Reproduction and Demolition
"Perde açılıp kapandığı yerde
Bir sonu bir başa vurgular.
Bir bilinse! bilinmez ki nerde,
Bir başlangıç bir sonu noktalar."*
 says
Özdemir Asaf in his poem "Perde" ("Curtain"). The first two lines of
this quatrain, in particular, state something I've learned from Asst.
Prof. Nedim Karakayali (in POLS 420) and from Asst. Prof. James
Alexander (in POLS 338): spatial relations are closely connected to
social or sociopsychological events. The concrete reflects (and shapes)
the abstract.
We can find numerous
examples of this when we look around. According to French thinker Jean
Baudrillard, the former existence and recent demolition of the twin
towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) were such reflections of human
minds on the solid earth: "Perfect parallelepipeds, standing over 1,300
feet tall, on a square base. Perfectly balanced, blind communicating
vessels. The fact that there were two of them signifies the end of any
original reference....The Twin Towers no longer had any faces."** This
might sound speculative, but it's hard to deny the truth of various
aspects of what he says about the nature of the WTC's existence.
Many comments can be and
have been made regarding the demolition of the Berlin Wall, which took
place following the reunification of Germany. People were very eager to
destroy the wall, in order to express what they thought about the
structure that had divided East and West Berlin. Today, silently and
without raising any dust, another famous wall is being "demolished" in a
different kind of way. According to a serious Chinese news website (english.people.com.cn),
a fake Great Wall will be built alongside a segment of the real one.
They're calling it the "Great Wall of Love" in order to raise money by
getting couples to pay to have their names inscribed on the bricks.
Think of the Great Wall
of China as a long single DNA chain. The fake wall will be a partial
replication of it. It will duplicate a part of the Great Wall just like
DNA is duplicated in a cell. Am I exaggerating things? In Florence,
Italy, a number of the statues being displayed outdoors are replicas of
the real pieces. When you go to an upscale bookstore in Ankara, you can
easily buy a copy of Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" or
Dali's "The Persistence of Memory."We're creating a new world out of
things repeating themselves infinitely, just like the rhythm of a
“trance” music piece. The more copies of a thing we have, the less it
will exist. The more we produce new copies of things, the more we will
turn real things into meaningless lines in an endless pattern.
*"The curtain brings
together an end and a beginning where it's opened and closed. People
rarely note that a beginning always manifests an end."
İsmail O. Postalcıoğlu (POLS/III)
ismail_orhan@yahoo.com
 |
