Victor Burgin, GUlru Cakmak, David Campa ny, Homay King, D. N. Rodowick, Anthony Vidler

projective 1. Geometry: relating to projection; e.g., projective transformation.

2. Psychology: relating to the unconscious transfer of

affect upon another person or thing; e.g., projective identification.

Essays about the Work of Victor Burgin

Geneve,2014

Table of content

D. N. Rodowick The Unnameable (In Three Movements)

Giilru Cakmak Victor Burgin's A Place to Read

and the Panoramic Subject of the Bosphorus

Homay King Beyond Repetition: Victor Burgin's Loops

Anthony Vidler Victor Burgin's Architectural Palimpsests

Victor Burgin/David Campany in conversation

9

39

71

105

133

Victor Burgin's A Place to Read and the Panoramic Subject of the Bosphorus 1

Giilru Cakmak

An informational video on the website of Swissotel Istanbul the Bos­phorus begins with a panoramic view showing the Bosphorus Strait­that meandering channel which connects the Marmara Sea to the Black Sea, running along Istanbul's European and Anatolian shores for about thirty kilometers. The frame zooms in to show a variety of boats on the sea while a male voiceover says: "Swissotel Istanbul the Bosphorus is located in a lovely secluded area." "Previously a historic palace garden, it offers tranquility close to the business district" is accompanied by a montage of two sequences: first a pool in the foreground, separated from the background by a screen of trees, behind which a tanker glides

by on the Bosphorus, and then a view of the Mosque of the Dolmabah\=e Palace, flanked on one side by ferries and smaller boats, and on the other side by cars in motion on a busy street. As one hears "we offer stylish, well-designed accommodation with six hundred contemporary

guest rooms, some featuring panoramic views of the Bosphorus, Asian Coast and the Old City ... " one sees interior views of a suite: a bed, a sitting area, and then a dining area next to windows. Adjacent to a dinner table, in front of a window, is a telescope. The panning shot next moves to an outdoor terrace, where, behind wicker furniture, the camera shows a panorama of the Bosphorus and the Old City lined with silhouettes of the Ayasofya and Sultanahmet Mosques at a distance. "

1 I would like to thank the following for their assistance and support in the research and writing of this essay:

Victor Burgin. David Campany. Cathy Luna. Mizyal Cakmak. Sedef Cakmak. Brock Tweedie. tinder Kaya. and my graduate students Sarah Browne, Alexandra Prince and Elizabeth Bola.

39

lIi 40 [ ••• ] Where your every need is fulfilled on site" brings the camera back ~ ~ to the interior of the suite: in one smooth gliding move, the camera-eye i scans the room, showing a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket in the ~

foreground, and a view of the roof of the Dolmabah<;e Palace behind the window. The montage sequence follows up with yet another pano­ramic view, this time a bubble bath filling with water streaming from a tap in the foreground, and two glasses filled with champagne and a bowl of strawberries in the middle ground, with a view overlooking

the Bosphorus Bridge and the Anatolian shore across the water. The video then goes on to detail the wellness center, restaurants and business center. For the duration of the entire film relaxing electronic lounge music with "oriental" undertones plays in the background.

This short video advertising the rooms and services offered by a luxury hotel in Istanbul speaks to a number of concerns that motivates Victor Burgin's recent work and writing, and specifically his video installation A Place to Read (2010). While the Swissotel voice over informs the viewer that the site of the hotel was formerly the gardens of a historic palace, the hotel complex built in 1988 in fact replaced a

modern building that had been constructed in 1948 as a coffee house, known as Ta~hk. A Place to Read takes as its focus this coffee house and its destruction by dominant power structures that shape the city­scape and the lives lived in it. In line with the artist's conviction that a

politically engaged art today has to be different from that of "Courbet, or even of Brecht," and has to turn its attention instead to a "psychic realism,"2 A Place to Read brings the viewer into a situation in which the fiction of a self-sufficient panoramic world safely enclosed within its horizon is shattered. Seams become visible, underlying layers surface, and the past haunts the present.

2 Victor Burgin, "Geometry and Abstraction," in Alexander Streitberger, ed., Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (leuven: leuven University Press, 2009).197.

The Panoramic Subject of Global Capitalism

The immersive panoramic experience of the Swiss6tel video is but one specific iteration of what Burgin refers to as a panoramic principle, fol­lowing Wolfgang Schivelbusch's account of the term in the latter's The

Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. In the early nineteenth century a pervasive transformation of conditions of spectatorship under the influence of emerging tech­

nologies of light-based sequential vision, such as panorama, diorama and the magic lantern, took place. 3 As Burgin explains, although the

panorama as a form of popular entertainment lost its prominence after 1900, its principles lived on, for instance in the cinematic camera's pan and static shot movements. 4 The pervasive presence of these principles signal that "the process of industrialisation of memory that started in the nineteenth century-most significantly with sound recording, photography, and film-led to the emergence of massive new global industries in the latter half of the twentieth century." 5

The panoramic experience is one of viewing the world in flux. Dispa­rate details are selectively identified to present a coherent representation of an experiential reality: "the idea of the panorama in a sense refines that of 'environment,' in that it invokes a perimeter, a subjective limit to what may be known of the totality of the 'perpetual infinite film' in which the real and the virtual mingle."6 Within a limited frame of vision, the "subject" is constantly reconstituted by a "concatenation" of images. 7 In selectively perceiving elements of a reality in constant

flux, the subject of the panoramic gaze then creates a fictive unity of the world surrounding her. 8

3 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Ught: The Industrialization of Ught in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: The University of California Press, 1988), especially 213-221.

4 Burgin, "The lime of the Panorama; Situational Aesthetics, 295. 5 Burgin, Components of a Practice (Milano: Skira, 2008). 82. 6 Burgin, "The Perpetual Infinite Rim: Questions from Alexander Streitbergerto Victor Burgin; in Situational Aesthe­

tics,268. 7 See Burgin, "The Noise of the Marketplace: Situational Aesthetics, 279-280, and "The lime of the Panorama,"

Situational Aesthetics, 297. 8 Burgin, "The Time of the Panorama," 298.

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':i 42 e ... .. u. 2 ;:; t:I

As Burgin describes it, two types of details populate the horizon of the world enclosed in a panorama: studium and punctum. Building on Roland Barthes's delineation of these terms in Camera Lucida, Burgin defines the panoramic studium as "anecdotal examples of quasi-auto­matic responses to the perceptual field, experiential commonplaces which readily lend themselves to a mise-en-scene."9 The panoramic punctum is much more accidental, involuntary, and aligns more with

an unconscious associative chain: details in the landscape summon memory traces and trigger after-images-"visual images, word-images and sound-images, perceptions, recollections and fantasies"-disturb­ing the linear unfolding of the scene. 10

The Swissotel video is strewn with common, almost cliche images associated with the Bosphorus and Istanbul, such as the silhouette of the Old City, the Bosphorus Bridge, the sea traffic, the land traffic, the Anatolian shore ... The discernment of such details is contingent upon the fact that they are easily comprehensible. In Burgin's words, such details participate in a broader universe of images that populates the "popular preconscious": "those ever-shifting contents we may reason­ably suppose can be called to mind by the majority of individuals in a given society at a particular time in its history; that which is 'common knowledge'." 11 Deeply embedded in structures of meanings, images

never come alone: as "mental hybrid constructs made up of fragments from the heterogeneous sources that constitute the everyday environ­ment of images in the 'developed world,'" 12 they usher in associative chains of thoughts, affects, memory traces of other images.

The panoramic studium creates an illusion of a consistent and ob­jectively existing reality. However, the Swissotel video is not simply a description of the world from a distance, but one of conjuring. The highly choreographed act of viewing leads the eye to selectively identify disparate details, which then generate a mental image of how it feels

9 Burgin, "The Time of the Panorama," 296. 10 Burgin, "The Time olthe Panorama; 297.

11 Burgin, "Photography, Phantasy, Function," Situational Aesthetics, 129. 12 Burgin, Components of a Practice, 75.

like to be at Swissotel Istanbul the Bosphorus. This is a virtual experi­ence, not only because of the digital medium that supports the film, but also because the very dense layering of word, image and music that constitute the video sequence all combine to summon a fantasy of so­matic experience: as if one is actually gleaning the world outside from within the hotel while being immersed in all the comforting amenities it has to offer. Not only does the bird's eye viewpoint of this fantasized virtual body possess everything Istanbul has to offer, but the montage

sequence itself acts according to a panoramic principle, generating a superhuman subject who glides from one part of the hotel to another, taking it in all at once, smoothly scanning its grounds, lobby, gym, multiple restaurants and lounges, and finally the private suite, in a

seamless scan of the gaze unified by the continuous pan shot of the camera and the trance-like rhythm. The brands "Swissotel" and the

complex historical idea called "the Bosphorus" are here welded to reinforce one another into a seamless unity. In fact, "the Bosphorus" itself becomes a brand: everything that can be experienced about it is folded into the panoramic view.

The area once referred to as Ta~ltk on the hills lying behind the Dolmabah~e Palace in Istanbul, overlooking the Bosphorus Strait and the Golden Horn, remained a site of unrealized projects for a very long time. Created sometime in 1875, when the hilly terrain was leveled with the intention of building a mosque and its grounds for the Otto­man Sultan Abdiilaziz, this project was never completed. 13 Some of the foundation stones remained, bequeathing the name "rocky"-Ta~ltk­to this area, which, for the next eight decades, was used as an open-air panoramic spot where ordinary people took in the view. It was some­time around 1946 that the mayor of Istanbul commissioned a public project on this site, a coffee house. 14 The trace of the Aziziye Mosque

as well as of the public site of Ta~hk lived on in the name, purpose, and architecture of the new coffee house.

13 iinder Kaya, in Top/umsa/ Tarih 222 (June 2012). 87. 14 Kaya, 87.

.-~!ta'd reproduc,,'11 a W<I!I!Icoloot Pillnt'~ of the Ta~hk dillnct An'Sl aod date lri.rlown. From the COUecll(I1 of O~, Kava

The Swiss6tel video presents the multilayered history of the site in a cryptic "previously a historic palace garden" voiced by the narrator, evoking a royal aura surrounding the site on which the luxury suites are built. In the case of the Swiss6tel's takeover, not only the physical building but also the historical trace of the coffee house itself has been erased after the fact. Swiss6tel discarded the public site, retaining the

panoramic apparatus-now only offered to a select few who can afford it. The takeover, then, is not only an appropriation of the actual physi­

cal setting of Ta~hk, which existed as a public site for over a century, but it is also an invasion of meaning-making mechanisms.

Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson and the "Center of Indeterminacy"

For Burgin, one of the most urgent tasks for contemporary artistic practice is a confrontation with the ways in which global capitalism, through its hegemonic control of mechanisms of representation, infil­trates the very psychic processes that constitute the subject, penetrating "latent registers of phantasy, memory and knowledge."15 If there can

be politically engaged art, it consists in highlighting those mechanisms by which "the political enters my subjective perception of a state of the world-as a percept amongst others, as a concept, connotation, association or fantasy amongst others in a psycho-phenomenological complex that may equally include the quality of the light or the memory of a song. "16 In a world inundated with remembered images, where does

agency lie? How is resistance possible? If Burgin identifies an avenue of resistance, it consists in contesting established forms of legibility by foregrounding a fundamental indeterminacy that underlies human existence, a kind of psychic unpredictability that determines percep­tion: "the agency of the unconscious, which tends to fracture common experience along the lines of individual psychology." 17

15 Burgin, "Photography, Phantasy, Function," Situational Aesthetics, 134. 16 Burgin, Components of a Practice, 80. 17 Burgin, "The TIme of the Panorama," Situational Aesthetics, 301.

45

46 Burgin's response takes its cue from Henri Bergson's definition of phenomenological immersion. In 1896, Bergson published Matter and Memory in which he declared the human being a center of inde­terminacy. In a world where the function of human senses was fast automated, proven to be easily manipulated and stimulated with new technological inventions, Matter and Memory read as a manifesto against the conditioning, predictability, habitual and repetitive disci­plining of the human body. IS

According to Bergson, the human body is an instrument of action, and the role of perception is selection and not representation: "per­ception consists in detaching from the totality of objects, the possible action of my body upon them." 19 Perception does not take place for

the sake of pure knowledge, but for practical reasons related to sub­sistence and life; for this reason, every perception points at a potential action, a reaction to what is perceived. In Bergson's model, perception and memory are intertwined, insofar as perception consists "in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; ( ... ) every perception is already memory. Practically, we perceive only the past."20 Thus, for Bergson, the present is immersed with the past.

If human consciousness is continuously haunted by the past, where is agency located? "Attention to life" is a key term for Bergson, insofar as the intensity of attention is inversely proportional to automatic reac­tion: "our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life." 21 Thus, there emerge several layers of memory in

Bergson's model: "If the retained or remembered image will not cover all the details of the image that is being perceived, an appeal is made to the deeper and more distant regions of memory, until other details that are already known come to project themselves upon those details

18 According to Jonathan Crary, Matter and Memory "was a major response to the general standardization of experience and automation of perceptual response atthe turn olthe century: See Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 318.

19 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991),229. 20 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 150. 21 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 14.

that remain unperceived."22 Attentive perception defines "intellectual

expansion" to the extent that the perception of an image is not a sim­ple afterimage, but an active effort of the mind to construct a circuit of memory layers attached to the perceived object. 23 This synthesis guarantees the richness of the perception. Every perception involves a reconstruction, a creation, and memory is capable of "expanding more and more, reflecting upon the object a growing number of sug­gested images-sometimes the details of the object itself, sometimes concomitant details which may throw light upon it. "24 Every percep­

tion thus realized also points at the accumulation of memory-images and widening of possibilities. Deeper levels of memory provide the human with freedom of choice, of reaction to the present, which is thus not only automatic, habitual, repetitive, but also unpredictable. 25

It is exactly for this reason that Bergson declares the human a center of indetermination, and thus of free action.

Just a few years after the publication of Matter and Memory,

Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in which he defined the unconscious as a mechanism of indeterminacy. According to Freud, the unconscious is a mechanism of signification, one whose core consists of memory traces without referents: "There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to

be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts

which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. "26 What Freud refers

to as "the dream's navel" is essentially a psychic force, a resistance to signification. Instead of leading back to originary memories that created them, memory-traces float unanchored in the unconscious, resisting

22 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 101.

23 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 105.

24 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 105.

25 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 249.

26 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: Lowe and Brydone, 1971),525.

47

48 meaning, only obeying the inimitable logic of the unconscious, which can never be fully revealed by analysis. Thus, mental images that consti­tute the core of the human psyche retain in them a fundamental alterity that remains inaccessible to conscious mechanisms of representation and meaning-making.

For Burgin, perhaps the only agency that can resist global capital­ism's hegemonic control of mechanisms of representation is this agency of the unconscious, an agency that lies in the unrepresentability of its

alterity. The crux of the problem for a politically-engaged contempo­rary art according to Burgin hinges on foregrounding the otherness of human indeterminacy as outlined in Bergson's and Freud's models, all the while acknowledging the always-already ideological primordial soup in which mental image-formation takes place. As I shall strive to demonstrate in what follows, A Place to Read both acknowledges "the pre-constituted field of discourse" 27 and yet at the same time gives rise

to affects-affects, which, disengaging themselves from specific images, potentially take on independent liv~s, foregrounding "the 'other' that is the unconscious, and the 'other' that is the Real-not the preformatted 'reality' of documentary 'realism', but that which is uncanny in experi­ence, that which resists signification, that which cannot be woven into the fabric of 'understanding,' cannot accede to the pseudo-democratic populist demand for 'accessibility."'28

A Place to Read

A Place to Read is an approximately ten-minute digital video installa­tion consisting of six segments: three intertitles that provide text and

three sequences of moving images that show digital reconstructions of Ta~hk Coffee House. The sequences comprise digital reconstructions of the demolished coffee house: first, an exterior view, which I will refer to

27 Burgin, · Photography, Phantasy, Function; Situational Aesthetics, 136. 28 Burgin, Components of a Practice, 84-85.

as Sequence I (see p. 93); then, the path that crosses the grounds of the public park and approaches the entrance to the coffee house (Sequence II, see p. 96), and finally, the interior (Sequence III, see p. 100). Text I, Text II and Text III introduce the Reader, the Writer, the Protagonist and his avatar, all of whom in some way relate to the coffee house.

Text I tells of a woman seated in a coffee house overlooking the Bosphorus Strait. She is the Reader. She reads a book that tells of a parallel world in which the coffee house is demolished, its garden

made into a car park. Every now and then, she glances at the view. The text's description of her panoramic view is littered with recogniz­able semiotic cues that indicate that this is Istanbul: the Dolmabah~e Palace, that material marker of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Im­perial presence, where Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, the founder of the Turkish Republic that replaced the Ottoman Empire, died in 1938. The text's representation of the Reader's panoramic view includes an

enumeration of all sorts of sea vessels that populate the strait-"the ferries, freighters, fishing boats and tankers." This ostensibly purely descriptive transcription of details that populate the landscape­a factual list of different types of boats that facilitate sea traffic in this bustling metropolis-resonates with the panoramic Swiss6tel video, in particular with the sequence when the latter zooms into the pano­rama to give a close up of some of the boats on the Bosphorus. Both of these moments in fact reiterate a trope that was fairly established in nineteenth-century Orientalist accounts of Istanbul. Theophile Gautier, writing in 1853, gave his impressions of the construction site of the Dolmabah~e Palace, describing the panoramic view from the Sultan's future quarters: "From the windows, the most marvelous view on the world is discerned: a panorama without rival ( ... ); the Bosphorus with its rapid and transparent waters crisscrossed in a perpetual to-and­fro by sail boats, steam ships, feluccas, prams, Ismid and Trebizond boats with ancient shapes and unusual sails, dinghies, caiques, above which flutter familiar swarms of seagulls." 29

29 Theophile Gautier, Constantinople (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, Libraires-Editeurs, 1853), 296.

49

50 The image of the boat comes up a few more times in A Place to Read. In Text II, the Writer too scans a panoramic view, gleaning com­monplace details that denote her location as Geneva-lIe Rousseau, Pont du Mont Blanc, Jet d'Eau, Mount Saleve on the horizon ... She is in the process of writing the book, in which the Reader will read about the Protagonist. The Writer's panoramic gaze on Geneva eventually encounters another detail, one which does not belong to the studium of the present cityscape: the image of a municipal ferry plying the Bos­

phorus on the label of a bottle in a shop window. The associative chain evoked by this picture within a picture triggers the Writer's nostalgia for Istanbul, and "wave upon wave of longing wash over her."

In addition to the Writer, Text II introduces yet another character: the protagonist of the book written by the Writer, and, perhaps, also the book read by the Reader, if they are in fact the same book. The

Protagonist lives in a dystopian world that mirrors ours, in which earlier independent modes of utilizing the internet and digital technologies are fast disappearing under high capitalist consumerism. In this world, the Ta~hk Coffee House has been destroyed, and its digital reconstruction built by the Protagonist is in danger of disappearance. In Burgin's work, the virtual reality created by digital technology stands in, on the one hand, for the overall experience of the world through mental images, while on the other it represents the final frontier being conquered by global capitalism, the manipulation of preconscious meaning-making. The significance of Burgin's resort to the digital medium emerges at this point: despite its deceptive immediacy, a digital image does not require a physical referent in the outside world.

While Text II's description of the Writer and her Protagonist ends with a dark note-"but a ruthless suppression of unlicensed servers now maintains the market in virtual land " -Text III takes place in the Protagonist's world, where the digital coffee house is still in place. Through the use of present tense and third-person description, the texts make all the characters immediate to the viewer of A Place to Read. However, various details make it clear that these characters cannot coexist in the same reality at the same time: the Writer is in the act

of writing the book the Reader is reading. The Protagonist is a fictive character. While all three texts offer parallel realities that could not take place at the same time, Text III offers two parallel realities of "real" and "virtual" lives, the Protagonist and his avatar. We follow the Pro­tagonist seated in a coffee house on a crowded street in Istanbul, while his avatar walks in the garden of the virtual coffee house. The avatar and his companion, the Woman, watch the silhouette of Ayasofya and

Sultanahmet Mosques in the Old City. While Text I may conjure in the viewer of Burgin's work actual

memories of specific historical incidents that left deep emotive traces­"a journalist is murdered, a tanker explodes and flames bridge the Asian and European shores"-it also makes it clear that these tropes

constitute a genre: after all, it is the plot of the story she is reading that includes the explosion and the murder, conspiracy and corruption:

"The story is about conspiracy and corruption"

And further below:

"The action takes place in a parallel world"

There are multiple instances of such disjunctions in the texts, inter­rupting the flow of a seemingly seamless narrative, highlighting that what we are reading is a representation, and that reality is never im­mediately available outside of its images. For instance, Text II notes:

"In the foreground is a glass ashtray, clean and empty beside a coffee cup."

Suddenly, the reader is made aware that this is an image, that the des­cription of the Writer is taking place from a specific perspective. "In the foreground" belongs to the world of the visual narrative-a description of a painting, stage directions in a play or a film script-and as such, this is a moment of rupture in the viewer's absorption in the fictive reality constructed in the text.

In addition to disrupting the spectator's complete absorption in the narrative by momentarily spotlighting the mechanism of representation

51 .~ t> .. '[ ...

52 at work, I believe such details play yet another role: the clean and empty glass ashtray in the foreground appears once more, this time in Sequence III, in the interior of the coffee house: a lone table is in the foreground, with a single object on it: perhaps a glass ashtray.

The cross-referencing between texts and images in A Place to Read

provide a universe for the viewer, a panoramic experience, but one which disrupts the fiction of a self-sufficient and enclosed world, where every detail functions as a specific instantiation of a single, broader

entity, such as the view of the Dolmabah~e Palace and the vessels on the sea, all of which contribute to the fictive unity of the entity called "Istanbul" or "the Bosphorus." As Burgin suggests, in such an image "the intrusion of the primary processes into rational thought (secondary processes) governs the mechanisms of visual association." 30 The glass

ashtray, inexplicably transported from a cafe table in Geneva to the interior of a digital reconstruction of a destroyed building, has a charge, a significance that is not immediately available: as if we are witness­

ing someone else's dream, and the glass ashtray is a displaced image of a latent memory-trace-hidden from sight through repression­with a potentially powerful affect attached to it, one which we cannot remember or pinpoint. 31

In other sequences of A Place to Read, too, there are other such inexplicable elements, which signal the scene's connection to a broader world of signs-again, one beyond the limitations of a fictive unity offered by a linear narrative. In these sequences, the omniscient third­person narrator of the texts leaves its place to a seemingly first-person camera view. While the Reader and the Writer scan the panoramic view in Texts I & II, the camera eye in Sequence I surveys the digitally recon­structed coffee house itself. Sequence I is an approximately two-minute film showing Ta~hk Coffee house from its exterior. The camera encircles the building following an elliptical orbit, beginning with a diagonal view from the northeast. The camera's bird's eye viewpoint glides over

30 Burgin, "Photography, Phantasy, Function: Situational Aesthetics, 126. 31 See Burgin's discussion of "displacement" in "Photography, Phantasy, Function: 126.

various surfaces-the sky, the sea, the roof, exterior paneling, earth, trees, bushes ... Each shifting viewpoint offers new information: first, the building is in a garden, then it is on the seashore, third there is a horizon, fourth, the roof has a geometric topography, and fifth, the camera returns back to where it began.

Repetition, Memory and the Conceptual Object of Art

Although the elliptical loop around the coffee house comes back to

the same spot, repetition is never a simple reiteration: what we see the first time taints when we see it a second time. This effect is in line with Burgin's other works. Writing on "some recent art" in his 1969

article "Situational Aesthetics," Burgin argued, "the specific nature of any object formed is largely contingent upon the details of the situa­tion for which it is designed; through attention to time, objects formed are intentionally located partly in real, exterior space and partly in psychological, interior space. "32 The "object" Burgin refers to has to

be understood in its broadest sense: it is a psychical object-a mental representation-generated in the mind of the viewer through a series of instructions given by the artist: "[a]n immaterial object is created, which is solely a function of perceptual behavior. "33 In 1967, for instance, the viewers of Burgin's two Memory Piece works in Greenwich Park were given cues, the overall aim of which was to "'parenthesize' a section of perceptual experience in time. "34 In this sense, the word "object" is

an approximation that, in fact, highlights a certain state of conscious­ness created in the viewer-akin to a Bergsonian state of heightened attention. How long this state will continue, and what specific forms it will take, are contingent on the viewer.

Likewise, in A Place to Read, not only has time passed in our first and last encounter with the same viewpoint, but we also recognize that

32 Burgin, "Situational Aesthetics: Situational Aesthetics, 7. 33 Burgin, "Situational Aesthetics," 8.

34 Burgin, "Situational Aesthetics: 10.

54 our second perception has been touched by the memory of our first perception: we recognize the view, and in our recognition, we replay the "narrative track" we have recorded-the series of impressions we have received from multiple angles in the past two minutes.

In the viewpoints given in Sequence I, there is a paradoxical mo­

ment: during its rotation, the camera at some point interrupts its flight around the building, and glides diagonally over the roof: for a

few seconds, both the building and its surroundings disappear from

sight, and a series of triangular forms that constitute the roof fill the

screen. And then, slowly, in the upper right corner, the sky appears,

followed by the horizon line, and then the sea, and afterwards the fa­

miliar view of the coffee house in its surroundings comes back into full

view as the camera completes its rotation. As Gilles Oeleuze explains

in Cinema I-Movement-Image, narrative cinema can show bizarre or

paradoxical points of view, however, "to avoid falling into an empty

aestheticism they must be explained, they must be revealed as normal

and regular-either from the point of view of a more comprehensive set

which includes the first, or from the point of view of an initially unseen,

not given, element of the first set." 35 In other words, in conventional

narrative cinema, unusual perspectives are eventually explained by

other elements that inhabit the same diegetic world. In Sequence I, the

peculiar viewpoint of the camera that suddenly glides across the roof,

as if studying its topography very closely for an undisclosed reason,

is never explained. After this passage, the camera returns to its initial

orbit. The device that maintains the fiction-the first-person camera

view-disrupts the narrative, and exposes its own presence, drawing at­

tention to the panoramic apparatus as much as to the panorama itself.36

While the texts of A Place to Read are rich both in suggesting mental

images experienced by the Reader, Writer and the Protagonist as well as

evoking them in the viewer of the work, the digital sequences, Sequence

I, II and III, are uncannily empty-as if they are condensed dream

35 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I-Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003),15.

36 Also see Anthony Vidler, "The Panoramic Unconscious: Victor Burgin and Spatial Modernism: in Shadowed (London: AA Publications, 2000), 8-19.

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selmlplr· P1Anm. .... prenalbt dart .......bh. ortu> JOlon oda

207

Photograph illustrating an article on the Ta~lIk Coffee House written by its architect. Sedad Hakkl Eidem. published in the Turkish

architectural journal Arkirekr in 1950

56 images-void of narrative, and yet manifestly charged. For instance, if the coffee house shown in Sequence I is the same coffee house in which the Reader is seated in Text I, there are some major discrepan­cies: her world is crowded, busy, populated; Sequence I is void of signs of life, and, most significantly, of elements of panoramic studium that mark the location as the shore of the Bosphorus.

In order to appreciate how Sequence I enacts a panoramic void, it

is useful to compare it to a photograph that illustrated an article on

Ta~hk Coffee house written by its architect, Sedad Hakkl Eidem, and published in the Turkish architectural journal Arkitekt in 1950. It shows the coffee house from a distance. In the background, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and further back, the Old City lined with silhouettes of the Ayasofya and the Sultanahmet mosques are visible ... In his 1980 essay "Photography, Phantasy, Function," Burgin suggests that "[e]ven the uncaptioned photograph, framed and isolated on a gallery wall, is invaded by language when it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other; what significant element the subject recognises 'in' the photograph are inescapably supplemented from elsewhere."37 The

language that "invades" the photograph that illustrates the first page of Eidem's article quotes many others, revisiting a nineteenth-century Orientalist trope of the mysterious Constantinople, such as once iter­ated by Gautier: "Constantinople, voluptuously reclining on a divan of her seven hills, dipping her feet in the sapphire and emerald water, and washing her head crowned with cupolas and minarets in a rose and blue sky that seems to sparkle behind a silver veil." 38 This reiter­

ation of the archaic, timeless, mysterious Constantinople constitutes the very background of the 1950 photograph. There are other layers as well: tankers and fishing boats dot the sea, again participating in an Orientalist studium of experiencing the Bosphorus ... Closer to the

37 Anthony Vidler. "The Panoramic Unconscious: Victor Burgin and Spatial Modernism: 122. 38 Gautier. "La Turquie," L'Orient, vol. 1 (Paris: G.Charpentier, Editeur, 1882). 81:" (. .. ) Constantinople, volup­

tueusement couchee sur Ie divan de ses sept collines, laissant tremper ses pieds dans une eau de saphir et d'emeraude, et baignant, de sa tete couronm!e de coupoles et de minarets, dans un ciel rose et bleu qui semble briller derriere une gaze d'argent."

foreground, the mosque and clock tower of the Dolmabah\=e Palace are visible. And finally, Ta~hk Coffee House dominates the middle ground: not only is it the largest building in sight, a strange juxtaposition makes it seem as if the very tip of its sloping roof very lightly touches one of the minarets of the Ayasofya, while its sharp angles chop in half two minarets of the Sultanahmet Mosque.

If a comparison between EIdem's Arkitekt photograph and the dig­itally reconstructed coffee house of Sequence I clearly demonstrates

the voiding of all references to the Bosphorus in the latter, it does not explain what it is that is recreated in Sequence I. The monochromatic color scheme of Sequence I suggests that it may just be a memory trace, a remembered image not properly identified ... As a virtual image, it is a memory of the building: as Burgin reminds us, "[t]he visible world is only ever seen through its prior representations." 39 Just as manifest

content has its roots in latent meaning carried by memory traces spiral­ing down to the dream's navel, the camera-eye's insistent and fascinated observation of the roof structure may have another motivation that is not manifest but latent, and even beyond signification. The panoramic view given in Sequence I is deliberately left insufficient, foregrounding Burgin's insistence on the difference between a subjective limit and "the totality of the 'perpetual infinite film' in which the real and the virtual mingle." 40

The Bosphorus that has been erased in the digital version of reality in Sequence I in fact shapes the very structure of the characters' experience of reality: the Reader scans the panoramic view of the Bosphorus from her vantage point in the coffee house. The Writer's nostalgia for Istanbul surfaces when she sees the image of a ferry on the Bosphorus on the label of a bottle in a shop window, and "wave upon wave of longing wash over her. "41 The Protagonist's experience of reality, too, is shaped

by the Bosphorus: he is seated in a coffee house on a crowded street in Istanbul, where streams of people walk by, "relentless as boats on the

39 Burgin, Components of a Practice, 93.

40 "The Perpetual Infinite Film: Questions from Alexander Streitberger to Victor Burgin: 268. 41 Intertitle text to A Place to Read.

57 .. . ~ ~ .. 'e ...

58 Bosphorus. "42 The past merges into the present, the real into virtual,

and "[t]he semantic figure that results is neither a line, nor a circle; but rather a spiral: a passage through a 'vertical' stack of semantic strata. "43

What A Place to Read accomplishes, among other things, is a dem­onstration of how the studium and punctum are in a continuum, ele­ments in a Bergsonian spiral of life that grows and reaches deeper historical strata, both personal and social. If global capitalism curtails the growth of this Bergsonian "attention to life," Burgin's work inter­

venes in the established mechanisms of harnessing. What I would like to do in the following sections is to probe even further into the mental images that orbit Ta~hk Coffee House in an attempt to show how past forms haunt the present.

From Amcazade to Ta~hk: The Spectator of the Panorama

The studium of the Arkitekt photograph foregrounds a modernist in­tervention that the architect of the coffee house, Sedad Eidem, meant to make in the fabric of the ancient city. Nonetheless, while looking forward, the architect simultaneously looked backward: Eidem's plan itself was inspired by the remnants of a yet another, even earlier build­ing built sometime in or around 1699 for the grand vizier of Sultan Mustafa II, a courtier named Amcazade Kopriilii Hiiseyin Pa~a.44 The

basic principle Eidem drew from the older building, called the Amca­zade Yah, was the T-plan: a central hall called a sofa surrounded by

42 Intertitle text to A Place to Read. 43 Burgin, Components of a Practice, 94. 44 While Eidem looked back at the Amcazade Yah as a moment of evolutionary perfection, imagining discer­

ning in its T-plan the crystallization of an essential Turkishness, the Yah itself, back in 1699, might have been associated with nostalgia for an even older past, with a desire to revive the past glory of the Otto­man Empire, as Sultan Mustafa II, during his short reign from 1695 to 1703, aspired to revive the glories of the day of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. See R.A.Abou-EI-Hai, "The Narcissism of Mustafa II (1695-1703}: A Psychohistorical Study: in Studia Islamica 40 (1974}, 115-116. Situated right on the water on the Anatolian shore of the Bosphorus Strait, the building that stands today is but the last physical trace of a residential complex constructed for the Grand Vizier KoprUlu Huseyin Pa~a as a summer residence (See Sedad Hakkl Eidem "Amucazade Koprulu Huseyin Pa§a Yah Ko§ku Anadoluhisan-Bogazi9i 1699 (llllh.}." in Suheyl Onver and Sed ad Hakkl Eidem, eds., Amucazade Hiiseyin Paga Yailsl (istanbul: Tlirkiye Turing ve

three eyvans (partially-enclosed spaces with three walls and a ceiling).45

The fact that Eidem cast his new building in reinforced concrete while

retaining its basic plan signaled Ta~hk's "specific and legitimate status

as a 'showcase' of all the essentially modern qualities of the traditional

Turkish house; a demonstration of the contemporary potential of his­

tory."46 With the construction ofTa~hk Coffee house, then, the mod­

ernizing elite of the young Turkish Republic thus ultimately activated

the site originally created for the display of Imperial power using the

plans of a late seventeenth-century Ottoman aristocratic mansion.

According to Eidem, the T-plan of this building answered absolutely

no practical necessity: the only explanation for its presence was the hereditary residual retention of a traditional spatial structure. 47 This

traditional structure, Eidem explained, derived from earlier models in

Asia Minor that consisted of two or three eyvans that opened up to a

central open-air courtyard. According to Eidem, the Amcazade Yah's

central hall with the fountain was an evolved form of this originary de­

sign. This plan went through several evolutionary stages before reaching

the form represented in the Amcazade Yah, in which the central space

that had been the open-air courtyard was completely covered up, and

the only residue of its outdoor function was signaled by the central,

and by now, indoor, fountain. 48 According to this account, then, the

living space evolved from an inside- and function-oriented one to an

outside- and pleasure-oriented one. EIdem's application of Darwinian

Otomobil Kurumu, 1970). This single remaining building was mostly probably the divanhane-assembly room­of the male-only selamllk section of the complex. As such, it was used as the official reception room where the Vizier received important guests, including the Sultan and foreign ambassadors following the two major military defeats of the Ottoman army in central Europe. One of the earliest public functions held in the Yall was the reception of Austrian and Polish ambassadors in 1699, with whom the Sultan had signed the Karlowitz Peace Treaty following the Ottoman military defeat About two decades later, in 1718, the ambassadors who were par­ties to the Treaty of Passarowitz, another Ottoman military failure, were again entertained at the Yah at a ban­quet See Enis Kortan, Kaybolan istBnbu/'um: Bir Mimarm Amlart, 1947-1957{1stanbul: Boyut Kitaplan, 2006), 16.

45 Sibel Bozdogan, "Modernity in Tradition: Works of Sedad Hakki Eidem," in Sedad Eidem: Architect in Turkey (New York: Concept Media Pte. Ltd., 1987). 50.

46 Bozdogan, "Modernity in Tradition; 50. As Bozdogan suggests, Eidem had been enthralled with the Amcazade Yah as early as in the early 1930s and whose T-plan he had adopted in another reinforced concrete project for a private residence in 1932. See Bozdogan, 43.

47 Eidem," Amucazade Kopriilii Hiiseyin Pa§a Yah Ko§kii Anadoluhisan." 48 Eidem, "Amucazade Kopriilii Hiiseyin Pa§a Yah Kti§kii Anadoluhisan."

59

60 logic to his description of the "evolution" of the T-plan from a semi­covered to a fully-covered one is not accidental. EIdem's account of the now completely functionless residual fountain aligns with Darwin's description of vestigial organs that had absolutely no function, except as traces of an earlier stage in evolution, proving the hypothesis that current species had evolved from earlier, less complex ones.49

EIdem used another Darwinian concept-"adaptation"-to account for the adaptation of the T-plan to its new geographical environment,

the Bosphorus: "the desire to construct a space that opens up to the view from three different directions," a desire that underlies all other such mansions along the Bosphorus according to the architect. 50 One assumes that the "desire" EIdem mentions was that of the architect

of the Yah, or its owner Amcazade Hiiseyin Pa~a, or both. What is significant in EIdem's account is his association of the "desire" with the "view"; more specifically, with a panoramic view of the Bosphorus

as mediated by elongated windows. According to EIdem's evolutionist account, then, an exigency for shelter left its place to the discovery of a vantage point from where one takes in the world in its constant flux, and the once walled eyvans opened up to take in the views of the Bosphorus.

Desire for Panorama, Panoramic Desire, and Light

The architect Enis Kortan imagines the interior of the Amcazade Yah: "The western fa<;ade of the Yah faces the Bosphorus. We can imagine how the afternoon light, reflecting off the surface of the sea, entered the room, and, reverberating on the ceiling and the walls, created an idiosyncratic space of fleeting light compositions." 51 In Kortan's

49 For instance, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, voL 1 (New York: Appleton and Company, 1871), Darwin argued that "the progenitors of man must have been aquatic in their habits; for morphology plainly tells us that our lungs consist of a modified swim-balled, which once served as a float. The clefts on the neck in the embryo of man show where the branchice once existed" (198-199).

50 Eidem, "Amucazade Kopriilii Hiiseyin Pa§a Yah Ko§kii Anadoluhisan." 51 Kortan, Kaybolan ;stanbu/'um, 16.

~ er lieS (.tel~r rI~t ' "ed on d d'lwrng .v Ada!' €r' e B aumo, t ,f t' E K o.k f "Ed, n the TOPkQ~' Pau e, 5 lprodLced ir L TOr,rdr, monde JU ealJ loU/nat de' V'_I'Jge~ IVo, VII, "lo 'j, 18631

62 description, the fleeting effect of light creates a transient space. In this account, panoramic windows facing the Bosphorus not only enframe a view of the exterior world-a continuously changing world presented within the parameters of a stable framing structure-but also stimulate transient moods, offering an embodied experience of the world in flux.

EIdem and Kortan demonstrate their fascination with accounting for the Yah's T-plan as a panoramic apparatus. It is exactly this kind of fascination that can be traced in a late nineteenth-century print by

Hercules Catenacci based on a drawing by Adalbert de Beaumont. This image has been mistakenly identified as the Amcazade Yah in a number

of modern publications, although, when published in the illustrated magazine Le Tour du monde, its title specified it as a view of a room in the palace of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. 52 A note by Adalbert de Beaumont on the following page names the building as the Kiosk of Pearl, part of the Topkapl Palace complex, located on the terrace over­looking the Marmara Sea.D Describing in detail the opulent decoration of the interior in order to "give an idea about the luxury of the epoch of Suleiman the Magnificent," the writer concludes by imagining the view from the windows: "and beyond, the incomparable view of the Bosphorus under a brilliant sky. "54

What is significant in the image and the accompanying description

is the insistence on the description of the interior as a panoramic ap­paratus: windows of the room enframe the world in flux, and present it to stationary spectators. The diagonal light streaming in from windows connects the observed panoramic world to its spectators, but also turns the spectators themselves into participants of a spectacle-one which is consequently offered to us, the real spectators of the scene: we are given to see the panorama together with the panoramic apparatus.

Theophile Gautier, writing in 1853 his impressions of the construc­tion site of the Dolmabah~e Palace, described the panoramic view from

52 "Interieur d'un kiosque du serail, construit so us Soliman Ie Magnifique. Dessin de Catenacci d'apres M. Adalbert de Beaumont: Le Tour du monde: nouveau journal des voyages 7 (157),1863,13.

53 "Interieur d'un kiosque du serail: 14. 54 "Interieur d'un kiosque du serail:' 14.

the Sultan's future quarters, part of which I have quoted above: "From the windows, the most marvelous view on the world is discerned: a panorama without rival ( ... ). If one leans out a little, one discovers on the two shores a series of summer residences, kiosks, painted in cool colors, which constitute on that marvelous sea stream a double embankment of palaces. Add to that the thousand accidents of light, the effect of the sun and the moon, and you have a spectacle which the imagination cannot surpass." 55 Gautier's accidents of light reso­

nate with Kortan's account of light compositions: even something as ephemeral and as experiential as light can, in fact, operate in the realm of studium. As Burgin suggests, "regardless of how much we may strain to maintain a 'disinterested' aesthetic mode of apprehension,

an appreciation of the 'purely visual', when we look at an image it is instantly and irreversibly integrated and collated within the intricate psychic network of our knowledge." 56

However, there is one more point about these repetitive accounts that insist on noticing the ephemeral, transient space created by light in a panoramic apparatus. As Schivelbusch argues in Disenchanted Light: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, the phantasmagoric power wielded by such novel technologies of spectacle as panorama, diorama and magic lantern derived exactly from such a choreography of light, of illumination, one which reinforced a sense of illusion: "the picture world of the new media offered endless opportuni­ties for creating illusions, belonging as it did to a different existential sphere from the reality in which the audience was sitting. "57

Catenacci's image as well as accounts by EIdem, Kortan, Gautier and Adalbert de Beaumont all attest to their heightened conscious­ness of light as a device: light creates an awareness of a differential existential sphere. The concatenation of images hitting the spectator who watches the world in flux is choreographed by light-as if light is a metaphorical spotlight, drawing the attention to specific points,

55 Gautier, Constantinople, 296. 56 Burgin, "Photography, Phantasy, Function: 136. 57 Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Light, 213-214.

63 .. > ·U .. 'f ...

64 but beyond that, allowing the attention to concentrate, to become self­conscious, triggering a Bergsonian expansion toward a heightened state of psychic consciousness. Panoramic light as a device parenthesizes phenomenological experience, and creates the conditions for a state of extended attention.

Theophile Gautier, Pierre Loti, and Enchantment

This notion of panoramic light as a metaphorical device that paren­thesizes the flux of life can help address one aspect of Edward Said's account of Orientalism in his seminal 1978 book of that title. Said does not differentiate between punctum and studium: "even the most imaginative writers of an age, men like Flaubert, Nerval or Scott, were constrained in what they could either experience of or say about the Orient. For Oriental ism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the strange (the Orient, the East, 'them'). "58

While Said brilliantly exposes how reiteration structures percep­tion and defines subject positions, his equation of "experience" with

"say" neglects that aspect of existence that is fundamentally unrep­resentable: "the 'other' that is the unconscious, and the 'other' that is the Real-(.oo} that which is uncanny in experience, that which resists signification, that which cannot be woven into the fabric of 'understanding. ", 59 Elsewhere, regarding the inability of Orientalism

to understand or express the complexity of life, Said argues: "it is a fallacy to assume that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books-texts-say."6o Leaving aside the uncontested fact that Orientalist structures would never have had the power to represent reality, the Real, I would argue that an archaeology of the encyclopedic

58 Edward SaId, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 19791,43-44. 59 Burgin, Components of a Practice, 84-85. 60 SaId, Orientalism, 93.

tradition of Orientalist studium-which Said refers to as the constant reiteration of idees refues-can nonetheless excavate "the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live." This

unpredictability, however, pertains to those very people who reiterated idees refues-those ideas "repeated, echoed and re-echoed uncriti­cally," as described by Flaubert in his unfinished Bouvard et pecuchet.61

According to Said, "in a highly compressed form this brief episode, taken out of Flaubert's notes for Bouvard et Pecuchet, frames the spe­cifically modern structures of Orientalism."62 The suture between the

experience and the word belongs exactly to that realm of human in­determinacy, to the concatenation of images spiraling downwards to the dream's navel. Coming to the "Orient" fully equipped with idees

refues-that Orienta list studium-enabled some travelers to frame and parenthesize the chaos of phenomenological experience. Such re­current terms as "impression," "mystere," "enchantement" may be but inefficient approximations in an attempt to at least give a name to

some of those otherwise unrepresentable experiences. Towards the end of his stay in Istanbul, Gautier grew tired of his

inability to access what he refers to as the "mystery" of the Orient: veiled faces, covered windows, impenetrable language ... The fascina­tion and hyperbolic excitement of previous chapters left their place to frustration and melancholia: "This mystery, which occupies imag­ination primarily, becomes exhausting after a while, when one recog­nizes that there is no hope of discovering it. "63 He was eager to leave,

and was already dreaming of the brilliant white colonnade of the Par­thenon-the minarets of Ayasofya did not give him pleasure anymore: "My soul, already turned towards another end, is not captivated by surrounding objects anymore (Mon esprit, tourne vers un autre but,

n'est pas impressionne par les objets environnant). "64 The light is turned toward the image of the Parthenon now, reflecting on its brilliant white

61 Sard, Orientalism, 116,

62 Sard, Orienta/ism, 116,

63 Sa'id, Orientalism, 363, 64 Sa'id, Orientalism, 363,

66 colonnades, drawing Gautier's "enchanted" attention away from the

disenchantment of Istanbul. Half a century later, melancholia not only lingered, but took over

Pierre Loti's experience. Writing about the impending modernization of the Anatolian shore of the Bosphorus-which, according to Loti, lags behind the European shore by at least a century-Loti's melancholia derived from his apprehension that the objects of his enchantment would soon thus disappear forever, unable to resist the unstoppable

homogenization of the entire world by "our barbarian modernity." 65

In both Gautier and Loti, the Otherness of Istanbul is expressed in two emotional extremes oscillating between enchantment and disen­

chantment, between euphoric fascination caused by a fantasy of im­mediacy-to be in the immediate presence of the Other-and complete dejection at one's inability to penetrate, possess, ingest, to become one with this Other ... This is a Bergsonian oscillation between rapt attention that enables consciousness to reach the deepest layers of memory on the one hand, and automatic responses utilizing only shallow layers of memory on the other hand: "our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. "66 As such, the exuberant experi­ence that accompanied deep convictions of the alterity of the Orient was genuine, and at certain moments perhaps life was experienced within the framework of a Bergsonian growth of consciousness.

The metaphoric light is accompanied by yet another device that facilitates access to the panorama: the caique. Loti enjoys the last ves­tiges of a pure and untouched Otherness in the sight of the Amcazade Yah: "When one passes in front of it, one is always tempted to slow down one's caique to take a better look. Excessively bent, above the flagstones of the esplanade that has turned green of its small bank, it allows one to see inside its great halls, through its windows no one bothers to close anymore. ( __ .) Nobody lives there anymore: nobody

65 Pierre Loti, "La maison de Keupruli," in Le Yali de Keupruli a Anatoli·Hissar Clite Asiatique du Bosphore (Paris: Societe des amis d'istamboul, 1915).

66 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 14.

takes care of these vestiges of the grandeur of the times past." 67 Else­

where, in another panoramic caique ride across Yahs lining the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, Loti writes: "passing from there is an enchant­ment for the eyes." 68

The caique used in panoramic rides on the Bosphorus is a device that accesses the "enchanted" world of the Orient. The 1905 edition of Guide Joanne gave this practical advice to prospective travelers to Istanbul regarding means of transportation in the city: "There are two

types of boats in Constantinople: dinghies, similar to those used in the Occident, short, stable and manned by Greek or Italian rowers, and caiques, small boats, narrow, slender, having a prodigious lightness, which means an excessive instability on water, rowed almost exclusively by Turks who do not understand any European language." 69 The caique is in fact a mediator, a vessel that is neither here nor there, neither Self nor fully its impenetrable Other. It is itself is both marvelous and dif­ferent. At the same time, it offers an entry, not too much beyond the threshold, but a momentary promise of identification of the Self with

its Other; or better put, it is a platform from where one watches the world hurtle by while being immersed in it... As such, it is the phan­tasmagoric panoramic apparatus par excellence.

In the virtual world of A Place to Read, the avatar of Burgin's Pro­tagonist enjoys the Bosphorus, exploring the vestiges of sunken caiques in the bed of the sea in Text III:

Once he walked on the floor of the Bosphorus, Butterfly fish scattering from sunken caiques. Now the bed is a desert, its riches erased to free disk space for commercial projects. Soon the coffee house also will go.

The seabed is a receptacle of devices of enchantment of bygone times. The dreamlike image of a figure walking among sunken caique -butterfly fish scattering-seems to capitalize on this intermediary

67 Loti, "La maison de Keupruli; n.p. 68 Loti, "La maison de Keupruli; n.p. 69 Collection des Guides Joanne: De P8ris a Constantinople (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie., 1902),190·191.

68 function of the Orienta list trope of a caique. The statement that even the virtual caiques have been erased from memory, overtaken by com­mercialism, signals the appropriation of the phantasmagoric power of this trope for a semblance of full possession. In a world where day-to-day experience has already been largely colonized by domi­nant political power structures that shape the cityscape, the invasion of cyberspace reads as the loss of one of the final frontiers where the imagination could have expanded. Now other types of avatars roam

the cyberspace, such as that of the prospective customer of Swiss6tel Istanbul the Bosphorus, who is offered a superhuman panoramic gaze that can penetrate the mysteries of the Bosphorus and the city. The earlier mode of fascination with the panoramic device has left its place

to a prescription of the telescope as a tool to facilitate access, even at a distance: the distance with the Other has been breached, not because the veil is lifted and the language finally deciphered, but because the subject'S newfound power to consume has obliterated this fantasized distance. Sadness and frustration promise to give way to pleasure and instant gratification.

If global capitalism has colonized psychic structures of meaning­making, emergent digital technologies promise some sort of a recu­peration of a notion of collectivity that consists of singular individ­uals, capturing "a potentially infinite variety of shared interests." 70

However, as Burgin also points out, micro-synchronization on the

level of a multitude of digital communities has also been appropriated by global capitalism. 71 The most powerful and destructive aspect of new virtual images created in conjunction with neoliberalism seems to be the ideology of utter clarity and utter predictability. This ide­ology stifles and destroys "a variety of existential circumstances of reception," such as the conditions that could give rise to an experience of enchantment. 72

70 Burgin, "The lime of the Panorama, H Situational Aesthetics, 302.

71 Burgin, "The lime of the Panorama." Also see Burgin, Components of a Practice, 86. 72 Burgin, "The lime of the Panorama," 301.

Here again, for one last time, A Place to Read intervenes. The Foun­tain, the metaphorical heart of EIdem's T-plan, appears twice in A Place

to Read, in Sequence III and in Text III:

The fountain in the coffee house falls silent in its gleaming pool.

Sequence III shows the interior of the digitally reconstructed coffee house. The fountain is in the center, and to the right, in the foreground,

is the table with the glass ashtray. Diagonal rays of light enter the room, and in a sequence that lasts less than a minute, we follow the passage of an entire day, from sunrise to sunset, by the traveling rays of light and the shadows of the window frames cast in the room. The sequence ends with twilight, and we see glittering points of light, reflecting off surfaces. The end comes with a darkness, one which resonates with the invocation of a primordial silence at the end of Loti's account of the Amcazade Yah, when the author hears the silence of the garden of the ancient house as he glides past in his caique: "the garden, with its white marble fountain whose carvings imitate a cloth with a pre­

cious embroidery, the old garden, filled with silence, tranquilly returns to a savage shrubbery. "73 Burgin notes that "the silences in my vid­

eos, the places where 'nothing happens', where you may close your eyes, are spaces where viewers may inscribe their own associations. "74

The fountain of Ta~hk Coffee House in twilight, that self-conscious iteration of a vestige of a primordial form, encapsulates the navel be­yond which analysis cannot go.

73 Loti, "La maison de Keupruli," n. p. 74 Burgin, Components of a Practice, 94.

A Place to Read