Volume 12, Number 19
28 February 2006





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"LIFE ETC."

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

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