Let’s think about time and what it means for animals experiencing the world.
There are particle physics timescales (stretching to Planck time, or 10-43 seconds) and those of cosmology (stretching to Hubble Time, the age of the Universe). These are the largest and smallest conceivable timescales for humans. Absolute time, however, died with Einstein’s seminal publications, and whatever credence we give to the reality of time today, most timescales are far too long or too short to have meaning to humans. Gibson emphasizes the range in which we live – minutes, hours, days, perhaps years – but he is quick to point out that these abstractions are not the way we experience duration in an environment. Ecologically, we are attuned to processes, changes, events, and sequences of events.[i]
Events are how we experience and catalog experiences of the world. Yesterday, a doctor’s appointment; today, a morning of coffee and reading with a dog in my lap; tomorrow, an important WebEx meeting regarding travel in the waning months of a pandemic – life rendered as a series of events is common and commonsensical. But what is an event? More specifically, what is an event for a fiction-making animal in his or her environment?
From a literary perspective, Paul Riceour’s notion of narrative emplotment offers useful analogies – specifically his differentiation of mimesis 1, 2 and 3, or prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration.[ii]
Prefiguration is the constellation of what is already there, what you enter knowing, and what you expect to come away knowing. Environments are world-fictions and therefore social. That does not mean that everyone present attends to or even perceives the same aspects of an environment but simply that they are capable of doing so given certain prefigurations. Impacts differ wildly. Not everyone who picks up Moby Dick, for example, reads the same novel – but that possibility always exists. Assuming we are fluent in the language in which the book is rendered (English in my case), are familiar with the environmental elements (whales, whaling, 19th century ships, and the ocean), and expect the characters to have certain predilections (obsessions, anger, revenge, etc.), the possibility exists for having an experience similar to those of other readers.
Configuration happens in the encounter itself – the mental framing that takes place in-situ. When reading a novel, this is obvious and most authors do a lot of the configuring work for the reader. But the process is similar to encounters that are not pre-scripted. An environment becomes a setting. You, other people, animals, and organizations become characters. And the interactions of characters with other characters or characters with settings witnessed through the frame of prefigured knowns render actions as plots and motives and portents. This stage of emplotment is understood as the event proper.
Refiguration, finally, is the realized take-away – the world re-construed in the wake of an event. It is here that meaning takes root, or fails to do so. The fact that some events are recorded as meaningful while others fade into the background is in no way mysterious. As clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson suggests, “Meaning means implication for behavioral output.”[iii] Events either affect us sufficiently to alter our prefigurations or behaviors or both (and are therefore meaningful) or they leave us more or less as we were before.[iv]
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 6-8.
[ii] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, translated by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
[iii] Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: the architecture of belief, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 13.
[iv] Even two events that look the same from the outside and occurred to the same individual in the same location but at different times can have different results in meaning. A person might trip and fall on the steps outside his or her home on multiple occasions, for instance. The times this occurs in which no long-term damage is done to one’s body or self-esteem tend to fade into meaninglessness. An instance in which the person suffers a lingering disability or draws the laughter or loving attention of onlookers, however, tends to be recorded as a meaningful event in that person’s life.
Architecture is Fiction 