Postmodern Light Switches

A postmodern light switch, typically a ‘rocker’ switch, is a light switch that doesn’t have a specific click for on and off; instead the switch position is unreadable or ambiguous.  It is a light switch for which the function of turning the light on and off is too simple: sometimes for example, an ‘off’ instruction misfires; a companion switch for the same light but on some other wall has been used so that your using that switch leaves it at 30% of normal luminescence; it has gone into emergency mode.  The light stays lit three hours; as a kind of default (just in case it is an emergency) but then neither does a on pop the semi-off-ness; the situation remains intermediate and beyond instruction.  The system needs a reboot maybe.  All that is clear is that things are not obvious; there is no old-world bi-polar diffusion of light and dark; when off is off or on is on is like a sub-divided electric pie: the quarters, fifths of a plasma. 

Like everything else a light-switch has a narrative function; like everything else it tells us what the world is - this or that.  The world stands in its image.  Screwed to the wall, the wires inside can be traced up to the bulb in the middle of the room, which hangs inside a shade, a fly blown skeleton but attenuated into an imaginary plasma that casts actual light, an opaque energy saving virtual ‘tube’ for which off and on are relative terms, for this device is controlled not by the switch itself but by a central computer somewhere in the depths of the house; symbolic of the loss of hierarchy endemic to our postmodern condition: who is in charge?  Not the light switch operator, obviously, but some sort of external ‘mind’ is.

Faint, the outline of the flying insect, a man with thick notched lips, at play on the vertical walls of the shade, casting shapes on the ceiling that flap endlessly to a quick fluttering sound.

Tags: Postmodern lights