Abstract
The previously developed conceptual frame is further differentiated in a limited study of the temporal dimensions of social situations and contexts. Incipient events, which arise in typificatory attempts to bridge social inconsistencies, structure those temporal dimensions and are hence not separable from a study of social interaction.
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References
The most explicit statement of the notion of “span” can be found in: A. Schütz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 62ff.
Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action ( New York-London, McGraw- Hill, 1937 ), pp. 762f.
For example: The “temporal dimension of the actor’s concern with the development of the situation may be differentiated along an activity-passivity coordinate.” Talcott Parsons, The Social System ( Glencoe, Free Press, 1951 ), p. 8.
Parsons, Structure, p. 58. — Schütz’ paper “The Rationality of the Social World,” (Coll. Pap., vol. 2, pp. 64–88) is mainly a discourse about this definition of Parsons.
Schütz, Coll. Pap., vol. 1, p. 351. — For the quoted monograph see: Parsons, T. and Shils, E.A., Toward a General Theory of Action (New York, Harper, 1962), pp. 47–243. Schütz cites esp. pp. 105,162f, and 166.
System, p. 67. See also: Parsons and Shüs, General Theory, pp. 76–91.
T. Parsons, The Social System: A General Theory of Action, in R. R. Grinker (ed.), Toward a Unified Theory of Human Behavior (Basic Books, 1956), pp. 55ff. —Parsons’ earlier preoccupation with the theory of differential equations is most obvious in his Structure of Social Action: The “Note B” (p. 77–79) reads like a lecture note from an introductory course on differential equations.
Henri Bergson, The Perception of Change, in: The Creative Mind (New York, Wisdom Library, 1946), p. 149. — Bergson saw the basis for such “unjustified abstraction” in the predominance of visual perception: “The eye has developed the habit of separating, in the visual field, the relatively invariable figures which are then supposed to change place without changing form.” (p. 147).
See for example: Maurice Natanson, A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Ontology (Lincoln, Univ. of Neb. Studies, 1951 ). This study of Natanson is a remarkably clear introduction to Sartre’s earlier positions in “Being and Nothingness.”
This limited interest in Sartre allows me to refer mainly to the rather broad presentation of his later position in Search for a Method (New York, Knopf, 1963 ). This book is the prefatory essay to Critique de la Raison Dialectique ( Paris, Gallimard, 1960 ).
“By alienation we mean the process by which the unity of the producing and the product is broken.” “By reification we mean the moment in the process of alienation in which the characteristic of thinghood becomes the standard of objective reality.” Peter L. Berger and Stanley Pullberg, Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness, New Left Review, 35, 1966, p. 61.
For example: J. P. Sartre, The Words ( Greenwich, Fawcett, 1966 ).
Such a notion of creativity is corroborated by a remark of a notable modern mathematician: “Obviously the schematical execution of a given general procedure is (after a few tries) of no special interest to a mathematician. Thus we can state the remarkable fact that by the specifically mathematical achievement of developing a general method, a creative mathematician, so to speak, mathematically depreciates the field he becomes master of by this very method.” See: H. Hermes, Enumerability, Decidability, Computability ( Berlin-Heidelberg-New York, Springer, 1965 ), p. 2n.
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© 1970 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Grathoff, R.H. (1970). Temporal Typification and Social Temporality. In: The Structure of Social Inconsistencies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3215-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3215-5_5
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