"Angelus Novus." Paul Klee (1879-1940)	J. David Betts AERA International Meeting SIGs Semiotics & Art and Learning 14 April 1998, San Diego CA

I've been asking my friends to take a minute and strike a pose.
It requires them to stand up and use their bodies to demonstrate a posture
that represents their concept of their relationship to the future. How would they stand?
How would they arrange themselves to physically portray themselves dealing with time?
What images do they create? What stances do they recall,
what culturally shared gestures they believe will express their relationship to the past?

Why don't you try it? You don't even have to stand up, really. Just do it in your seat.
Pick a direction to face, set your countenance. Arrange your limbs, and pose for our camera.
That's it.
Which way are you facing? Why that way? What signal do your arms give?
How would someone know that?
What expression do you wear? How do you feel?

My friends seemed to share a common conceptualization of time. They would "face the future."
They often used images from movies: pioneers facing the broad expanse of the American prairie;
analogies from nautical experiences: gazing forward from the bow of a ship.
Those that have gone along with this exercise
so far have all stood foursquare facing the future.
In the teeth of the gale, so to speak. Time rushing
at them and past them as they bravely faced into the future.
Arms at the ready. Teeth set in a brave grimace or a tight smile.

I tried very hard not to prompt them about how to stand.
I avoided asking them to "...face the future."
I did not indicate where the future was, or the past.
I ambushed them because I wanted to get their first response to this problem,
what came quickest to the surface, and was therefore possibly their most deeply held concept.
Individuals who tried this activity agreed that dealing with time
is not something we usually spend much time on.
But we were all interested in seeing what shared cultural concepts
were expressed and how we used our bodies to express our individual relationship
to time. These postures and gestures are the precursors of
language and signal our semiotic predilection.

In December of last year, Mike Cole posted a message on the xmca
(Mind, Culture, and Activity) listserv, in which he shared a fragment from
Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History, IX." (1968).
Cole's source for the discussion is "Conceptions of Mind." Edited by G. Harman (1993).
In one of his historical essays Benjamin wrote about a poem purported
to describe a painting by Paul Klee. The poem is attributed to Gerhard Scholem:

The Klee painting, "Angelus Novus ," (above) shows us an angel
as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which
keeps piling whatever wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole that has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught
in his wings with such violence that the angel can on longer close them.
This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back
is turned. While the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress." (pp. 257-58).

This image of the Angel of History reminded me of a very useful one
that was planted in my head by a teacher a long time ago.
Her idea was that the difference between the Romantic and the Classical
could be understood through an analogy to a powerful locomotive
steaming along into the future (it was implied).
Romanticism being the very nose of the engine, and classicism the train
and all being pulled along behind. A graphic metaphor,
and useful in it's energy, but ultimately limiting. And ultimately
inviting of further questions. Where was this locomotive,
and where was it going? Who laid down the tracks?
What did they represent in this picture? What came before?
What comes after? Lots to conjecture about here with many
interesting possibilities. Useful for a student of history, these
questions are the essences of narrative.

Salvador Dali Time and Semiotics. After Aaron Ross (1991)

A sign is a thing which stands for something else. The sign may refer
to the specific content being communicated (the signified), or it may
simply point to a formal device that is without meaning (the signifier).
The human psyche freely associates sign, signifier and signified in an unending
chaotic stew, bound by the matrix of the individual's personality and experience.
There is, therefore, a potentially infinite number of interpretations of a given sign.
This leads to an infinite chain of semiosis in which each is related to all others
through the process of association. In practice, however the chain breaks.
It must, else relativity would be destroyed by infinite connectedness.
Certain links must be severed, interpretation established.

Interpretation can be highly volatile, even catalytic.
In Dali's work we see what he called the "paranoiac-critical method".
His representational images have more than one dominant interpretation
generated by the artist's submission to the associative power of his mind.

In his 1935 essay "The Conquest of the Irrational," Dali wrote,
"...this method afterwards became the delirio-critical synthesis which bears the
name "paranoiac-critical activity." Paranoiac: delirium of interpretive
association bearing a systematic structure. Paranoiac-critical activity:
spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretive
critical association of delirious phenomena.