Expansive Subjection, vol. 2

Montage series | Type: Polemic, photo-montage. Year: 2018-2019.

The 2nd installment of "Expansive Subjection” - following the original series in 2015 - expands on the idea of memory as a creative resource and the act of remembering/returning as a sly but radical means of creation. The aphoristic text “On making sense” that follows, was written around the same time as a complementary piece.

On making sense

Pure thoughts and ‘making sense’ are not the same thing. Pure thoughts might be traveling at speeds not even reasonably graspable to the consciousness. Act of making sense on the other hand, has to do with de-acceleration of thoughts, rewinding, cutting, clipping, montaging. Construction of patterns, hence geometry as a device, has an innate connection with the act of making sense. Codification happens through patterns, not just in language – the most obvious example – but in all arts as well. Figures lead to codes, which lead to patterns, whose accumulation construct memories – or information that could be accessed when desired. So-called “abstraction” in artistic terms, in this sense, is an attempt to overcome patterns familiar to the mind in order to produce previously inaccessible ways of knowing, or sensations.

Domestic environments often consist of a careful choreography of objects. Music, in notational essence and in performance, relies on accumulated relations between individual moments whether signified by marks invented to diagram (through abstraction) the sonic event or performed by repeated movements of the flesh against air in specific duration(s). Examples could be multiplied and a sweeping generalization such as “all beings leave behind patterns,” could be made. The real issue in question is not the factual existence of the patterns themselves, but the purpose they serve as intermediary media in interpreting the external world for beings. These intermediary media act as what one might call “frames,” or “techniques”, whose very existence draw a line between the being and whatever-the-being-is-not, so as to make claims of “us/them” viable. It is through pattern making –mental or otherwise- that the being achieves the status of a subject in the world and delineates objects to make senses of (which involves further processes of pattern making –yes, mental or otherwise-).

Making sense, or pattern construction, is inevitably related to processes of ‘revisiting’. Obsession with progress as a default condition, a constant translation forward without looking back, in simplest terms obstructs the capacity to make sense. Revisiting however shouldn’t be understood as going backwards or the opposite direction, but rather as the movement in question welcoming vectoral shifts so that it will familiarize itself with certain previously well-trodden paths. Coming back to a –again, mental or otherwise- place, strolling again amongst the traces left by previous happenings is the very essence of a will that has an urge to make sense. It is in fact the means of ‘recollecting’ certain parts through this stroll that spawns the logic –dare I say, grammar- of the pattern in the making. In this vein, there is a ritualistic side to the act of making sense; the body itself has to participate in pattern construction in space-time, thus also emerges the concept of everyday life as a revolutionary context.  

Making sense is forensic because the subject is always late to a scene. Making sense is ceremonial because rituals of codes have to be performed to access the liminal. Making sense is archeological because ruins are excavated and catalogued along the way – ruins that already are and those that will be.

Being a subject is to be stuck in a continuous self-induced state of arrival. Subject is always to arrive at a destination, even when it’s on the leave. This is the linear nature of biography; as Hannah Arendt once pointed out, biography is a line cutting through everything circular that is earthly. Everything earthly is indeed circular, or in other terms, cyclical. Cyclical natures don’t necessarily imply simple replay – it could be thought more like shifting gears, passing narratives and elements (in the chemical as well as an analogous sense) to one another. Yet the very condition of becoming a subject is fleshing out an arc of life (bios), that has clearly defined nodes, edges, vertices. The revelatory aspect in this line of thought is that subject-making, or subject-being, is not necessarily an anthropocentric concept. Groupings of human-beings could be made subjects via other earthly groupings such as climate or geography. This is not about a nature/human divide; as ‘human’ is a categorization of particular earthly elements (chemical or otherwise) grouped in particular means just as ‘climate’ is a categorization that indicates another earthly grouping with a different domain. By affecting the ‘bios’ that is human, and inducing particular patterns in their ways of existing, climate attempts to make sense of humans, just as humans attempt to make sense of the climate through pattern making (meteorology, astronomy, etc.). In this example, humans assume subject status while objectifying climate, and climate does the same. Climate aspires to be a subject as well, as it is also always arriving, since tomorrow’s weather is already somewhere else’s weather.

Project: Aykut Imer.