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the last chapter of the ae thesis... ._______________________________________________________________. /_______________________________________________________________/ | working on 'the architecture of electricity' (ae) thesis to be | finished near 2000 Common Era. just finished writing this piece | about Plato's utopic state, the Republic. the upper-case letters | are of a smaller font size than the lowercase letters, and | these words will be hyperlinked to their definitions, as will | the numbered footnotes with the bibliographic information. of | the concepts in this piece, most all have been established in the | the thesis prior to this text (this is at the end of the thesis). | thus, a concept like the E-INFRASTRUCTURE has a whole section | detailing how electricity is produced and consumed, and that in | turn has another section about what ELECTRICITY is, etcetera. | feedback is welcome. bc |____________________________________________________________. a r c h i t e x t u r e z : an online community for hacking | and cracking the architectural code - www.architexturez.com | //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ______________________________________________________________________ AE S T A T E ______________________________________________________________________ The classical Western state envisioned by Plato in the seminal philosophical work The Republic, written in the 4th century B.C.E., is foundational to understanding our present-day ELECTRICAL STATE. The issues Plato describes in the "allegory of the cave" are parallel to issues surrounding the VIRTUAL ELECTRICAL WORLDs of our ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs, for example. The story begins with Socrates talking with Plato's brother, Glaucon: "Here allegory may show us best how education- or the lack of it- affects our nature. Imagine [wo|men] living in a cave with a long passage-way stretching between them and the caves mouth, where it opens wide to the light. Imagine further that since childhood the cave dwellers have had their legs and necks shackled so as to be confined to the same spot. They are further constrained by blinders that prevent them from turning their heads; they can see only directly in front of them. Next, imagine a light from a fire some distance behind them and burning at a higher elevation. Between the prisoners and the fire is a raised path along whose edge there is a low wall like the partition at the front of a puppet stage. The wall conceals the puppeteers while they manipulate their puppets above it." (500) Socrates continues that the puppeteers use objects such as stone and wood to create stories with human and animal images, projecting them as shadows onto the cave wall by the LIGHT of the fire, accompanying them with sound effects. Conclusively, Socrates says, "reality for the prisoners would be nothing but shadows cast by artifacts." (502) The audiovisual CYBERSPACE of our ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs can be considered to be an ELECTRONIC cave. We sit, staring at the screen like Plato's prisoners, thinking that what we are seeing is REALITY itself, when instead it is like shadows cast on an ELECTRONIC cave wall. (504n) Socrates then says of the prisoners: "Imagine now how their liberation from bondage and error would come about if something like the following happened. One prisoner is freed from [his|her] shackles. [S|He] is suddenly compelled to stand up, turn around, walk, and look toward the light. [S|He] suffers pain and distress from the glare of the light. So dazzled is [s|he] that [s|he] cannot even discern the very objects whose shadows [s|he] used to be able to see. Now what do you suppose [s|he] would answer if [s|he] were told that all [s|he] had seen before was an illusion but that now [s|he] was nearer reality, observing real things and therefore seeing more truly? What if someone pointed to the objects being carried above the wall, questioning [him|her] as to what each one is? Would [s|he] not be at a loss? Would [s|he] not regard those things [s|he] saw formerly as more real than the things now being shown [him|her]?" (506) Glaucon agrees with Socrates that the freed prisoner would doubt their own eyes, and instead would want to believe that the shadows cast on the cave wall by the LIGHT of the fire are the true REALITY. But then, Socrates says, the prisoner is brought out of the cave, into the LIGHT of the sun. (508) The prisoner is habituated with their new external environment. First they see familiar shadows. Next reflections in the water of humans and other objects. Then the objects themselves, and ultimately the phenomena of the heavens, including the LIGHT of the sun. (510) At this point Socrates proposes that the prisoner "would be able to conclude that the sun is the cause of the seasons and of the year's turning, that it governs all the visible world and is in some sense also the cause of all visible things." (512) Today, if we are to understand places such as CYBERSPACE, we will need to walk out of the ELECTRONIC caves created by our TELEPHONEs, RADIOs, TELEVISIONs, and COMPUTERs and look for the source of this new ELECTRICAL LIGHT. Realizing ELECTRICITY is the source, like Plato's sun, will focus our vision on the central role the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE plays in establishing and sustaining these new VIRTUAL ELECTRICAL WORLDs. The story continues with Socrates describing to Glaucon how the freed prisoner returns to the inside of the cave: "Consider... if [s|he] should go back down again into the cave and return to the place [s|he] was before, would not [his|her] eyes now go dark after so abruptly leaving the sunlight behind?" "They would." Glaucon answers. (514) Socrates then states: "Suppose [s|he] should then have to compete once more in shadow watching with those who never left the cave. And this before [his|her] eyes had become accustomed to the dark and [his|her] dimmed vision still required a long period of habituation. Would [s|he] not be laughed at? Would it not be said that [s|he] had made the journey above only to come back with [his|her] eyes ruined and that it is futile even to attempt the ascent? Further, if anyone tried to release the prisoners and lead them up and they could get their hands on [him|her] and kill [him|her], would they not kill [him|her]?" (516) "Of course" Glaucon replies. Socrates then summarizes the allegorical story: "The prisoner's cave is the counterpart of our own visible order, and the light of the fire betokens the power of the sun... in any case, this is the way things appear to me: in the intelligible world the last thing to be seen- and then only dimly- is the idea of the good. Once seen, however, the conclusion becomes irresistible that it is the cause of all things right and good, that in the visible world it gives birth to light and its sovereign source, that in the intelligible world it is itself sovereign and the author of truth and reason, and that the [wo|man] who will act wisely in private and public life must have seen it." (518) Glaucon again agrees with Socrates, sharing the belief in an educated understanding of the LIGHT of reason as the bearer of goodness and truth. Likewise today, to understand the CYBERSPACE of our ELECTRONIC caves we need to begin to understand the rationale and truth of ELECTRICITY as it is materialized in ELECTRICAL ARTIFACTs of the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE of POWER, MEDIA, and TECHNOLOGY. We need to understand where nature ends and artifice begins. Plato proposes this "enlightenment" constitutes and founds the perfect state, on both the individual level and that of the city-state: "Perhaps if we adopted procedures to examine city and citizen simultaneously, we could rub them up against one another and generate enough friction to light the countenance of justice and fix it firmly and forever in our own minds." (522) In a manner similar to Plato's description, by establishing CONSCIOUSNESS of the source of our ELECTRICAL ENLIGHTENMENT, we can understand the ELECTRICAL STATE in terms of an individual HOMO ELECTRUS and the collective ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION. Yet the state that Plato promotes in The Republic is one ruled by a monarch-philosopher or aristocratic assembly of super-[wo|men] called guardians who are courageous, wise, and virtuous, like the utopic city itself. (524) Plato believes these people are the clear and strong "light" that will illuminate the ideal city. (526) Paradoxically, Plato's pragmatic idea of the "good" and "true" is also rife with elitism, classism, racism, and slavery. (528n) Taking this into account, it is still possible for us to appreciate Plato's state, where justice battles injustice, and the anarchy and civil war of the city and the self is governed by "reason, spirit, and desire." (530) Plato declares: "...the best city is one whose situation is most like that of an individual human being." (532) Plato then describes how the best state, a city like that of a human BEING, experiences pain and pleasure as a whole organism via 'a bodily network that communicates the event to the governing soul.' (534) Today the local and global ELECTRICAL STATE can be "seen" in the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE of our cities of ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION which emulate the structure of an individual HOMO ELECTRUS, as Plato proposes. An example will help draw out the parallel: 'the bodily network' of the heart, SPINAL COLUMN, CORD, and nerves are mirrored by POWERPLANTs, ELECTRICAL POLEs, TOWERs, and POWERLINEs, while the 'governing soul' of the BRAIN and SENSEs are mirrored in the mediums of ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs. In ARCHITECTURAL terms, the ELECTRICAL POWER SYSTEM composes the body of the COLUMN, while the ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs compose the CAPITAL, or head: the eyes are extended through TELEVISIONs, the mouth through RADIO, the ears through TELEPHONEs, and the BRAIN through a networked COMPUTER. (538n) In addition it could be said that the ELECTRICAL OUTLET is "female" and vulva-like, and the PLUG is "male" and phallus-like. In their conjunction ELECTRICAL POWER is transferred, animating various ELECTRICAL TECHNOLOGIES like toasters, ELECTRICAL LIGHTs, and video games for example. The local and global ELECTRICAL STATE is understood as BEING both a local individual and a global city. As in Greco-Roman ARCHITECTURE, the trabeated COLUMNs and CAPITALs of an ARCHITECTURAL ORDER, in essence, symbolize the individual bodies and minds that make up the city, the ENABLATURE representing the collective state. (540n) So too do the individual COLUMNs of ELECTRICAL POWER and CAPITALs of ELECTRONIC MEDIA make up the ELECTRICAL ORDER, wherein the ENABLATURE symbolically represents the collective ELECTRICAL STATE. Each local ELECTRICAL individual structurally contributing to the global cities of ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION, planet EARTH. The central question becomes whether the governance of the head (MEDIA) or body (POWER) of the individual or city, and thus the trabeated ELECTRICAL STATE, is PUBLIC or PRIVATE or a combination of the two. (542n) Can an aristocracy of PRIVATE MEDIA and POWER truly foster a democratic PUBLIC ELECTRICAL STATE, and vice versa? Plato's philosophic and textual city is named The Republic. It is built by "architects using measurements from the divine pattern", political artists and philosophers who first clear the city for a new foundation, then outline a constitution, and "look at justice, beauty, and temperance in their ideal forms and then again at what they are trying to reproduce in [wo|men]." (544n) In all, it is the image of an idealized state wherein the city is an individual, and the individual a city. This enables us to consider HOMO ELECTRUS as the measure of ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION. The "city walls" of our ELECTRICAL STATE becomes the wall between our CONSCIOUSNESS and REALITY, as it is mediated by the ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs and the SENSEs of HOMO ELECTRUS. For instance, a TELEVISION news program keeps certain ideas outside of the city's mental and physical perimeters, while embracing and exploiting others. Plato next refers back to the allegory of the cave as a dialectic journey of reason- stating that "education is not what some professors say it is" and that the individual ascending toward the LIGHT or "the good" equals true philosophy. (546) Yet we have to disagree with Plato's "good" that monarchy and aristocracy are better suited to governing the human-city, than is democracy. Given this contradiction, it is not difficult to see there is an aristocratic elite controlling today's ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE of POWER, MEDIA, and TECHNOLOGY. What is a TELEVISION news anchor, if not a Platonic guardian? Plato then writes of Socrates comparing the citizens of a democracy to drone bees in a hive: "Armed to sting, these [wo|men] now wait inside the city. Some are burdened with debt and others disenfranchised; some suffer deprivations of both kinds. Hating those who acquired their estates and plotting against them and the rest of the citizens as well, they thirst for revolution." (548) Likewise, today, we need to realize that our ELECTRICAL STATE is an aristocratic, not democratic, government. This is evidenced in the auctioning off of rights to the PUBLIC property to PRIVATE monopolies, often multi-billion dollar cartels, making it difficult if not "illegal" for democratic POWER, MEDIA, and TECHNOLOGY to function, such as micro-power RADIO stations and open-source software. In sum, as Plato suggests, to have a democratic ELECTRICAL STATE of ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION and HOMO ELECTRUS would require a revolution. For democracy to happen, each person would need to establish a government within themselves, which would then spread to the city at large. Socrates believes children should be educated in this way: "The same purpose must guide us in raising our children: before we set them free, we must, in effect, establish a government within them. The best in ourselves must foster the best in them. And we shall not let them go until we confirm in them this authority... Then they may go free." (554) Plato concludes The Republic with an admission from Socrates of this idealistic human-city built so far, only in a dialectic of words: "It makes no difference whether such a city now exists or ever will. But perhaps its prototype can be found somewhere in heaven for [him|her] who wants to see. Seeing it, [s|he] will declare [him|her]-self its citizen. The politics of this city would be [his|her] politics and none other." (556) We propose The Republic currently exists as the ELECTRICAL STATE, in both HOMO ELECTRUS and the cities of ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION. Like Plato, the collective city is measured by the individual human being, and vice versa. Yet, in disagreement with Plato, we believe a revolution needs to occur to transform the aristocracy of the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE of POWER, MEDIA, and TECHNOLOGY to more democratic formations. This is to say, to democratize the governance of ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION and HOMO ELECTRUS, we will need to transform the ELECTRICAL ORDER from a PRIVATE to a shared PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS constituting the E-STATE, or ELECTRICAL STATE. As William Morrish and Catherine Brown write in Infrastructure for the New Social Covenant, we can start by understanding the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE as a "repository of cultural imagination, as well as the network for community connections." (560) Like Plato's ideal state of the individual relating to the collective city, Morrish and Brown write: "Infrastructure is the visible underpinning of civic life, which can instruct citizens about their values and relationships to each other and highlight the connections between city, suburb and the hinterland whose natural resources sustain it. Infrastructure can-- and should-- make those lines of connection clear and vivid." (564) Similarly, our ELECTRICAL STATE is mirrored by a common natural and artificial ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE: the ELECTRICAL POWER SYSTEM acting as the body and ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs as the head of HOMO ELECTRUS, and their collection constituting a local and global ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION. Morrish and Brown continue in their vision: "In order for infrastructure to become the background for our collective existence, identity, presence and history, we believe that infrastructure must fulfill broader cultural, social, and ecological functions. The infrastructure in these human-made landscapes should serve multiple goals, chief among them enriching our sense of place, bridging our commonwealth and enhancing the workings of ecological systems." (566) This enables us to see the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE in new ways. For example, by understanding the similarity in function between an ELECTRICAL POWERPLANT and the human heart, we can "see" that the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, like the smoke from a cigarette, has an impact on our collective body which ultimately influences our ELECTRICAL STATE. This pollution is in addition to the status quo of 2/3rds ENERGY-loss of the typical ELECTRICAL POWER SYSTEM, which from Plato's perspective would constitute a diseased and dying state of BEING. In this sense, the collective ELECTRICAL STATE can be very unhealthy for the individual and collective BEING, and demonstrates the detriment of having an aristocratic control of ELECTRICAL POWER, MEDIA, and TECHNOLOGY. All of which SIGNALs a need for revolutionary and evolutionary change to optimally balance the democratic PUBLIC and aristocratic PRIVATE control of the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. (570n) Morrish and Brown continue that "infrastructure should be designed as bridges to link us rather than walls to divide us." (572) Likewise, we need to "see" the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE as integral to ELECTRICAL STATE we currently live within. "Seeing" this wall of our CONSCIOUSNESS, whether through ELECTRONIC MEDIA or our SENSEs, we can then 'bridge the gap' to the new REALITY. This democratic approach, as Morrish and Brown write, would "encourage infrastructure projects which evolve out of public participation." (576) Yet, the reality of the PRIVATE marketplace is not ignored: "Infrastructure is more than a utility but a foundation for our sense of being and place and carries within its veins the lifeblood of many different communities-- the neighborhoods and habitats for human, plant and animal populations. Ultimately there is no economy without a living nature. Without it infrastructure ceases to function, the marketplace withers and dies, and individuals lose the common ground of community." (578) So too does the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE of POWER, MEDIA, and TECHNOLOGY need to be understood as an ecological system needing balance. For instance, the "planned obsolescence" of COMPUTERs demonstrates the economic, social, and political sickness we face today. Morrish and Brown conclude by proposing a "new covenant" using infrastructure to create community: "We believe that the role of infrastructure... is to create the systemic framework for each community's mission: to nurture economic productivity, cultural expression and social equity while preserving and replenishing natural resources. Infrastructure can become the vessel to carry forward the dreams of a new covenant into physical reality." (580) In effect, by perceiving the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE as the ARCHITECTURAL foundation of our ELECTRICAL STATE, we can begin to constitute ourselves as a community of ELECTRICAL humans, living in an ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION, inhabiting the EARTH as an ELECTRICAL organism, all of which is mutating, evolving, and revolving democratic governance alongside ELECTRIFICATION. Let us return the poetry of ARCHITECTURAL reason from exile. (584n) Let us find ELECTRICAL ENLIGHTENMENT from within the ELECTRONIC caves we inhabit. Let us "see" the ARCHITECTURE OF ELECTRICITY. And let us build a democratic ELECTROMAGNETIC ARCHITECTURE for the present and future ELECTRICAL STATE. ______________________________________________________________________ Illustrated Dictionary of Historic Architecture. Edited by Cyril M. Harris, c.1977. Dover Publications, Inc. New York. (390) p.389 (414) p.130 (444) p.507 (452) p.227 (454) pp.227-228 (540n) p.95 this is literally the case with Greco-Roman caryatids, "a supporting member serving the function of a pier, column, or pilaster and carved or molded in the form of a draped, human, female ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Republic, Plato. A new translation by Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott, c.1985. W. W. Norton & Company, New York. (500) p.209, (502) p.210, (506) p.210, (508) p.210, (510) p.210, (512) pp.210-211, (514) p.211, (516) p.211, (518) pp.211-212, (522) p.129, (524) p.135, (526) p.125, (530) pp.129-139, (532) p.154, (534) p.154, (544) p.190, (546) pp.212-226, (548) p.247, (550) p.248, (554) p.282, (556) p.284, (584n) p.297, "...we shall declare that if poetry that is imitative and aims to produce pleasure can show cause why it should find a place in a well-governed city, we should be glad to welcome its return from exile." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (504n) The light of this electronic screen can be equated with Paul Virilio's 'electronic false-day'. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (528n) p.131, Plato believes there can be no paradox, with which we disagree. Plato's idea of the "state" functions as a double entendre, at once profane and sacred, true and false. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (538n) The electrical state can thus be understood as both being both physical and metaphysical. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (542n) Thus, can a public state be said to exist, when both the electrical power and electronic media are privately constituted? And likewise, can a private individual exist when both the head and body are only publicly constituted? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Infrastructure for the New Social Covenant. William Morrish & Catherine Brown, c.1993. Excerpted from the forthcoming book: The Productive Park: Infrastructure as Neighborhood Resource, to be published by The Architectural League and Princeton Architectural Press. (560) p.2, (564) p.6, (566) p.8, (572) p.15, (576) p.16, (578) p.20, (580) p.22, ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (570n) This is written from the point of view of an American. This is not to say that public power, media, and technology are without fault. Only that, currently there is a myopic lack of public awareness in America, which is dangerous for its one-sidedness. We believe a combination of a public and private electrical state is still the most ideal form of government. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net