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Genealogies as the Language of Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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To take a structural approach to genealogy means dealing with it as a story written in a language that is unknown and yet to be deciphered. It is the very language of time—individual and familial—in which a human being situates, often in a striking manner, the principal life and death events of his own destiny. Or better perhaps, it means discovering this in genealogies, which must first be exhumed from the dusty cabinets where a solid and excessively documentary tradition has too long confined them, in order to consider them now, in a sense, as venerable “black boxes”, potentially containing secrets of the intimate functioning of families, capable of providing unknown information on this subject, with meaning and logic winning out over the apparent fantasy with which they have been coated.
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- Copyright © 1990 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
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1 It is useful in this respect to distinguish clearly the words of language that make it possible to speak of or to "metacommunicate" about time, such as the abstract terms of age and time, from the pure time contained in age. Although time cannot be limited simply to age, age is entirely in time.
2 It is through this approach that we will later examine the familial structure, re named "familial invariable" for its cybernetic connotations.
3 The descriptive code still called the "menetic code" is partly based on this dis tinction. For example, conventionally the letter "d" designates any active age of death or the length of existence of an individual; the letter "l" (for lost) designates an age of mourning. The active age at which a parent generates is coded "a". We can therefore automatically break down his death age into the age at which he be comes a parent plus the age at which his child experiences his death. This produces the following formula: d = a + 1. See B. Froussart and M. Lecamp, "Code descriptif du temps familial et algorithmes de durée de vie", Psychologie médicale, 1988, vol. 20, No. 11.
4 On this subject see B. Froussart and M. Estève, "L'écart d'âge entre époux com me organisateur temporel", Dialogue, 1986, No. 93.
5 If some readers may be surprised by the arbitrary limitation of these three types of events, we would reply that it is in fact a choice based on a pratical end. By be ginning with a study of these ages there is a greater chance of touching on the group morphogenesis, with birth increasing the family, death amputating it and marriage segmenting it. These three types of events effect the form of the social entity. Later we can examine the manner in which disease aids in maintaining this form through a study of the ages at which it afflicts related individuals, and then through a study of other significant events.
6 This approach must be distinguished from others, better known, elaborated in studies such as M. Philibert, L'Échelle des âges, Paris, Le Seuil, 1968, II.I, "Le foisonnement des périodisations préscientifiques masque le caractère fondamental des échelles", p. 80 ff.
7 For this see B. Froussart, M. Lecamp et alii, "Essai sur l'organisation du temps familial: théorie ménétique", Génitif, 1986, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 15-42 and in partic ular § 2.3, "Décomposition du mène", Tableau III, p. 25.
8 We have called this type of diagram a Borek diagram after the name of the psy chologist who discovered the principle of this transformation (see below our article princeps, note 12). The model distinguishes between two types of geometrisation. In Borek I, the distance between the lifelines, although determining parallel right angles, is arbitrary. In Borek II it is determined by ages of generation, which results in a representation that is mathematically more coherent but that requires more room. This point is developed in "Le temps des familles", with a preface by G.G. Marca ni, in the spring 1990 issue of Bulletin de psychologie, Paris.
9 In Table I, the right angles of generation are those in which one side corresponds to a portion of the parental life line; the angles of filiation are those in which one side corresponds to the life of the subject who is born:.
10 Every "passive" age implies a "product" constituted of the child who is born, the person who dies, the relative who marries; this product is indicated as a super script in the upper right of the menetic transcription. Thus the expression 9AZ X would mean "grand-parental age ‘g' reached by the individual X at the birth of his grandchild AZ". This child is not the agent of age "g" but a product of generation.
11 Like those of events in time: a grand-parent dies when one of his grandchil dren is born.
12 On these reappearances, see our article princeps: "La réapparition des âges dans le système familial. Proposition d'une méthode d'examen. Application à trois alli ances", Systèmes humains, vol. 1, No. 4, Québec, Trois-Rivières, 1985, pp. 13-34.
13 R. Abellio and Ch. Hirsch deal with this difference between esoteric and exo teric numerology in Introduction à une théorie des nombres bibliques, Gallimard, 1984, p. 63 ff.
14 This idea is largely developed in F.E. Mairlot, La Nouvelle cybernétique. Es sai d'épistémologie des systèmes dynamiques, Brussels, Chabassol, 1983. "L'invar iant, object de la cybernétique ou la forme en tant que système", p. 111 ff.
15 Assembling and verifying data require a great deal of time, which exhausts many genealogists. For practical reasons we will limit ourselves here to three con tiguous families: the original family of the subject, the original family of his father and the original family of his mother. Father of Jean-Luc: Louis J., born 21 February 1924; mother: Marie L., born 2 june 1924, premature death on 30 November 1967; child A: Odile, born 2 May 1954; child B (Jean-Luc J.); child C: Josette, born 21 July 1958, married, two children; child DZ, male, stillborn 3 May 1963, no given name. For the rest of the data see in No. 395 of the Bulletin de psychologie our article, "Aspects commémoratifs d'un décès par infarctus". In the same article can also be found an attempt at a statistical validation of relationships through varia ble analysis.
16 A first sort of significance is provided by the fact that the ages here placed in relationship are those reached by people who are very closely related. These are not indifferent ages since all concern the generation or the death of close blood rela tionships of the deceased. For documentary purposes we can still speak of significance in the sense given this term by F. Collot, "Une théorie de la ‘signification' prolon geant la théorie de l'information", Revue de Bio-Mathématique, No. 91, 1985, "La correspondance", pp. 39-45. Full significance can only be guaranteed by the ability of a relationship to contribute to temporal organization or at least to its revelation to the observer. The significance concerning the placing in relation of forms of time is for this reason called "formal"; it leaves aside the psychological significance.
17 For easier reference, the ages concerned by a relationship have been circled. The note "p.m." indicates an age reached "post mortem" after the death of the person in question. Menetic analysis considers that time is not suspended by the disappearance of individuals within a family and that it is important to take into account the age that otherwise would have been reached by deceased persons in order to bring out the temporal links that unite the living to those who preceded them in this structure.
18 See above, B. Froussart and M. Lecamp, 1986, 1987, 1988.
19 In the model the words of time, because of their specificity distinguishing them from ordinary language, are called "menes", whence the term menetic given to the theory concerning them.
20 The age at which an accident can occur or be experienced is frequently regu lar; even though he was killed in an automobile accident, Jean-Luc's maternal grand-father died at an age that obeys the model precisely.
21 For this, see our article, "Algorithme d'organisation temporelle de trois décès grands-parentaux", Actualités psychiatriques No. 7, 1987, pp. 55-62. It is impor tant to add that the descriptive algorythm does not create necessity; if three life spans obey the model it is because the model is capable of inducing a process of comparability, but this does not mean that death is programmed. It can only be "informed".
22 R. Hoffmann and P. Laszlo, "Representation in Chemistry", Diogenes, No. 147, Casalini, 1989, p. 23 ff.: chemical representation as language.
23 An example of a frequently observable variant is this: the age at death com bines the age at the birth of the first child and the age at the birth of the last along with the age of one or the other when they become or cease to be parents in their turn.
24 The following pages represent the essential conclusions of the article, B. Frous sart and M. Lecamp, "Approche cybernétique du temps d'une famille", XIe Con grès international de cybernétique, XVIIIe symposium, Namur, August 1986, Acta.
25 Marie's life span obeys the model strictly, particularly in the "rule of death" described earlier, since her age at death, namely 85 years, is equal to the sum of the ages she had reached upon becoming and upon ceasing to be mother, plus one of the ages of maternity of her daughters: 85 = 24 + 37 + 24. Calculation of this in days provides an astonishing approximation (less than a half-day per year of ex istence).
26 The age of 24 years reached by Florent in 1948 is excluded from the analysis since it is not an age of parenthood. However, it is part of the syntax of admitting a stranger into the family (the husband of Elise).
27 These four ages of giving birth are themselves part of a superstructure called the "FLS structure", not discussed here.
28 G. Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Claude Lévi-Strauss, Plon, Julliard, 1961.
29 It is above all a time of process made up of several intense moments including the first encounter; beginning of cohabitation; institutional, customary, adminis trative and religious rituals. Only observation can situate them temporally at the inscriptive level.
30 On regulatory time see the article "Théorie ménetique" by Dr. G.G. Maruani in Dictionnaire des thérapies familiales. Théories et pratiques, under the direction of J. Miermont, Paris, Payot, 1987, p. 562.
31 In passing we can also note the frequent pairing of time and names, with the chosen partner having a name that sounds like that of the deceased person.
32 There is another aspect of time less easily accessible and yet seeming to con tribute as well to the construction of a "liberal" marriage: considering the overall temporal structure of the family of the other person. For lack of an expression to describe this, we have called it "numéro-comptabilité" (numerical accounting). This is expressed in the numerous and precise disconcerting similarities between the two genealogies that come into contact but that are established only by the birth of a child resulting from a union of the two of them. The two genealogical "appara tuses" can be seen as partially complementary or symmetrical. We will give no ex amples of this here for it would require an examination of complex temporal configurations. It is understandable that this type of organization could control the union in order to make the temporal organization of generation easier and to allow genealogical reference to the two lines, which is facilitated by interstructural nu merical accounting.
33 Table taken from the article in Systèmes humains cited above in note 8.
34 Many authors complain of the difficulty of structural analysis in integrating the dimension of time. This difficulty is felt as well in the analysis of "liberal" familial systems.
35 We now know better the role of time in the advent of modernity since the ap pearance of the book by J. Attali, Histoires du temps, Paris, Fayard, 1982, and that of D.S. Landes, L'heure qu'il est, les horloges, la mesure du temps et la for mation du monde moderne, Paris, Gallimard, 1987.
36 In "Remarques sur l'analyse de la parenté", R. Needham writes that we still do not know why systems of relationship function like genealogies: La parenté en question, onze contributions à la théorie anthropologique. Under the direction of R. Needham, Paris, Le Seuil, 1977, p. 105.
37 G. Pineau, Temps et contretemps, Montreal, Ed. Saint-Martin, 1987, chap. 5, "La guerre des temps scientifiques", pp. 59-78.