Who Goes There?

by Robert Cheatham

But of course the very things that make crossings so valuable for life contribute to the very things that often make life unbearable. In a closed system, everything seems to contribute to a crossing. Any particular biological body is evidence of that. However once the system is breached, the very efficiency of the crossings in the closed system contributes to the total failure of the 'system' (death of the body). In reality, there do not seem to be any totally closed systems, all configurations, constellations, ensembles, bodies, having a certain amount of leakage built-in, entropy being one measure of a crossing of energy and matter. (Keep in mind that entropy means a "theoretical measure of energy which cannot be transformed into mechanical work in a thermodynamic system", energy transformed into heat, then lost or dissipated, via, e.g., friction). The history of the crossings of matter, energy, and consiousness -- or technology -- is the history of attempts to turn larger and larger amounts of that entropic heat to useful work and thus reduce entropic decay. (In truth, the heat loss is simply transferred to the next larger 'system', which, for all earth bound processes, is the eco-system of the planet earth.)

There is, however, a type of crossing which, at least initially, seems immune from the type of decay asociated with physical processes and that is the flow and crossing of information and communication. It is, no doubt, imbricated with materiality but increasingly the rhetoric of information is tied to its de-materialized aspect, a virtual 'ballooning' away from objectness. Information and its movement becomes an infinitely renewable resource, creating its own containers out of its own non-substance.

This negentropic crossing of information, communication, consciousness is not a new one however, the mythopoetic tradition having long been aware of the crossing of streams of dreams, bodies, minds, dimensions across different realms and 'platforms'. That tradtion has also long recognized the powers available to those who find those nodal points or gateways. Science and technology have long been pre-occupied with the materiality of those crossings. Those ensembles of information are now themselves undergoing a rapid transformation as even the idea of 'materiality' undergoes change. Matter itself is becoming nothing but a crossing at the node of information and communication, infinite surface within a finite space, holes traversing holes (see the Menger Sponge http://iuma.southern.com/filter/menger.html for such a holey model.)

The Greek traditions of Mercury and Hermes embody the aspect of communication, boundary patrols, the uncertainty and instability of flows and crossings (Hermes in its trickster mode). These instabilities extend even into its sexual self (from whence we get the word 'hermaphrodite'.)

The African Yoruba tradtion of the West Africa, also has the crossroads figure in Elegba (and in the Afro-caribbean Voudoun tradition of the Loas http://www.vmedia.com/shannon/voodoo/loa.html#leg). Erik Davis (http://www.levity.com/figment/trickster.html) lays out many of the characteristics of Elegba: the connection with languages, communications, the act of divination as a hermeneutic entrance into a network of meanings which are always in oscillation and moving from place to place and plane to plane (its very partiality creating an interpretive need, a boundary and breach all in one) and the 'possession' of one system by another. (One could suppose that possession is simply one aspect of a dynamic style of thought, which includes the idea of doubling or twins, wherein sympathetic resonances can be set up between areas of similarity. As novelist William Gibson points out, the veves bear a remarkable similarity to the printed circuits; both are used to establish communication.) For Davis, Eshu-Elegba is "the being of the network", the very essence of a global telematic presence, with all of its ambiguated communicational strategies. And like almost all shamanic figures in mythology, Elegba is a cripple, using a cane to maneuver, feining falls, actually falling sometimes, proceeding in a crab-wise motion, never in a straight line. And yet always the custodian of the gate, the way, for those who would pass from one domain to the next.

But, like another figure of another crossroads, Maxwell's Demon, (http://www.pomona.edu/pynchon/entropy/demon.html) Legba, Hermes, and their kin are not pure flow. A sorting also occurs at crossings, a sifting of routings, paths in terms of possibilities, probabilities, a constrained toss of the dice at each node as the message makes its way. One might say the divinitory structure of tosssed coins, yarrow stalks, or pebbles is built-in to the very structure of the net, a giant Pachinko game, endlessly combining, separating, combining, a continual weaving from randomness to order and back again -- or is it vice versa?

Like Deleuze and Guattari's probehead in Tousand Plateaus, the trickster elegba's cane continually probes fault lines in space and time even becoming conflated with the phallus as a further probe into matter, genetic, molecular, always moving materials across boundaries and simultaneously setting up boundaries, three points triangulating moving targets (perhaps prefiguring the crossroads of crosshairs, certainly putting the human at the ominous end of a certain technological vector). A roulette wheel but with, no doubt, a slight 'fix' in the works to vector outcomes to the human domain (while still being able to consort with the dead, those ultimate passers-by). And all mythological boundary figures start and end with communion with the dead. As Avital Ronell points out in The Telephone Book, the very history of modern communications technology is tied up (crossed) with attempts to speak with the dead (http://noel.pd.org/topos/perf5.html) or a radical other (Bell, Edison, Marconi, etc. The gateway between the living and the dead is perhaps only traversible with the cabalistic incantatory immateriality of information and language. Perhaps the stroke between life / death marks the ultimate engagement of technology.)

But several rather severe questions remain, questions which can only be asked and not answered: what are the consequences for life, thought, and labor of being asked to live continually at the crossroads? Traditionally, that is, up until yesterday, one went to the crossroads and through them, was sorted, picked up goods and services that had arrived through various other crossroads and went back home. What happens when the home itself becomes a radical, incessant crossing; when subjectivity becomes even more slippery as it is crossed by ever more powerful engines of simulation? (Subjectivity itself is now subject to simulation, as artificial intelligence (http://noel.pd.org/home/zeug/doll.html) researchers continue to refine their approaches; does subjectivity have a gold standard?) What happens when the pure crossing of information passing itself, becomes the generator of value, need and necessity?

And the other question is: who's in charge here? Chaos theoreticians (http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/matterdl.htm)and partisans of complexity theory would have it that we are beginning to engage with world-wide self-organizing systems, systems which find their own balance, structure, and autonomous governors. These structures are composed of crossings and boundaries.

Boundary maintenance is also the preserve of Elegba and Hermes. Indeed, Hermes literally means 'stone heap,' or a boundary marker for roads. Rafael Lopez-Pedraza also points out the connection of Hermes and these stone markers to the phallus as delineation of borders and as warnings to foreigners: "The stone heap is, in fact, an archetypal image of a god. Therefore, we can say, this god Hermes, 'Lord of the Roads' as he came to be know, also marks our psychological roads and boundaries; he marks the borderlines of our psychological frontiers and marks the territory where, in our psyche, the foreign, the alien, begins." (Hermes and His Children, p. 14, Spring Pub., 1989).

Perhaps we are coming, historically, to the edge of the roadway, bumping our toes on the stone heaps which help to define the path at the end of the twentieth century. These figures of myth, which even now -- or especially now maybe -- continue to have resonance as the way into the future seems all too uncertain and everything seems to be porous, leaking away from us. The sublime achievements of an industrial age start to seem like faded posters as the edges of an increasingly uncanny age makes its way onto the world stage, an age presided over by gateways, flight paths, lines of flight (two quite different things), increasing numbers of roads, of all kinds, everywhere -- and concommitant inability to tell which one we should set foot on. No wonder a gimpy potentially traitorous travel guide seems better than none at all.