“It is not exactly true that social sciences have always alternated between actor and system, or aganecy and structure. I might be more productive to say that they have alternated between two types of equally powerful dissatisfactions … ANT might have hit on one of the very phenomena of the social order: maybe the social possess the bizarre property of not being made of agency and structure at all, but rather of being a circulating entity. (1999: 16,17, original emphasis- Quoted in Tony Cook’s essay Transactions in Perpetual motion in Transactions and Creations: Property debates and the stimulous of Melanesia. NY: Berghahn, 2004)

My eyes are a piece of a networked system, their connected to my ears and spine and toes and skin. My vision is twenty twenty but sometimes my sight is very poor. I sometimes see only myself, and sometimes I can’t see myself just my perspective on the system I feel stuck in. erdrich)

Unpacking my experience of the circulating entity:
there is my experience of what happened (which is the idea of what happened in the singular, which is fixed to a time and set of other thoughts and circumstances,)
and there is also the evidence the experience leaves in the world
as well as other peoples’ idea of the experience and also
the collective, interchangeable, conversational existence of the experience.

it’s the route we take endlessly attempting to define self from other, or to find our way back to the others we loved and lost.

This process only ever comes to a still when we end transaction. But other things can happen to it besides it stopping. A closed interaction will repeat the same pieces of information and this will go on until some new idea breaks in from beyond.

In other words, there’s a difference between the truth and the truth that’s being circulated right now-
habit equals opinion times time.
(energy equals mass times the constant (the speed of light) squared.?)

Hence Innis’ preoccupation with the evils of present minded-ness- the mentality that believes it has an exclusive, brand new, and therefore best, hold on the world.

Bahktin describes these fundamental, structural differences in a culture’s sense of time and space, as they appear in literature, as ‘chronotopes’. There is the chronotope of the road, the harvest, the modern city. Even in literary theory the relationship between these kinds of time sense, and the presence and understanding of different technologies, such as the road, is implied. And so in the study of communication and media it makes sense to wonder, as Innis does, about our own sense of time and space, the assumptions and blind spots inherent in our own ‘chronotope.’