Jale Öner lives and works in Istanbul. She graduated from Anadolu University Fashion Design Department and worked in design for two years after her graduation. She is going to graduate from the Department of Cultural Management at Bilgi University, this spring. During her graduate education, she worked as a content writer and web editor, focusing on text and visuals in various creative agencies and galleries. Topics of her interest include ecology, freedom of expression, queer theory, city, and cultural heritage.
The body is prone to vulnerability. It makes us subject to the gaze and touch of the other. In return for being subjects that form relationships with one another through our autonomous bodies, every form of address attributed to the body by the authorities, every role attempted to be undertaken, makes the subject more prone to vulnerability.
Butler associates this vulnerability with the condition of relationality; “The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint”.
This reminds us of both the impasses of collective life and the intervention directed at identity through the body. Even if by embracing the idea that we are autonomous we might challenge the idea of being controlled, a minimum of dependence is not a condition from which we can steer away.
Freud, too, draws conclusions about the relationship between the subject and the condition of vulnerability/inflicting injury, and says that the ‘stranger’ – if he is not a collaborator – is unworthy of our love, and even that it is highly likely for him to harm us; “After primal man had discovered that it lay in his own hands, literally, to improve his lot on earth by working, it cannot have been a matter of indifference to him whether another man worked with or against him.” And thus, in the contrary course of events, he positions the stranger as the potential perpetrator of our possible vulnerability; “[The stranger] seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, [...] if he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and showing his superior power”.
This creates a fragile structure, and for the sustainability of this fragile structure, the subject has to act according to the written and unwritten rules that ensure the continuity that ties him to other bodies, and if he does not, it would be inevitable for him to be marginalized. When he breaks these rules, the subject, who no longer has a fellow collaborator, is also deprived of the love and compassion of society. And on top of that, he is not only deprived of this love, but it becomes justifiable for him to face an intervention through the body and the space he inhabits.
Subjects who are facing a menace, internalize norms and reproduce the authority in the bodies and spaces of their own and in their surroundings. The subject is not only exposed to pressure, but he also produces and exerts this pressure. On the other hand, the deviants who need to undergo an intervention are removed from the fields of representation and only find themselves a place in statistics. No matter if the subject adapts to the community or not, the utterance of “know thyself” that he perceives is a constant.
In response to all these threats, necessity alone is not enough to keep people together. So, is alienation the only thing that the individual who has realized this faces?
The exhibition, Single-Base Incompatible Alliance, discusses the impasses of collective life through the interventions directed at identity by way of the body and of space, and the condition of alienation that arises from these processes.