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The ELECTRICAL ORDER defines the systematic arrangement of the phenomena of ELECTRICITY as it is made manifest in the ELECTRICAL WORLD, EPOCH, and INFRASTRUCTURE. (0.1n) It consists of the ELECTRICAL "rules, laws, and structures" which have emerged from a seemingly chaotic universe. (0.2n)
An overview will help demonstrate how the ELECTRICAL FORCE has become a systematic and controlled ordering device. (0.3n)
From the theoretical big bang to the EARTH and its LIFEFORMs , from HOMO ELECTRUS to the discovery of AMBER and LODESTONE, from the BATTERY to the ELECTRICAL POWER SYSTEM, from CYBERSPACE to ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION- there has been an evolving order of "continuous change from a simple to a more complex form" over time. (1.2) 
This evolutionary approach enables us to posit the ELECTRICAL ORDER in biological terms.
That is, to analyze ELECTRICITY as if it were alive, a living organism, the spark of life, a BEING of sorts. (1.5n)
Can the phenomena of ELECTRICITY really be considered a "complete whole which by the integration, interaction and mutual dependence of its parts is comparable to a living being"? (1.55) By definition, we propose that ELECTRICITY has indeed evolved as such an "emergent" order in the universe: "a living thing which has changed in response to environmental conditions by the natural selection of randomly occurring mutations, developing from the simplest forms to complex forms which are more prolific and stronger, due to their better adaptation to their environment." (1.6) Verification of this proposition would help to explain the Another aspect of the systematic and controlled ordering of the ELECTRICAL FORCE is the dichotomy that results from the process of ELECTRIFICATION. That is, by distinguishing between the "new" ELECTRICAL ORDER and the "old" non-ELECTRICAL order of TRADITION, we can juxtapose the two different sets of rules, laws, and structures. (2.0n) For example, the systematic arrangement of candlelight can be compared with that of incandescent ELECTRICAL LIGHT. Or, the TRADITIONAL ORDER of ancient Greece and Rome can be juxtaposed with the new order of ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION. Although there is an apparent incongruity, this thesis seeks to bridge the gap between these two very different realities. (2.5n) To resolve this paradox between the new and old, the order of TRADITION will be juxtaposed with the ELECTRICAL ORDER as it is extended and represented within its most common and tangible physical form- the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. (2.7n) In effect, the rest of this thesis is needed to prepare the groundwork for this juxtaposition. To enable our ARCHITECTURAL analysis, then, we first need to investigate the ELECTRICAL ORDER in terms of creating new experiences of SPACE, TIME, AESTHETICs, and CULTURE which ultimately constitute our new ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION. |
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HOMO ELECTRUS experiences SPACE and TIME in at least two ways, with our natural SENSEs and with our technological EXTENSIONs.
First, with our SENSEs, we locate our position, distance, and duration between different objects, events, and places. This means, for example, that we use our ears to sample sound waves travelling at 1,100 feet a second, cycling at frequencies between 50 and 15,000 cycles per second, which establishes a 20 foot distance for two way conversation between humans, and a 100 foot distance for one-way hearing. Likewise, we use our eyes to sample visible ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVEs travelling at 186,000 miles a second, at frequencies of 10,000,000,000,000,000 cycles per second to see at a 300 foot radius, up to one mile for visual communication between humans. (2.8) Interestingly, it has even been theorized by Russian physiologist Elie de Cyon in 1901 that our experiential organization of the three-dimensional planes of Euclidean SPACE and its x-y-z axes are somehow oriented by our three perpendicular ear canals. Others have further speculated that all animals sense of SPACE varies with their unique physiology. (2.9) An important use of our SENSEs is to make boundaries between things, or places, where we claim and defend our "organism's territory." (2.10) For example, a house defines a territory inside the neighborhood, the neighborhood inside the city,.. the world inside the solar system, etc. just as our SENSEs define a territory inside our BRAINs via CONSCIOUSNESS. "The territory is in every sense of the word an extension of the organism, which is marked by visual, vocal, and olfactory signs. [Humanity] has created material extensions of territoriality as well as visible and invisible territorial markers." (2.11) A second way we locate our position, distance, and duration between different objects, events, and places is through technological EXTENSIONs that are supported by the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. As anthropologist Edward T. Hall writes, these EXTENSIONs can function to speed the evolution of an organism: "[Wo|Man] and [his|her] extensions constitute one interrelated system... Because of the interrelationship... it behooves us to pay much more attention to what kinds of extensions we create... The relationship of [wo|man] to [his|her] extensions is simply a continuation and a specialized form of the relationship of organisms in general to their environment... [W]hen an organ or process becomes extended, evolution speeds up at such a rate that it is possible for the extension to take over..." (2.12) Indeed, ARTIFICIAL EXTENSIONs of our SENSEs, such as those found in ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs correspond with our ability to see, hear, and speak, and define our territory. 
For example, a RADIO STATION can broadcast messages for hundreds of miles at the speed of LIGHT, or 186,000 miles per second. These messages travel in an invisible spectrum of ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVEs that are spatially and temporally partioned such that, for instance, a RADIO program is carried by a WAVE at a frequency of 88.5 Megahertz, or 88.5 million cycles per second, and a RADIO RECEIVER uses a dial or tuner to map and locate the specific frequency, or bandwidth, so as to hear the sound. Likewise a TELEVISION STATION broacasts a specific program to a specific SPACE and TIME of the TELEVISION RECEIVER, otherwise known as a channel.
There are many unique attributes of these ELECTRONIC EXTENSIONs of HOMO ELECTRUS. One is the ability to multiply SPACE and TIME such that a local object, event, or place- such as a POWER outage or war- becomes witnessed as global news on billions of TELEVISIONs and RADIOs around the world. The instantaneity of the news coverage thus extends the human limits of eyesight and hearing. Another attribute of the new media is the ability to store INFORMATION and retrieve it again, manipulating its spatiotemporal playback with commands for recording, fast-forwarding, rewinding, pausing, morphing, or duplicating the object, event, or place. Thus, the mediums of compact disks and audio and video tapes create in their formats "rules, laws, and structures" by which to perceive and use the INFORMATION. This is one reason the "remote-control" is deemed such a powerful tool, in its ability to edit the media experience by surfing through the SPACE-TIME of RADIO or TELEVISION programming. The Internet COMPUTER NETWORK also demonstrates a spatial and temporal territoriality by using e-mail addresses, and internet protocols or IP numbers in which to locate a specific computer in the rhizomatic universe of interconnected COMPUTERs. The networks that create the Internet are, in turn, broken down into a new delineation of PUBLIC and PRIVATE places, as the ubiquitous FIREWALL of the commercial sector demonstrates. The COMPUTER SYSTEM, like the other media, also creates an internal VIRTUAL ELECTRICAL WORLD, or CYBERSPACE , and an external territory made up of ASSEMBLAGEs of ARTIFACTs. It is the goal of this thesis to create a conceptual bridge between these different worlds in one experiential model. In all these novel ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs both spatialize TIME and temporalize SPACE , and in doing so become rudimentary SPACE-TIME MACHINEs by which we navigate between different objects, events, and places. (2.13n) Thus, our experience of SPACE-TIME has organically evolved with the new ELECTRICAL ORDER in both the SENSEs of HOMO ELECTRUS and their EXTENSION in ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs. |
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The ELECTRICAL ORDER can be seen in the AESTHETICs of the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. To see this we first need to acknowledge our role in this perceptual process, as Rudolf Arnheim states: "In order for an object to be perceived appropriately, its field of forces must be respected by the viewer..." (2.14) Indeed, the most obvious LINES-OF-FORCE of the ELECTRICAL ORDER are found within the ARTIFACTs of the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. For example, to perceive the internal world of CYBERSPACE in the everyday BUILT ENVIRONMENT, it becomes necessary to "see" the external ASSEMBLAGE of POLEs, TOWERs, and POWERLINEs that make up THE GRID. This enables one to conceptualize the network of INFORMATION travelling at the speed of LIGHT in the SPACE-TIME, making visible and tangible to the SENSEs a seemingly invisible place. Arnheim continues on about the effects of these force fields: "These perceptual pushes and pulls are the sensed effects of physiological processes that must be assumed to be occurring in the corresponding brainfields- processes attempting to cope with the perceptual inputs from the sense organs and to reestablish the equilibrium upset by the intruder. Intuitive ordering can be considered a reflection of the physical field processes that take place in the nervous system and are related to natural branching systems by a link more direct than mere analogy." (2.15) Thus, through the SENSEs of HOMO ELECTRUS we experience the harmonious design of ELECTRICITY. Although it may not be considered beauty itself, the design of ELECTRICAL ARTIFACTs project and reflect a truth about nature, ourselves, and our place within it. To appreciate this ELECTRICAL AESTHETIC, then, we need to acknowledge an ELECTRICAL cosmology of "rules, laws, and structures" in the objects, events, and places around us. One way to see it is through the collective design of INTERFACEs such as screens, dials, tuners, buttons, switches, readouts, motors, programs, PLUGs, OUTLETs, and wires that become paradigms by which we influence our CONSCIOUSNESS and REALITY. Another way to perceive this aesthetic evolution of the ELECTRICAL ORDER as an emergent organism can be found within the design of harmonious relations between the form, scale, light, texture, shape, material, and color of our ELECTRICAL ARTIFACTs. For example, a distribution P0LE carries ceramic INSULATORs and metal CONDUCTORs to control the subatomic flow of ELECTRICAL CURRENT throughout the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. The POLEs themselves are often made out of wood from regional forests, which blend into the street scenery of trees in urban jungles. As are pad-mounted TRANSFORMERs which are painted grey, green, and brown to blend into their environment, rendering the infrastructure "invisible." And streetlights too have evolved as an outgrowth of ENERGY, like a specific genus of tree responding to its environmental force fields, with qualities such as luminosity, height, lightsource and fixture type, candlepower distribution, street dimensions, etcetera. (In combination, the typical DISTRIBUTION P0LE with a "cobra-head" streetlight fixture and armature can be seen as an aesthetic evolution from the tensile structures of boat masts, which may symbolically originate in the wooden crucifixes of old). Similarly, a technology such as RADIO creates scalar ASSEMBLAGEs in the BUILT ENVIRONMENT, where a 400 foot metal ANTENNA radiates geometries of INFORMATION out to a radius of millions of smaller metal ANTENNAE located on cars, houses, and RADIO RECEIVERs to be decoded. (2.155n) It is in this common aesthetic, or design, that the ELECTRICAL ORDER can be seen and understood as a universal field, albeit with local vernaculars. Thus, the thousands of POWERPLANTs, RADIO and TELEVISION STATIONs, and the billions of streetlights, distribution POLES, transmission TOWERs, and ANTENNAE all help to define a common framework for the ordering ELECTRICAL phenomenon all over the "developed" world. (2.16n) This external understanding of the ELECTRICAL ORDER becomes an important point for AESTHETIC knowledge through an internal examination of the perceiver, as Arnheim states: "This framework must include not only the conditions outwardly presented to the perceiving mind but also those prevailing in the viewer [him|her]-self: [his|her] mental preparation, [his|her] intentions and goals, [his|her] ways of looking at things, and so on. For a valid analysis one has to make explicit both the framework that is being considered and those potential influences which are being bracketed out." (2.17) Thus if we explore the ELECTRICAL AESTHETIC external to ourselves, we also have to rationalize our internal perception of this ELECTRICAL ORDER . To do so, we need to understand our experience of artifice as an EXTENSION of our internal ELECTRICAL nature. 
Ultimately this leads us to consider the order of the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE as a literal EXTENSION of our NERVOUS SYSTEM; such that the scaffolding of TOWERs and POLEs act as EXTENSIONs of the SPINAL COLUMN which is a conduit for ELECTRICAL ENERGY and INFORMATION; and further that our ELECTRONIC MEDIA SYSTEMs and TECHNOLOGIES literally extend the SENSEs of sight, sound, touch, hearing, and taste of HOMO ELECTRUS.
In this way the COMPUTER can be understood as an EXTENSION of the BRAIN, which acts as a CAPITAL atop the SPINAL COLUMN. And the BRAIN can even be compared to a "black box," such that it is a "portable electronic device of unknown workings controlling an operation or making a recording." (2.18) In all, a common ELECTRICAL AESTHETIC has emerged from the organic evolution of the ELECTRICAL ORDER in both the INTERFACEs of HOMO ELECTRUS and the ELECTRICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. These have combined to establish an ELECTRICAL STATE of affairs and a universal ELECTRICAL cosmology. |
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"...no matter how hard [wo|man] tries it is impossible for [him|her] to divest [him|her]-self of [his|her] own culture, for it has penetrated to the roots of [his|her] nervous system and determines how [s|he] perceives the world." (2.20)
ELECTRICAL CULTURE is synonymous with ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION. (2.201) It consists of the economic, social, and political effects of those objects, events, and places created by HOMO ELECTRUS for the ELECTRICAL STATE. It is created by both collective and individual CONSCIOUSNESS, a marriage of ELECTRICAL ENERGY and INFORMATION, which is then transmitted as REALITY through SPACE-TIME. (2.202n) In fact, some believe that culture is the vehicle by which our species evolves. (2.203n) To rephrase Stephen Kern, ELECTRICAL CULTURE is made of a wide variety of ELECTRICAL phenomena which have certain common features in their essential nature or function which we must be able to interpret as a common language. (2.21) If we can consider the ELECTRICAL ORDER as this communicable language, we can begin to understand its unconscious, subconscious, conscious, and supraconscious cultural influence over us. A typical day in the life of a HOMO ELECTRUS will demonstrate the variety of cultural experiences which the language of ELECTRICITY ties together: "Waking from dream, consciousness on, electromagnetic heart beating- ELECTRICAL CULTURE is thus communicated by a language made up of objects, events, and places which represent the economic, social, and political dimensions of HOMO ELECTRUS in ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION. To paraphrase anthropologist Leslie A. White, this evolution of ELECTRICAL CULTURE is a direct result of our ability to control of ELECTRICAL ENERGY. As White states that "[t]he functioning of culture as a whole therefore rests upon and is determined by the amount of energy harnessed and by the way it is put to work." (2.23) Indeed, our harnessing of the ELECTRICAL FORCE is unprecedented in its ubiquity. This, as White suggests, has helped create the stage for a single economic, social, and "political organization that will embrace the entire planet and the whole human race." (2.24) This new ELECTRICAL WORLD ORDER is evidenced equally as much by the global stock market as by the celebrity presidency and humanitarian rock stars. If, as White states: "[c]ultural systems, like biological organisms, develop, multiply, and extend themselves", then we should realize the exponential organic evolution of our ELECTRICAL CULTURE extending from a NATURAL to an ARTIFICIAL and then VIRTUAL ordering of our environment in the trillions of ELECTRICAL TECHNOLOGIES we use everyday. (2.25) For example, the EXTENSION from lightning to lightbulb to virtual LIGHT in CYBERSPACE demonstrates the domain of this shared ELECTRICAL CULTURE. As does the symbolic ELECTRICAL POWERPLANT act like the godhead of the cultural octopus, with its tentacles extending an infra-cultural order outward. (2.255n) Further, if as we consider ELECTRICAL ENERGY at the center of cultural production and consumption then concepts such as "information revolution" and "information society" may also find their origins in ELECTROGENESIS, as William Irwin Thompson states: "An environment is a field of energy that supports the individual organism; information is the individual's means of storing energy and thereby controlling [his|her] relationship with the environment. Since information is a control of energy, a society is only as large as its capacity to store information." (2.26) Thus, the communication of INFORMATION and the harnessing of ELECTRICAL ENERGY constitute our ELECTRICAL CULTURE. Through its INTERFACE of HOMO ELECTRUS the ELECTRICAL ORDER is mediated and evolves like an organism, transmitting CONSCIOUSNESS and ELECTRICAL CIVILIZATION through SPACE-TIME. (2.27) |