1 Time and temporality: Linguistic distribution in human life-games Stephen Cowley 1 and Jens Koed Madsen 2 University of Southern Denmark and Birkbeck, University of London _______________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract While clock time can be used to clarify facts, all living systems construct their own temporalities. Having illustrated the claim for foxtail grasses, it is argued that, with motility and brains, organisms came to use temporalities that build flexibility into behaviour. With the rise of human culture, individuals developed a knack of using linguistic distribution to link metabolism with collective ways of assessing and managing experience. Of human temporal management, the best known case is the mental time travel enabled by, among other functions, autobiographical memory. One contribution of the Special Issue is to show many ways in which temporality connects up circumstances, goals, perception, attention and modes of recall. It can be hypothesised that temporalities evolve because the relevant skills reduce uncertainties. Using cases from blogging, problem solving and doctor-patient interaction, we find that, in each case, parties shift between close attention to the lived situation and using resources – especially wordings – to manage temporality. It is concluded that the multi-scalar nature of language enables individuals to orchestrate their lives in ways that are, at once, social, cognitive and subjective. Key words: distributed cognition, distributed language, temporal influences, lived temporality, clock time, subjectivity _______________________________________________________________________________________ The truly ramified nature of time cannot be captured by what amounts to a mathematical convention (Smith, 2003) Introduction The Fifth Distributed Thinking Symposium (DTS V) called for papers offering “a clear view of how time- scales, dynamics, and local/non-local impact on human interactive communication.” In spite of having set what now seems to be a rather fuzzy target, the Symposium opened up a rich seam of theoretical and 1 Corresponding author, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Language and Communication, Sdr. Stationsvej 28, 4200 Slagelse, Denmark, cowley@sdu.dk 2 Birkbeck, University of London, Department of Psychology, Malet Street, Bloomsbury London WC1E 7HX, j.madsen@bbk.ac.uk. The research is supported by The Danish Council of Independent Research, DFF – 1329-00021B