Heterochronicity: Interview with Dr. Heike Polster, Memphian (via Germany)

Gentle readers. I was too tired to use capital letters, so I beg your forgiveness. Dr. Heike is a local scholar, German professor at the University of Memphis. She has a new book out. And she's going to send me the .jpeg of her book cover soon and I will post it.

Please let me know if any of you are interested in coming to a book reading from Dr. Heike (which is her first name; I'm just being goofy). It would be quite a fun and worthwhile learning experience, and maybe some of you could contribute a heterochronic experience.

Here's the interview:

you've coined a new term - heterchronicity. what does it mean?

Heterochronicity describes a concept similar to simultaneity. When events occur at different places at the same time, we call them simultaneous. People often use the same word if they see two temporal phases shown within the same space, say, for instance, in an episode of C.S.I., where the investigators try to reconstruct how a crime happened, and, while looking at the scene of the crime, they imagine the victim and the perpetrator to share their, the observer’s, space, although the events happened in the past. There was a similar set-up in a scene from “The DaVinci Code.” Tom Hanks’ character and his companion walk through the historic inner city of an old European town, and suddenly, the shapes of people from the past appear around them. Such a visual experience is technically not one of simultaneity, but one of heterochronicity. Here, different times are brought together in the same space: past and present are shown to share one location.

when do people experience heterochronicity?

I am in the process of collecting narratives and artworks which show demonstrate heterochronic visions. In the literature I have studied, mainly 20^th and 21^st century German and Austrian texts, heterochronicity is often experienced by people who are trying to reconstruct the past. An exile revisiting his childhood home, a father seeing his little girl in the face of his adult daughter, a tourist projecting the vision of an intact building onto a ruin: all these are heterochronic visions.

and is there homochronicity as well?

I do not think so. A theologian might state that in God’s presence, when facing eternity, past, present, and future become meaningless. An esoterically inclined person might remind us to live in the now. It is my contention that human beings live a heterochronistic existence. We remember, we project, we plan, we change course. We depend on imagining times other than the present in order to survive, physically, emotionally, socially, culturally. Our humanity depends on it. Our values depend on it. Jay Griffiths, a British author, once wrote: “our attitude to time is – blissfully unwitting – self-portraiture.” (Her book is remarkable, and is the one work I can wholeheartedly recommend to laypeople interested in thinking about time: “A sideways look at time,” Tarcher/Penguin, 2004) I agree with Griffiths that our understanding of time says more about what makes us tick than what ticks.

what shaped your understanding of the material in this book - other scholars, experiences?

I am very interested in something called “Postmemory.” Postmemory denotes the transition from memories by eyewitnesses to created and recreated memories by people who did not witness certain events. Think, for instance, of Art Spiegelman’s “MAUS”. The actual story of the graphic novel is the narrator’s difficulty to tell his father’s story of surviving the Holocaust. The narrator knows he must fail to deliver any representation that would appropriate the experience of persecution and the death camps. He chooses the medium which he is most comfortable with: comics. Spiegelman mixes media and incorporates the process of the creation of a (visual) narrative into the narrative itself. This is a common element in postmemory texts.

In order to make and keep history accessible, historic events and people’s experiences need to be mediated continuously. Heterochronicity denotes a method many narrators and authors use in order to relate historically relevant information. It is visual in nature, and always thematizes its representational nature in one way or another.

i want to have a heterochronic experience. how do i do it?

Imagine an older version of yourself talking to yourself. Stand on a streetcorner and try to imagine what happened there the day before. Become an anthropologist and figure out contexts for the artefacts you work with. Retrace the steps of another person.

what do you most want people to understand about the ideas in your book?

Heterochronicity probes our understanding of time and space. From millenia of philosophical discourse, we have inherited a difficulty of speaking of either one of these concepts without refering to the other. Representing time in any way usually relies upon a medium we deem homogenous: space. As a result, we often assign to space the characteristics of stasis, and to time that of fluidity. However, if we allow for space to be more open, to denote the trajectory of “stories so far” as Doreen Massey has called it, I believe we will create more awareness in everyday perception, awareness of our own moment in history, and our responsibility to understand the causes and effects of our actions.