Some thoughts about the semester theme
Me enseñaste a ver la unidad
y la diferencia de los hombres.
Pablo Neruda
It has been decided that we will have the semester theme “Time, space and identity” in
the next semester.
The idea with the semester theme is to create some coherence between project groups.
This goes both for supervisors’ and students’ proposals. A semester theme gives us a
bigger chance to have meaningful discussions at project definition seminars, mid-term
seminars and presentation seminars. Mind you: meaningful discussions are also possible
when groups meet whose topics have nothing, or little, in common. But that’s always a
bit of a matter of luck.
For this reason it is important that all project proposals relate to the semester theme in
some way. We hope that as many proposals as possible are accessible through BSCW
before Christmas.
If you formulate a proposal, we want you to try and argue how it is related to the
semester theme. This makes it, of course, necessary to have some idea of what the
semester theme is about. What follows is my personal view on it, a view that, of course,
is biased by my own background.
In the spirit from the quote from Pablo Neruda’s Canto general (“You have taught me to
see the unity and the difference of the people”), one could say that one aspect of
Humanities is that it deals with variation and likeness. People are different, and they are
also alike. This is very simple and basic. The main parameters according to which they
can vary are time and space. People and groups of people are different through time –
this is the historical dimension – and also through space – you could call this the
geographical dimension, but geography is not the only discipline within humanities that
deals with groups and individuals co-existent in time. Space is not always perceived as
pure, extended space, often it is seen as space that is structured in some way. People
may be held apart not just by distances in kilometers, but also by
 accessibility (due to natural features like mountains or waterways),
 languages (and mutual ability to understand each other and make oneself
understood),
 political systems (with their rules for crossing boundaries, keeping people in or out),
 visa and immigration rules and policies, or
 means of transport (think of hours wasted in motorway queues and airplanes’ CO2
emissions).
Time is different from space since we cannot travel in it – it just goes the one way all the
time, or rather: we move through it only in one direction. (Space has a limitation, too:
we cannot be in two places at the same time.)
Identity is what keeps people together through time and space. It presupposes
difference; a statement like ‘2 = 2’ tells us nothing, but ‘1 + 1 = 2’ is informative (or has
been, when we heard it first). Claiming that I am the same person that I was twenty
years ago, only makes sense since there could be some doubt as to whether I really am
the same person. The French-American philosopher Paul Ricœur has pointed out that
certain everyday concepts like promising something, or being held responsible for
something, are crucially dependent on some sense of identity: if I were not the same
person who promised you to keep some deadline (like for sending you this paper), you
could not blame me afterwards for not having kept it. Biographies, especially
autobiographies, are roadmaps of this travel through time.
Politicians are notorious for hoping that their voters have bad memory powers and
don’t insist on their being the same person as the one they were before the elections.
“What do I care about that idiot that I was yesterday?”
People can be alike as they can be different, but likenesses or identities are many, and
all people are like many other different collections of people. Some of these collections
are mere categories (like people wearing glasses or pipe smokers), some are proper
groups (like the native speakers of a language, or all Danish citizens), although in many
cases it can be disputed if a particular collection is a mere category or a group. Benedict
Anderson has argued in his famous ‘Imagined communities’ that nations are not natural
collections of people, but something that comes about through our ideas of having
something in common – and no less real for that reason.
So from this point of view the semester theme could be rephrased as: what makes
people (individuals and whole groups) act, behave and feel different, and what makes
them experience themselves as the same people they were earlier, the same as other
people, or belonging to a group?
From my own field of research, communication and language, I can add another aspect
under which time, space and identity become relevant. In his book Sprachtheorie of
1934, the German psychologist Karl Bühler (1879-1959) proposed a model of language
communication, which had as one of its central parts a model of the ‘now, here and I’ of
the speech act. (At the time of the publication, Bühler was professor in Vienna. After the
Anschluß in 1938, he had to flee the Nazi dictatorship and died in Los Angeles.)
What did Bühler mean by this? What a sentence like ‘I am drinking tea.’ or ‘It’s raining’
means, can not really be understood if we do not know
 when it was uttered,
 where it was uttered, and
 by whom.
You can see how time, space and identity also come crucially in into the analysis of
everyday communication.
Finally, on yet a different note. When Ireland in 1975
went over to the metric system, the old black-on-white
road signs with distances in miles were replaced by a
new design giving kilometers instead of miles. Speeds on
speedometers in cars were given in miles per hour for a
much longer period, though. Why is it more difficult to
replace the unit for measuring distances than the unit
for measuring speed? My colleagues in linguistics would probably suggest that distances
are less ‘embodied’ than speed is. We have to measure distances (i.e. compare them
with something else), while we think to have a more direct access to speed of
movement, which we think we can ‘feel’ with our bodies. A bit of reflection and
remembering that we don’t experience speed when we look out of the window of an
airplane (because there is nothing to compare with before we are close to touching
ground again) shows that this is not quite the answer yet. What is really embodied is
acceleration, which indeed we can feel in our bodies (like when a car is speeding up or
braking). Mathematically, acceleration is a complex concept, witness the formula for the
Earth’s gravity (a form of acceleration which is so common that we don’t feel it any
more except when we stumble and fall), viz.
g = 9.81 m2
s
Thus, acceleration (which combines notions of time and space in a complex way) is more
immediately accessible to experience than the apparently simple concepts of time and
space. The German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant maintained that Time
and Space are not concepts formed by experience, but forms of sensibility that are a
priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. The Irish experience fits well in
with this.
I know that identity is a concept that philosophers and cultural theorists feel much more
comfortable with than, e.g. psychologists. Keep that in mind when you are thinking
about project proposals. There will be reading suggestions accompanying the project
proposals, but if you want to read something already now, a good text may be Stuart
Hall’s “The question of cultural identity”. Not an easy text, but more easily accessible
than many others. And since there a couple of names that you will hear very often and
rarely get a chance to read, you better grasp the chance and get enlightened by direct
reading rather than by hearsay (some other names you better check out eye-to-eye are
Bourdieu and Foucault).
How do we get to a problem formulation and a project proposal from here?
Well, one way to do this is to check out your personal experiences (in reading, watching
a film or tv program, talking to people, traveling) about difference and sameness. Where
do you have encountered differences you didn’t understand, or likenesses that were
almost uncanny? And have felt that this experience required an explanation? It doesn’t
matter if this happened in an internet café in Katmandu or in Pressbyrån in Hässleholm
station (which claims to be the geographical centre of Europe), in a bus queue in Dun
Laoghaire waiting for the 46A or in the canteen of Roskilde University – it’s the kick that
counts that you got out of your experience – call it “Aha-Erlebnis” or (as James Joyce
would have done) “epiphany”. And get down to inquiring what it was that gave you that
kick.
A totally different approach is to read this semester’s project report and screen your
‘delimitations’ section. What questions would you have liked to be able to deal with,
and were stopped by limitations of time and space (there again!), and your fellow group
members? Want a new start? Now’s the time.
In formulating your project topic, you should in the first place state some problem – in
the first place maybe just a puzzle – that you want to read and think and write about.
Try to describe it such that others find it attractive to work with as well. Maybe you have
already some acquaintance with relevant literature. If this is the case, list it in the
proposal – maybe some of your fellow students might want to have a look at a book or
two already during the long break until the end of January, in order to prepare
themselves for the coming semester. This can be academic literature, but also a novel –
or a film or work of art (painting, sculpture, or building) or even music. There is a
reference list at the end of this letter. Maybe it gives you some good ideas (thanks to my
good colleagues for suggestions).
Deadlines: if Dorthe receives your proposals before December 18, we can put them on
BSCW before Christmas. Later submissions are possible, but as soon as the semester
handbook is printing, we cannot include them there any more. And it is important that
everybody enters the group formation process well-prepared. Make sure you state how
a proposal connects with the semester theme, and contact one of the supervisors
currently allocated to the house to make sure that supervision is possible. (Tell us, who
you have talked to.)
Have a pleasant exam period and a relaxing holiday period.
As ever,
Hartmut
House Coordinator
References
Anderson, Benedict 1993. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalism. London: Verso [also in Danish translation]
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1964. “The attitude of the Algerian peasant toward time”, in: Jesse
Pitt-Rivers, ed. Mediterranean Countrymen. Paris and The Hague: Mouton. p. 55–72
Bühler, Karl 1934. Sprachtheorie. Jena: Fischer
Hall, Stuart 1994. “The question of cultural identity”, in Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony
McGrew, eds., Modernity and its futures, Cambridge: Polity Press 1993, p. 273-325.
Hawking, Stephen W. 1988. A brief history of time: from the big bang to black holes.
New York: Bantam
Holford-Strevens, Leofranc 2005. The history of time: a very short introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Landes, David S. 1983. Revolution in time: clocks and the making of the modern world.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Ricœur, Paul 1994. Oneself as another; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
[translated from: Soi-même comme un autre]