jonathan kemp

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In the asymmetry of the logic gate in its being open and then closed, it is the latter that makes possible the conceptualization of the circuit:

//if there are machines which calculate all alone, add, add up, make all the wonders which man had up to that point believed to be characteristic of his thought, it is because the fairy electricity enables us to establish circuits, circuits which open or close, which stop or are restored// The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-55. Cambridge Univ. Press 1988/Norton 2009 p302 

Through the system of gates that let current pass hardware makes it possible to incarnate zero in a rate or rhythm as a fundamental scansion. Zero is wedged into hardware to exist in its literal read/write, an effect of the flat trompe-l'oeil of language locked up in a circuit. How is the instruction understood by the hardware? How is the machine code decoded?

There are three basic logic gates: NOT, OR, and AND. They carry out logic based on electrical current. The current in a 5v circuit is interpreted 0v = 0, approximately 5v = 1.

NOT is simplest: it converts a binary value into its opposite: 1 becomes 0, 0 1.

OR and AND combine two inputs of current to produce only one output current. 
Assigned numerical values are thus subjected to arithmetical operations. 

If a logic circuit has one output (single bit adder), the low logic level of 0, addition cannot be carried out.
1+1 will be 0, whereas the exact result is 10. It is impossible to write 10 - hich takes 2 bits - by coding the result on only one bit.
To circumvent this problem, another bit must be added to the circuit: the //Carry Out//. 
As a Carry Out i.e. an additional bit of output, it makes it possible to perform the operation 1+1=10, by coding out of two bits the result in two bits.
There are thus two bits of output - the bit-result of the logic gate and the bit of Carry Out which makes possible the writing f a number higher than 1.(([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder_(electronics)]])) (([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_logic]])) ((Floyd, T., Digital Fundamentals. 8th edition. 2003. Prentice Hall pp290-295))

In an economy of information a difficulty arises: for each possible addition of two non-null bits it would be then necessary to anticipate two bits of result.
The Carry Out needs to convert to Carry In. By using only the Carry Out, an additional bit for each addition made is needed in order to have enough memory. By re-using the Carry bit of output and making it an input, there are 3 bits (the two bits to be added and the Carry bit) that can make an addition that goes up to 110 i.e. 4 (a full adder).

It is this way of re-using the supernumerary bits of the result as additional bits of input that makes this electronic system of counting efficient - as a modular system of half, full, parallel, cascading adders it re-uses the excess of data produced (the output) to make its own input.

Thus, the written data are also those which are read: the read/write comes about in this typically simple way, through the recycling the excess of data. This feedback is autophagous, feeding from information which it excretes like Kekule's dream of the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth.

The raw material which provides the electrical power and the infrastructure for the reading/writing is the RAM, either as static (SRAM) storing so long as the dc power is maintained, or dynamic (DRAM) storing short term in between capacitor refreshes; and the cpu is the machine which reassigns and functionalizes this memory.

In order to analyze/critique this architecture, the Program invokes the construction of a magical correspondence system as O.S, to treat electrical material according to the methods devised in such a system translation, rather than propositional logic.

**Towards an electrical OS**

One track for the development of this materialist-based OS would be to re-interpret the architecture of the logic gate.

Electric current, when it passes through the logc gate, is seen assigned a value of 1 (5V or more) or 0 (<5V).
The Carry Bit surplus can be expressed and spent in an electric carnival - at the logic gate, when 5V wants to combine with 5V they are treated like information, 1+1, and added by the cpu read/write.

The electrical surplus is not mathematical but a build up of energy and, as such, is ritually sacrificed. Logic gates exchange electrical currents rather than add two interchangeable 1's - in computation what increases is the number of bits while the electrical current continues to flow in closed circuits with zero value to ensure the duration of the system. It is a diachronic system whose information, the expansion of the number of bits, ensures the historical dimension (information) while the electric circuit is the necessary synchronic substrate. 

Reverse this world and it would be the information (not the Carry Bit) that will loop in order to ensure a fixed structure, while the electric carnival will culminate in building up the voltage to challenge the circuit structure.

The now and its development history (synchrony and diachrony) are interrelated: ther's always the diachronic in the synchronic and vice versa: computation proceeds by circuits (cycles) in a diachronic temporality.
The electronic circuit registers cyclicity in a diachronic logic by the Input and Output which serialize and functionalizes the electric circuit. Electronic = electric + Input/Output

The electrical OS will behave in opposition to the functional, with the inscription of diachronic sequences (information = linear temporal movement) in  asynchronic temporality. The circuit of the OS will function diachronically, but its I/O will be cyclic. Whereas computation uses cycles to build and accumulate data, this OS will utilise the hierarchical organization of electricity to ensure a cycle of **life** and **death**, sign and meaning.

**Death** is conceived of in diachronic terms. it is on the exclusion of death that diachronic logic is founded.
By excluding death from life, life is made an interval determined between birth and death (a double bind) by the exclusion of the not-born and already-dead. Deaths do not exist (except in the imagination); real time is seen as taken between an input (given genetic, heritage, legacy, diachrony) and an output (death; or the escape from it while enduring in one world). To conceive death as the termination of linear life is one of the pivots of **rationalism**.
The death/short-circuit must take place in a play as it is a sacrifice. To give direction to death, it is all the logic of the sacrifice, of the Execution ritual.

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jonathan kemp

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