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.

Pg. 20

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

Roland Barthes

The starting point of his essay “The Death of the Author” is that language is the one that rules over a work of art and not the author. So to assume that a text represents a meaning that can be deducted from the author’s intention is misleading, a direct connection between the author and the text does not exist because the text itself is a compilation of “unconscious quotes”: “a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

The death of the author means death of the theory of origin. Originality is put into question: ”a field without origin-or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins”.

Because the text has no ‘intentional’ meaning it can only be perceived as an open field for research and as inter-textual within a network of texts. “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

The author becomes, should be called scriptor, all literature should be called writing and work of art becomes simply a text: “In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason, science, law“.

The claims he latter develops even further in his essay “From Work to Text” entered into the agenda of poststructuralism, such as the celebration of liberation from (pha)logocentric axioms like Father, Law, Reason; the polyphony of different language games (Lyotard); the concept of play and jouissance (Derrida, Lyotard): “text is the jubilant celebration of its uncontrollable semantic openness, which constitutes an anarch(isti)c act of subversion against any center of a structure – through history also known as God, Reason, Science, Law”.

One of his latest essays “The centre of the city –the empty centre” can be perceived as an allegory of the condition of postmodern art, as well as critique.