Enquire Within

Are democratic values viable for emergent nations embroiled in internecine conflict? What implications does the fading of old World-Historical models and frames of reference have for democratic societies and institutions? What does the advance critique of modernity suggest about those practical problems? If traditional assumptions about personal identity and collective value have lost currency, what becomes of the social mechanisms and methodologies that were based upon them? Is consensus a terrorist apparatus?

   While these provocations are from a flyer for the Sainsbury Conference, "Rewriting Democracy: Postmodern Cultural Politics" (Nov 6-8, 1998), they fairly reflect the kinds of topics to be found here. But don't look for a 'report of proceedings' or even 'outcomes'; rather, specific texts become data for the E-lekh, an ongoing experimental 'Interface for Graphical Users.' (One might call it Demographics, but the term has acquired dubious connotations.) Indeed, as you explore the E-lekh and find points which deserve correlation, you are invited to make such a contribution yourself, to improve the population distribution -- there's lot's of space!

   For those reading this in Braille, the image consists of 'fat' and 'thin' parallelograms which appear to form 'geodesic domes' and pockets and little boxes in a kind of five-way grid -- the result, in fact, of cutting 5-dimensional space by a plane at a certain angle, but it is a real map; the projection of an oddly wrinkled, even (but not evenly!) textured, surface in 3-space -- situating each page of text, each field of meanings, in a unique topological neighborhood. While there are buttons at the bottom of each page which will ultimately link the four adjacent holdings, they appear in the interim only to point suggestively here and there. As the experiment/ experience is to feel out the meaning of such adjacency, the particular selections will depend entirely on the crops that grow and the fertility of the imaginations which tend them.

Go back to metaphorical square one -- at (52, 224), if you still dig 2D -- or find more on rhombic complexity (204, 224), but now's your chance to browse around. (The active areas form a large central 'diamond.' Note that the 'flaws' actually detail patches of intense cultivation.)