it's the final countdown
31 Aralık 2009 Perşembe
Sartlar neyi gerektiriyorsa...
2009'un son gunu
2009 benim icin olabilecegi kadar kotu gecti, sınırları ve sinirleri zorladı. almadigim red kalmadi, neye elimi atsam elime degen seyin bir tarafi ufalandı...fenaydı kısacası ve ben de esref-i mahlukat'a donusemedim onca fenalıga ragmen. Neyse, cirkin gecen senemi yukarıdaki sekilde sıkıstırıp zapturapt altına aldım. Haydi hayırlara vesile ola, belki 2010 daha kıvamında gecer.
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30 Aralık 2009 Çarşamba
Sevgili A.E.Bulbul, tesekkur ederim
I am starting this diary on a sunny day
I feel things inside, overwhelming things.
I feel my pulse beating.
I'm confused, nervous.
Like something missing, a desire...
I can't yet control
On the edge of an abyss,
I feel this crazy urge to jump
28 Aralık 2009 Pazartesi
A Path to Self Realization or Victimization: Female Body
This study examines the social construction of female bodies through analyzing anorexia and body building as two crucial bodily performances that challenges the discursively defined, idealized female body and her identity. Fleshy materiality; linguistically and culturally marked surfaces of female bodies that has served for production and continuity of particular culture is replaced by subject’s own corporeality. Butler’s notion of “performativity” is the starting point to discuss the unnatural status of gender; and corporeality of bodies is highlighted through analyzing Todd Haynes’ short film “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” and Ms. Olympia(s); and then in the last part, focus shifts to the Foucault’s definition of “individuality”, which is explained in negative terms, to underline the difference between victimization and / or resistance of female bodies during their performances.
In her book Volatile Bodies, Grosz states that “body is represented and used in specific ways in particular cultures” and therefore human body and its embodiments should be work through discursive performances (Grosz, p.18). In contemporary world, or in terms of Giddens late modernity, without addressing the necessity of the deconstruction of dualistic Western metaphysical perceptions of body, it is no longer possible to take a step to thoroughly conceptualize the contemporary representations of body and identity.
Body and mind do not represent the two distinct categories, and indeed they are mutually theorized the subject’s unity and self realization or emancipation. Since body is a “political field where power relations can be observed”, self control over body is the main tool to reach self realization; and if the body is the field of power and implementation of discourses then resistance is inevitable against the political regulations that take place on the surface of discursively normalized individuals (Foucault, p.173). Female body is a useful site of repression and production since “it is both a laboring, sexual and reproducing body“(Bakare-Yusuf, p.318).
Sacredness or Handicap of Corporeality
Munson points out “the physical traits of sex are culturally elaborated and given meaning within a culture through construction of gender that means people take some cues from their physical characteristics of the bodies with which they are born but they learn to use a variety of signals to demonstrate their similarity to other people in specific gender category.” (Munson, p.127-143) The biological differences that are used to legitimize the women’s limited access to power in society and that are attributing women the passive sexual and / or political role, represents their secondary status to the men. Hence, marginalization of women has been seen as natural and regarded as the fact of their biology. The concept ‘gender’ explains how an individual’s biology is culturally valued and interpreted into locally accepted ideas of what it is to be a woman or a man. That means gender and the hierarchical power relations between men and women are constructed meaning that the associated roles and expectations of gender identities can change from culture to culture. In the first chapter of her book Second Sex de Beauvoir argues that women are biologically disadvantaged compare to men; and it is the reproductive handicap of female body (de Beauvoir, p.35-67). Thus some feminists like de Beauvoir, emphasize the importance of the rejection of the reproductive disadvantage of females’ bodies to gain the similar capacity of power in the context of public life.
In response to this negative attitude towards body and women, Moira Gatens in Power, Bodies and Difference states that, there are also “some feminists advocate the affirmation and celebration of women’s bodies and their capacity to recreate and nurture” (Gatens, p.120-137). Gatens claims that these theories are important responses to the female body and also identity politics however both of them interpret body as something given, innate and territorially defined. While the former response focuses on the sexual equality principle, later one emphasizes an essential sexual difference of the female bodies; thus these responses to corporeality of female preserve the binary oppositions, indeed. Butler gives somehow different explanation to gendered, sexed bodies and identities. “Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre- given sex; gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result gender is not to culture as sex is to nature, gender is also the discursive/ cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “natural sex” is produced and established as “pre discursive”, “prior to culture”” (Butler, p.346)
‘Performativity’ is an important concept for Butler as “the repetition and the ritual of gender performances have an ongoing outcome. They contribute to the naturalising of the bodies, making the cultural fiction of gender appear credible and real.” The gendered body is performative, thus it has no ontological status apart from the acts that constitute its reality. Performativity could be interpreted as a paradigm shift in the study of gender and corporeality, because Butler’s claim about the inscription on the surface of bodies led us to read gender as something “only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.”(Butler, p.173) The examples of anorexia and body building confirm “the play of absence and presence on the body’s surface”, and as a result of minimal or excessive use of body we faced with multiple ways of deconstructing individuality and reconstructing the subjectivity. (Butler, p.172)
An Androgynous Utopia: Gender destruction of Karen Carpenter
“Anorexia … is an obsession evolving out of a complex internal apparatus of resistance and control; it is an addiction and abuse of self control, a fascism over the body in which the sufferer plays the part of both the dictator ad the emancipated victim who she often resembles.” (Film, 23′)
My first example is a short film about an anorexic body and her identity crisis; and I interpret this process as a resistance and protagonist’s death as a way to self realization. The film, Superstar (directed by Todd Haynes ), focuses on Karen Carpenter, who found dead in her parents’ home from anorexia in the 1970s and connections between her illness, family dynamics – controlling mother, celebrity, consumerism, and U.S. politics.
Superstar portrays the reasons to the crisis of the idealized female body in the image of Barbie and conceptions of normalcy trough the examination of Karen, who is sick of consumption and starves herself even as her image is consumed. Karen’s family tries to domesticate her with an organized marriage to reimpose her stable female role both in biological and sexual terms that means her family locates her into an institutional setting to maintain the control over her body. Although, Karen does not internalize the normativity and she resists proscribed ideals of femininity, she could not reject them at all. Hence, the process that what Karen experiences is all about a crisis of identity. She does not know what she should do; she just knows that it is not possible for her to live with her image.
Karen’s anorexic body and her identity crisis are fed by domestic crisis of the Carpenter family and also by political crises that are represented on T.V; they are the images of the Holocaust, the bombing of Cambodia, the Vietnam War, and the White House. As Landy underlines that domestic crisis that disrupt Karen’s integrity, are mother-daughter arguments and mainly about Karen’s career, her clothes, her weight, and her desire for independence, and these scenes of domestic crisis are connected to the public space conflicts. (Landy, p.123-140) After each image, Karen’s bodily performances and her identity become more fragmented and abnormal; and therefore her story shows that bodily boundaries, definitions, gender codes are never sacred since body always exceeds control. Her bodily presence is often relegated to the status of non-existence. Her illness makes her a subject instead of putting her into the place of victim, who suffers because of the physical and psychological pain. She is able to express her bodily absence and the presence of her pain, of what makes her as an agent instead of a normalized individual.
“The imitation that mocks the notion of an original ”: Ms. Olympia
Does femaleness produce femininity? What about the people, who do not fit the strictly defined boundaries of male and female that create a third space within binary oppositions? In what terms those identifications related with gender- a set of signifiers, and its structural units (female- femininity and male- masculinity)? Is it possible to equate high heels, breasts, make up, varnished nails or long hair to vagina? If the answer is yes then we should question about the Ms. Olympia, the idealized female body builders of each year; and try to understand the difference between Lenda Murray, Iris Kyle and their performances as a part of femininity or masculinity since their bodies do not seem that much lack of feminine signifiers. These girls wear high heels during their performances, they have varnished nails, and generally long blond hair; actually they have a dramatic or maybe an absurd charm (Coles, p.68). Being female has its own signifiers however, the female body builders challenge all traditional ideas and signifiers about femininity, and demonstrating that how sex, gender, sexuality served as a natural package, the femininity, the female bodies and even the most and the strongest signifier of maleness – masculinity are constructs.
Ms. Olympia competitions are the publicly constituted spaces where the bodies of female body builders are highly controlled; actually these competitions aims to normalize the “grotesque bodies” of body builders. Castrated feminine markers of body builders are controlled, they are dressing up with feminine signifiers and through their dress code (which are sexy bikinis) and make up, female body builders are allowed to enter in male gaze of heterosexual culture (Schulze, p. 261). Muscularity and power are linked to masculinity and thereby these are the feminizing strategies to make female body builders normal (Ian 1990, p.72). Fetishized feminine curves are eliminated by muscles, since these curves are the signifiers of female sexuality, cancellation of them marks female body builder’s sexuality as indifferent to men. Their bodies are grotesque, perverse and do not look like normalized, discursively individualized feminine bodies; these performers outgrow its own self, transgressing its own body (Bakhtin, p.317). Their performances can be interpreted as a performance of drag since we could argue that she is performing the space of masculinity, and resists traditional reading of her body. Artificial nature of femininity is grotesquely demonstrated through make up, hair, fetishistic dress code and breasts. Thus we could read female body builders image as an example of MTF transsexuals.
To conclude that female body builders’ dragish or MFT styles, mimicries highlights that what we socially, culturally learned and internalized as natural is no longer possible since there is no proper fe/male body that is taken for granted. There is nothing inherently natural to about gender, and gender is a kind of mimicry and when female body builders imitate these roles through their bodies than we meet something highly artificial and grotesque. Their female body is a copy, or imitation and their muscled bodies are the imitations of their imitations. However, through their performances fixed boundaries are blurred, they dismantle the slashes.
There is no power without resistance, and female body is not merely a victim
In Discipline and Punish Foucault explains how disciplinary power creates individuals form a mass of bodies through three elements; hierarchical observations, normalizing judgments and examination. Power relations construct the social reality through the implementation of these three elements as surveillance mechanisms, and people are the objects of the “regime of truth” that is controlled via these processes; and then they are transformed into individuals by experiencing, internalizing the knowledge and/or microphysics of power in everyday life; and since women are their bodies, particularly female bodies are subjected, used, transformed and improved (Foucault, p.136) Bodies are inscribed with power; they are the fields of power relations. Regulation and representation of bodies in social sphere show us the construction processes of useful, normalized bodies within the society (Bird, p.91). Body is rationalized and has become an object of expert mechanisms. Anorexia and body building are responses to overdetermined female bodies appearances as decorative presentations.
Anorexics and female body builders use their bodies in unconventional ways that challenging gender stereotypes. From traditional points of view the body has generally been associated with the innate, immutable, the god given; but these female performers reject the notion of a preexisting body since people are able to intervene their bodies and treat them merely as costumes. On the one hand anorexics’ and female body builders’ projects explore the problem of territorially defined bodies, and on the other hand they rewrite their identities, which are stuck within their bodily boundaries. Therefore, these performers prove how the identity is a fragmented and multiple process of becoming rather than fixed categories indeed. Anorexia or body building could be read as a project that is a path toward self determination for women to gain control over their own bodies.
Minimal or excessive use of bodily performances constitute women as subjects who use their feminine body as a site for action and protest rather than as an object of discipline and normalization. To sum up, woman is the creator not just the creation; not the passive object of another’s decision, and they are not the scopic objects of the “collective male gaze” between private and public spaces, contrarily they are the directors of the voyeuristic terminology over their bodies (Mulvey, 1975).
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24 Aralık 2009 Perşembe
sevgili noel baba sana sesleniyorum
ben ebit, onumuzdeki ay 25 olacagim ama senin kocaman bir kalbin oldugunu bildigim icin boyle samimi bir dilekle sana kosarak sarilmak istedim. evet, senden bahsediyorum noel baba. senden bir ricam olacak, yeni yılda asagida gordugun birbirinden guzel bes saat arasindan birisini bana getirebilir misin? anadolu yakasina duserse yolun lutfen ugra, odamdaki kucuk balkondan iceri girebilirsin. yatagimin uzerinde fıstık isimli bir arkadas olacak, hediyemi ona emanet edersen en kisa surede elime gececektir bu guzel saat.
isteyenin bir, vermeyenin iki yuzu kara noel baba. seni bekliyor olacagim.
XoXo
Hamis: pembe tercihimdir, hic olmadi beyaz olup kenarlari pembe olani getirirver.
21 Aralık 2009 Pazartesi
‘‘What happened? Why, at the age of thirty-two, was this smooth-voiced girl from Downey, California, who led a raucous nation smoothly into the seventies, found dead in her parents’ home?’’
Teori dersinin odevi Karen, kadin bedeni ve yarattigi resistance uzerine olacak, umuyorum, baslamak uzereyim... "there is nothing that she is in control. so, losing weight signifies not just weight control but total control.... ve boyle ilerleyecek bakalim neye benzeyecek, bitince koyacagim. Todd Haynes'in filmi uzerinden gidecegim, barbie dolls = ideal female body falan fiti...Hamis: Annesi cok fena, yuzune tuz ruhu dokulmus sanki?
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20 Aralık 2009 Pazar
Ozkorkmaz Gunlukleri da dam dam da dam paah
Sıkıcılıktan okunamayacak boyuta erisen bu alanı birazcık renklendirmem gerekiyor, nasıl olacak bu iş pek bir fikrim yok. Eski bloggerlarla arayı bir an önce kapatabilmek için blog yazmaya yeni başlayanların vazgeçilmez tekniğidir hevesle gunde bir kac defa giriş yapmak. Bende boyle islemiyor durum, su uc cumleyi yazana kadar icim daraldi, ruhum bunaldi, mideme agrilar girdi. ama yok bu defa azimliyim sıkıcı da olsa, sadece kendimin gorecegi bu blogu bir sekilde doldurmaya karalamaya baslayacagim. yandaki fotografi kendime armagan ediyorum ebit, oldu mu?hadi kalasin saglicakla
sii yuuu tomorrooov
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Response Paper #6: Jacques Derrida
Western way of thought is basically repressive, search for a universal system of thought that shows the absolute truth and beauty through the use of binary oppositions. However, Derrida argues that we can never arrive at an absolute, final meaning. Neither at the beginning nor at the end is there a point at which the definitive meaning can be found, since there is neither a beginning nor an end.
According to Derrida, meaning is encoded between binary oppositions, but the first term is not always the valuable. Instead of accepting the slashes, rigid boundaries around the meanings Derrida wants to show how the truth can be so relative and how these binary oppositions are not opposite and can be exist together. Therefore he is interested in deconstructing, neglecting the boundaries between oppositions. Since meaning is not stable and always postponed; so it can never be finally fixed; that means different context give words different meanings, the centered language system can not have a constraining power over people. Actually, he radically deconstructs the traditional theatre, decentered the power of the text writer and gives each one a chance to write his/her role. In my response paper I am going to give two examples to reveal the role of the individual and how their inscribed bodies serve as a marker of (multiple) identities.
First case is going to be about one of the impressive and also unbearable performance of Orlan, French multimedia artist, which deconstructs the usual, taken for granted status of body and its unity in Derridean terms. Her performances are criticizing the essentialist views about body, especially female body and the concept of beauty, which are regarded as innate, immutable and God given in the context of Western metaphysical thinking. In the second case I am going to give a more radical example of Australian artist, Stelarc’s performance “Suspension”, which is an identity lack performance and challenges the sacredness of body since the artist hangs his nude body in flesh-hooks suspension.
“My body is my art” (Orlan)
Orlan is inspired by Duchamp, so considers her own body a "readymade" that means she describes her body as a combination of manufactured objects rather than a territorially defined pure unity. She cancels the function of aesthetic surgery and presents its an unusual meaning(s) through her performance.
Orlan’s performance could be read as a self determination of a woman, who is the creator, not the created and gains control over her body. Instead of having her body beautified, she uses surgery as a medium for a deviant project, to make her face ugly. What we have internalized as the nature or the territoriality of the body is an outcome of social and cultural norms and continuities. But Orlan’s performance underlines that there are possible constructions and multiple differences that challange imposed perceptions or “truth” about what we have learned. To deconstruct binary difference disrupts both ontological and corporeal security. If we interpret her body as a text, it is going to be obvious that her decision to change her bodily fixity also alters her textual stability. She disrupts the place of the words within the text and claims an alternative reading to the preexisting readings of body, and indeed enables a risky dream of control over life, deformation, paralysis and death.
The surgical operation is controlled by herself; the performance takes place under local anesthesia. At the end of the each surgery her look is constantly shifting, her face transforms something more ambiguous and looks different. As she changes her face, her body becomes more alien and more fragmented. Since Orlan writes her own destiny during her performance, she is not the victim or the passive patient, she is the subject and the object of the transformation.
“The body is obsolete” (Stelarc)
Stelarc subjects his body to hanging by flesh-hooks, attached to a number of rocks to be counterbalanced, in his Suspension performances. These performances determine the limits of the body in relation to forces of nature, particularly of gravity. The whole performance becomes a very physical extension of the body, where the skin begins to lose its shape and artist reaches the physical and psychological limitations of the body
Stelarc's artistic performance discovers the idea of "enhancing the body" both in a physical -technical- and psychological manner. Through Stelarc's work, we reach a third stage of corporeal existence since the body becomes both the subject and the object in order to discover its limitations and also its future. In his interview with Ctheory.net, Stelarc explains the meaning of the “obsolete body”, he states that: “The body lacks of modular design, technology is what defines the meaning of being human, it’s part of being human. Especially living in the information age, the body is biologically inadequate.”
As he argues that the suspension itself is an end, it is the mimicry of overcoming gravity. Suspending the body with hooks helps the body support itself, thus the body becomes it's own support structure. So, performance of hanging the body imitates the passivity of the flesh and emphasizes the inevitability of death in order to create new capacities for the living corporeality.
Postponed meaning: What counts as a body?
I tried to explain the how the binary opposition between mind and body or any dichotomies is no longer possible. Cartesian dualism put a hierarchy between the mind and the body. The mind constitutes the ultimate meaning, essence of men, whereas the body is excluded and acts just as a medium; and hence reality is only accessible through the mind that means body is just an object. Both Orlan and Stelarc erase the slashes between the dichotomy of mind and body, especially put the body at the centre of their performances, they have their bodies and they are their bodies indeed. Thus these two artists challenge the political, ethical and physical norms of the Western society; and their definition of body and absolute meaning.
Orlan and Stelarc use technology to inscribe their bodies. They use their bodies to inscribe their art. Body is not conceived as inferior to the mind. Each performance of the artists change the shape of their skins, they look different at the end of the each performance, so they gain different inscribed identities, which are constructed by its performers. Additionally, Orlan and Stelarc perform their corporeal transformations by putting their skins and also identities in a process of becoming rather then being since there is a postponement and transgression of the meaning in both performances. Their bodies or identities are both objects and subjects of the performances, therefore we could say that their performances’ should read through Derrida, and beyond the Cartesian duality of mind and body since it is both mind and body.
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8 Aralık 2009 Salı
Response Paper #5: Karl Marx
In today’s world, classical theories of Marxism are not effective tools to analyze the historical and social changes. Contemporary world is the world of transformations and emphasize much more on the mixture and unpredictability in society; and everyday life becomes a more dynamic, pluralistic, contested sphere; and expresses a range of highly differentiated meanings. It is no more possible to describe it as homogenous whole that resist for a communal identity or ideology; individuals increasingly shape their own identities through reflexively social practices. Hence in order to understand the society and its transformation, we should study on the routines, everyday practices, ways of doings and operating and power relations within these practices rather than economic base, and relations of production at the institutional level. I am going to explain Agnes Heller’s notion of Objectivation in everyday life and then the importance of New Social Movements as a more fashionable – desired way of resistance rather than proletariat resistance in itself.
“Objectivation” in and for itself
As I understand from my readings, Orthodox Marxism is located at the centre, has the dominant power of the sacred reference; and interprets Marxism as the science of the society. Then manipulates historical materialism to discover the laws of history and societies; hence in a narrow sense, classical Marxist theories explain the modern capitalism in the world that we live in. So, the analysis of capitalism works like an historical analysis; but the problem is this analysis of capitalism has become an analysis of whole humanity, -pure theory and illogical practice-. Revolutionary shift from capitalism to communism is not an outcome of an ethical or philosophical choice but rather an inevitable step, works like a destiny for humanity. This is a vital point for me to criticize classical view by giving references to Heller.
Agnes Heller, Marxist critical theorist (lets over stigmatize her, she was Hungarian and Jewish) and Hegelian philosopher, argues that rather than existing area of exploitation and oppression, everyday life is an area of contestation and struggle, through which individuals reflexively define themselves, their relationships to others. Individuals have power to reproduce or reshape their place as an outcome of their active participation and differentiated lifestyles in EDL, thus when we question about EDL this will allow to question about the whole society and power relations.
Heller tried to problematize the link between alienation, social reproduction, and humanization & democratization of EDL. As a Marxist theorist, for Heller, capitalist division of labor, the hegemony of bourgeois ideology were regarded as barriers to the development of critical thought, the rationality of intellect, that leads individuals to challenge dominant norms and rules, individuals turn increasingly inwards focusing only upon themselves, their own EDLs and final products instead of the complexity of the processes. In my opinion what makes Heller more crucial and different than Orthodox Marxists is her emphasize on morality; and she argued that social fragmentation, particularizm eroded the collective morality, thus prevented collective action. Heller examined the alienated human potential by working on objectivation and argued that the solution can only be found by criticizing the practices of everyday life, which is colonized by the institutions. Objectivation in itself is the backbone of EDL, works as a guide, an index; and individuals internalize this framework by using everyday language, tools, norms & rules. Objectivation for itself underlines the fragmented and heterogeneous structure of the EDL. While the former legitimizes the EDL, second one makes us to think critically on EDL and open the path for freedom. I exemplified Heller work because bottom up theory is the lack of traditional Marxism which regarded individuals as invisible actors and values, beliefs and customs as irrelevant.
“Men make their own history” (Touraine, 1981)
In contrast to the proletariat’s movement, NSM do not seek to control the state; and instead display new forms of democratic organization; also they have raised awareness of the common problems facing humanity by rejecting authoritarianism.
Newly emerged global actors -such as anti-racist groups, LGBT organizations and environmental groups- are active participants of NSMs. I think that their goals are different and more moral form traditional socialist movements. First of all they are not rooted in the working class; and their interests can not be reduced to their class interest; indeed they have radically redefined class. Secondly, each individual has power to write his-her own history and social movements represent the organized collective behavior of actors to control their own historicity. The movement of 19th century can not be regarded as a social movement since the strategy, direction of every move and result was deployed, and was known by Orthodox Marxist theorists. Since Orthodoxy constructs itself on the historical engineering to control the predictability of history; underlying mentality is to know today, to predict the future through the interpretation of similar mediums. Like a fortunetelling to learn about the curse of the history; and this is the teleological assumption of Orthodoxy.
What is ideology? Is it purely false consciousness of the proletariat, who are not aware of their own historical role? What about the importance individual desires, or the determinant role of particular ideas? If the revolutionary process from capitalism to communism is historically over determined, then how could we talk about the role of individual? Is there any “good” ideology? Was the ideology of bourgeoisie good enough when it resisted to the feudalism? Class conflict or any social conflict can not be reduced to the struggle between owners of the means of production and exploited workers, as in the Marxist analysis. The concept of class is challenged by culture and identities; and economic determinism is no longer effective to understand the nature of the struggles of diverged identities’ interests. New struggles do not merely focus on issues of income, or political representation and therefore these struggles are defined as social or cultural. Resistance is now visible in the streets; it is not the proletariat’s collective action but the small battles that will transform society by destabilizing coercive state and delegitimizing its dominant discourses of power. To understand the nature of resistance we should look at the micro level resistances, and tactics that create alternative sites of equality.
Looking for a better life
With the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and then the collapse of Soviet Union in the late 1980s, Marxism has experienced a shift toward newer forms of multicultural approaches basically on identity politics. If the aim of Marxism is to reach a better life, then Marxism should continue to be theoretically productive, providing critical insights on the multiple problems and crises with globalization. EDL is a crucial field for Marxist theory to deal with the unintended problems of globalization such as ecology, terrorism, and the proliferation of new forms of identities. EDL is not just an area of production, and reproduction. It rather includes the ways of governing the society, and the repetitive character of EDL embodies power relations and therefore when we understand the nature of the repetitions and the micro level naturalized power relations, we will be able to solve the complexity of society and historical transformations.
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