The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-23, Edited by Max Brod, purchased in Madrid, Spain, 1965, when I was twenty, still imagining how to become  a writer.  Here is the very copy in my hands now, with the pencil marks selecting certain passages.  Kafka’s ambivalence about his plans to marry Felice Bauer crystallized a general dilemma, an aporia at the center of life that Sartre later formulated as:  live or tell.  Entries dated 1913 inventory reasons for and against the marriage.  The choice seems to be between Felice and Writing.  Several times he wonders if the only solution is to throw himself out a window, not without his gallows humor.  “I have come to believe that there are possibilities in my ever-increasing inner decisiveness and conviction which may enable me to pass the test of marriage in spite of everything… Of course, to certain extent this is a belief that I grasp at when I am already on the window sill.”

Her name was Happiness

Kafka articulated how the world is, or was to me then:  two realms, two dimensions, two realities, with no connection between them, with me as a potential movement between if not for being rooted or chained to the spot.  I did not understand Stimmung at the time, that I was in a Mood, it was not in me, an attunement shared by the culture collectively, thematized in the forensic atmospheres of film noir and the paralysis of cities evoked in modernist poetry.  The cliché or commonplace human condition of alienation I experienced as a personal and private anxiety of indecision, specific to me.  Sanford Kwinter, commenting on Metamorphosis, describes the interface of Dasein and the Outside that I could not identify in 1965.  It is the conditions of a threshold, a boundary zone.

Thus the break with time is often also inseparable from a negation of worldliness and a collapsing of space.  The moment of waking reproduces these same border or limit conditions.  One world continues indifferently, unmoved and unchanged, while another spills into it, filling all the cracks and chinks between objects with the swirling indefiniteness of a wanton becoming.  Though the dream-time of sleep has come quietly to an end, somehow the pure virtuality that animates it has burst its barrier and invaded the real, depositing there precisely what had always been anathema to it:  the so-called untimely, or the irreducible, absolute, and incontrovertibly new.  We are assured now that this grotesque inmixing (and this is developed in the narrative as a befouling and as a pollution in every possible sense) is in every manner real (Kwinter, Architectures of Time).

[ An experience emerges here, in the manner of a figure to be explored:  an isotopy aligning Spain Decision/ Superfund disaster/ Trace.  Nachtraglichkeit.  Replication.  It is felt now]

“Electracy” is a portmanteau of “electricity” and “trace,” the latter introducing Jacques Derrida’s theory of (arche)writing into the naming of the digital apparatus.  Flash Reason — deliberative reason for the dromosphere — as a rhetoric of image metaphysics, revises our relationship with time space.  Policy formation in politics, and prudence in ethics, require an understanding of electrate time.  What shape is time in Now?  “Trace” is Derrida’s name for this temporality.

Tracing

The formation of an image in a cathode ray tube (the electron beam scanning the rows of dots): The “interlaced” pattern scans every other row of pixels, The phosphor dots grouped RGB, odd then even, left to right.  This operation of the CRT screen figures how the world picture is constituted in historical culture:  “trace” is the electron beam scanning between arche and telos, origin and gathered end, in continuous movement, shuttling across the historical field.  Trace scans the history of Being; “Origin” and “End” are effects of this movement, which underlies and binds any particular understanding of time-space (as circle, line, or broken line, for example).

Plait-O

Trace has been described as a weaving, plaiting, interlacing of metaphysical strands, as a figure of writing.  What is being woven?  The strands are:  the empirical subject (the living person), the transcendental subject (of language), the writing support, time (temporality).  A keyword is contamination.  Here we find an intersection with our category “Disaster.” A pattern is plaited interlacing the contamination of groundwater at Cabot-Koppers Superfund site, with the philosophical demonstration of the necessity of contamination of metaphysical categories.

W/Hole

What is differAnce, again?  It is the opening that makes playing possible.  Trace is the movement of the play:  it is a certain modality of relation.  What this movement of play supports is nothing less than the history of truth, as an emergent effect of literacy, in its metamorphoses from one epoch to the next from its beginnings (origin) in Classical Greece (invention of alphabetic apparatus) to the present shift into electracy.

“Creosote is the name used for a variety of products: wood creosote, coal tar creosote, coal tar, coal tar pitch, and coal tar pitch volatiles. These products are mixtures of many chemicals created by high-temperature treatment of beech and other woods, coal, or from the resin of the creosote bush.

Wood creosote is a colorless to yellowish greasy liquid with a smoky odor and burned taste. Coal tar creosote is a thick, oily liquid that is typically amber to black in color. Coal tar and coal tar pitch are usually thick, black, or dark-brown liquids or semisolids with a smoky odor.

Wood creosote has been used as a disinfectant, a laxative, and a cough treatment, but is rarely used these ways today. Coal tar products are used in medicines to treat skin diseases such as psoriasis, and are also used as animal and bird repellents, insecticides, restricted pesticides, animal dips, and fungicides. Coal tar creosote is the most widely used wood preservative in the United States. Coal tar, coal tar pitch, and coal tar pitch volatiles are used for roofing, road paving, aluminum smelting, and coking.”

“The Meaning of Life.”