audience regarding the Soviet era in Russian history, and that the candidates discursively tried to establish the extent of Zyuganov's and communism's relevance in the future through temporal narratives. Through a combination of such appeals and narratives, the candidates offered a series of selective remembrances that suggested competing but incomplete and over‐simplified characterizations of the nature of the Soviet past.

Strindberg's A Dream Play: Postmodernist Visions on the Modernist Stage

Since the 1980s, new approaches to theatre historiography, the study of what Sue-Ellen Case has called the “convergence of history and theory,” have begun to arise in a challenge to generally accepted principles of theatre history, such as the supremacy of independent facts, the autonomy of dramatic texts, and the hierarchy of text, performance, and culture. The French critic and philosopher Michel Foucault has pointed out that the grouping and ordering of events into historical periods creates a “space of reference,” which lends some events a heightened meaning, while obscuring or submerging others. In a substantial challenge to traditional methods of theatre history, historiographers influenced by this view have begun to examine the theoretical underpinnings of historical periodization. In theatre theory, Thomas Postlewait has investigated the often unarticulated assumptions by which theatre historians isolate a group of historical events and designate them with period names.Many scholars now center their attention on historical discontinuity: searching for ruptures in the historical narrative, focusing on dynamics which lend instability rather than stability to historical periods, and reconceptualizing temporal historical narratives into spatial relationships. For example, from a perspective of discontinuity, a play is conceived not simply as a fixed entity created at some moment in history, but as a representation of layers of historical influences; likewise, a theatre building is not simply a material location in space, but a physical expression of historically emergent architectural styles and sociopolitical circumstances, and a performance is not simply a translation of a text to the stage, but a collage of past and emergent cultural and aesthetic processes.

Concepts of time and narrative temporality in the study of aging

In the context of present day Western culture, human aging is in danger of losing its temporal qualities because of the way it is objectified by scientific research and practical organization. An overemphasis on chronological concepts of time plays an important role in this process. Such concepts have a special function: they help to produce exact, but abstract and formal measurements. For gerontology, chronological time is indispensable because of its general scope of measurement. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that chronological time concepts can only be of limited significance for understanding the temporal dimensions of aging. Firstly, it is argued that even for research on aging, comparative concepts of time deserve the same status as metric concepts. Secondly, it is emphasized that human aging takes place within human time, with a present, past and future. This sense of a longitudinal present is missing in chronological time but eminently elaborated in narrative action. Narratives also shed some light on the concept of (the aging) personal identity and cultural images of aging.

MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND THE HISTORICAL IMPERATIVE

This paper focuses on the intersection of music analysis with music his tory and attempts to suggest ways in which these two kinds of discours es are related more intimately than many analysts would like to think. My starting point is that much musical analysis, by staking a claim on certain musical objects, derives the source and function of those objects from an understanding grounded, explicitly or covertly, in a temporal narrative. By paying attention to the figurative language of analytic texts, I try to identify narrative elements which, when pieced together, amount to a kind of subliminal story which the analysis has emplotted, even if this story is often somewhat remote from the explicit concerns of the analyst. My arguments here rests on the claim that narrative is one of the most powerful tools by which people make sense of their experien ces, and that despite the attempts of theories to appeal to such qualities as internal consistency, empirical evidence, explanatory power, or even musicality, the internal ?laws? of narrative play a formative role in de ciding which musical parameters analysts isolate, and how these para meters are treated1.

KANT'S TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF GENESIS

Two distinct interpretations of the early chapters of Genesis are to be found in Kant's writings. 'Speculative Beginning of Human History' was written in 1786, five years after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason and two years before the Critique of Practical Reason. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone was written in 1793, three years after the Critique of Judgement.1 Kant's interpretation of the myth of the Fall of Adam and Eve in 'Speculative Beginning of Human History', as its title suggests, is concerned to outline a philosophy of history. The later interpretation in Religion is concerned with the problem of evil and its origin. The two distinct problem atics lead to divergent, and at points contradictory readings. Despite this, each study may be seen to be a comment upon and a criticism of the other. The studies share a common reference, derived from the main part of the critical philosophy, by characterizing human beings as at once natural and rational creatures. The divergence of the studies will be seen to centre upon the understanding of morality and evil, and the relevance of real historical time to the resolution of the attendant tensions, in a perfected human society. The two essays differ most markedly in their treatment of historical time. 'Speculative Beginning' accepts that the narrative of the first six chapters of Genesis reproduces a real historical movement, albeit that the individual humans whose actions are so narrated are taken to be personifications of human groups. Hence, the time within which individuals act in the narrative is read as the time of historical and social development. For 'Speculative Beginning' Genesis presents merely an abstraction from the complexity of real historical events. (SB; p. 50) In Religion, the temporal narrative is more radically questioned. (R; pp. 36—37) The temporal succession of events is significant only in so far as temporal succession indicates logical primacy. While the earlier essay is concerned with the origin of morality as an historical event, the later essay is concerned with the origin of evil in each individual human being. The seeming temporality of the Fall of Adam is thereby fused with the atemporal doctrine of original sin. This distinction leads to highly divergent evaluations of Eden. According

The Space and Dialogue of Desire: Lacan, Greimas, and Narrative Temporality

In Freudian Thing Jacques Lacan attempts to narrative return to Freud in psychoanalysis. The form of his narration is a kind of polemical ventriloquism in which Lacan speaks for his adversaries, for Truth herself, and in a section entitled discourse of the other, for the desk behind which he stands as he talks. In this essay the narration of his discourse on and with things takes the forms of a colloquy with his audience, riveted so respectfully in those seats to listen to me despite the ballet of calls to work (E, p. 132), the plot of a murder mystery (E, p. 123), the frenzy of a tragic chorus (E, p. 124), the nonsense of a joke (E, p. 122), the allegory of Acteon's dismemberment (E, p. 124), a game for four players (E, p. 139), and, as I have said, the discourse-what Lacan calls the fable (E, p. 136)-of the desk.' For Lacan, things are problematic: Truth herself says, speaking through Lacan, that trade route of truth no longer passes through thought: strange to say, it seems to pass through things. ... Here, no doubt, things are my signs, but, I repeat, signs of my

Tathāgata

In Bsos. viii, 781 ff., Mr. E. J. Thomas argues that “Tathagata” may have been taken over by the Buddhist from the Jain Tathāgaya, and that it may be an incorrect Sanskritization of some unknown non-Aryan and non-Dravidian word. This seems very far-fetched. Mr. Thomas does not take any account of possibly Vedic origins, common to Buddhism and Jainism. We have shown incidentally elsewhere that countless Buddhist terms, for example arkat and attā, are purely Vedic, and have argued that the Buddha legend is almost wholly made up of Vedic material with only such modifications as are inevitable when the eternal birth is to be retold in terms of a temporal narrative. We are convinced, in other words, that the Buddha, the “Kinsman of the Sun”, the “Eye of the World”, and “Great Person” of the Pali texts, the Buddha who may be represented in art by a pillar of fire, is an incarnation or descent (avatarana) of the Vedic Agni.