The parable “Before the Law,” introduced as a mise-en abyme in The Trial, suggests the problematic nature of Gateway.  The man from the country comes to the city and encounters the law as a gateway guarded by a doorkeeper (a threshold guardian, a daimon).

Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper.  He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body.  The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.”  “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?”  The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you.  I’m going now to close it. (Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” Trans. Ian Johnston).

Crossing Over

The ambiguous lesson is kairotic:  kairos.  The Trial and The Castle both treat this theme of the moment, and the fear of missing it, the missed encounter. In both stories the protagonist comes very close to the bridge, to the moment that would open the link between the two realms (whatever they might be –- the hearth and the uncanny).  The paradox of revelation in Kafka’s vision is that the closer one is to illumination, the weaker one becomes, to the point of exhaustion or sleep, so that the Augenblick never occurs.  The reader, however, is given to understand what is possible. “Awakening, the bodhi that is continually spoken of in Indian thought from the Vedas to the Buddha, is something that happens during wakefulness, an invisible shift, a sudden change in distances and in the mental pace, thanks to which consciousness is able to observe itself—and is therefore able to observe itself in its typical role as observer.  The most effective metaphor for this event is the awakening from sleep, the passage from dream to wakefulness” (Roberto Calasso, 226).

The real neither reveals nor conceals, but intimates (to paraphrase Heraclitus, who referred rather to the oracle).  Here is one such intimation.

Moment

Heidegger cited this Satz now and then, when advising circumspection over inspection.  This final post of the year 2008 indicates a thread waiting to be spun:  the gateway.  Christo and Jeanne-Claude have their own purposes, but also are making art whose future is open and indicating a direction for further thought.

What instructions may be received here?

The entire Western Tradition relevant to Avatar is latent within this scene from Modern Times.

Event

Allegorical hooks:

1–Site:  Department store (commodities).

2–The Hole (abyss, void)

3–Blindfolded

4– Rollerskating (trajectory)

5–for a “gamin” (Paulette Goddard)

6–Charlie Chaplin as Little Tramp

7–in a movie– FX

8–YouTube clip

9– cited in a blog

Who is the “Socrates” of electracy? That is, who is charged with corrupting the young? Whose behavior draws a crowd and serves as gadfly, challenging the received assumptions and values of society? This post may be filled with any celebrity in principle. Britney was number one in Yahoo search not long ago, and she and Paris were used as the icons in the attack ad for candidate John McCain attempting to tar Obama with the brush of mere celebrity. The paparazzi inscribing Britney in infospace recorded her in the upskirt genre of pornography, and that image should become, if it is not already, an emblem of what it is to be/have image.

Socrates Today

What we are learning from our celebrities is what it is to become an image. This image that celebrities already are marks the site of avatar. You know you are electrate when you begin to experience yourself as an image. To avatar (verb) is to manage this condition (to learn its rhetoric). The story told about Cary Grant indexes the experience: in response to those who said they would like to be Cary Grant, Grant replied, “so would I.” Mariah Carey was quoted once as complaining that her image was having more fun than she was. Ordinary netizens are beginning to encounter the effects of celebritude when their FaceBook or MySpace accounts are used to judge the contents of their character.

These anecdotes suggest a continuity between the invention of selfhood in literacy and that of the avatar in electracy. Plato, in Phaedrus, has Socrates critizing the written word because it wanders away from its parent/author and goes about in the world unprotected and only capable of repeating itself. The primary issue reported from the vanguard of apparatus shift is the experience of slippage in one’s identity, a loss of control of the I/Me relation and even loss of the sense of having an authentic core self (see the case of John Edwards’ involvement with Rielle life). The “self” emerged in Classical Greece through the experience associated with reading and writing, in which authors noticed their thought and especially their insights arose within their own minds, and were not voices or visitations by spirits arriving from outside.

Selfhood was never something that happened by itself, but was rather a potential that could be realized through the work of education: Aristotle’s entelechy applied to human identity. Pindar’s admontion to “become who one is” was taken up by Nietzsche in modernity (Werde der du bist), indicating the consistency of the problem of individuation throughout the epoch of literacy. Hegel generalized the authenticating movement of alienation into the dialectic of world historical progress, allegorized most commonly in the journey of Ulysses away from and return to home.

What is the movement of avatar?

Socrates (in Plato’s dialogue, Apology), explains at his trial his career as a gadfly around the city, including the source of his judgment (prudence) in the daimonion (voice of a daimon) that spoke to him.

“It may seem curious that I should go round giving advice like this and busying myself in people’s private affairs, and yet never venture publicly to address you as a whole and advise on matters of state. The reason for this is what you have often heard me say before on many other occasions–that I am subject to a divine or supernatural experience which Meletus saw fit to travesty in his indictment. It began in my early childhood–a sort of voice which comes to me, and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposoing to do, and never urges me on. It is this that debars me from entering public life.”

A Mantic Event

After the guilty verdict, Socrates again referred to his daimonion, attesting to the rightness of his decision to attend the trial rather than to flee into exile.

“In the past, the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course. Now something has happened to me, as you can see, which might be thought and is commonly considered to be a supreme calamity; yet neither when I left home this morning, nor when I was taking my place here in the court, nor at any point in any part of my speech did the divine sign oppose me. In other discussions it has often checked me in the middle of a sentence, but this time it has never opposed me in any part of this business in anything that I have said or done. What do I suppose to be the explanation? I willl tell you. I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing, and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil. I have good grounds for thinking this, because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I was doing had not been sure to bring some good result.”

Plato, “Socrates’ Defense (Apology),” in The Collected Dialogues.

Using our heuretic analogy (inventing electracy by analogy with literacy), Socrates provides the prototype of the first literate person, syncretic in his participation in both the oral and alphabetic apparati. The experience of being addressed by a spirit (a daimon), his mantic capacity, is quintessentially oral. His dialectical practice of asking his interlocutors to define their terms is a literate skill.

Instruction: propose a figure who is for electracy what Socrates is for literacy. Who might be a good exemplar of an electrate person?

Instruction: document a site designated as a self-portrait.

Pain's Prairie

We are using the analogy of how the Greeks invented Philosophy (literate metaphysics) out of spoken Greek in the context of alphabetic writing, in order to invent an image metaphysics out of filmic media (the movies as General Cultural Interface).

Relay: House of Sand, directed by Andrucha Waddinton. The interest of this example is that the film originated in a single snapshot of an elderly woman standing in the doorway of a flimsy hut surrounded by dunes, taken in the arid and poverty-stricken northeast of Brazil. The image evoked for the producer and filmmaker the whole experience and history of that region. Thus it recommends itself as a relay for understanding choral images. Waddington unfolded the snapshot into a narrative, demonstrating how a site implies a diegesis (a “world”). The Popcycle of discourses is active in this diegesis.

Chora

1) The story for the site emerged as a hybrid, sparked by a dream, in which Waddinton mixed parts of his memories of the Japanese film Woman in the Dunes, with the information about the Brazilian region (Entertainment Discourse).

2) The subplot of a visit of scientists to the area was based on an actual expedition in 1919 by a group that took astronomic measurements to prove Einstein’s theory of relativity (History Discourse).

3) The other relief from the women’s isolation are the neighboring residents of a quilombo community of runaway slaves (Public Policy disaster).

4) The theme of the film — the indifference of Nature to human intentions — expresses a feeling, an attitude, a mood experienced through this place (Expression).

Corridor Window @ Shands Hospital

A situation becomes region through measure. Oblio writes the measure of measure, since what remains to be learned about electracy is a path of movement through the dataverse. What measure organizes the ratios, proportions, functions of relationship, allowing thought to move from the given to the unknown, circumspectly? Conduction (the fourth inference). The practice of reflective judgment must be updated, replacing analogy with digilogy (analogue digital). The ratio jumps, if still guided by beauty. The sublime conditions of modernity overwhelmed Western beauty (the classical proportions of the Renaissace), but did not necessarily exceed the range of beauty itself. The vanguard arts experimented with new functions to replace ratio, but never forget the multi-cultural, syncretic character of those experiments (importing from every non-European tradition its alternative experience of beauty).

This hospital where in May doctors provided me with a total hip replacement is a place from which to learn region (chora). If there was any doubt about the wisdom of the decision to have surgery, this post from Lindsey put them to rest. Her Yoga instructor “gave the example of those swamis who have spent so much time in their lives in the lotus pose that they destroy their hips and can’t walk anymore. These swamis are so revered for their transcendence of practical necessities (such as being able to walk) that on holidays, their students celebrate them by carting them around like statues. At the end of the celebrations, they are packed up and put in their caves for the rest of the year.” She warned me not to count on my students to be so devoted.

A hospital in its institutional form is a scene of constant measurement. The staff hierarchy extends from the Orthopedic surgeon (Peter Gearen) to the orderly who empties the trash basket in my room at midnight. During my stay (May 22-25) the gossip featured the firing of the Dean (Dr. Kone) for having admitted a politically connected young man without the approval of the admissions committee. Each patient is a set of vital signs continuously monitored. My condition was assessed by these human norms, embodied in the organs and their operations (the interactive systems of blood, air, bowels, bones, nerves). What is pain? One must assign it a number every few hours, 0 – 10 (from none to unbearable). How quickly the customs of modesty, privacy, status give way to material access to the organism. The other FAQ was: when was your last bowel movement? You can’t go home until the next one.

This material institution is the vehicle for hospital as tenor, as figure, as in Baudelaire’s “Anywhere out of this world.” “This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.” Here is the register of the image category that is to electracy what concept is to literacy. The material hospital manifests the achievements of literate metaphysics: the mastery of the material literal order. Electracy is to the figurative what literacy is to the literal world. If this oblio were a remake of Baudelaire’s poem, the narrator’s conversation with his soul would be different. Baudelaire’s soul fails to respond to any of the proposals of travel to an exotic place that might please it, finally crying out “anywhere, so long as it is not in this world.” My soul’s nature, rather, is stodgy, rooted in its locale, uninterested in adventures or elsewheres, to the point that the narrator must chastise it for failing to use its potential for movement. It might as well be in the body of a Swami.

Yet I have journeyed from time to time, even if after each sally, during the return, I wondered what had been accomplished. Most recently there was the consultation in Washington, D. C. In the limo on the way to Reagan National at dawn the movement of the car along the curve of the highway positioned us to receive full in the eyes unexpectedly the flash of the rising sun reflected in the glass facades of the high-rises along the river. This flare I recognized at once as an indication, a graphic of illumination (afterwards, in retrospect). It just reminds us that there is a gateway, perhaps as the Tao says, a door or window to the collective subtlety. This register beyond language, formless, has always been the target of art, such as Czeslaw Milosz’s Unattainable Earth. His method for approaching the inexpressible sense of being was to collect his own writings together with whatever else he experienced during a certain period (1981-84). “He lived among people, was feeling, thinking, getting acquainted with others’ thoughts, and tried to capture the surrounding world by any means including the act of the poem, but not only. In everything he wrote then the same striving and the same tone could be discerned, as we move in our life through successive renewals and incarnations, each of which has its own tone. Why then separate what is unified in time?” (Milosz).

What is the gate, according to the Tao? It is the energy that is life, in every dimension and scale, whose vital signs may not be recorded by putting one’s finger into a machine. And yet it is the basis for Chinese medicine. That breakfast tray, when the green ceramic cover in the style of the hospital’s crockery is lifted, the hot pancakes produce a steam in the chill of the cold room. The steam from boiling rice gives the character for ch’i (chee), which is the name of this energy or spirit (the original character combined the signs of sun and fire). Aristotle coined “entelechy” to describe this force, and the observation evolved through the Western tradition in every attempt to name a life essence: daimon, genius, monad, conatus, dasein, duende. Milosz cites D. H. Lawrence, to say that if the pancakes are not eaten with all the senses awake, if they are just hogged down, that is “the feeding of corpses.” Where in this scene is the indication of duende (Lorca), beyond my corpse hunger? The flare of the window on the way to Reagan National was a clue.

The staff were curious about the young man in green scrubs who kept returning to my room at all hours, staying sometimes for an hour or two at time. It was not a specialist treating me, I explained, but my son, Tyson, who is a Resident at Shands. He was there when the physical therapist came the first time to get me out of bed, to introduce me to my walker, and take me out for my first stroll. Outside the door of my room, she pointed to the window at the other end of the corridor. That window was the destination of my roundtrip. Ty accompanied me as I inched along, and a memory occurred to us simultancously, of a similar journey, roles reversed, when he was fourteen, recovering from abdominal surgery, taking his first walk with my assistance. His troubles of those years became the motivation for his career path.

When we discussed this shared memory later I thought of the puzzle once discussed by Koestler, about how to locate the exact place of intersection on a path traversed by a Monk climbing a mountain one day and returning the next.
Discussions of this puzzle in cognitive theory provide a formal structure in which to record the measure we seek. “The solution preferred by Fauconnier and Turner is to imagine the monk walking both up and down on the same day, a scenario constructed by taking elements of two separate input spaces, one for the monk walking up the mountain on one day and one for the monk walking down the mountain on a different day, and blending them into a single image (blended space). A generic space, containing everything the two input spaces have in common (the monk, the mountain path, and a day beginning at dawn and ending at sunset), is required to support the blend. In the blend, the mountain slope and the two separate days are fused into a single mountain slope and a single day, but the two monk images cannot be fused, because they move in opposite directions, so they map into the fourth, blended space, as two separate individuals” (L. David Ritchie, “Lost in Conceptual Space: Metaphors of Conceptual Integration”)

Chora may be composed as a blended space. Here is a dialogical image, blending past and present, two shufflings along a hospital corridor, each setting a goal of the window illuminated with light of the outdoors, even if that view is otherwise obscured by frosted glass or hanging blinds. One helps the other, repaid in kind. This blend fuses more than two space-time incidents, but introduces the coherence of a vortex into the disparate chaos of the institution. It is not a matter of yards or meters, yet fully a measure. The distance from room 18 to the window and back, along the corridor busy with the traffic of care and healing, of pain and Code Blue, is the measure of this time-space region. Window light. Life is a hospital, in which we help each other to the bathroom. Why? This question stumps only the corpse. Corridor window @ Shands hospital: the @ marks the object (a), the expressible standing in for the inexpressible. In electracy we are learning to take the measure of this unattainable earth, and to apply this measure to the play of well-being as a political force. In the electrate apparatus there is a coming institution dwelling anywhere out of this world.

About 1948, age 3+, I awoke from my nap and, as usual, called for my mother to let me out of my room. She decided that was the day I would learn to open a door. Standing on the other side of the door, speaking loudly enough to be heard over my screams, she offered instructions. Grasp the knob firmly, turn it, and pull toward you. Oh, grasp, turn, and pull, all at once? Perhaps that combination was what had eluded me previously, when my hand slid ineffectively around the knob? So it was possible to open any door, anywhere, and walk right through?

According to legend Lao Tzu was keeper of the archives at the imperial court. When he was eighty years old he set out for the western border of China, toward what is now Tibet, saddened and disillusioned that men were unwilling to follow the path to natural goodness. At the border (Hank Pass), a guard, Yin Xi (Yin Hsi), asked Lao Tsu to record his teachings before he left. He then composed in 5,000 characters the Tao Te Ching (The Way and Its Power).