“Writing in English is the most ingenious
torture ever
devised for sins committed in previous lives.” - James Joyce
I guess I have two personalities, which mesh really well with each
other; both are extremely passive. It is not because they are ignorant,
never, but just non-responsive. Below is a conversation among the
two.
- I still remember the day my grandmother passed away. I was young,
perhaps five or six. She was lying in her bed with all her children
standing around her. I remember looking at her for the last time
and going outside to play with my tiny balls made of colored glass.
Sometime later I went back home, saw my mother crying, and she told
me that Grandma was dead. I could not say anything, just stared
at my mother, the room, and Grandma’s ghost. The very last
thing I remember is pretending that I was sleeping, while everybody
was rushing to do something in the house. The ambulance came, neighbors
and relatives filled up the house, and even my father came early
from work. I was happy to see him but continued pretending to sleep.
- I have never had the correct words to say - what is “a correct
word” anyways - but admired people who are always full of
with words for every occasion, when I could only stare. Actually,
that’s why I have always wished humans to have tails. Because,
one can understand how an animal is feeling just by looking at the
tail: happy, scared, relaxed, emotional, sexually excited, sad…
etc. It is so simple, so straight forward and without connotations
that can make a person paranoid while trying to decipher another’s
meaning. And if humans had these completely instinctual tails, controlling
and repressing the desire could have never been an issue. However,
some cultures would start circumcising tails or/and forbid women
to show theirs in public places; once again they would find ways
to control people, prevent autonomous expressions and restrict them
within the synthetic world of language.
- Making the choice between talking and not talking was not really
hard; as I said earlier I have always had difficulty, indeed, finding
the correct expression for any specific situation. This does not
stem from lack of words or having trouble with verbal communication,
but more from being indecisive about situations. I was told after
my grandmother’s funeral that all living beings born and die,
begin and end, appear and disappear. They were obviously trying
to explain me what had happened to her and what would happen to
them and to me after some time… No, I was not mature enough
to understand something bad had happened, and, besides the idea
of disappearance seemed really entertaining to me. That’s
why; words expressing grief did not make sense at all, although
everyone else was expecting hearing them from me.
- One way or another we are being taught to manage the expectations
of others. If somebody is born as a human being, s/he has to follow
the pathway that has been used since the beginning of the history
of humanity and please the ones who have walked the same pathway
before. Hiding in chicken coops, - where I spent most of childhood
performing my idea of disappearance - or refusing to use the pathway
where others are walking will not help to create an alternative
direction in life – if that is even possible – but only
make other people spend extra time disciplining you.
- "The body is a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which
the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments
of culture are inscribed…" This quote of Foucault makes
me question the being.
- The moment a child becomes a being, culture inscribes its mark
in bold, black letters affirming “human” on the surface
of his/her body. Every human body, then, functions as an expansion
for the territory of power structures. A territory where the vocabulary
to define “human being” is limited only to binary oppositions:
male/female, good/bad, right/wrong, black/white, beautiful/ugly...
etc. The child is going to perform his/her life according to these
oppositions, which have already been defined, accepted or rejected
by others many years ago. If something was defined as “wrong”,
no one can change what that thing refers to in the language and
no one can change how “bad” a person is for carrying
out a “wrong” action. I remember how many times I received
a “no” from my mother for my requests, when she never
had an answer for “why not”. According to her, my request
must be wrong because that was what she had been told; she was trapped
in fixed standard of authorization. - Who is not? Available in different
degrees? -
- Language, which holds the connection between mind and object,
introduces the individual to the collective voice and vocabulary,
fastens the codified norms of the society, and imposes them on the
individual. All significations are controlled by society, thus there
is no escape from power through language.
- Is there a way to escape at all? Can avoiding signifying something
provide an escape? Can a human body stop signifying? Is there a
way to cross out the word “human” written in bold, black
letters from our bodies? - Perhaps not. - But maybe by creating
an ambiguous situation for the mind, one can manage to find a little
opening to think beyond the fixed significations. Intoxication might
provide an escape from the strata. – A temporary one, of course
- Every relief in the brain breaks the signification, the correlation
between the content and the mind. And only after that the ideology
directed by authority starts signifying various other connotations.
- Unattended Body is a performance – a passive resistance
- discussing how an existence at “it’s most banal”
(Heidegger) can simply be perceived as a disturbance, a potential
threat if it does not act in its expected way for society. It questions
the fixed significations: what defines expectancies, their limits
and how are they conceptualized in different contexts. Unattended
Body is a body that attempts to disconnect him/herself from its
characteristics and the characteristics of other people sharing
the same place. It stands/sits still at places, avoids eye contact,
does not carry any object which can help others to relate it to
something/somewhere; no shopping cart at the grocery store, no gun
or money bag at the bank, no plastic container at the gas station,
no filthy clothes or disturbing odor, no sign for an emergency health
problem, just a body – obviously a human body – sitting…
Still… Until it has been considered as a disruptive act by
the security that has to secure, regulate the routine and maintain
the continuity without any interruption. Any divergent, doubtful
behavior needs to be destroyed immediately to maintain the continuity
of the authority, the status quo, just like antibodies fight against
the intruders trying to leak into the body to deteriorate the organism.
- "How one can actually attend one's body?”
- Apparently, this is not a voluntary attainment (attendance?).
Otherwise who would want to have a body - a trap, in other words
- which obviously is an extension of the power structures? Neither
the body nor the language belongs to the individual. The rules and
norms of the authority are instilled in humans beginning from childhood:
the human way of eating, expressing, behaving, looking, reading,
fucking…
- According to Deleuze and Guattari, the “total escape from
the strata is tantamount to death since it is unachievable to live
without the organism”. But, if the organism just pretends
as if it is dead, stops responding to its external space, stops
carrying its own body weight, stops communicating? It becomes non-responsive,
becomes a fatigue for the system… Slows down everything.
Stops…
References:
Arzu Ozkal Telhan, Entitled. DVD. 2003
Arzu Ozkal Telhan, Unattended Body. DVD. 2004
Arzu Ozkal Telhan, Nothingness. DVD. 2005
Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings, 1972-1977 USA, Pantheon Books, 1980
Gill Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Logic of Sense, New York, Colombia
University Press, 1990
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