Karma Yoga for better referendum results!

Swiss village people doesn't like foreigners. The result from this hostile attitude was confirmed on the last Swiss referendum. This referendum showed that, in general, people from the Swiss villages are not willing to contact, nor to interact with strangers and that they consider them a threat for their country. Instead, they prefer to restrict the mobility of the foreigners, and if possible not to allow them to move in. We all know that this mentality leads nowhere, and it needs change.  

Therefore, I thought of a project, which might influence the situation, and make an impact on this hostile mentality of the Swiss majority. This project should hit a double point. Firstly, it should improve the real integration between the two hostile groups, the villagers and the foreigners. Second, it should introduce foreigners (with special emphasis on the young ones) to the one of the greatest forms of yoga, karma yoga. Unselfish work for the other, without any recoupment - is the shortest definition for this specific type of yoga, which unfortunately is at least known in the west.

The general idea is that the two hostile groups should join through work. The young foreigners, many of them fond of gyms, fitness, hatha yoga and many other forms of physical practices, should once or twice a year, use their physical abilities to help the villagers in their big working actions. In other words, do some karma yoga for the unknown village man or family, for free.

That would be a perfect way for the two groups, not willing to know of one another, but willing to vote against each other, to really start to get along. Work gathers people around mutual goal, the feeling of something successfully finished bonds humans stronger than anything else, much stronger than having a lunch or coffee or shopping together. The frightened men from the villages, together with their families, via this project will get the REAL opportunity to meet some strangers who invade their country, will get the opportunity to work together with them and at the end of the day to finish big part of their endless job. Even more, they will get this help, again, for free.

On the other side, the young foreigners, students for example, will have the opportunity to offer their abundant physical abilities to those who really need them. The daily physical gym training will be replaced for the same, sometimes even harder physical activity, performed this time in a non-designed space of a stable, steep meadow, village house etc.  Why paying for training, when you can get it for free?

Actually, gyms and fitness centers were the initial inspiration for my project, and not the humiliating referendum results. The generic fitness practices are an inevitable part of every contemporary city life style. Gyms are spaces designed for upgrading physical and bodily performances and perhaps transform negative energy, accumulated during the day. However, gyms and other fitness studios are big centers of misleading focus of egoism. They represent clearly a substitution for the childish obsession with the perfect physical outlook. They are full of seriously determined individuals who seriously work on their physical shape and status. Looking at them sometimes looks is like looking at disembodied army of soldiers who forgot the connection to their primal instincts.

 Doing something for yourself is much more easier than doing something for the other. And doing something for the other, who hates you, and wants you out of his home, is even harder. For this you need real muscles. That’s the real challenge. Behind sexy and powerful bodies should lie even stronger developed soul of a hero how is willing to help, to sacrifice, to give.

The gyms and fitness centers were initially gave me inspiration for this project. These centers of physical power should be transferred into the villages, where power is really needed. Thus, real transformation of the quality of life for the both groups can step into the phase of realization. We live in a society who needs real changes from inside. Switzerland is rich enough to survive thousands and thousands of immigrants. But both of them, the  immigrant group and the group of native Swiss, are poor, have lack of the virtue of living in a community, living together for a mutual goal.

On seeing a sex issue

“On seeing a sex surrogate” is a script written by American poet and journalist Marc O’Brian, on which the 2012 film “The Sessions” is based on. The approach of the film director is surprisingly honest and straightforward focusing on the love-erotic adventure of Marc O’ Brian, a disabled man suffering from the polio virus since the age of six, largely paralyzed from the neck down, but strongly determined to end up his virginity. Although the director is keeping the style of a typical Hollywood romantic comedy product, he is much more straightforward and honest towards questions of sexuality. A complex interweaving of sporadic but not less important social, religious and political topics make this film valuable of a closer overview.

There is a focus on spheres of equally sensitive themes of disability and religion, human sexuality and sexual rights, and finally about sex-therapy legality, all of which director Ben Lewin pulls off skillfully. Lewin uses a refined sense of humor while opening up these themes following the life sequence of the main protagonist Marc O’Brian (John Hawkes), when he determines for a sexual and love-erotic experience with a woman.

The story is not just a pure adventure game. It is a romantic drama as well, full of affection, desire and despair. Carefully guided through the everyday life of Marc O’Brian, we are also introduced to his anxious world view shaped by catholic premises. He perceives sex as something terrifying, forbidden, exorcised form his life since he got punished with the polio-virus. His world view is terminated by an aerial view of Virgin Mary gazing above him and repeatedly asking him to overcome despair with assent, to substitute bodily desires with virtues of the heart, to understand and appreciate when an attractive woman attendant shares no same affections for him as he does for her. However, his desire for a sexual experience does not get diminished by this influence of the catholic education. He is desperate to feel presence of a naked woman body beside him, per se to experience being loved by another person, to feel sexually desirable. Perfectly normal desires, I would say, just they are shadowed by an unpleasant display of a disabled body. With a help of his psychotherapist and even with a greater help of his own endeavor to meet with a woman sexually, he arranges with a sex-surrogate a terminate number of sessions in which explicit work with the body and sexual intercourse are encountered. He also does not forget to ask his priest for a blessing. It is an initiation process after all, and it requires blessing from the heavens above!

The feminine and elegant sex surrogate Cheryl (Helen Hunt) stands for an actual individual whose been working with O’Brien in real life. In the interview given for the “Ability Magazine” at the film premiere in LA (http://abilitymagazine.com/The-Sessons-the-movie.html), Cheryl Cohen Greene talks about her experience with Marc O’Brian, and emphasizes the fact that she likes her clients and that she likes her work. This affection is romantically pointed out in the film.

Nevertheless, the fact that a working field of sex-surrogates includes the actual sexual intercourse as a parcel of the therapy practice underlines the specificity of such profession and the difficulties of being recognized. The first (I assume also normal) reaction on the film is to question upon legality of the profession: “I Just Saw The Sessions, and I Don't Get How Being a "Sexual Surrogate" Is Legal?” directly from the title, a journalist for a life-style online magazine, sets a notion of a visible disturbance with the fact that the lines of a therapy which includes sexual (or bodily) activities are not strictly drawn. From another interview with Linda Poelzl, sex-surrogate actively working on the US West Coast, we can read that she is highly aware of such conjunctures: “People assume sex surrogate therapy is one big sex party. And clients often assume they can get a few sex lessons and then they are fine, but it’s usually more complicated than that.” Poelzl works in the field of human sexuality as a certified sex-surrogate for more than a quarter of a century. Alongside with close collaboration with psychotherapists, The International Professional Surrogate Association (IPSA) is the only existing organization that legally occupies sexual surrogate therapists. “Prostitution and fear of legal repercussions have taken a toll on the profession. Consequently, Poezl’s line of work is both highly risky and thinly populated”. As she says “We are a dying breed”.

As a part of a legal protection she contracts with the client a “confidentiality agreement” which helps differentiating her work from prostitution. It states: “CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT: I understand that the surrogacy sessions are for the purpose of expanding my ability to feel physical pleasure and emotional fulfillment through greater intimacy and increased sensation and to overcome sexual dysfunction. I acknowledge this session series is not for the purpose of sexual gratification or entertainment and may or may not include sexual intercourse, manual, or oral stimulation. I understand and will abide by the above agreements.”

It is normal for people to think of such profession as something odd and weird. A lot of people think, “Sex, sex, sex!” But …Sex surrogate work is about a relationship with less focus on psychological processing. It’s helping a person relax and talk about their feelings. I teach them about touching, body language, how to show confidence…once you get some, that is.” - explains Poezl in her interview standing in the magazine rubric: odd jobs.

The film however highly romanticizes this aspect of the profession, guiding the viewer to watch the movie only through O’Brien perspective and not willing to sneak up more closely to the other side. Marc O’Brian experiences the stroke of luck this beautiful woman to fall in love with him, and to have personal affections for him. Although in the actual script it is clearly stated that O’Brian is satisfied with the initial purpose of the sessions, and is willing to go on with his life, believing to find a right match for him, the director of the film surprisingly goes in direction of a poignant romance spaced with humor. After successfully ended sessions with Cheryl, he continues in a successful love (presumably love-erotic) relationship with another beautiful woman. What I find very disappointing is the very end of the film. In a pure Hollywood style the director goes into a teen-age-like imaginary of a funereal where three beautiful women are crying for him, the great hero. As the director felt that he is in charge of fulfilling the wishes of the real Marc O’Brian.

Regardless the bad-ending, this film opens up serial of questions about legality of the catholic church who is not able to help their believers on one side, and the illegality of the sex therapists, which role in the society is deeply undermined, misunderstood and replaced with those of (also in some states legal!) prostitutes. Is it possible for such a society to overcome the abbreviations of the hard science and stand up for practices that involve direct bodily, even sexual contact? To make step back and recognize legality of a sex-therapy? I doubt since we live in a society, which has ambitions only to get richer but not healthier.

“Free Your Mind” T Shirt

Self-made T shirt design is a way to occupy a public space without paying for it. It is creative, fun and intelligent way to spread messages into the public space involving your own self as a main manager of this particular public area. It is a minimalist way of deconstruction of the laws of "discipline and punish", which we are all forced to live with. One can use T shirts as kind of portal for spreading messages and saying his/her/its own opinion. Thus, the most typical street wear becomes a social media for those who know how to use it. It is a pop product but, through its use as a media for intervention into the public sphere and expressing own genuine attitude it becomes an activist tool, as well. The freedom of the individual to create its own T shirts makes them democratic. However, such democratic paradigm that I prescribe to T shirts presupposes democracy. It is two ways street.

Paradoxically the history of T shirt begins with the soldier’s uniform at the end of the 19^th century before or during the I WW. T shirts become part of the individual styling only after James Dean rebelled against false social norms, representing the wild, young and powerful man body dressed in a simple white T shirt. This kind of street dress went never again out of fashion. But, in the same it time kept representing the social and lower class.

What interests me here is T shirt’s potential for expressing individuality. Paradoxically, T shirts are in the same time the most universal, the most unifying piece of clothing on the globe. Pop and mega stars wear it, as well as the poorest ones, received in a form of donation, intellectuals, artists, workers. Parallel to its global use, it has also a global function. It is good for outdoor as well as for indoor. It can be comfortable but also sexy. It can be for lazy days but also for working hours. Every popular event prints its own T shirt (fresh example is the forthcoming Brazilian football championship).

However, they continue to be our private space for public representation of our own attitude, opinion, for expressing our free mind. It is a space that no one can control entirely and in this sense it is one of the most powerful tools of democracy, although, democracy presupposes its existence. Like graffiti that we wear it on our own body, which we can change it for another at any given moment, T shirts are media, which are uncontrollable. The census here cannot function entirely. Thus, a simple T shirt can be powerful political tool that always connect a concrete individual with a concrete life situation. It resists passive TV and any other type of consumerism and allows people to be interactive, provocative, always fresh and awake, always conscious about their place and role in creating cultural politics.

World Maps and World Mental Maps

Few days ago I’ve heard a good joke about an “inquiry that investigates the lack of foodstuff in the rest of the world. The inquiry failed because the people in Europe didn’t know what is shortage, in Africa they didin’t know what is food, and in USA they didn’t know what is the rest of the world”. This joke exaggerates the most typical prejudices about ignorant Americans who are not able to perceive the rest of the world, about poor Africans and spoiled reach Europeans.

Prejudices exist.  Armgard Seegers notices in his review for the German edition of Atlas of Prejudice in Hamburger Abendblatt, that “everyone knows the most popular prejudices are often not quite nice and are mostly politically incorrect. However, every society on Earth tends to marginalize specific groups, using the usual insults and slurs against those who are considered strange and foreign. And so even in a globalized world prejudices remain inevitable even if their list is slowly getting shorter”.

The Atlas of Prejudice is made by an intelligent graphic designer, with great sense of humor, Yanko Tzvetkov, who decided to do mapping on different stereotypes and prejudices that people from all over the world exercise on other groups and nations. These maps are rendering a different kind of perception of the existing national borders, emphasizing the invisible cultural factor that creates mind maps about the rest of the world. Some of the land borders have long since disappeared from the real world maps but the prejudices, like the one that the Americans have about the Russians, (which in the “Atlas” are described as “Commies”), persist.

Tzvetkov uses graphic design as tool for doing a different kind of cultural study. Besides the creative research he has done, he also performs a creative way of using both visual graphic and language in order to present a contemporary vision of the globalized world. His work  visually enriches the debate on “othering” and perception of the “other” that preoccupies contemporary academic studies.

In "Tearing Europe Apart" with simple usage of a graphic visual graphic tool Tzvetkov presents 20 ways how a continent (in this case Europe) can be sliced:

Tearing Europe Apart

He presents the slices of the Old Continent among Wine, Bier and Vodka Europe, Euphoric and Depressive Europe, Lazy and Hard Working Europe and so on. Everyone is very familiar with these mind maps. Besides, each one of us is very fond of all the simple, small details that represent our native places as special and different.Thus, global maps based on cultural paradigms can be a successful representation of such diversity..  And, if some artist happens to have great sense of humor, like Tzvetkov has, than diving and doing research on such maps can be great fun.(By the way I didn't missed the chance to take a look of Europe according to Greece only to see how they perceive Macedonia. Not so nice: Land X)

Europe according to Britain

Europe according to Switzerland

World according to US

These and other world maps successfully render cultural indications for geographical spaces that are primarily defined by national borders. In our minds geographical spaces are strongly connected with the cultural practices of the peoples. A specific spacial character bonds strongly together geographical features with cultural paradigms. Taking into consideration these cultural paradigms, each time a different world map can be rendered in a provocative way, teasing clearly defined national borders and displaying the more “natural” way human interactions function in today global world.

In addition, take a look at his other project on national cuisine "Cookbook". His blog is great too: http://alphadesigner.com/blog/

Facebook relationship status

I open my FB account and  the first news feed that I see there is that J. K. just got married to B.K. Next what I can see is a silly diamond ring icon and their picture together. Immediately underneath it, another news-feed is telling me that B.K got married to J.K. A silly diamond ring icon and the same picture again. I know that they got married. I am one of her best friends. Few days ago we talked for a while on skype, all excited about it, laughing, a bit crying. Happy. I just  wonder what was the need for both of them to make that announcement as public as possible, immediately after they got back home from the ceremony? 
My friends here are not an exception. Many FB users regularly update their FB relationship status, as they pass from one small to another bigger fight with their partner, moving slowly, with full tension from “in a relationship” to “it is complicated” to “single” status in few weeks or so.

Personally, I perceive FB primarily as a useful tool. I like to use it as an info sheet for cultural and other kind of events. It connects me with a wider circle of “friends” that share same interests. 
However, as for any other social network, the public profile, the public representation of my personality must exist. Besides putting a nice, decent profile picture, I have to fulfill a summary of personal information that would give a complete shape of my image. The list of these information that create my public profile includes: family names and connections, name of the institutions where I study or I used to study, where I live or used to live, favorite books, movies and music, and the most valuable, precious, and important feature that gives such an elegant glimpse into the privacy of everyone - the relationship status.

There are 9 categories on my FB list that I can choose. I read an article on this topic some days before, and there it was written that there are 6 categories. So, things evolve! (meaning: these categories evolved from 6 to 9!)
What I can choose among the categories is that I am: “in a relationship”, that I have a “fiancé” that I am married or divorced or simply separated. In the Macedonian FB transcription, someone got really creative, so besides “it is complicated” (as one of the most interesting categories)they also suggest options like: “civic union” and “domestic partnership”. The most irritating category is the one that says “it is complicated”. Like it is not always like that?! The sense of promiscuity that goes along with such a statement makes from one love relationship a cheep version of a Spanish soap-opera (that infinitely occupies public’s attention with the “complications” of the lovers). It is an announcement of a possible infidelity, possible break up. It involves me as an audience into someone’s private life. At the end one can simply conclude it functions as every other market place. Sometimes I really feel embarrassed to see my friends selling themselves on the FB love market. A friend of mine told me that nowadays young boys asks young ladies in clubs “if they are on the market?” Such question brings up so many layers of meaning behind. However, youngsters just paste what they copy from the social networks. Because everybody is on the market, and they seem they like it. 
In fact, being in a relationship is a matter of constant change. Relationships are, by definition, states of constant mutation and transformation. As long as one is in a relationship it is in a constant move. Things are always complicated in a relationship. People constantly get involved with new people, they constantly fight and love passionately, they have heavy talks, they bring decisions to have children or to get divorced. Someone dies, so the next day you become a widow/er. 
All FB users, however, are so eager to define their statuses so they can belong to a category, to make it stable, to confirm it. They feel the need to be defined, to have a complete public profile, to have an identity that is recognized as such by the circle of 300 FB friends. It is a parody of life, if you ask me!

The Garden - One Man's Land

Traveling through Switzerland with SBB is the ideal travel, seen from a tourist point of view. In a safety environment of the cozy, fancy and expensive train-compartments, the tourist is able peacefully to contemplate the idealistic Swiss landscapes. These landscapes look almost unrealistic as they fit perfectly into the organized and super-clean urbanized areas where usually tourists end up their tours.

Coming from a country where one of the prevailing nature attribute is certainly wilderness, I always have problems to accept, with complete adoration, these perfectly organized landscapes. Not that I don’t agree with the sense of proportion, where the ratio of the parts to the whole reflects harmony. But, somehow, in perceiving the Swiss harmony, at the bottom of the capture, there is a sad recognition that nature has been subjugated to humans. The submissive human influence, behind the idealistic Swiss landscapes, is hidden, along the same analogy, as the tourist experience is hidden behind the windshields of the train. I have the impression that Swiss people (or should I say authorities) have designed the landscapes, so that they can offer the perfect tourist product.

However approaching cities, the trip introduces the tourist with the industrial areas of the country. These areas are somehow magically and in a perfect balance with the rural and wild regions. I have never witnessed such sense of balance in any other place of our planet. Approaching cities, besides the urban seaside of smaller and bigger factories, workshops, shopping malls or recycling stationeries, every city has its own gardening area. It is an area highly regulated within the organized whole, as everything else. The special thing about these areas is that I really, really love them. They are the only space that I somehow perceive as authentic and free. With other words, whenever I see them, my first immediate perception, translated into words is: home! It looks like back home!

These areas are somehow part of the urban paradox. They are restricted by fences, divided in small parcels, and they all belong to someone, who I guess pays money for owning his/her private small garden. Yet, they breathe with individuality, or one can say authenticity, that is not common to see on other places in Switzerland. The love and dedication that each one of these owners invests in his/her private gardens spreads the feeling of something worth to enjoy it, much more than any perfectly organized tourist tour. They all look similar, which is the repeating step, but at the same time they are somehow different. This difference, again in a highly controlled space, attracts attention, first of all because it radiates imperfectness. It shows the naïve abilities of the owner to create its own garden.

The garden becomes an escapist project for each of these individuals, which try to balance the necessity of modern everyday experiences in the urban cities. These gardens, where the individual expression of the owner can cope with the nature, mark the space as authentic. They are not typical for Switzerland, situated at the margins of the prevailing vision of the authorities, how to organize and sustain successful interaction with nature.

The most interesting parts of these gardens are the small and unpresentable, noteless huts and national flags next to them. The garden areas represent the essence of the marginalized groups of immigrants. Thus one can see in space, smaller than a football stadium, dozens of flags from Mexico, US, Spain, Albania, Russia, Serbia etc.  The garden parcels become national spaces of the immigrants. They deliver the vital touch with the soil that gives the notion of connection with the roots, one left in search for better life. Gardens become materialization of the feeling of nostalgia. They are small, pleasant oasis nourished by owner’s sentiments for the country he/she left. Paradoxically they are the most beautiful part of the landscapes SBB offers me through the windshields, during my rides from one city to another. 

New Identity Cards

Few weeks ago, via Facebook, I received an invitation for a promotion of new IDs in Macedonia. “Not again?!” -was my immediate reaction that comes as a reflex of any kind of governmental PR propaganda. My country passed through many transitional phases since the break down of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. The formation of a new independent state brought necessary change of all possible forms of documents including: passports and IDs, driving licenses and many others. Such “transitional practices” have affected citizen’s sense of belonging to a community, nation, ethic group, ghetto, family and so on, until infinity.  

Thus, when I first saw the invitation my immediate reaction was that I don’t want to change my IDENTITY card AGAIN! As a side effect of all possible campaigns for strengthening the national feeling and feeling of belonging to a European community, many citizens, and here I am not an exception, would react with resistance. Leave me alone with your PR propaganda!

It is not only the PR propaganda that gets on my nerves, the one that instructs me constantly to whom I should belong, to how many children should I give a birth, how rich and eternal Macedonia is, but it is the actual visual and architectural reconstruction that takes place nowadays as a materialization of this propaganda. If you ask me, not a big difference from any previous fascist propaganda of any dictatorship. A quasi  “Goebbels” PR machinery that is zealous to determine us, the folks! As a matter of fact, they are doing quite good.

Acctually, this invitation was of a different kind. The invitation, definitely didn’t belong to the PR activities govern lately with great firmness by the governmental apparatus. The invitation is part of an independent artistic projects, that tries to “use the strategies of the creative activism”  to draw attention upon very serious political issues in Macedonia. Thus, the organizers of this absolutely marginalized and side-off event, with almost sect flavor, won my sympathy. Firstly, because of the nostalgic moment connected with the old IDs that have marked my personal transition into full age (and leaving the fool age). Secondly, because of the humble effort to join together the sense of socialist brotherhood with the new age spirituality vogue.

When I asked the artists (using FB of course, I didn’t go to Macedonia to attend the event, which would be rather DADAistic stroke to pull up) is there a deliberate intention to connect the notion of socialist “brotherhood and unity” with the symbol of the radiating heart, they didn’t confirmed it directly. Irena Petkovic, one of the artists that I have talked to, instead made emphasis on the effort to create a contrast between the “ideal past” and the “reality”.

Firstly, the artists, try to create a virtual state, using an esoteric aesthetics, as a “contrapunkt of the public sphere which is largely occupied with the discourse of hatred, discrimination and social exclusiveness” (Irena Petkovik). Their intention is, through resisting the “reality” they are not willing to belong, to create a contrastive STATE of Love and Equality. In such a state, the differences are not repressed but celebrated, and the marginalized groups are the heroes of the community! They have created blank pages in the IDs where each of the participants could write all the heroic deeds he/she have done in life. These two pictures can show you the resemblance between the Pioneer Booklet, that each one of us possessed it as a Pioneer (in the ages of socialist Yugoslavia), and the concept for new Identity Cards.               

Here I would like to stress out the importance of naming these marginalized groups, that are of central interest for this project! They are named as follows: single mothers, unemployed, lesbian and gay population, atheists, sexual workers, drug addicts, Gypsies! Please take a look at this selection and imagine, just imagine the “Macedonian reality”, that these artists are trying to change.

Why would a single mother be a marginalized group? Why would that be one sexual worker?!!? And the atheists, are they serious?! Is it possible that atheists, nowadays, in a country that has EU integration aspirations, are treated as marginalized group? Unemployed, as statistics shows in the last 15 -20 years, are THIRD of the population (and the other third have left the country because they can’t find jobs)! They are not marginalized; they are the majority of the population!

Ok. I’ve read Gramschi, and Marx, Neruda and Racin (Macedonian leftist poet from the beginning of the 20^th ct.) and I am still confused: how is it possible that the apparatus of hegemony works so smoothly each time?! Simply incredible! The above mentioned groups are the absolute margins of the Macedonian reality, although they are more than third of the population. The abyss between the normal-successful-manager-antic-Macedonian—Orthodox- Christians and the Losers is strategically fostered by the neo-liberal radical politics that leaves no space for compromises. I don’t know if the overarching radiating heart of the IDs will help to slow down the radical RIGHT flowing river, but I am sure is not able of stopping it.

The Perfect Woman

When I check my emails, regularly among all possible kind of web site marketing commercials, and library reminders (ok, from time to time I receive real e-mails from my neighbors and friends) I get one or two chain letters. Probably among all various ways of social-network communication, chain letters are the most bizarre ones. The sympathetic content of the messages, usually nicely designed and packed, are followed by a bizarre threat to spread further the message or otherwise you are jinxed. I get confused if I should concentrate on the letter or stay focused on sending it in 10 minutes to 10 friends. As foolish as these messages can be, they do not stop spreading out there in the internet world. 

Few days ago, again, I have received such a letter from a close friend. It always amazes me how highly educated, young, prosperous and bright people keep sending me chain letters. I guess each one of us says to ourselves: I don’t believe in these things, but still, better to send it further on, for any case.  I guess the fear from a bad luck overcomes any sense of the intellect. In a highly profane society as our western European society, the mystery of the bad fortune continues to charm us. 

Nevertheless, what I have received this time was a short, not so nicely designed, message dedicated to the perfect woman. The ending paragraphs were as always as usual warning me that there is no happiness for me if I don’t send it further on, to all good women that I know in my life. As a matter a fact, I know many, but I also know much better ways to express my gratitude, elation towards them and to cherish our friendship than to send them a chain letter. Besides, not all of them use internet. 

The content of the message was as follows: For one perfect Woman; for one magnificent and mighty Woman. For the one who knows how to deal with stress, to deal with most difficult problems. She laughs when she would rather scream; she sings when she would rather cry. She cries when she is happy, she laughs when she feels fear. Her love is abundant. There is only one thing that is not right. She forgets how much she is worth. Send this message to every good woman you know and you respect. Remind her at the fact how unique she is. I love you….

What I have read in this message has frozen my blood. It is the scariest prison that I can ever imagine. And someone portraits this as a perfect and mighty woman. Unbelievable! Many times, I've heard that we live in a schizophrenic society. Without doubt, if that is the ideal of a perfect woman, than indeed, this claim is for real. What I've read in these words was a scared voice of a woman who is not allowed to speak up her mind loudly. She is not allowed to live freely her emotions, her thoughts, her life. She should bear the necessities of various natures, but she is not allowed to show or express any of her struggles. Thus, she should cry when she is happy and sing when she wants to scream. For such ‘perfect’ woman is not allowed to express her inner contents. If she wants to be ‘perfect’ than they should avoid clear expression.

I read these days again some awesome parts of the early 80s feminist critique. Monique Witting in her essay One Is Not Born A Woman says on one place: “what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor: the ‘myth of woman’ plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women”. 
The mark, is the sheer physicality of the sex, to whom one belongs. The same goes for race “They are seen as black; therefore they are black; they are ‘seen as’ women, therefore, they are women. But before being seen that way they first had to be ‘made that way’”. So let make ourselves perfect women, right? 

But we are not able to escape the oppressor’s ideology. We are just following passively, believing that we are on the right way. Monique Witting claims that we should radically question first the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in order to make the first step towards the real change of consciousness. “Simone de Beauvoir underlined particularly the false consciousness which consists of selecting among the features of the myth (that women are different from men) those which look good and using them as a definition for women. What the concept ‘woman is wonderful’ accomplishes is that it retains for defining women the best features (best according to whom?) which oppression has granted us, and it does not radically question the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’,  which are political categories and not natural givens”.

After reading such text, I get insecure if I am on a right way even if I only care to become better human being. Because the category ‘to be better human being’ might also be a construction imposed by the ‘civilization’. 

Knowledge and Power

A classical historian would characterized its ‘discipline’ as one in which knowledge is presumed to be diachronic, as a succession of different states of distribution of the means of production, following certain inner logic. However with the uprising of the Structuralism, the entire concept of history was put into question. Michel Foucault takes the synchronic analysis, suggested by linguistics, and applies it on history.

He proposes a perception of history as a succession of discursive formations, as constituted by system of signs, discursive realms that work to construct a version of the real. In order to find a form of unity that combines all possible different formations he develops the term episteme. Epistemes are conceptual frameworks (deeply rooted, unconscious structures for organizing knowledge) that are used in different epochs to understand the world. These epistemes are built as sign-maps to assign order into society. Once this organizing phenomena is reached we will be able to explain “historical events” in relation to particular discoursive formation which allowed  (or did not allow) some event to happen.

One of the most prominent theoreticians of our time, the creator of “Orientalism”, Edward Said combines the concept of epistemes and the concept of hegemony (Gramsci) to show how the Orient evolved as a mirror image of the “idea of the European identity”. The Orient signifies a system of ‘representations’ formed by political forces that brought Orient into Western learning (disciplines!). The first “Orientalists” were 19^th ct. scholars who translated the writing of the Orient into English. Based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest requires knowledge of the conquered peoples, by knowing the Orient West became to own it. This idea of knowledge as power (again Foucauldian influence) is very much present in Said’s critique. Beside Foucauldian influence (in first place the concept of episteme and the method of archival research) another important “poststructuralist” influence is Derrida’s concept of “the center and margins” and of “the Self and the Other”.

Some of Foucauldian concepts were major influence for another school of critique in the US: the New Historicism. Heavily influenced by new linguistic concepts, they start to perceive the historical as textual. History is not any more seen as stable, unchangeable context that literary texts reflect upon. It is rather, like the literary text itself, a discourse.  It is perceived simply as ‘representation’ – term very important to the new historians – enabling to study relations between texts (both literary and historical) and to discover how they trace, or negotiate, certain patterns of meaning.

The New Historians are focused on issues of power, mainly influenced by Marxist theory and Foucauldian theories on knowledge and power. They are mainly dealing with the processes of the circulation of discourses and how they succeed to gain and maintain their “social energy” (term created by Stephen Greenblat).

What is the big impact that Foucault made to change the perspectives of how observations upon history (or literature, or cultural artifacts) should be made?

Foucault noted that the world we live in is shaped as much as by language as by knowledge. Knowledge and perception always occur through the media of language. In certain ways, we will not be able to know anything if we are not able to order the reality linguistically. But language is a matter which is very much alive, perpetrates in time, changes its essence constantly. Therefore, what counts as knowledge also changes in time, and with each change, the place of language in knowledge also changes.

Foucault goes further on in his “historical” analysis, showing that the two realms of knowledge and power are intrinsically interconnected. Modern power can enter every artery of our daily lives (Big Brother is watching you!) subjecting every aspect of human existence to strategies of knowing. The Panopticon is the metaphor he uses to describe the state superior surveillance, which is not any more connected directly to a particular institution or a person. Thus, the form of “gouvernementalite” is formed in which, through subtle techniques of control, compliance is ensured.

Heterotopia_ Michel Foucault

Heterotopia, literally meaning `other places` that describes a world off center, with respect to normal or everyday spaces, one that possesses multiple, fragmented, of even incompatible meanings.

Heterotopia is a rich concept in urban design and can be investigated throughout our contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated communities, wellness hotels, festival markets.

The text “Des espaces autres” was a lecture given by Michel Foucault on 14 March 1967 to the Circle of Architectural Studies. The text was however not published for almost 20 years. It was finally published by the French journal Architecture, Mouvment, Continuite in 1984 with title “Des espaces authres”.

 

Heterotopia: Of Other Spaces (1967)

The great haunting obsession of the 19^th ct. was, as we know, history: themes of development and stagnation, themes of crisis and cycle, themes of accumulation of the past, the big surplus of the dead (1) and the menacing cooling of the world (2). It is in the second principle of thermodynamics that the 19^th ct. found its essential mythological resources (3).

(1)    In the formulation `surplus of the dead` we read reference to the demographic and hygienic fears of the 19^th ct.; more particularly, the fear of a demographic explosion bringing with it the accumulation of dead bodies. ...().. Where to bury all these surplus dead bodies? Foucault comes back to this debate later in the text when he speaks about the relocation of cemeteries to the outskirts of the city.

(2)    The 19^th ct was haunted by the fear that the earth was cooling, in a linear, physically determined way from fire ball to ice ball.

(3)    Foucault is referring to the concept of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that closed systems – while their energy remains constant – evolve to ever higher levels of disorder.

The present epoch would rather be an epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at the moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of  (refers to Hegelianism, historicism and most of all Darwinism) than that of network that connects points and intersects with its own skein (The rise of s new spatial order based on the network is a leading theme in the first part of the text, lecture).

Medieval space: space of localization. This space of localization opened up with Galileo, for the real scandal of Galileo’s work is not so much his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolves around the sun, but this constitution of an infinite and infinitely open space... () ... In other words, starting with Galileo, starting with the 17^th ct. extension supplanted localization.

Today the emplacement (4) substitutes extension, which itself had replaced localization... ().. We are in an epoch in which space is given to us in the form of relations between emplacements.

(4)    The term ‘emplacement’ in French refers to site and location (as in parking space) or the setting of a city, but also to support (a billboard: emplacement publicitaire)

Pg.16 Like on FB :)

Now, in spite of all techniques invested in space ...()... contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desacralized. ...()... we may still not have reached the point of a practical desacralization of the space. And perhaps our life is till ruled by certain number of oppositions that cannot be touched, that institution and practice have not yet dared to undermine; oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between space of leisure and that of work. All these are animated by unspoken sacralization. (5)

(5)    In the introduction to The Order of Things he refers to utopia and heterotopia as literary genres. In this lecture heterotopia refers to places and institutional arrangements in society.

Utopias are emplacements with no real place. ...()... utopias essentially are fundamentally unreal spaces.

Heterotopias are: ...()... counter-emplacements, a sort of effectively realized utopias in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Since these places are absolutely other than all the emplacements that they reflect, and of which they speak, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias: heterotopias.

The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a place without a place. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does really exist, and as it exerts on the place I occupy a sort of return effect… the mirror functions as a heterotopia in the respect that it renders this place that I occupy at the moment when I look myself in the mirror, at once absolute real and absolute unreal space, since in order to be perceived, it has to pass through virtual point, which is over there.

Heterotopias: how can we describe them? What meaning do they have?

I principle; heterotopias of crisis: sacred, or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are ...()... in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly etc. ...()... But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced by what could be called heterotopias of deviation: rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, retirement homes.

II principle; heterotopia in the course of its history: cemetery (the ‘other city’).

III principle; heterotopia has the power to juxtapose in a single real space several spaces: the theatre, the cinema, the garden. (Pg.20) The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been, since the dawn of antiquity, a sort of blissful and universalizing heterotopia.

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IV principle; heterotopias are heterochronisms; linked with the slices of time. Heterotopia begins to function fully when people find themselves in a sort of absolute break with their traditional time: museums, libraries (heterotopias linked to the accumulation of time) and fairgrounds, vacation villages. ....()... museums and libraries are heterotopias in which time never ceases to pile up, heaping upon top of its own summit...

V principle; heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing, that both isolates them and makes them penetrable: pubs, hammams.

VI principle; the last trait of heterotopias is that they have ...()... a function. ...()... Either their role is to create a space of illusion... (brothels)...()... Or else, on the contrary creating another space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorderly, ill construed and sketchy (colonies), Jesuit colonies.

The ship is the heterotopia par excellence (6).

(6)    This poetical artifice of the ship obscures the fact that the text ends in limbo, that the text required a final part. After the historical outline, the ‘short history of space’ from the introduction and after the main part, the trans-historical/ahistorical outline of heterotopology, the third part should have treated the role of heterotopia in the third phase of space, the spacial order of emplacement. In any case Foucault has not responded to the question that the construction of the text calls for.

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[1] Heterotopia and the city