Sumbebekos
The mares that could take me as far as I want to travel
HAD so taken me once they set me down on the Daimon's way. For it is SHE who takes the
knower through each town.
(Parmenides)
John Craig Freeman made our header image, to help start the genre of oblio. Our research questions may be addressed in the literate way by means of definitions and propositional logic (what is "electracy"? what is "image"? what is "place"?). We may want to ask and answer these questions and others like them trusting to the "bootstrap." This mode of addressing what "is" meets the needs of books and journals as required by our institution (the academy is the primary institution of literacy). We may make our plans with several threads (and hope that Mr. Mentality is otherwise engaged in Bang Pot).
To become an egent of EmerAgency commits us to a path of inventional thinking, involving experiments, heuretic probes, working by analogy from the genesis of literacy, to discover/design the practices of electracy. Imagine in place of this email a scene (here is the mode of understanding for which we must invent the apparatus). Glue (for it is an image not a person) has come out of his place on his way to the mailbox. A blacksnake rests on top of the holly hedge that lines either side of the brick walkway from the front door to the street. The morning light of early June. The holly has encroached on the brick way, since who wants to trim it? The barbed leaves (whoever planted it lacked foresight) protect a microcosm of creatures, and one of them rests now in the sun, already tonguing Glue's passage.
The snake speaks, but Glue does not understand it. Not for the reason Wittgenstein proposed, with respect to his lion, but because what is said is Greek. "Sumbebekos." Glue stops, moving the snake to dive into the center of the holly. "Sumbebekos"? This scene is viewed remotely, at a time when I no longer live there, or anywhere (Dasein). We know from theory what the scene does, the way a child may be given to understand the purpose of a library. In this later time we are electrate (all of us who share this moment) having learned a certain skill set that will have been invented, corresponding to an equipment several generations on. Something real is happening. The scene is not about what we can name. We know to zoom out, to take in that part of the city of Gainesville imaged here in a certain way, with a multitude of mailboxes, a fleet of trucks moving among them with packages (all junk mail, and one postcard), dating this history (Glue will have been surprised by that card).
We may ask Glue a question, or simply encounter him. Better to converse in Greek with the snake, or follow the holly where it goes, realizing we are not regarding the world, but a thought? Not an idea, but a felt. It is metaphysical, yes, but perhaps not categorical, or perhaps it is a new kind of category. Not literate, although literacy still functions in that moment as it does now--the techne of conventional consulting (and much expanded, while leaving all the problems in place). This scene fronts a database, to test what the philosophers propose: a form and practice that reveals what is prior to and that enables noticing a thing as "holly," or "snake," another thing as "Glue" (to recognize and identify them, and thereby gain recognition and identity). Not the policy or its problem, not the decision made, but the chora of the decision.
What we notice is that, in reaching, thought is touched (middle voice). Here is what it is to be an egent (active patient), if you want. It is a Greek thought, if only by analogy (how do we experience being, today?) because the French read the Germans reading the Greeks and found "nous" (knowledge by intuition) as the unexplained. Such is my limitation, the finitude of the FRE, guided by poststructuralism (our anagogy). When we image place, we attempt to design a site supporting, enhancing, augmenting, democratizing, making accessible this other mode of revealing that works with/out category, that writes beyond literacy (and orality), to create with it a civic cyberspace. It is thinking on the spot, situated thinking--harnessing the "always already" decided, that enables a collective me to choose in the first place.
An emblem, then: morning light, blacksnake, Sumbebekos.