Automatic Caution

I want to start out by saying I am not a scholar of postmodernism, philosophy, aesthetics or any other critical discipline. I am, however, familiar with these areas through debate, and as such I have read widely from authors such as Foucault, Lacan, Nietzsche, Agamben, Zizek and so forth. I guess my point is that my knowledge is wide but not deep.

In the course of writing this blog, my goal is not to write through any particular lens, but rather to analyze my life critically the way it occurs to me to analyze it. Certainly, some of what I have read or heard or can remember will inform my thoughts and writings, but the goal is not to be scholarly, the goal is just to express my thoughts. Therefore, I will no doubt contradict myself, incorrectly interpret various philosophers, and commit other acts of condemnable scholarly sin - and I welcome your criticism for all of those points, but also your tolerance.

As ironic as it may seem, I wanted to offer that framework for my readers. This is an agreement between you and me: in reading this, you agree to downplay my mistakes and oversights. Meanwhile, I agree not to pretend that what I'm writing is scholarly. In so doing, we create a new space that allows for the discussion of my work as if it was philosophy, even though it is really just the work of a hobbyist. Lovely, isn't it?

Finally, I want to discuss the title of this blog: Automatic Caution. Literally, that is how I want you to approach my writings. It is also how I approach life. Never assume that what I say is true, whole or anything else. Don't read just to understand, read to criticize.

On a figurative level, the title is of course a joke about the signs on most automatic sliding doors in the United States, which are composed of a yellow circle with the words Automatic, Caution and Door from top to bottom. Some designer, thinking of esthetics rather than practicality, clearly designed it so that the central word of the intended phrase, Caution, was also central to the design, placing it in the middle of the circle, set out in a black strip. In other words, he blindly assumed that everyone would get the intended message, 'Caution! Automatic Door,' because of the contrast between the words in black, Automatic and Door, and the word set out in yellow in a black strip, Caution.

Unfortunately, our minds are trained to synthesize data only in dualities - up to down, left to right, etc. As a result, the sign invariably reads in the order of the words, 'Automatic Caution Door.' Of course, most well-adjusted adults can decipher the message, learning over time to re-arrange the words so that it becomes natural to simply read Caution Automatic Door. As a small boy, however, I remember reading the sign not as a warning, but as a description of the door. The wooshing, magical sliding doors were called Automatic Caution Doors, because that's the only way those ubiquitous signs made any sense.

My parents, thinking it was a funny joke, played along with me in saying, "Oh look, an Automatic Caution Door!" until years later I realized the mistake. Mind you, not my mistake - because anyone taking the signs at face value would come to my conclusion - but the designer's mistake.

So why hasn't society addressed this obvious problem? Instead of changing the sign to read as it should, the arrangement of the words 'Automatic' followed by 'Caution' and then 'Door' in the emblematic yellow circle has actually become a symbol for the same circle with the same words, just in a different order. I can only imagine that we don't change this because it would simply be too inconvenient to replace all the signs for all the doors, not to mention to replace the society-wide symbol. At this point, I think we would probably have trouble recognizing the true meaning of the sign if the words were re-arranged to convey their actual meaning, even though we constantly joke about it (there's even a website devoted to the absurdity).

This is the absurdity of society, the things I notice, and the type of esoteric things I will be talking about. I hope you enjoyed it.