The
Study of the Cultural Through Personal
3.1 A brief glimpse into my earlier practice
In my
2007 video work Default/Defo, I recorded the voices of my relatives while
searching for different accents in their way of speaking. I was looking for
traces of the place they grew up in and the way they inhabit a default language
in their accents and how their specific ways of voicing the words alter the
sound of a language. The title of the piece comes from the idea of considering
a “default” language and the accent as defo (the Turkish word for “flaw”) which
someone leaves on that language. In the video, my image appears on the screen,
dubbing the speech of my relatives. The audience saw my image, while they heard
the voices of my close family from the speakers. I was speaking over their
voices in my own accent, at my own pace and with my own idiosyncrasies. My
voice was heard from the earphones provided. Thus, at first sight the audience
saw my image and the sound of others and once they put the earphones on they
would hear me dubbing. All these familiar voices gathered, all the traces and
places met on the image of myself, producing “a form of self- portraiture ...
in which the self is bound up with its familial other” (Renov, 2004,
p.xiii).
This
work marked a shift in the way I work. Around the time I was working on this
piece, I started documenting what was happening around me with a video camera,
sound recorder and photo camera, I was using pictures from my family albums, as
well as photographs I found in second-hand book shops. Although my work did not
necessarily rely on documentary language; collecting, documenting and recording
had become an important part of my practice at the time.
It was
the first time my image had appeared in my work and it was also the first time
my close others had made an appearance in my work. Until then, I had refrained
from appearing in my own work and avoided any personal reference due to my
reservations about the traumatic, confessional presence of the artist’s self,
which I thought would create a certain sense of subjectivity at the site of
encounter. In his critique of the testimonial, “traumatic, confessional”
accounts appearing in the ethnographically informed art works, Hal Foster
raises his concerns about such a sense of subject (1996, p.180). Foster is very
much concerned with the sense of authority and authenticity that the self
imposes on the field of inquiry and on the field of cultural production. We see
his doubts being amplified further when his criticism is directed at the figure
of the ethnographer, a figure who writes about the subjects s/he is studying
from a distant, detached, privileged position in which the other is
objectified.
In the
works where I introduced myself into the scene of my art practice, a concern
with the representation of the self emerged. While “self entails other; the
other refracts self” (Renov, 2004, p.xiii), I was wondering about how much does
my story belong to me and how much to the other, how much am I allowed to tell,
if my story touches the others’? The concepts of mahrem4 and personal distance
were at the centre of my earlier work. In that delicate area between self and
other, between a first person singular and what this singularity is entangled
in, I was concerned about where the lines of my story finish and others’
stories start.
In the
video detefabulanarratur (it is your story that is being told) from 2008, there
was a reference to this dilemma that which was present in the title of the work
as well. In this video piece I introduced myself in a rather peculiar language
that adopted the structure of Turkish and vocabulary of Kurdish. The text I was
performing in the video read as “My name is Esra, I am 26 years old ...” and
followed the usual language in the first few pages of a foreign language book,
which teaches you how to introduce yourself to others, to give personal details
about your name, age, where you are from etc.
Having
Kurdish family connections, yet not knowing any Kurdish, I looked up each word
to be used in writing this text in a Kurdish dictionary. On the screen, a close
up image of my mouth performing the text appears’ while English subtitles run
underneath the blurred image. The framing gives a sense of confessional
narrative to the scene, providing only an unidentifiable part of the whole
image.
The text
I read makes no sense either in Kurdish or Turkish, although it was based on an
idiosyncratic translation project between the two languages. My performance of
this text demonstrates a failed exchange; a failed encounter between the two
languages. Only the subtitles in English, in that “universal” foreign language,
gave some clue about what I was saying. It was only through this distant
language, that my story was disclosed.
In a
way, I performed an impossible encounter in this illegible self-representation
by leaving the audience on the outskirts of communication. My story was delayed
in the complicated exchange between a language that gave the structure to the
story and the words another of another language fleshing out this structure and
then a foreign language that subtitles this “made up” language.
When I
showed this piece during a studio critique while I was doing my postgraduate
course in Turkey, it was criticised on the basis of its self-orientalism by my
studio mates. Contemporary art in Turkey from the 1990s onwards witnessed an
increase in the number of artists dealing with the sensitive issue of Turkish
identity from highly critical standpoints. These works by artists of mainly
Kurdish descent received attention in Western art markets and was widely
circulated, which generated a sense of suspicion in the contemporary art scene
in Turkey. Artists dealing with this delicate area were blamed for serving the
agendas of Western art institutions’ still orientalist interest in the suppressed
and marginalised identities. Artists were blamed for working with this mindset
“in order to find a place for him/herself in the art scene” of the West
(Fisher, 2004, p.236). The accusations of self-orientalism came out of these
conditions.
This
criticism seemed to be turning into self-censorship at times. The
oversensitivity towards self-orientalism can result in disregarding any
possible dialogue the work may wish to trigger. Commodification of differences
is a possible risk, yet, the sensitivity around Orientalism (see Said, 1979)
seemed to turn into an intolerance, condemning every gesture too readily as
self-orientalism. Critical engagement needed to be supported, I believed,
rather than leaving these questions unexplored because of their risky
nature.
How was
I supposed to position myself within this problematic site? Having found myself
stuck between self-orientalism, self-representation and self-censorship, I
wondered how I could position myself. While my personal story converges with
the stories of others, what are the responsibilities of telling one’s personal
story?
There
are no straightforward answers to these questions. The ground between the self
and other is a conflicted site which should be worked on continuously. It is
this problematic relationship, the dynamics present at the encounter which
began to shape my practice later on. In an attempt to unpack this dilemma which
I face in my art practice, in this chapter I examine this problematic position
of the self by studying the self as a source of knowledge, a tool of inquiry
and a medium of expression. I discuss the reflexive turn in the research
context, the idea of situated knowledge and self-knowledge as related ideas and
focus on autoethnography in particular, which welcomes the once unreliable and
undesirable presence of the self in the research context. I will then elaborate
on the implications of such an approach, the possibilities and problems it
poses for my practice.
3.2
Self, as the medium of inquiry
Anthropologist Judith Okely asks rhetorically
whether there could be any “better medium” than the human being to study a
fellow human being:
In the
study of human being by another human being (and what better medium is there?),
the specificity and individuality of the observer are ever present and must
therefore be acknowledged, explored and put to creative use (1996, p.28).
For
Okely, this insight comes from working as an ethnographer in the field, which
relies on observations, and her very presence for the understanding of other
human beings and their culture. She recognises that the dynamics of the
encounter and what is made of the field by the observer is determined by the
“specificity and individuality of the observer” (Okely, 1996, p.28).
A medium
suggests (if we are to borrow a definition from the realm of art) a language
which has its own grammar, structure, its own conventions and history. The
material, and its physical limits, as well as the history of the medium
determine the possibilities of the medium. As a channel of communication, it
determines what is being communicated and expressed. The idea of the
researcher`s self, as the medium through which we understand others, means
accepting the limits of this medium which is conditioned by the historical and
cultural background of the self (i.e. ethnicity, nationality, gender, age,
education, occupation and personality). The connections between things, events
and actors are measured by this medium, the experience of the field is tainted by
the specificity of the researcher’s self.
Fieldwork
experience relies on the researcher’s self to such an extent “that it is
impossible to reflect upon it fully by extracting that self” Okely elaborates
(1992, p.8). At the site of the encounter, there is not an all-analytical,
objective researcher dissecting the human condition into an understanding.
Observing, participating, attending to; these basic methods of fieldwork
require the full and active presence of the researcher, not just their purely
intellectual capacities. Research relies on “all of the anthropologist’s
resources; intellectual, physical, emotional, political, intuitive” that are
formed by “past embodied knowledge” (Okely, 1992, p.8). These factors affect
how the fieldworker engages with the field, how s/he observes, what catches her
attention, how she communicates with others and how she participates in daily
routines, and hence the whole fieldwork experience, which forms the currency of
ethnographic research. The encounter with the other is filtered through the
researcher’s attitude towards the world. As Clifford Geertz also suggests:
“sometimes we come from our own society, sometimes not, but wherever we are, we
are situated” (in Marcus, 2008, p.26) and this situatedness affects our observations.
3.3 Reflexivity: the introduction of the
researcher’s self into the field
The
recognition of the human factor, the effect of the researcher’s self on the
research and on knowledge production, was not confined to the discipline of
ethnography. This acknowledgement was widely accepted across other social
disciplines, resulting in a reflexive turn in knowledge production. Reflexivity
openly questions the existence of a detached and objective observer and
advocates an attitude that acknowledges the marks of the researcher on the
research work produced (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2009; Davies, 1998;
Etherington, 2004; Hertz, 1997).
As Kim
Etherington argues reflexivity “challenges us to be more fully conscious of our
own ideology, culture, and politics and that of our participants and our
audience” (2004, p.36). Etherington goes on to say that by unearthing the
research process reflexively, the “dynamic process of interaction within and
between ourselves and our participants and the data that inform decisions,
actions and interpretations at all stages of research” is made visible (ibid.
2004, p.36). Rosanna Hertz also suggests that reflexivity requires “constant
(and intensive) scrutiny of ‘what I know’ and ‘how I know it’” (1997,
pp.vii–viii). This is a relentless analysis, affecting the form of research
substantially.
The
reflexive researcher is aware that the outcome of research is an interpretation
and translation of the field, s/he does not “simply report ‘facts’ or
‘truths’”(Hertz, 1997, pp.vii–viii). Such an approach to inquiry targets
“value-free scientism” Charlotte Aull Davies suggests (1998, p.178). By showing
how the researcher’s self is intermingled with the research in a series of
complex relationships, the belief in an objective, detached observer and the
“creation of true, objective knowledge, following a scientific method”
(Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2009, p.3) is called into question.
Nevertheless,
Gillian Rose warns that to consider reflexivity as a means to make the research
process fully transparent would be a fallacy (1997, p.311). Against the claims
of “transparency” that finds a voice in Kim Etherington’s words: “Reflexivity in
research conversations and writing creates transparency” (2004, p.37), Rose
asserts that the dynamics governing the research cannot be totally captured.
The world is not a static object waiting for the analytical mind of the neutral
researcher to dissect it, nor could the researcher know her conditionings and
intentions determining her decisions fully.
Rose
argues that we should take into account the limits of the “knowing subject” and
the fact that our research subjects, as well as our very own selves will always
escape us. Such an attitude is accepting of a more partial, non-finalising,
non-over generalising account, “avoiding the false neutrality and universality
of so much academic knowledge” (Rose, 1997, p.306). As subjects, we cannot know
fully the dynamics shaping us and our relationships with others. Thus the gaps
and failures must be stated, they must be embraced Rose argues.
3.3.1 Self-knowledge as a resource for cultural
inquiry
As the researcher’s presence with all its
fallacies has begun to be recognised increasingly in research, personal stories
and knowledge have also been considered a possible means of studying culture.
Self-knowledge becomes “a central source of data … becoming another acceptable
scholarly basis for understanding social life and human behaviour” for social
research Rosanna Hertz suggests (1997, pp.ix–xii). The personal emerges as the
base for the theoretical, Nancy Miller argues, a valid “cultural material”, in
the inquiry into the social (1997, p.21).
This idea of “personal as theoretical”
resonates with the feminist coda of “the personal is political” that was
embraced in the art of 70s, when artists from the margins of society took the
lead on the stage of cultural production. This is when the presence of these
marginalised selves becomes a “crucial medium for resistance and counter
discourse” as Renov describes it, casting “doubt on the coherence and power of
an exclusive historiography” (2004, p.vi). In a similar move, the discipline of
anthropology has opened itself up to “different histories” as a challenge to
the idea that there is “a single ethnographic reality, only waiting for
anthropology to describe it” (MacDougal in Russell, 1999, p.12). The once erratic
personal source is now regarded as the source for knowledge, at a moment when
the limits of research have expanded a great deal thanks to post-colonial and
feminist epistemologies.
This new
epistemology, “detailing concrete experience and multiple perspectives that
include participant’s voices and interpretations” is dramatically different
from an approach that privileges “theory generation, typicality, and
generalization” Carolyn Ellis argues (2004, p.29). Singular voices can disrupt
the conventional course of knowledge production in conventional ethnography,
which Catherine Russell describes as a process “by which individuals are
abstracted into general social patterns; individual subjects become
representative of cultural practices and even ‘human’ principles” (1999, p.5).
The voices embracing a reflexive attitude can offer “experimental
representations” as Rosanna Hertz suggests and “allow the author to push the
boundaries of prescribed ways of conducting social science” (1997, p.xii).
3.3.2 Autoethnography
Autoethnography as a
reflexive approach recognises the self as a medium as well as a source of
inquiry, and relies largely on the researcher’s self-knowledge in the study of
the field. In autoethnography, the subject and object of study are
intermingled, their boundaries are blurred; “the subject and object of research
collapse into the body/thoughts/feelings of the (auto)ethnographer located in
his or her particular space and time” (Gannon, 2006, p.475). The
autoethnographer is situated in an in- between zone by being a researcher and
researched, the subject and object of inquiry simultaneously. She is the medium,
standing between these two states (the word “medium” suggests an intermediary
position, thus the medium speaks from this intermediate position), trespassing
on the boundaries of self and other constantly, making negotiating between the
two her relentless occupation.
The
subject of autoethnography, as the term itself suggests is the ethnography of
one’s self. As Nicholas Holt says, these are “personal accounts where authors
draw on their own experiences to extend understanding of a particular discipline
or culture” (2003, p.2). Such study seeks to reach beyond an isolated self and
aims to achieve more than “a disclosure of the truths of an inner-self”
(Gannon, 2006, p.480). As an ethnography of a kind, autoethnography “has to
focus on what we have in common with others” Wolff-Michael Roth argues (2009,
p.4). Thus, autoethnography departs from the personal concerns and aspires to
reach to the knowledge of the other based on their shared ground.
Thus in
autoethnography, the field of inquiry oscillates between personal and public,
cultural and individual selves. Ellis and Bochner argue that this back and
forth movement between cultural and personal, zooming in on the individual
subject and zooming out to the bigger picture, “refract and resist cultural
interpretations”, and abstract generalisations (in Alsop, 2002). An
autoethnographic approach studies the details. In comparison to the view from a
distance, where these details are sacrificed for a more generalised, abstract,
coherent approach, autoethnography aspires to capture the particularities,
multiplicities and conflicts in the field.
Autoethnographic
inquiry relies on the intricate position of the self in-between. The “tensions,
resonances, transformations, resistances, and complicities” (Haraway, 1991,
p.195) that occur in the relationship between the “self” and the “other” become
the currency of research in this approach. Since we are “constructed and
stitched together imperfectly” (Haraway, 1991, p.192) this interdependent self
could give us insights about the wider framework it is entangled with. The
study of the self becomes a means to inquire into the relationships that
construct this self.
3.4 The
self entangled with the other In my research process I turn my focus on these
stitches between me and the unfamiliar other. At the encounter I grasp the
limits of my habitual knowledge conditioned by my personal history, culture and
background. Charlotte Aull Davies argues that “the ways in which cultural
realities are constructed” become more visible at the encounter (1998, p.180).
She further states that the “autobiographical exploration of fieldwork” may
provide the clues to explore the “cultural realities” determining the dynamics
of the encounter (ibid.).
In my
clumsy dialogue with the “local rhythm” of the others, the “unconscious” rhythm
of my habitus becomes unsettled. Okely suggests that autobiographical details
are able to convey the cross-cultural work at the encounter (1992, p.2). In Anthropology
and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and Embodied Knowledge, she
advocates for the autobiographical accounts of fieldwork being made more
visible. Such a study would not only uncover the motivations and conditioning
of the researcher determining the research, but would also reveal what happens
at the encounter with the other. “The autobiography of the fieldworker
anthropologist” she suggests, “is neither in a cultural vacuum, nor confined to
the anthropologist’s own culture, but is instead placed in a cross-cultural
encounter” (1992, p.2).
Alfred
Schutz, remarks that “In the process of learning how to participate in the host
society, the newcomer gradually acquires an inside knowledge of it, which
supplants his or her previous ‘external knowledge’” about the culture she has
entered (Schutz in Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983, p.9). The newcomer, “blind
and deaf” (Ataman, 2009) to the new culture she has just entered, slowly
develops some sense of it over time. A sense that not only relies on
intellectual capacities but that finds its way “through all the senses, through
movement, through their bodies and whole being in a total practice”, as Okely
describes the presence of the fieldworker in the field (Okely, 1992, p.16)
Thus, an
embodied practice calling for all the faculties of the subject is at work, as
anthropologist Nigel Rapport contends. This extracurricular practice in the
field produces “local belonging”; through a sort of “crash course in what it
was pertinent to say, to whom, when” which enables him to be accepted by the
locals (Rapport, 1997, p.98). He suggests that what ethnography produces is not
only pure “academic abstraction”, work in the field also produces an “embodied
local practice” with direct influence on the researching subject (Rapport,
1997, p.98). Immersed in the lives of others, responding to the rhythms of
day-to-day experience, through living in that culture and following its daily
rhythms, the subject in the field of others comes to embody these
practices.
The
practices of participation – which are some of the crucial modes of working in
the field using the participant-observation method – learning the local codes
and the acquisition of “inside knowledge” leave cracks in the continuity of the
self, slowly undoing old habits and replacing them with new ones. Engaging in
dialogue with others, through following the natural grain of the new setting
and its material and immaterial practices, I come to learn the appropriate ways
of responding to a world that is unfamiliar to me. There are many
conformations, negotiations, a lot of giving up on what one knows and one’s
values, at this crossroads.
I want
to be fluent in the culture I currently dwell in. If not naive enough or
willing enough to go native, I want to develop an understanding of this new
dwelling of mine, gain some fluency, so that not every single everyday task
feels like a struggle.
Unlike
an anthropologist who is in the field on a perhaps more profound mission, to
understand humankind; my newcomer’s aim is to feel less strange, less clumsy,
to get by in daily life, first and foremost. Overwhelmed with the impossibility
of figuring out the complex narrative of this strange place I am trying to
dwell in, my aim is about feeling and following the texture of this new setting
and its everyday rules.
My primary
responses are still geared towards the daily rhythms of “back home”. Sometimes,
out of habit I still follow the routines and rituals of that now-distant place
with a knee-jerk reaction. The confrontation with the strange, unaccustomed
ways of the new creates a self-doubt. Dwelling in here means aligning with -
what Okely calls - the “unconscious rhythm” of this new locality (1992, p.17).
As she says, experience in the field of others means acquiring “a different
bodily memory ... as an adult in another culture”, which means the obligation
“to change or superimpose new experience upon past embodied knowledge and come
to terms with a changing self embodied in new contexts” (Okely, 1992,
p.16).
3.5
Artist as autoethnographer?
The
exploration of my experience of settling down in this unfamiliar culture and
the changes it creates on my horizon is what I am concerned with in my
practice. To this end, I focus on the practices shaping my immediate
environment; the field of mundane, everyday practices “where we make our worlds
and where our worlds make us” (Pink, 2012, p.5). Since within this evasive site
of experience I reveal and manifest myself.
In contrast to my earlier work, discussed previously in this chapter, in
the works I have done throughout this Phd my image and voice slowly disappear
from the scene to be replaced by a focus on the practices that surround and
shape this self. While I observe the changing everyday practices challenging
the accustomed ways I respond to things, the intangible forces ingrained in the
everyday practices become my focus in my art practice. Sarah Pink emphasises that the study of individual
practices can give us an insight into the wider field which the individual
inhabits. It is through paying attention to “the relationship between the
detail of everyday activities (the enacting of practice) and a wider society”
that a feeling for the texture interweaving the field with every individual
knot can be captured:
As
recent anthropological research demonstrates, attention to the detail of how
individuals learn, engage in, experience and know through practices enables us
to better understand the implications of the specificities of the performance
of practice for wider social issues (Pink, 2012, p.21).
The
focus on detail and the careful study of everyday practices resonates with the
autoethnographic sensitivity of looking at its subjects in close up. An
exploration of “individual performances ... how and why individuals modify and
re-create practices as they perform them” (Pink, 2012, p.21) constitutes the
concern and focus of such an approach. The study of “individual performances”
manifests “everyday tactics” that produce “unforeseeable sentences, partly
unreadable paths across a space” within the dominant forces at work in the
realm of the everyday (de Certau, 1984, p.xviii). De Certau’s understanding of
everyday tactics suggests the malleability of the prevalent language and the
“space of others”. These “unforeseeable sentences”, the different means of
uttering the dominant language form new “trajectories”. The study of these
individual practices is crucial, because “the consciousness and interpretations
of agents are an essential component of the full reality, of the social world”
(Wacquant, 1992, p.9) and because individuals transform the map with their
idiosyncratic performances on a daily basis.
So,
where is my work located? How do I handle this slippery material of the everyday,
the practices ingrained in my daily life? As Stephen Johnstone argues, working
with the complex material of the everyday requires “an interdisciplinary
openness, a willingness to blur creatively the traditional research methods and
protocols of disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology and sociology” (2008,
p.15). The study of the evasive site of the everyday escapes any possible
systematic approach, it demands interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary,
transdisciplinary strategies; in short it demands an inquiry troubling the
disciplinary boundaries of research.
“So what
then, where is the work located?” asks Irit Rogoff herself, questioning her
position in the interdisciplinary field she is occupied with (2006). This
crucial question appears in her article “What is a Theorist?”, where Rogoff
discusses the converging paths of the artist and theorist. The role of the
artist cannot be contemplated without an exploration of what a theorist is, she
suggests; “these existences and practices” are deeply connected, “the old
boundaries between making and theorising, historicising and displaying,
criticising and affirming” has long gone (2006). Rogoff supports her argument by elaborating
on the task of theorist first; it is to be “undone by theory” (2006). Through
“critical analysis” the theorist first dissolves the field of study, the ground
that a particular problem, issue raises upon. “Analysis”, as the etymological
roots of the word also support, is an act of dissolving (Online Etymology
Dictionary). Yet the work of theorist does not stop there. The next step is to
“go beyond critical analysis into the possible imagining of an alternative
formulation” (Rogof, 2006). It is at this point that Rogoff locates the
critical work of the artistic practice. She argues that the “actual cultural
making” of the artist build itself upon that “‘disrupted-through-analysis’
cultural phenomenon” that theorist has left us with (Rogof, 2006). The artistic
imagination suggests “possible imagining of an alternative formulation” (ibid.)
that raise upon this dissolved ground.
Rogoff’s exploration on the intersecting paths of artist and theorist
demands us to reconsider the work of ethnographer and artist, the possibilities
the encounter between their distinctive approaches to the study of culture
could offer. By unpacking and then re-formulating the primary work that
ethnography is engaged with, anthropologist Tim Ingold addresses this issue. By
reminding us of other meanings of “graphy”, Ingold challenges the very
definition ethnography, which translates as “writing people, culture”. Ingold
elaborates on the gesture of drawing instead; another kind of “graphy” which
suggests a mode of observation working in synchrony with the moment. In this
approach we do not first observe, and then go on to describe, a world that has
already been made – that has already settled into final forms of which we can
give a full and objective account. Rather, we join with things in the very
processes of their formation and dissolution [italics my own] (2011, p.2).
In this
paragraph Ingold not simply understands the practice of “drawing” as a method
of observation used by the visual artist, but he actually describes a specific
practice of attending to the world that follows the lines of the world. With
this insight he draws the distinctive perceptions of art and ethnography to
each other and redefines ethnography. The movement inherent in such an
understanding of “graphy” (“formation and dissolution”) seems to display
parallels with the journey of the theorist/artist, as it is described by Irit
Rogoff, which proceeds through dissolving the ground one stands on to gather
this dissolved ground back again with the artistic work that expands our world
with the vigour of its imagination.
3.6 The
self untangled: against representative claims
Rogoff
argues that it is essential to “unfit ourselves” and challenge the “subject
fixing and method valorising” attitudes in an inquiry that troubles the
disciplinary boundaries and works on its field through “making and theorising”
(2006). This idea of “unfit[ting] ourselves” take on a new significance within
an autoethnographic approach, which depends on the self as material and medium
of inquiry. The study of the field
through the “unreliable”, unfinalised and incoherent material of the self will
be “knowingly but defiantly open to a critique of being non- representative”
(Okely, 1992, p.12). Yet there is a tendency to perceive autoethnographic
accounts as more authentic, since autoethnographers seem to provide an
insider’s knowledge about the field they come from. Mary Louise Pratt’s
conceptualisation of autoethnography is an example of this line of thought
(Pratt, 1991). Pratt considers autoethnography more like counter-ethnography,
conducted by insiders as a reaction to the colonial gaze that previously
studied them. For Pratt, an autoethnography is “a text in which people
undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations
others have made of them” under the colonial gaze (ibid., 1991, p.2). Such an
approach incarcerates autoethnographer into a representative duty and
misleadingly believes that an autoethnographic account provides authentic
truth. This attitude may have played a crucial role within the debates of
identity politics, but it is important to note its fallacies.
In a
sense, such a representative role might produce a “symbolic house arrest”, in
the words of Nicholas Bourriaud, where “everyone is located, registered, nailed
to a locus of enunciation, locked into the tradition in which he or she was
born” (Bourriaud, 2009c, p.34). Speaking from within the contemporary art
context, Bourriaud criticises the tendency to approach an artwork through the
“condition”, “status”, or “origin” of the producing artist, “his or her
cultural, ethnic, or geographic roots” (2009c, p.34).
When
one’s background becomes a haunted image cast over whatever one produces, it
might curtail the particularities of individual voice. How much does the
adjective “Turkish” define what I do in this research and in my practice? Does
such a framework not limit my ability to shift between many identities, many
positions, many other genealogies and the stories I can follow? Can we imagine
fluent, mobile identities while we are stuck with such adjectives?
I am
struggling to adjust the tone and the place I am speaking (from? as? to?
towards? with?). Gayatri Spivak, the author of the influential essay “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” where she questions the possibility of the subaltern having a
voice of their own, raises a question about the possibility of speaking in the
singular:
I …
found myself constructing Gayatri Spivaks who “represented” various historical
and geographical cases. How to distinguish this from a request to speak of the
singularity of one’s life? (in Smith and Watson, 2010).
Spivak acknowledges
that the choice to “speak in the name of” is a crucial move for “political
mobilisation” today, however, she also points out that this position may lead
to a “distancing from oneself”:
The
moment I have to think of the ways in which I will speak as an Indian, or as a
feminist, the ways in which I will speak as a woman, what I am doing is trying
to generalize myself, make myself a representative, trying to distance myself
from some kind of inchoate speaking as such (in Guneva,1990, p.60).
Spivak’s
account gives an insight into the ticklish position of a subject who is put in
the position of speaking in the name of a larger community. She refuses to be
considered as a spokesperson, to be the voice of the under-represented,
unmarked, subaltern. Spivak goes on to say that, “there are many subject
positions, which one must inhabit; one is not just one thing” (1990,
p.60).
These
singular voices do not claim to offer us the “correct” version of the story,
but instead they suggest an “opening of multiple perspectives” Catherine
Russell argues (1999, p.11). The aim is to show the particularity, multiplicity
of the field instead of providing a more truthful account. “The aim of
situating academic knowledge is to produce non-overgeneralising knowledges that
learn from other kinds of knowledges” Gillian Rose adds (1997, p.316).
Moreover,
to expect an authentic truth from such an inquiry would imply a “fetishised
perfect subject of oppositional history, sometimes appearing in feminist theory
as the essentialised Third World Woman” (Haraway, 1991, p.193). In this lines,
Miwon Kwon, as an art critic tired of being expected to speak as a Korean,
about Korea and on Korean things expresses her concerns about the exoticising
attitude inherent in this attitude: I was equally conscious of the fact that as
much as the struggle of minority groups opened up critical spaces to challenge
the hierarchical and exclusionary social and institutional norms, the
foregrounding of cultural difference or national or racial identity could also
serve as a new kind of realism, novelty, and exoticism that were used by the
same dominant culture for its entertainment and renewal (Kwon, 2011, pp.200–1).
The
dilemma that artists or other cultural actors are left with is to find a
language that can overcome this “symbolic house arrest”. In a similar way to
Kwon, novelist Elif Şafak expresses her trouble with being expected to “write
informative, poignant, and characteristic stories” about her culture, “unhappy
stories of unhappy Muslim women”, because she happens to be a “woman writer
from the Muslim world” (ibid., 2011). And what happens when she writes it
(given that she did actually write about “unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim
women” in her novel Honour)?
Being
in-between, insisting on staying in-between needs more room, fewer adjectives,
fewer definitions and more flexible positions (if not a total abandoning of
them). Or maybe, given their insistence on persisting, a provocative reworking,
reconfiguring of these frameworks. “There is nothing more difficult than this
back and forth between ways of living, speaking, thinking and feeling”
Christiane Kraft Alsop says, “there is nothing more risky than switching
between various identities and practices of estrangement”(2002).
In this
chapter, I have explored the intermediary position that autoethnographic
inquiry occupies between “self” and “other”, “cultural” and “personal” and the
possibilities this approach may offer for my inquiry on the in-between
character of my dwelling. In the following chapters I mainly focus on my art
practice, the process of my research located across the practices of art and
ethnography.
