The concept of a protected
space, usually
sacred. Recently
mirrored in real life by IBM's molecular computer which has 3-D space/
volume as its arena for useful
operation, whereas molecular computers beforehand had just used the top and bottom of the electron's orbit.
Camille Paglia is big on temenos as hallmark of concepting for the vagina in
arcana, as "impregnable" cities. I'm not, because that's oxymoronic negative space -- she's not protecting anything by protecting that space -- she's protecting the fitness for its surroundings' use: reproduction (in essentialist concepting). The thing is, the vagina is concepted thus because of its spatial aspects -- nothing to do with its atoms, except the perception of same by prevailing memes. The defense of the vagina is of the housing that *makes* such a concept in the first place! It protects its emergent properties rather than the thing itself! In so doing it protects nothing -- it only censors what happens within that empty space in the interests, supposedly, of its casing. However
fascist that may be. The interests of a woman/temenos/citadel/society based on concepted sex roles such as these, seems to prelude anything which might conceivably be aggregately powerful enough to threaten her. Analogy in cyberethics: "degredation of performance" as,
by defintion, anything.
Applied to civil liberties, of course, reproduction, which must be the highest priority at all costs (even to denying rights, since reproduction is progeny is you-but-better (younger and more
generative), might do something un-approved and unknown by the temenos, so possibly getting out of control and damaging it -- but, again, the fact is you can't damage empty space! To define it properly, you have to keep it to the *walls* of the space, and that means you're left alone if you're inside it and not touching the walls. In jurisprudence, this is called innocent until proven guilty. This is the democratic, writ
cthonic -- another of Paglia's favorite concepts -- and applied to the (inter)personal.
The beauty of IBM's computer is, it takes away informational basis on which to codify 3-dimensional reality into two-dimensional code. It takes away the possibility for surface --therefore, 2-D -- to override 3-D and real (not that 2-D code can't still exist -- it just can't override it like
the moral can). No longer is the observer allowed to get away with surface of 3-D objects, and therefore 2-D plain on which to evaluate one-dimensional "yes or no surface intersection", and therefore they can no longer justify concepting perception as a single point, but instead must incorporate its multifaceted world in the fact that their 2-D caliber is perceived through *aggregate*. HUGEly significant.
And biology is just in time to catch up with the realities of distributed bodies which culture has only recently allowed us to make significant: perception is far more than eyes, and eyes themselves are not a single point, but an entire *organism*.
In it is the possibility to do something in the temenos of the "vaginal", archaic, social "temenos" that is
free and civil society, and not be beholden to the tyranny of applying speculative action to us by system-runners who mete out the liberties in the space, that act on threats that are
direct, not speculative, on facts not 2-D code, by
truth not
fiction. Temenos is dynamic of battleground for terms: is empty space seen as a negative free space or a positive possession by everyone involved in its creation? So long as space is concepted by majority-rules and not space-is-space, it will be the latter. The former, OTOH, is required of caliber understanding such that open space is open space, no matter how close it is to one, and therefore open to anyone who wishes to take it, even someone you don't like very much. Temenos in positive concepting takes away this right of other people. And, namely, men. (The heresy! It's *women* who've been victimized by the men! How dare you suggest that the relationship was anything but one-way!)(Of course, men themselves perpetrated it by *protecting* the women for the same reasons for so long.) The caliber of meatspace and reproduction, sex and identity, spatial perception and concepting of "objects" has proven, mostly in biotech, to be due for quite a change. Temenos is at the heart of that because it's the self-concept relative to emergent natural properties of self.