RELATED TERMS: Things; Actant
Carlo Rovelli notes that, “The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. They are — if they are at all — in a where but also in a when. They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events.”
It is this recognition that underlies the design of narrative environments as event-making: the composition of ‘things’ (materials, objects, bodies, persons) which choreograph a temporal ‘when’ (through narrativity) and a spatial ‘where’ (through environmentality), thereby constituting a deictic and indexical field that positions human subjects somewhere for sometime, an experience from which they draw meaning and inferences for continued inter-action, but not ‘conclusions’, as actants (Greimas) - interpretants (Peirce).
References
Rovelli, C. (2018) The Order of time. Translated by E. Segre and S. Carnell. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.