Neocybernetics and Narrative (Posthumanities) by Bruce Clarke

Author:Bruce Clarke [Clarke, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT006000 Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory
ISBN: 9780816691029
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Narrative Time

Systemic operations entrain the notion of time. Whereas structures are temporally indeterminate, autopoietic systems take time, they operate in time. Moreover, they make time: as the product of their own productions, observing systems construct the time of their own observations. In Luhmann’s terminology, they temporalize their own complexity.24 For systems capable of observing time, time emerges in the first place as a repercussion or contingency of their own self-referential operations. Systems time, in short, is an emergent construction specific to the system that produces it and bound up with the recursive self-production of that system. For instance, this operational dynamic can account for the standard distinction between subjective and objective time, “experienced time” and “clock time.” At any given moment, time consciousness registers the present phenomenal state of a psychic system whose very ongoing product is the self-perception of consciousness. Clock time is no less a systemic production, but one that social systems generate and communicate through technological mediations, through a broadcasting of collective temporal standards allowing the social synchronization of psychic systems. But as we are all aware, any psychic system is at liberty, at its own social peril, to desynchronize itself from the collective clock.

This distinction between phenomenological and social time has affinities with the narratological distinction between discourse and diegesis, between the reversible time of the telling and the irreversible chronology of the fabula—the tale as embedded in the forward temporality of its storyworld. The analogy holds enough to bridge our discussion back to narrative theory proper, but starts to unravel if we consider that, over and above the order and time play of a narrative discourse, the temporality imputed to a fabula or storyworld is ultimately not social time but natural time, time abstracted from social and psychic mediations—time per se in its simple vacuity. But while thermodynamic entropy sends time forward for physical systems, autopoietic systems generate their own time. “Real time” is precisely and merely what we blindly indicate nowadays by casual uses of that phrase: the thoroughly mediated experience of pseudosimultaneity constructed by the momentary synchronization of psychic, social, and technological systems.

How can we bring these operational matters of systems time to bear on matters of narrative time? Genette comments: “The narrative text, like every other text, has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading.”25 Indeed, observations of a text’s temporal and other significations come to pass only in its reading—reading being the standard term under which the systemic operationality of the observation of narrative structures is unknowingly acknowledged and thereby removed from critical awareness. The operating of narrative (that is, of narrative structures) by narrative observers (that is, by observing systems turned toward narrative structures) and the systemic contingencies of reading as the particular operation of an observing system—indeed, of multiple and multiply interpenetrated observing systems—are often not observed. Let us briefly remove the brackets from the operationality of narrative observation, and redescribe systems-theoretically what occurs when reading. What sorts of things occur when the ongoing

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.