Preamble 4: “Kids Running From Place to Place”

“The fecundity of the individual case” was my first blush with understanding the deeply temporal character of ideas, images, things, concepts, selves and that this temporality did not mean the flickering on and off of one isolated moment after the next. It means that ideas (et al.) are continuously emergent and re-emergent in their very being themselves at all. They are not just in contemporaneous fields of relations. That field that they are is also temporal. They are not just “in time,” but rather are temporal.

Not only do ideas (et al.) have a past. That past is turning out to be different than we might have imagined in the past. They are flowing gatherings, sometimes roiled and contested, sometimes unnoticed. They are, to recall Ludwig Wittgenstein’s images, more like family gatherings, with all the contention and love that might entail.