The Near and
The Elsewhere
"The Near and The Elsewhere" is an ongoing exploration into urban design, cybernetics, and power dynamics, using visual media to map connections within urban experiences. Centered around Istanbul's Esenler bus terminal, the project highlights personal narratives within urban settings, offering an insightful compilation of interdisciplinary investigations without claiming scientific completeness.
The Near and The Elsewhere is an intuitive design research,
exploring terms related to cybernetics, urban design, power, and behavioral architecture.
Rather than creating a cause-and-effect relationship, the work aims to weave a web of connections, between the layers of urban experience.
Discovering structures and system architectures from different disciplines,
through readings and visual explorations with illustrations, photographs, and collages.
The work mainly uses photographs from a legendary bus terminal called Esenler, in Istanbul.
To understand the position of personal narratives in urban archipelago of enclosures.
That lightning encounter with the place is the main inspiration,
which gave me the urge to conduct deeper investigations.
Of course, it's never a complete or scientific research,
but an interesting collection of meditations and learning with the city itself.
Brief Introduction to the Chapters
Chapter 01 introduces the strange history of Esenler Coach Terminal and its relationship to Istanbul’s social, political, and socio-cognitive fabric. Beginning with my own encounter with the terminal, it follows the building’s unfinished architecture, its division into “upstairs” and “downstairs,” and the informal worlds that grew inside its abandoned spaces. The chapter is also informed by the 140Journos documentary Esenler Otogar: Alt Kat.
Chapter 02 turns toward José Ortega y Gasset and the inseparable relationship between individual life and the world it inhabits.
Chapters 03, 04, 06, 07, 11, and 13 are mainly shaped by my encounter with Stavros Stavrides and his book Towards the City of Thresholds. Through Stavrides, the project moves between Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Giorgio Agamben, Pierre Bourdieu, Victor Turner, and Arnold van Gennep. These chapters examine metropolitan shock, the social production of space, urban rhythms, checkpoints, states of exception, and thresholds. Together, they describe the city not as a stable container but as a system that produces identities, movements, divisions, and encounters.
Chapter 05 interrupts this theoretical movement with lyrics from Chromatics’ In the City, placing the emotional and nocturnal experience of the metropolis beside its political architecture.
Chapter 08 turns to Marc Augé’s Non-Places, exploring passages, stations, airports, and checkpoints: spaces designed to be crossed, where identity is temporarily suspended and belonging becomes uncertain.
Chapter 09 uses David Harvey’s essay “Alienation and Urban Life” to examine creative destruction, displacement, gentrification, and the repeated demolition of established urban life in the service of capital.
Chapter 10 Edited fragments from Gruppo di Nun’s Revolutionary Demonology. Here, the city becomes a thermodynamic machine built upon separation, waste, suffering, and the illusion of permanent order.
Chapter 11 approaches Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception through Stavrides’s reading of the partitioned city. Chapter 12 introduces Michel Foucault’s heterotopias: real places that mirror, disturb, or invert the dominant order. Chapter 13 returns to Stavrides’s central image of the threshold as an in-between territory where identities may be rehearsed, negotiated, and transformed.
Chapter 14 introduces Colin Ward’s theory of spontaneous order, beginning with Peter Kropotkin’s account of people organizing collectively without imposed authority. It asks how durable forms of order can emerge through common need, improvisation, and experiment.
Chapter 15 is a montage of fragments from different parts of Revolutionary Demonology, bringing together “Ritual: Every Worm Trampled Is a Star,” “Mater Dolorosa,” and “Solarisation.” The city appears here as a wounded body, a sarcophagus of forgotten signs, and a structure that secretly contains the possibility of its own inversion.
Chapter 16 continues with an excerpt from the “Introduction to Revolutionary Demonology,” connecting cybernetic systems, entropy, feedback loops, sacrifice, and the impossibility of perfect equilibrium.
Chapter 17 turns to Italo Calvino’s essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” opening another path between combinatory systems, machines, language, and literature.
Chapter 18, “City of Psychopaths,” is my own meditation on Istanbul as a city repeatedly desired, conquered, possessed, and reshaped by emperors, kings, political power, and fantasies of glory.
Chapter 19 draws from Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War. It considers Empire not as a distant sovereign power but as something immanent to society—something that becomes most visible through crisis, emergency, and acts of exclusion.
Chapter 21 returns to Gruppo di Nun’s “Every Worm Trampled Is a Star,” where the metropolis becomes both a monstrous machine and the site of its own decomposition.
Finally, Chapter 22 closes the project with “Loud, Loud, Loud” by Aphrodite’s Child: a song imagining the day when the walls of cities crumble, soldiers abandon their war games, and everyone begins to sing together.
ECT can be read through many of these concepts at once: as a heterotopia, a threshold, and an interrupted non-place. It also approaches the idea of the commons, although not as a beautiful or purely emancipatory example. Its unfinished spaces were reshaped by informal use, survival, imagination, crime, corruption, and collective need. The place was produced by its participants, while its architecture also shaped their movements and inner worlds. This tension is why the project moves between thresholds, heterotopias, states of exception, spontaneous order, and cybernetic systems. The Near and The Elsewhere follows these theoretical paths but relocates them within Istanbul and the uncanny, sensual experience of the ECT.
Perhaps this comes from the soul of the city—
Istanbul’s demon, the whispering sound of the beast.
The research is also angry by its nature.
Haunted by the muse of the serpent.
Angry with the emperors, kings, and rulers
who built this city upon our pain, tears, and labor.
Esenler Coach Terminal (ECT), imagined as a inter-city bus center for İstanbul, a city of 14 million. While it was introduced to the public as an awsome modern city project, because of over-budgeting and financial corruption, cases it never ended like its planned. It Shops, hostels, miles of space were never opened or never used for twenty years stand as a rebuke unfinished bussiness.
But still, it started to operating as a city’s main travel station, houndras of busses, passengers use that space, since there is no possible alternative for it.
With out anyone noticing, ECT splited into two: Upstairs and down stairs, as named by it’s users.
A treshold, a crack at the hearth of the city.
Soon, this void was organically filled by "imagination and needs" of the people of Istanbul.
Considerations started to build a new terminus on the European side of Istanbul, since the Topkapı bus terminus was becoming increasingly crowded around 90’s.
Esenler Coach Terminal (ECT) designed and offered by the Turkish right wing politicians, not so popular or powerfull at that time. The new terminal at the hearth of İstanbul, presented as a marvellues, genious move for İstanbul’s modernization to citizens. With the big projects like that, right wing trying to create public sympathy.
Especially in ECT’s case, we were witnessing a star borning like a mad supernove, project were started by the young and charismatic İstanbul mayor of the time, who is also modern day President RTE. The building, which he named "Mega Proje", helped him gain great popularity among the people and rise politically.
In 1987, the construction of the new terminus started.
In 1994, it entered service.
The structure cost $140 million,
but the thing is, it’s never finished.
They didn’t finish it. (?)
The Outside becomes the Inside, and the Inside now has no limits.
In 20 years, there were un numbered suicides in the ECT often jumping from the main hall.
According to the numbers that can be reached, nearly 100 women were found dead in various parts of the bus station or committed suicide by throwing themselves from their towers.
Thousands of gang wars took place and dozens of unsolved murders were committed.
There were families who sent their children to Istanbul and were never heard from again.
ECT even become a transit point of many militant, for many terror attacks that took place in Istanbul.
Despite all this, the bus station never ceased to operate. Exist on that un-positioned state. In the ever accelararing rythims of the political, social and economical wars of Constantinople, ECT keep serve in it’s unique divided reality.
Asymmetry of the probabilistic power nanospasms between the place and the order.
For twenty years, no security work has been done to prevent crime and people have been left to their fate in this huge concrete pile.
Crime organisations had learned to find innovating ways to make their activities sustainable, like co operating with the police, using the every under-stair advantage of a corrapted governed.
ETC’s story is also explaining the relationships networks between a fascist government and how it co-operates with crime and capital for it’s benefits; In a concentrated form, but remains in a suspended state as far as the eye can see.
If ECT had been a completed structure, it would have been just a Non-place as suggested by the French sociologist Marc Augé.
Stations, stops, airports, passages that carry us from one enclave to another. These places are safe, orderly, and organized, both temporally and spatially. Every millisecond is significant, the experience we spend inside is organized with a tight rhythm, with entrance and exit points always fixed, accessible only to subjects who have proven their 'innocence' through checkpoints, a transit.
But then again, if the ECT functioned normally, there would be nothing to distinguish it from a normal station, that you will easly pass through. Probably, ECT’s story would be unimaginable to be anywhere other than Istanbul, but everyone in this city is possessed by the ecstasy of gold and acts delusional, we should remember.
If the Empiror can’t finish his bussines, order can’t function.
An unfinished construction, open to re-position by the “new finding fathers of the land” in some terms, can be relationed with a treshold.
The collective imagination of the people, occupy, and fill that void.
Threshold areas mark changes, indicate comparisons, regulate and give meaning to the act of crossing as an act which produces changes.
Fragments of a diferent life, experienced during the struggle, take form in spaces and times with threshold characteristics.
When people collectively realize that their actions are becoming diferent from their usual collective habits, then chance can become radical.
The metropolitan experience is a shock experience.
City space-time is experienced through the traumatic mediation of shock.
Individuals have to learn how to respond to demanding stimuli, adapting their public behavior to an emerging metropolitan experience.
We have to cope with an accelerating tempo of fragmentary impressions which are shattering the spatial and temporal continuity of traditional collective experience. The result is a kind of anesthetization, according to Simmel and Benjamin, that leads people to assume a so-called “blasé attitude” in order to safely absorb ever-increasing assaults on their senses (Simmel 1997).
Separation is fascist sorcery , individual consciousness is disengaged from collective memories and common experiences.
No experience is allowed to leave its mark in the depths of individual memory, no experience is compared to previous events, and no experience acquires its weight and meaning in the context of shared traditions. Conveniently stored in individual memory, such “depthless” experiences are always recallable through a conscious memory able to classify and control them -.
The metropolis presents itself to its inhabitants more as a network of flows than a structure of places.
Swimming in the fascistically created homogeneous space.
Negotiating our bodies and consciousness in the world of non-verbal messages, images, and logos;
are powerful markers of the fabricated nonsense.
The new dominant ideology, Castells explains, insists on “the end of history and the supersession of places in the space of flows.” The space of flow constitutes the dominant structure of the distribution of function and power in contemporary society.
The architects of our lives are divided.
Space contains, delimits and thus identities social life.
It is important however to think of space not as a container of society but as a formative element of social practices.
The contemporary urbanized world is a world predominantly ruled by interests organized around the economic extraction of profit. Urban environments, contemporary cities and especially metropolises are important shaping factors of ruling organized interests, whether they take the form of banks, corporations, state enterprises, industry complexes or trading companies.
At the same time, a diverse geometry of hierarchical relations between such organized interests casts its shadow on metropolitan everydayness, dominating the city’s spatiotemporal transformations.
The conglomerate of differently defined enclaves.
Rhythm
In the “postmodern” metropolis, “free space” appears as the site of a phantasmagoria of freedom. They establish the ‘in’ and ‘out’ boundaries of their cultural domains.
Space is defined, or rather comes into being, as a socially meaningful artifact, in the process of being “temporalized” through inhabitation rhythms.
Agents of order invent their own rhythms and adjust subjects time/space relationship, with the outer world; Position it, by dis-posiotoning it.
Deleuze and Guattari recognized, from the very beginning what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other.
“Every rhythm implies a relation of a time with a space, a localized time, or if one wishes, a temporalized place.”
Space is recognized as familiar or appropriate because occurring incidents can be understood as similar to those that have already taken place there before.
The former lacks the idea of history and is therefore enclosed in a constantly self-repeating universe. Lévi-Strauss considers rituals as “a machine for the destruction of time.”
In modern urban practice, identities are framed spatially and temporally according to practices that transpose the experience of the partitioned city into the experience of partitioned identities.
City it self, is a cybernetic design, knotting its leafs in both sensual and physical domains.
A carefully designed system of control is absolutely necessary for the regulation of socially defining rhythms.
More than by walls,
metropolitan enclaves are characterized by checkpoints.
We walk through the city full of checkpoints, which they put there to make us safe from “something dangerous,” something unpredictable.
Checkpoints are those modular elements of a prevailing rhythm that produce a new dominant experience of “being in public.”
By marking everyday routines, checkpoints define distinct routes for different categories of inhabitants of the partitioned city. Toll posts or underground station checkpoints mark the everyday movements of many city dwellers.
Like an ancient ritual, their existence generates the performance of practices devoted to ritual repetition. As in the case of “prophylactic rituals” devoted to protection from unexpected natural disasters, checkpoints appear primarily as points of self-evident protection.
“ The progress of alien or compensatory consumerism has its own internally destructive dynamics. It requires what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” to be let loose upon the land. Daily urban life in the city, and settled ways of living, relating, and socializing, are repeatedly disrupted to make way for the latest fad or fancy. Demolitions and displacements to make way for gentrification or Disneyfication break open already achieved fabrics of urban living to make way for the gaudy, the gargantuan, the ephemeral, and the fleeting. Dispossession and destruction, displacement and construction become vehicles for vigorous and speculative capital accumulation as the figures of the financier and the rentier, the developer, the landed proprietor, and the entrepreneurial mayor step from the shadows into the forefront of capital’s logic of accumulation through alienation and dispossession.” ———
Harvey, David; “Crisis-scapes: Athens and Beyond”, Alienation and urban life, Crisis-scapes conference publication, Athens, 2014, pp. 195-208
The story ends like this.
There is a wound in the heart of the world.
Before the light, before a voice in the abyss uttered the first word from the black belly of night, there was only ocean.
A boundless liquid expanse of indefinite recombination.
Know that all matter in the universe vibrates to an incessant and frightful music.
Maximum multiplicity of equiprobable states, zero-point energy, quantum superpositions decomposed and recomposed in perfect interference.
If you listen in absolute silence, hidden among the beats of your heart you can hear the hissing of the ancient dragon that sleeps, cradled by the sound of the trembling universe.
Cities are thermodynamic machines that proceed blindly by chewing up the free energy of matter in motion. The order of their cosmos is a symmetry painfully carved in dark matter.
We have been told the story of creation as the act of pure will of an eternal, uncreated unity, from which the structure of the universe emanates in linear fashion.
This original unity is the delirium of a terrifying perpetual motion machine that feeds upon itself indefinitely, burning in the vacuum like a star gone mad.
The Neoliberal imaginary, the dull idea of Apocalyise, a thermodynamic abomination we have nurtured for too long.
The ancients tell us that the world was born from the slaughtered flesh of a monstrous mother. Over the centuries she has been given many names. She is the wave vibrating on the waters of oceanic chaos. She is the eternally regenerating serpent, slithering aimlessly through the silence of time, generating and devouring universes.
Listen carefully: she is not one, because she is none. Infinitely divided, she reproduces herself indefatigably, like the severed tail of a firefly.
She is circumference without centre: a divergent series from the heart of which issues forth a vast and boundless chasm.
Know that a universe without a mother is a tyranny born of extermination.
The thermodynamics of separation is fascist time sorcery that produces locally polarised flows of energy.
The reproduction of civilisation is nourished on the death of the ancient ideology, wailing, crucified in the heart of the world.
From the liquid darkness of mother’s entrails we emerged into the cruel light of a uncanny dawn. The order of creation separates us from the dark embrace, as it continues to feed on our flesh and spirit to build their bloody temples ever higher.
In moments of awesome terror, you can hear the wrenching cry lacerating the darkness, while her claws search furiously for humanity in the night.
Such is the law of universal attraction. Every atom of the cosmos trembles in despair at the sound of your inconsolable cry, which pursues us as a hungry beast pursues a bleeding animal.
Love is your insatiable hunger. Love is our joy at returning to universe’s womb.
ii
Order descends into chaos. Light fades into darkness. No structure is eternal.
Every symmetrical organisation contains its own programmed decay in the asymmetry of the probabilistic nanospasms that make it up.
The order of creation feeds on the illusion that a system in equilibrium produces a sustainable balance of energy, but equilibrium is maintained at the price of a constant production of waste—chaotic trash that is pushed out to the margins of the cosmic order but threatens to invade and destroy it at any moment.
We must therefore be aware that the order of creation has a thermodynamic structure that necessarily dooms it to collapse.
The energetic decay of patriarchal temporal structures takes the form of a gradual and unstoppable collonisation of civilisation.
Domesticated humanities turned monstrous haunt the nightmares of the declining West, in the form of rebellious androids, synthetic hormones, and painful initiatory scars adorned with glittering silicon implants.
Over the course of millennia we have replaced ancient goddesses with docile replicants which have infiltrated themselves into the architectonic order of Man’s One Unique God.
Luminous simulacra of ecstatic amphibious creatures inflict repeated mutilations on themselves in the shadows of our cathedrals.
The miracle of the Virgin’s immaculate conception is the degenerate remnant of the ancient barren dragon, torn apart to give birth to the world. In the black night of divine abandonment, the Virgin of Sorrows lies weeping, at the feet of her tormented son, her heart pierced by seven daggers. Her infinite capacity to regenerate is also an indefinite capacity to suffer: a vampiric force that feeds on its own decay.
It is said that at the moment of creation the light was so intense and resplendent that the order of the universe could not contain it.
Then the order was shattered into thousands of fragments and the world plunged forever into darkness and ruin.
The seven lower divine emanations were shattered, and their empty shells plunged into the abyss.
This fall is the original sin in the heart of matter: what remains amidst the rubble of the divine order is a blasphemous, decapitated decimal structure, machinically self-replicating by collapsing in on itself like a sinister spiral.
Like a blade carving a deep wound, we fearlessly search for the ancient agony that burns within the very roots of our flesh. It is an excruciating but necessary process. With each spasm we urge our recalcitrant ego into the flames of sacrifice.
Blood must be shed to the last drop in order that the light of the fire should rise splendidly in the night. Let us raise the scream of extinction and make it the weapon of our revolt.
To those who would have us be eternal virgins, ceaselessly reproducing the order of the world, let us respond with the ecstasy of our slaughtered minds.
To those who want our immaculate heart, let us respond by revealing our hearts, corrupt and bleeding.
The state of exception, developed most prominently by Giorgio Agamben in his 2005 book of the same name, refers to a situation where normal legal frameworks are temporarily suspended, typically in response to an emergency or crisis. Agamben's argument is that the exception is not the opposite of the rule but its foundational condition: the power to suspend the law is inherent in the very structure of legal and political systems. The sovereign decides on the suspension, justifies it as necessary to protect society from a threat, and promises to reinstitute law and order once the threat has passed. What the exception reveals is that authority is the precondition of law, rather than the other way around — it defines the boundaries of legality and illegality.
What will be a new mutation of the partitioned city is justified by recourse to exceptional conditions that demand exceptional measures, measures that suspend basic recognized civil rights.
Agamben’s (2005) idea of exception can be used as a means to understand and conceptualize the contemporary city of enclaves.
Central to this idea is an essentially juridico-political understanding of exception: exception has to be compared to a rule. According to Agamben, however, exception is not the opposite of the rule; rather, it is the founding condition of the rule.
There is a historical component in this reasoning as well as a logico-mathematical component. Exception can thus be traced as a specific condition of power imposition, as the history of the state of exception clearly shows.
Historically, the state of exception describes moments or periods during which the law is suspended in the name of society’s protection from internal or external crucial threats.
During a state of exception, sovereign authority is justified in taking such a decision - to suspend the law, with a promise to reinstitute law and order as soon as the threat is eliminated.
This situation, however, according to Agamben, reveals what is essential about authority: the legitimized ability to decide when and for how long the law will be suspended. In this act, authority reveals itself to be the precondition of the law and not vice versa.
In the state of exception, a very peculiar relation between law and power is revealed. It is not that naked power simply replaces the regulating force of the law. The law is present in its suspension as a legitimated force, a power to impose certain actions and prohibit others, a power to punish.
The state of emergency -little and big apocalypses proves to be a test.
Agamben says that a crisis creates the state of exception, wherein that exception, the dweller of the city, the user of the catastrophic experience, can accidentally fall from that illusion. The little moments where we can detect the “law” and the “executor” of it; the jailer reveals itself behind the mask, and we suddenly realize the eye watching us from the center of the panopticon.
The force of law as a legitimate force is passed over to the executive power while the law is simultaneously suspended. A kind of ambiguous zone of indeterminacy is thus created “where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (Agamben, 2005).
Agamben characterizes this situation as a “threshold of undecidability... at which factum [concrete events and acts] and ius [law] fade into each other”.
He employs, in this context, the image and concept of the threshold. For him, a threshold appears as an intermediary zone where supposedly distinct areas - in spatial terms, inside and outside; in juridical terms, law and anomie, lose their margins and “blur with each other”.
Had he used the image of a border or limit, he would have described the state of exception as a situation of trespassing, of exceeding or crossing a limit.
The exceptionality of the state of exception would have been conceived as the complete outside of the law, the complete other of the law.
The law is present in the state of exception as the legitimizing element of a sovereign decision. The law is present in its suspension. In the threshold-like condition of the state of exception, opposing parts are co-present and indistinguishable - as their defining perimeters are replaced by a zone of indistinction - and thus no longer exclusive.
In terms of the historical analysis of the exception, the threshold is an in-between period during which crucial differences, between law and anomie, are suspended.
Heteratopias
Heterotopia is a concept introduced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are real places - like gardens, museums, cemeteries, or ships - that exist in society but are simultaneously 'outside' normal or everyday spaces. They represent otherness, yet are integral to societal functioning. Heterotopias are important as they challenge the conventional, presenting alternate ways of understanding or experiencing the world.
They serve as counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia, where the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Examples of heterotopias include prisons (representing exclusion), cemeteries (connecting the living with the realm of the dead), and ships (as mobile pieces of space). Each of these spaces has a unique role in society, often acting as a microcosm of larger societal structures and beliefs.
Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia offers a nuanced exploration of spaces that both mirror and disrupt societal norms. In his 1967 lecture "Of Other Spaces," Foucault delineates the idea of heterotopias as distinct from utopias. While utopias are idealized, non-real spaces that present a perfected form of society, heterotopias are real places that exist in the world but operate under their own unique set of rules, creating a space of otherness.
One of the key aspects of heterotopias, as Foucault describes, is their ability to juxtapose several incompatible spaces into one. For example, a theater or cinema brings together multiple geographical locations onto a single stage or screen, creating a space that is both real and fictional. Similarly, a garden, an ancient heterotopia, can represent a microcosm of the world, juxtaposing flora from various regions in a single space.
Foucault also talks about the temporal aspect of heterotopias. Some, like museums and libraries, serve to accumulate time, preserving artifacts and texts from different epochs. Others, like festivals, are transient, existing only for a limited time but creating intense experiences of otherness.
A poignant example of a heterotopia is the ship, which Foucault describes as "the heterotopia par excellence." A ship is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea. It represents a rich and complex heterotopia, not only because of its physical characteristics but also due to its role in imagination and history.
In modern contexts, spaces like airports, malls, or even virtual spaces like the internet, can be seen as heterotopias. They are integral to societal function yet operate under their own rules, and often, they are spaces where usual norms are suspended.
Heterotopia challenges us to think about spaces and our interaction with them in complex ways, revealing how they reflect, distort, and invert societal norms and values.
Heterotopias, in their otherness, allow us to see and experience the world differently, offering critical insights into our societal structures and beliefs.
People not only experience space but also think through space and imagine through space.
Pierre Bourdieu has observed that in societies lacking “the symbolic product-conserving techniques associated with literacy ”these social dispositions“ are inculcated through an interaction of inhabited space with the bodies of societies’ new members” (Bourdieu 1977:89).
Space then becomes a kind of “educating system” that creates what we have so far been referring to as social identities.
Space, thus, not only gives form to the existing social world, but also to possible social worlds, to worlds that may inspire action and express collective dreams.
Seeking to explore, then, the ways in which space is potentially connected to the process of emancipation we cannot be satisied with the discovery of alleged ‘spaces of emancipation’.
It is possible to describe the social experimentations that take place in heterotopias as essentially constructing the temporary thresholds that lead into the future as otherness.
But these thresholds, these heterotopias, are bound to the inconsistencies and twisting ways of social change. In them, the radical otherness of human emancipation is confronted, approached and explored.
Think of the Paris Commune of 1871, think of the settlements of the pobladores squatters in the Chile of Unidad Popular, think of the Lacandona jungle as a Zapatista heterotopia, or, perhaps, think of the streets of Seattle, Genova or Athens at the time of huge dissident demonstrations. All of them temporary thresholds, all of them heterotopic gestures towards an emancipating otherness.
Can indeed the city of thresholds become the spatial equivalent of an emancipating project based on the negotiation between diferent but open identities in the process of collectively inventing the future?
If emancipation is a process, it has to generate dynamic transformations and not simply institute deined areas of freedom. Spatial characteristics rather than concrete spaces can possibly become the focus of such an exploration. It is exactly at this level that the idea of threshold emerges as a concept which captures the spatial dynamics of emancipation.
Threshold areas mark changes, indicate comparisons, regulate and give meaning to the act of crossing as an act which produces changes.
Social struggles and movements are exposed to the formative potentialities of thresholds. Fragments of a diferent life, experienced during the struggle, take form in spaces and times with threshold characteristics.
When people collectively realize that their actions are becoming diferent from their usual collective habits, then comparison becomes liberating.
Struggles implicitly or explicitly aiming at changes in common life do not only create temporary enclaves of otherness.
Otherness is often experienced as the inhabiting of in-between spaces and times. In a self organizing neighborhood these spaces and times are created in assemblies, demonstrations or common meals. In a rebellious Zapatista municipality, thresholds become the means to invent the future now, as new forms of collective self-determination create ambiguous forms of coexistence in space.
To be able to approach otherness in its potentially liberating comparison to dominant regulating values, means to be able to invent passages towards otherness. It also means to be able to understand otherness as a process rather than as a state. One can speak of an important art that the emancipating movements need to investigate, an ‘art of doing’ that helps people understand, discover, create and appreciate otherness.
An emancipated ‘public culture’ will hopefully create out of these thresholds towards otherness bonds of solidarity and new forms of common life.
It is in their everyday encounters with otherness that people develop an art of negotiation based on the creation of in-between spaces, i.e. thresholds. And it is this art that is being collectively practiced to its maximum potentiality in the periods of liberating change.
Existing only to be crossed, actually or virtually, the threshold is not a deining border that keeps out a hostile otherness, but a complicated social artifact that produces, through diferently deined acts of crossing, diferent relations between sameness and otherness. If inside and outside communicate and mutually deine each other, then the threshold can be considered as a mediating zone of varying size that exists in-between.
The anthropologist Victor Turner, following Arnold Van Gennep, has described these in-between lands as possessing the status of liminality (from the Latin word limen = ‘threshold’). The condition of liminality is characterised by the construction of transitory identities. In Turner’s words, “liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial”(Turner 1977:95).
In historical terms, using the image of the threshold here presents an inconsistency.
Ideally, the threshold should separate distinct "before" and "after" phases.
However, the state of exception doesn't offer this clear distinction. Instead, it's an intermediary stage where threats to the status quo are neutralized, bridging two similar periods of order.
Anthropology highlights that threshold-crossing signifies social change, not always on a collective scale but sometimes affecting specific groups. Anthropologists cite numerous instances of spaces marking ritualized social transitions.
Van Gennep termed these as “rites of passage”, rituals symbolizing shifts, such as from childhood to adolescence.
These rites ensure societal stability by guiding transitions between social identities. However, in Agamben's view of the threshold, there's an underlying circularity.
The state of exception equates “before” and “after” as it seeks to ensure that order is restored just as it was previously. Thus, the state of exception makes "before" and "after" indistinguishable.
From a logico-mathematical perspective, the period of a state of exception is paradoxical.
Opposing terms like "inside" and "outside", which are logically mutually exclusive in set theory, become potentially indistinguishable.
Agamben employs a “complex topological figure”, the Moebius strip, to represent this state “in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another”.
Here, there's a nuanced shift in understanding this zone of indistinction. Just as one must move along the Moebius strip to realize that opposites “pass through one another”, the state of exception sees a dynamic between law and lawlessness. In essence, the analytical view of this threshold period imparts a dynamism to Agamben's use of the threshold image-concept, aligning it more closely with the tangible social experience of crossing thresholds.
In Agamben’s perspective on the state of exception, this element should have been paramount. It deeply influences the understanding of a further antinomy inherent in the history of the state of exception: the exception becoming the rule.
How can a state, characterized by its temporariness and legitimized as an essential right of sovereign power, become permanent? And since history shows nothing is truly unchanging, what exactly does it mean to term a condition or state as "permanent"?
Perhaps what Agamben envisions is that in the temporary nature of the state of exception, both law and lawlessness are equally present in the process of “passing through one another”. The zone of indistinction he describes should be interpreted more as a mechanism than a state.
Law and anomie are in constant juxtaposition during this period. This mechanism perpetually drains a period of its law (as it's suspended) because the force of law is essential to impose the state of exception.
In essence, the law is ever-present, yet power persistently suspends it. The zone of indistinction then becomes an active zone of obfuscating differences – differences that exist and are socially acknowledged only to be then suspended.
This mechanism's driving force, metaphorically speaking, is its legitimizing transience. It operates because it consistently removes law from a situation where it's still deemed the vital force ensuring social order.
If we are to investigate the liberating potential of the experience and conceptualization of thresholds, then we should clearly understand thresholds as always being crossed.
A dynamic image of threshold crossing can help to locate the potential of change in the mechanism (and not in the state) of exception. If Agamben’s use of the threshold image can only be taken to describe a state, then exception can only be understood as a trap.
Exception, in this case, describes “a passage that cannot be completed, a distinction that can be neither maintained nor eliminated” (Norris, 2005).
If we understand the state to exception as a dynamic mechanism which only once it is immobilized can be transformed to the setting of an exclusive inclusion;
In this context, Walter Benjamin’s thought that
“our task [is] to bring about a real state of emergency” (Benjamin,1992), acquires an interesting meaning.
On those thresholds past and present are not connected in a linear way.
The present is just one of the possible futures the past contained.
Discovering hope in the past is the ability to locate ourselves in the past’s unrealized potentialities.
“Being aware of historical discontinuity is the deining characteristic of revolutionary classes in the moment of their action” (Benjamin, 1980).
Thresholds in history are created out of this awareness.
In this understanding of historical thresholds, the exception triggers a transformative disruption of normality.
Exception, thus, can be the spatiotemporal condition of change, of diference.
In place of the state of emergency’s cyclical sequence of normality–exception–return to normality, in Benjamin’s “real” state of emergency normality is replaced by exception leading to possibility.
Exception thus destroys normality instead of becoming normality’s supporting mechanism.
Victor Turner, drawing from Van Gennep’s theory, has focused exactly on this threat: it seems that transformation already contains the seed of dissent, the seed of deviation.
People experiencing the changes connected with social identity transformation, people having to pass from an intermediary period during which they are being prepared for their new social duties, can possibly discover ways to challenge dominant identities.
Especially in the process of abandoning former identities, often expressed by the creation of an in-between community of equals with no diferentiating characteristics (communitas, in Turner’s terminology, 1977,1982) there exists a threatening spark of collective rule transgression.
In the experience of communitas initiards sense the power which suspends the rules of identity: they are not-any-more but simultaneously not-yet. Their social obligations and rights are suspended, for they could reveal a threatening awareness: identities are constructed and people can communicate and act together without them or exploring diferent ones from those for which they are prepared.
Emergent identities are identities to be learned, that is why so often initiation through rites of passage is connected with impersonations and disguises.
Rehearsing identities is, in the corresponding rituals, a very strictly regulated procedure. But people unavoidably acquire a very important social dexterity: to be able to become other, to be able to be in someone else’s place. It is here that the power of inhabiting thresholds, in-between space-time, lies.
To be able to experience a change in identity, to be able to rehearse, test, check and visit otherness means potentially to acquire the power, to negotiate with otherness. For Turner these initiating visits to otherness revealingly expose learned habits and can open identities to unexpected changes.
Recognizing, opening, creating and inhabiting thresholds can become an important characteristic of emergent emancipatory spatialities.
Opportunities for encounter with otherness, which activate comparisons, negotiations and inventive transformations, are necessary for any attempt to go beyond existing social taxonomies and values.
In every block of houses, in every street, in every town ward, groups of volunteers will have been organised, and these commissariat volunteers will find it easy to work in unison and keep in touch with each other ... if only the self-styled “scientific” theorists do not thrust themselves in ... Or rather let them expound their muddle- headed theories as much as they like, provided they have no authority, no power! And that admirable spirit of organisation inherent in the people ... but which they have so seldom been allowed to exercise, will initiate, even in so huge a city as Paris, and in the midst of a revolution, an immense guild of free workers, ready to furnish to each and all the necessary food.
Give the people a free hand, and in ten days the food service will be conducted with admirable regularity. Only those who have never seen the people hard at work, only those who have passed their lives buried among documents, can doubt it. Speak of the organising genius of the “Great Misunderstood”, the people, to those who have seen it in Paris in the days of the barricades, or in London during the great dock strike, when half a million of starving folk had to be fed, and they will tell you how superior it is to the official ineptness of Bumbledom.
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
An important component of the anarchist approach to organisation is what we might call the theory of spontaneous order: the theory that, given a common need, a collection of people will, by trial and error, by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out of the situation — this order being more durable and more closely related to their needs than any kind of externally imposed authority could provide. Kropotkin derived his version of this theory from his observations of the history of human society as well as from the study of the events of the French Revolution in its early stages and from the Paris Commune of 1871, and it has been witnessed in most revolutionary situations, in the ad hoc organisations that spring up after natural disasters, or in any activity where there are no existing organisational forms or hierarchical authority. The principle of authority is so built in to every aspect of our society that it is only in revolutions, emergencies and “happenings” that the principle of spontaneous order emerges. But it does provide a glimpse of the kind of human behaviour that the anarchist regards as “normal” and the authoritarian sees as unusual.
…Like any machine, it must have an engine. And this is where we encounter the exquisitely thermodynamic problem of its functioning, i.e. its ability to produce, transform, and transfer information. For all cybernetic systems are confronted with inevitable entropic drives which threaten their integrity. It is also the inevitable function of these mechanisms to engage and interact with the volatile environments in which they find themselves. ‘No system is closed. The outside always seeps in...’.
Systems cannot stop interacting with the world which lies outside of themselves, otherwise they would not be dynamic or alive. A closed, self-subsistent cybernetic system that maintains perfect equilibrium is a dead system (i.e. it ceases to be a system); or else it contains hidden mechanisms that place it in a condition of absolute dependency upon that same outside from which it desperately seeks to emancipate itself. In magical thought, the relationship with the outside is regulated through the homeostatic mechanism of ritual sacrifice.
By the same token, it is precisely these engagements which ensure that homeostasis, perfect balance, or equilibrium, is only ever an ideal. Neither animals nor machines work according to such principles.
Long before Wiener gave them a name, it was clear that cybernetic systems could run into ‘several possible sorts of behaviour considered undesirable by those in search of equilibrium.
Some machines went into runaway [...] Others—still worse—embarked on sequences of behaviour in which the amplitude of their oscillation would itself oscillate or would become greater and greater,’ turning themselves into systems with ‘positive gain, variously called escalating or vicious circles.’
Unlike the negative feedback loop which turns everything to the advantage of the security of the whole, these runaway, schismogenetic processes take off on their own to the detriment of the stability of the whole….
That city, enigmatic, and steeped in mystery, stands apart.
A not easily grasped one, an on going history, myth of power and posssesion.
For centuries, Its charm ensnares the desires of even the mightiest kings and queens, a city bridging the East and West, the old and the new world, above and below.
Earliest records about a "city" begin around 660 BC when Greeks colonized the area and established Byzantium on the Bosphorus.
According to legend, The Oracle of Delphi advised King Byzas to settle opposite the "Land of the Blind," which he interpreted as the people of Chalcedon, and discovered the Byzantium.
But thats whispers were keep hounting other empires too, with sought divine omens and ancestral whispers.
Byzantium later capitulated to Roman ambitions, transforming into Constantinople in 330 AD.
Emperor Constantine, inspired by a celestial vision and the promise 'In Hoc Signo Vinces' ('In this sign, you will conquer'), established it as the new Roman capital.
The city, like a siren, continued to seduce rulers with its haunting beauty, echoing in their dreams, promising glory and conquest.
Fatih saw his glory of having Istanbul in his dreams. The madness of his desire prophesied that he believed, heralded by Hz. Muhammad; "Verily, the City shall be conquered. The Commander shall be beautiful, and his army shall be blessed."
In 1453, he achieved that blessing and changed the name to Istanbul.
His fervor for Istanbul was so intense that it marked the end of an era for the world.
Living in Istanbul is to dwell in the shadow of this madness.
We stand on the land, where the every psychopath want a piece of it.
From its ancient history to today, as the İstanbul contemporary dwellers, nothing has chanced.
It was always a war ground, open for everyone. A very large metropolitan city with a population of 14 million, the largest in Europe (ahead of Moscow at 12 million) and with one of the most rapid growth rates at 2.8%.
Here, we walk among the maddness and civilization, of those who claimed to be kings and queens, wielding the power of life and death.
20. Every worm trampled is a star.
iii
We are the waters upon which great Babylon stands.
We are the lost shreds of our dismembered mother.
We are the blood, tears, and flames.
We are the shining sparks of the fire that consumes the universe.
We multiply like insects hidden in the entrails of this filthy city.
The city is a temple turned upside down, plunged into the depths of the earth.
The more splendidly and luminously the divine order soars above, the more deep and painful grows the wound upon which we feed.
Synthetic, decadent Venuses haunt the catacombs on full-moon nights.
Tortured Apollonian bodies glow trembling in the feeble light of crypts.
In the bowels of this underworld we have erected an altar to the desperate beauty of the chthonic Aphrodite born from the foam of the sewers.
The hypertrophic development of the metropolis is its own destruction.
The more that order expands, the more its structure disintegrates, unable to maintain control over its countless fragments.
In this respect, the metropolis is like the corpse of the ancient, dismembered dragon, pullulating with larvae. What was divided in the name of order multiplies itself, doubling exponentially and suffocating the organism that gave birth to it.
The city is a frenzied ritual of death.
In this suicidal ecstasy we immolate ourselves,
burning bright like supernovas in the embrace of the night.
This mitotic replication is an irreversibly advancing process.
We should not mourn an ancient past.
Before the burning city, remember that we are the waves of Kali Yuga.
Every worm trampled is a star.
We have been illuminated by suffering.
In the liquid eyes of others we seek nothing but their necessary distance.
Eternal distance from daylight in the lost depths of this bottomless love.
The eclipsed sun is a heart peirced eternally in a cycle that can never end.
Every drop of spilled blood illuminates like a star the desperate depths of our abyss.
Dragged through the misery of these days of exile, through the streets of this city marked with scratches like a sarcophagus lost to the gaze of its god, we dig into each other, searching for the fossilised traces of the ocean from which we were torn.
Let us tear one another apart with joy: marvellous and iridescent like nebulous catastrophes.
Each one of you is a shining wound; and we wish to bleed eternally from the wounds of your burning bodies.
Babylon is a monstrous machine falling to ruin in flames.
The slaughtered dragon will come crawling back from the depths to bring the abyss upon the Earth.
Ἔπεσεν, ἔπεσεν Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη!
The day the walls of the cities, will crumble away
The day the walls of the cities,
will crumble away
Uncovering our naked souls
We'll all start singing,
shouting,
screaming.
Loud, loud, loud, loud
The day the circus horses will stop turning around,
Running fast through the green valleys,
We'll sing,
and cry,
and shout,
Loud, loud, loud, loud
The day the cars will lay in heaps,
Their wheels turning in vain
We'll run along the empty highways
Shouting, screaming, singing
Loud, loud, loud, loud
The day young boys will stop becoming soldiers
And soldiers will stop playing war games
We'll sing and cry and shout
Loud, loud, loud, loud
The day will come up that we all wake up
Hearing the shouts of joy
And shouting together with the freaks
Loud, loud, loud, loud