In his introduction to the present subject of Varlık, editor Mehmet Erte reminds us of a time when a literary journal revealed in any province of Anatolia may discover its place on the cabinets of Istanbul bookstores. Magazines printed in Istanbul, in the meantime, reached readers all around the nation. These days are over. ‘Not to mention distribution, what number of day by day publications are left that may survive?’
Erte identifies the offender of print’s dying in social media, which did not convey the pluralism it as soon as promised. As a substitute, by way of ‘algorithmic encirclement’, social media is ‘quickly homogenizing society, imprisoning it in echo chambers.’ That’s exactly why we have to help literary magazines like Varlık, which is now in its 93rd yr of existence. ‘Once we lose the magazines, solely those that produce based on market calls for and clients designed by social media algorithms will stay.’
Boycott Fb now
In Varlık’s symposium, ‘Nervousness of distance’, writers from totally different disciplines (philosophy, literature and cultural research) critique social media. Mahmut Mutman asks what a social media profile is, philosophically. The place precisely are we writing to after we put up on social media? In rhetoric, Mutman notes that the ‘face’ on Fb is a ‘synecdoche’: an element (face) that stands in for the entire (id). Like different social media platforms, Fb ‘is a spot the place I assemble my face, my look, my emotions and ideas, in brief, my “id”.’
Social media seemingly permits one to current herself as she needs to be seen, however is, in reality, ‘a machine working with an algorithmic system built-in into an financial mechanism.’ Meta, the proprietor of Fb, income from gathering demographic and behavioural information from roughly 3 billion customers worldwide (34 million of whom reside in Turkey) and promoting it to advertisers. There may be, in different phrases, no ‘self’, simply quantifiable information accrued for these platforms.
Mutman agrees with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer that the tradition trade ‘ruthlessly erases all types of individuality by invading the realm of creativeness or fantasy’. He provides a approach out for customers of social media, which has changed radio and tv because the medium of the tradition trade: we wield the facility not to make use of it. ‘Are you able to think about that roughly 3 billion customers worldwide, and 34 million in Turkey, stopped utilizing Fb for, say, every week?’ With out these many thousands and thousands of profile pages, Fb would stop to exist.
Nervousness and resistance
Tuba Pırlant Yılmaz’ reminds us of Jean-Paul Sartre’s analogy in Being and Nothingness about somebody getting caught whereas trying by way of a keyhole. ‘Their consciousness, which till that second flowed freely, instantly turns into seen from the surface, solidifies, and stands there like an object.’ Sartre was describing a second of disgrace, ethical reckoning, and ontological shock. Once we ship a WhatsApp message, look forward to the blue tick that acknowledges receipt, and exist in that interval between studying and responding, we inhabit an identical area, in a ‘ready room’.
Social media platforms revenue from the precarity of that area. The distinction from Sartre’s character is that on social media platforms the observer and the noticed are the identical individual. ‘The topic is each spectator and actor, and the scene by no means closes.’
Yılmaz seems to be at Byung-Chul Han’s The Transparency Society (2017), Rachel Cusk’s Define trilogy (2014–2018), and Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 movie Parasite and identifies a shared curiosity in clear, faux and invisible identities. She recommends Heidegger to know subjectivity totally: ‘Within the digital age, Dasein can’t detach itself from the community, and even when it does, it doesn’t stay silent; it turns into an perspective, a definition in itself.’
On social media, for instance, perspective turns into definition. ‘Somebody posting on Instagram doesn’t simply add a photograph; they condemn themselves to a story, a consistency, and an id. Somebody making a video on TikTok acts by inwardly sensing how the algorithm will learn them – which class, which viewers they are going to be positioned in. Expressing an concept on X transforms the topic into that concept. He not exists because the thinker, however because the factor he thinks.’
A 2020 report by the American Psychological Affiliation discovered that 63% of Technology Z recognized the stress to be seen as a big supply of stress. It’s good to be concerned, Yılmaz contends, because it’s an indication of not having surrendered, of resisting being outlined, of making an attempt to keep up one’s ambiguity, and of not totally internalizing the gaze of the opposite. ‘On this sense, nervousness is a type of resistance; it’s the very act of refusing to vanish.’
Orhan Veli
The problem additionally includes a work of literary biography, co-authored by students Necati Tonga and Özkan Aras. They deal with the college years of Orhan Veli, arguably probably the most vital poet of Turkish literature within the twentieth century, alongside Nâzım Hikmet. Veli studied at Istanbul College’s Philosophy Division between 1933 and 1936, the place he befriended Mîna Urgan, Azra Erhat, Güzin Dino, and different cultural luminaries.
Throughout his studentship, Veli attended conferences by Hans Reichenbach, the German thinker who based the ‘Berlin Circle’ in 1928 however was dismissed from his college put up in Berlin due to his Jewish ancestry in 1933. Reichenbach emigrated to Turkey the place he headed the division of philosophy at Istanbul College. Veli, we study, attended one among his lectures on snowboarding.
The poet dressed very nicely, at all times wore a tie, and would have his sneakers polished on the shoemaker’s in Taksim. He ‘by no means missed a single tea celebration or ball organized by the Society of Literature College College students.’ In 1934, the Society revealed a tradition complement, ‘the Literary Ball’. There Veli revealed two satirical drawings of college professors (one is the legendary exiled philologist Leo Spitzer) in addition to a mocking poem, all reprinted in Varlık, the place Veli revealed a lot of his poems and essays in his time.
As Varlık’s editor Erte writes, regardless of all of the difficulties, ‘the journey of our literature’s flagship continues,’ for which one feels grateful.
Evaluate by Kaya Genç
