officialese: interrogation room

… when the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out. The body can be the vector of that turn, but so too can discourse, collective practices, infrastructures, and institutions.

Judith Butler (2020). The Force of Non-Violence. Verso Books. page: 10

… the ethical stand of nonviolence has to be linked to a commitment to radical equality. And more specifically, the practice of nonviolence requires an opposition to biopolitical forms of racism and war logics that regularly distinguish lives worth safeguarding from those that are not – populations conceived as collateral damage, or as obstructions to policy and military aims. Further, we have to consider how a tacit war logic enters into the biopolitical management of populations: if the migrants come, they will destroy us, or they will destroy culture, or they will destroy Europe or the UK. This conviction then licences violent destruction – or the slower death-in-life of detention camps – against the population that is phantasmatically construed as the locus of destruction. According to that war logic, it is a matter of choosing between the lives of refugees and the lives of those who claim the right to be defended against the refugees. In such instances, a racist and paranoid version of self-defence authorizes the destruction of another population.

Judith Butler (2020). The Force of Non-Violence. Verso Books. page: 62

Contemporary European racism perhaps takes different forms, but the efforts to block migrants to Europe are in part rooted in the desire to keep Europe white, to safeguard a nationality that is imagined to be pure. It hardly matters that Europe has never been exclusively white, since the idea of European whiteness is a fantasy that seeks to be realized at the expense of a living population that includes people from North Africa, Turkey, and the Middle East. … The thousands of migrants who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean are precisely lives that are not deemed worthy of safeguarding. Those waters are monitored for the purposes of trade and maritime safety; there is often cell coverage. So, how many countries have to disavow responsibility in order for those people to be left to die? Even if we could track the decision not to send help to boats in distress to this or that functionary from a European government, we would not quite grasp the large-scale policy that effectively lets populations die, that would rather let them die than let them in. On the one hand, these are decisions, and we can track who is accountable for deciding in this way; on the other hand, the metric of grievability is built into these decisions in such a way that migrant populations are ungrievable from the start. We cannot lose those who cannot be grieved. They are treated as beyond losing, already lost, never living, never having been entitled to life.

Judith Butler (2020). The Force of Non-Violence. Verso Books. page: 120-121

“Citizen, Speak Turkish!” campaign ... promoted the speaking of the Turkish language in public. The campaign aimed to eradicate the public visibility and audibility of non-Turkish languages and it was one of the important initiatives of the Turkification attempts in the early years of the Turkish Republic. This campaign demonstrates that it is not the state alone that defines and promotes a national identity, but social actors outside the state also actively contribute to the creation and dissemination of this identity in tense alliances with the state.

Senem Aslan (2007) “Citizen, Speak Turkish!”: A Nation in the Making, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 13:2, 245-272, DOI: 10.1080/13537110701293500

Even with the most autobiographical details included, the second a story moves from the mind to the page, through the filters of memory and language, it becomes –however personal – fiction.

Olivia Sudjic (2018). Exposure. Peninsula Press. Page: 97

7/27/10

Begin to doubt the Wet. Why would I want this stuff made public?
An old stumble: exposing the abject.
This temptation goes way back.

Moyra Davey (2020). Index Cards. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Page: 27

To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. Freedom isn’t simply a matter of indulging all material cravings, Sade-style. It’s also about finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyed by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which you’ve been assigned.

Olivia Laing (2021). Everybody, A Book About Freedom. Picador. Page: 179

In 1928 a local newspaper of Izmir in Turkey wrote: “Citizen, do not make friends with or shop from those so-called Turkish citizens who do not speak Turkish.”

Senem Aslan (2007) “Citizen, Speak Turkish!”: A Nation in the Making, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 13:2, 245-272, DOI: 10.1080/13537110701293500

If silence equals death, he taught us, then art equals language equals life.

Olivia Laing (2020). Funny Weather, Art in an Emergency. Picador. Page: 77

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I’m still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinise the essentials of my living.

Audre Lorde (2017).Your Silence Will Not Protect You, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. Silver Press. Page: 2

I think the weight of history abides in our private bodies. Each of us carries a legacy of personal and inherited trauma, operating within an unequal grid of rules and laws that depends upon the kind of body we were born into.

Olivia Laing (2021). Everybody, A Book About Freedom. Picador. Page: 308

REMEMBER: read the book "How to get a PhD"

Hi Betül

Firstly, I am surprised that you are going to Venice at the end of the month - I don't recall you mentioning this to me.

Remember that you need to discuss travel/ vacations with me beforehand. See the EECS Research Student Handbook (from the MAT QMPlus) - I attached the part on attendance. This is important.

Dear Betül

I am sorry to say that after review of your Stage 3 and revised Study plan, and after discussion with your supervisory panel, the progression outcome from your Stage 3 review is: Transfer to MPhil as we felt that standard of work is insufficient for PhD level study.

Bon pour l'Orient (good enough for the Orient) is a French condescending term that refers to the stamps affixed in the 19th century to the diplomas of students coming from colonial or Ottoman territories. These students were subjected to a less intensive level of education in Western educational institutions and obtained degrees which despite being useless in Europe, were deemed good enough to secure employment in the colonies.[1]

In modern use, the phrase pejoratively describes practices which although unacceptable in advanced Western countries, might be thought appropriate for less developed countries.

[1] Harb, Zahera (2017). Reporting the Middle East: The Practice of News in the Twenty-First Century. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 1786721767

“The notion of a referendum is in any case a divisory line: you choose one side. Meanwhile, you’ve got the mass division of sixty-five million people crossing the world from parts of it which are untenable, unlivable and in flames. And what’s left of the world deciding whether or not to open the gates or the walls or to build more gates or walls. How could we live in the world and not put our hand across a divide? How can we live with ourselves? It isn’t either/or. It’s and/and/and. That’s what life is. ”

Olivia Laing (2020). Funny Weather, Art in an Emergency. Picador. Page: 164

Evrendeki tüm çeşitliliği kucaklayan: ve
Evreni daraltan: -dır, -dir, -dur, -dür, -tır, -tir, -tur, -tür.

Memed Erdener’in Ütopik Bürokratik adlı sergi kataloğundan, sayfa:28

What embraces the full diversity of the universe: and
What narrows down the universe: is..., is..., is..., is..., is..., is..., is..., is... 

From Memed Erdener’s Utopic Bureaucratic exhibition catalogue, page: 29 

Violence is a fact, and yet whenever I’ve sat in Joe’s Pub watching Viv or listened to Nina Simone sing, I’ve felt the room expand around me. This is what one body can do for another: manifest a freedom that is shared, that slips under the skin. Freedom doesn’t mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time. A free body need not be whole or undamaged or unaugmented. It is always changing, changing, changing, a fluid form after all. Imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear, without the need for fear. Just imagine what we could do. Just imagine the world that we could build.

Olivia Laing (2021). Everybody, A Book About Freedom. Picador. Page: 309

Each essay rings the changes of its range, the breadth, the penetration moving inward about the fashionable brick of all styles, unity. Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all composition. In nothing is the banality of the intelligence more clearly manifested. There is no less significant matter for the attention. Every piece of writing, it matters not what it is, has unity. Inexpert or bad writing most terribly so. But ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness.

We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living. Don’t you want it, to be impregnate with all that light? And what will happen if you are?

Olivia Laing (2020). Funny Weather, Art in an Emergency. Picador. Page: 8