Introduction to

Sociotechnical Cognition

Compilation

February 2017

Some texts and English translations by Işık Barış Fidaner

The lighthouse is from the video game Life Is Strange.

yersizseyler.wordpress.com
fidaner.wordpress.com

LaTeX codes of the book still under CC Attribution-

NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

2
Contents

Read me! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Sociotechnic Activities at Planet Trappist-1e . . . . . . . . 7

On what-is and what-ought-to-be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Significance Test: Discourse and Perception . . . . . . . . . 10

Punctuation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Words of Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Digital transference: Energy and Entropy . . . . . . . . . . 15

The inability to acknowledge a proven fact, as translated

into an appeal to an authority to “unfortunately” dis-
regard some person (me, in this case) . . . . . . . . . 24

A sentence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

United state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

The card-carrying human kindness seeker . . . . . . . . . . 30

Presenting VNIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

3
The arrow of time and the shitters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

About my situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Neuroscience can devise a dialectical philosophy of sociotech-

nical cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

What is a scientist? Who are “we” and who are “they”? . 55

Topology as Tautology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Riddles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

RESIST QUANTUM!
Ceren Büyüktetik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Those who think they have found the black hole without
even observing the solar system
Aslı Erdoğan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Combinatorial problems inherently require questions of non-

spatial presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

On Physics and the Real of Woman . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

To prepare the revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

The Eyes of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Just as there can be no meta-language, there can be no

meta-data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

The addressee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84

4
Scientific Stakeholding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

We reject the terminations in DTCF Department of Theater

ÖKM Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Amed City Theater opens with its first play

Vecdi Erbay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

‘Life is us, art is us’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

5
 Read me!

January 12, 2009

This is a blog post. It has a definite topic, and it has a certain sender.
However, it’s addressee is not yet determined. At least it was, until you
chose to read it. As you went on to read these sentences, you assumed
the role of the recipient, making this post reach you. Now, if you make a
comment, this event of receiving will be clear for me and anyone else that
passes by: you will be disclosed. If you do not, you will go on to occupy
the default place of the undisclosed recipient.

6
 Sociotechnic Activities at Planet Trappist-1e

February 20171

You are being sent to the human colony in TRAPPIST-1e to serve as a

“sociotechical worker” which primarily involves the constant adjustment of
the so-called action-signifiers that are being deployed in the space station
for its variety of tasks.

(. . . )

There is a terrestrial legend, a myth about a life form, a neural leech that
proliferates on TRAPPIST-1E. Earth folks sometimes associate inexplicable
phenomena with this thing they call . . . ?. . .

But your colleagues on the planet confidently deny its existence. There are
adverse life forms but they are nothing like that, and the incidents on the
Earth show neither correlation nor regularity, so it’s just that, a myth.

“The Earth folks have always been a bit too . . . ?. . . anyways,” the professor
explains. “Let’s go to the space farmer’s market and I’ll show you the actual
life forms we have here.”

1I haven’t written the book. It’s just the seed.

7
 On what-is and what-ought-to-be

TR: May 2010 & EN: January 2017

The surest way to lose sight of the unseverable link between us and what-is
is to attempt to place a what-ought-to-be up against and independent of
what-is. This effort conceals our link with what-is under a negation.

Just as words are needed for speaking, so do we need things for thinking.
Words that-are-not cannot be used in sentences. Likewise, the dictionary of
our thought comprise the things that-are: all of our thoughts are articulated
via the things that-are.

We also articulate what-ought-to-be by what-is. Such thought is different

from others in that it claims to be independent of what-is.

By attempting to make what-ought-to-be independent of what-is, we place

it up against what-is, we ground it on the negation of what-is, i.e. on
what-is-not. What-ought-to-be is a state of affairs inaccessible to what-is,
therefore it is an ensemble of what-are-not.

Yet from the perspective of what-ought-to-be, all that-are turn into what-
ought-not-to-be, for what-ought-to-be as an ensemble of what-are-not must
oppose things that-are at all times. Yet the set of what-are-not wherefrom
what-ought-to-be emerges can only exist by virtue of what-is.

8
In this case we can do two things:

1) We continue pursuing the set of what-ought-to-be that we have arbi-

trarily determined. We reduce our relation with what-is to a negation to
promote this ideal. We criticise, dislike, make fun of what-are, and up
against them, we place what-are-not that we have elected to constitute our
ideal.

2) We become aware that we need things that-are for thinking and dream-
ing. We don’t hold on to what-ought-to-be as an escape from what-is. We
pass through what-ought-to-be in order to return back to what-is. What-
ought-to-be ceases to be an ideal goal and becomes a transitory bridge
where we come from what-is, and return back to, again, what-is.

9
 Significance Test: Discourse and Perception

TR: May 2012 & EN: November 2016

Perhaps one could adopt a significance test to pass beyond the paradigm
of counting by fingers / measuring by rulers (that is, the commodity ab-
straction):

— Viewed from which of its aspects is the situation we have found ourselves
in or the event we are experiencing more significantly (more extraordinarily,
more extremely) visible?

— How can we emphasize / represent these aspects and how do we express

/ nominate this significance?

This is what Žižek calls “looking awry / parallax view”.

Statistical significance
P-value

10
In case you ask about how to do it:

At first, one needs to distinguish the addressee’s discourse and the percep-
tion that is pursued:
— Discourse is a more or less organized toolkit comprised of sentences and
symbols.
— Perception means in which manners one speaks in which places. So it’s
a perspective that finds new grounds within any context of speech. It’s
a “significance” that the totality of the constituents in the environment
express.

Supposition:
— The discourse one uses can never express the totality of the present
perception. As the communication environments are altered, the perception
is constantly renewed, and the discourse remains lacking.

Method:
— In order to open a discourse that has been closed & congealed,
1- One conceives the speaker’s discourse and perception separately
2- One forms a sentence that the perception certainly affirms, but the dis-
course is unable to prove (Gödel sentence).
3- The discourse will have to negate such sentences, but since the percep-
tion will weigh more heavily, a resolution & opening will take place within
the discourse. It will have to update itself in a way to affirm these new
sentences.

Supposition:
— If there are counter-perceptions that the perception has been excluding,
these will be indirectly included in the discourse. They can be detected in
the manner of speaking, in the examples presented, in the jokes etc. This
exclusion and the indirect inclusion, being a constant source of pleasure,
also covers up the abovementioned lacking of discourse by giving it an
appearance of completeness.

11
Method:
— In order to relate the present perception with the counter-perceptions
that are being excluded,
1- One conceives the speaker’s discourse and perception. One predicts the
counter-perception by examining the excesses in the discourse.
2- One asks a question from within the present discourse, by relying on
the present perception, but one whose answer will trigger the counter-
perception.
3- The counter-perception instantly finds the answer. But this answer is
not reflected into the discourse since it is being excluded. The finding of the
answer is observed through the indirect effects on the discourse: Changes in
the manner of speaking and the changes in mood, new examples and new
jokes that emerge, etc. Even as the answer remains unsaid, the question
has played its part: Since the exclusion that was protecting the perception
has been debased, the perception will have to be formed from scratch.

12
 Punctuation

July 2015

.
The necessary

...
The unnecessary

...
The necessary is one among the unnecessary

!
The contingent

!..
The contingent interrupts the unnecessary

?
The impossible

?..
The impossible resides among the unnecessary



And this is me –> !.(?)

13
 Words of Capital

July 2015

http://www.sakareller.net/insan/baris/entropic_correlation_of_
words_in_capital_by_karl_marx.zip

These entropy agglomerations were produced in REBUS.

Details on REBUS, source code and example:

https://fidaner.wordpress.com/science/rebus/

Relevant Papers:
— Clustering Words by Projection Entropy
— Summary Statistics for Partitionings and Feature Allocations

14
 Digital transference: Energy and Entropy

September 20162

Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to write this post quickly and then
go to the supermarket. What I will tell are the thoughts that emerged
today on my way to the Boston Lacan Study Group (BSLG) meeting on
Lacan’s 8th seminar book: Transference, class 12. There was no reason to
bring these thoughts up during the meeting, for even without a big Other,
we had other things to discuss, which is good.

Let me introduce you to my phone which is not really a phone because it

is without a SIM card (without a micro-SIM card to be exact, since I have
a SIM card that inhabits my other phone that is really a phone), but this
is not the issue now. The current issue is that this phone is an object of
transference, and since there is no big Other, it is an object of transference
that functions in its own right. You only need this device, & clouds. . .
2 You can find the Turkish translation in the 28th Placeless Book, Bilinen Son İyi

Yapılandırmayı Hep Bir Tık Daha İyiye.

15
 Clouds like these maybe why not?

Not like these, unfortunately. I mean the digital non-cloud clouds that
I access using my non-phone phone without (micro) SIM card. So, OK.
What’s the point?

The point is that we are obliged to acknowledge that, as an object of

transference, this device has two aspects in its possession:

Information and electricity.

But these two are mixed to one another, since information travels by elec-
tricity and we are informed via electricity. So let us subtract each of them
and look at their remainders.

Device - Information = Energy

Energy = abstracted form of Electricity without Information
Device - Electricity = Entropy
Entropy = abstracted form of Information without Electricity

To represent these two aspects, I chose two objects:

16
 A Pokéball charger and a CYOA book to represent Energy and Entropy

First one is a “power bank”, a portable charger in the shape of a Pokéball.

It represents Energy. Its main attributes are:

1. There is a symmetry that keeps a balanced proportion between gains

and losses by somehow accommodating past with future: If you
have charged the charger, then the charger is supposed to charge
your device.
2. It is a unit, it has a membrane, which in this case consists of a
USB port and a micro-USB port, but it could just as well have the
membrane of a biological cell.
3. It is without information. Charging does not inform this unit, it
just pours a charge into it according to some proportionality in time.
Information is completely subtracted in order to obtain this unit of
energy.
4. In its fictional role, it functions as a source and sink of object-causes
of desire: Pokémons3 come out of Pokéballs, or they go into them.
3 What is a Pokémon? It’s what we obtain by putting Schrödinger’s cat into Einstein’s

elevator and pressing the UP button.

17
 It’s a generator at the same time that it’s a consumer. These objects
constitute a “franchise” that only relates to itself.

My second object is a Choose Your Own Adventure book to represent

Entropy. Its main attributes are:

1. It has an asymmetric structure in various senses. There is only a

single beginning but several endings. The pages are not comparable,
paragraphs, words, letters are not comparable. It is constructed by
letters: vowels and consonants. Moreover, it can be considered as
a single vowel (beginning) that resolves into a variety of consonants
(endings). It’s like a hall of mirrors that reflects symbolic asymmetries
onto one another.
2. It cannot be contained: Each semantic piece in every page is open
to a variety of interpretations. Even the pages, being numbered as
they are, cannot be considered “units” in any sense, since they need
not succeed. Some pages succeed to one or several other pages,
whereas some other pages do not succeed, and that’s why we call
them “endings.”
3. It is without energy. It’s just a bunch of ink molecules inscribed onto
the material that we call “paper.” No one can see a symmetry in
a Choose Your Own Adventure book except true believers of The
Laws Of Nature According To The Established Honorary Science Of
Physics.
4. It is solely fiction, pure fiction as embodied in a structure. There
is nothing that distinguishes it from what psychoanalysis calls The
Unconscious. It’s printed by a press, just like unconscious thoughts
are repressed. It’s a map with branches to multiple directions. It’s
like a symptom. You could even consider it a rhizome and I wouldn’t
disagree.

So what?

18
It’s getting late, so let me just say that I’m on the side of Entropy.

But my Entropy is not the one that dooms the universe to an ultimate
symmetrical death according to The Unfortunate Second Law Of Thermo-
dynamics.

Mine is an Entropy from which symmetry is subtracted. We can subtract

it, because it’s a symmetry of equations, not a symmetry of nature. And
that’s why people should really go back to Emmy Noether if they want
to understand how to interpret the real import of the recent evidence on
gravitational waves.

OK. Now I’m off to the supermarket.



And this was something that emerged after the BLSG meeting in June.

See in Zizek Studies.



19
As experimentalists, Dr. Beacham and his colleagues had to ignore the
theory papers about what it all might mean. “We can’t be chasing ambu-
lances,” he said. “Let the data do the talking. In this case it turned into
this flat line.”

Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology and a member of

the C.M.S. team, said, “So there is no gloom and doom in my opinion that
this is gone. As we have said multiple times, it could have been anything,
including nothing.”

The Particle That Wasn’t — Dennis Overbye

...

Or, to put it in yet another way, one should bear in mind here the two
aspects of the notion of remnant: the rest as what remains after the sub-
traction of all particular content (elements, specific parts of the whole), and
the rest as the ultimate result of the subdivision of the whole into its parts,
when, in the final act of subdivision, we no longer get two particular parts
or elements, two somethings, but a something (the rest) and a nothing.

The Sexual is Political — Slavoj Zizek

20
And see my new MIT umbrella for the rainy days to come this year — (I
think) a very good joke; as to why, see the last page of Counting Qualia.

21
They are looking for a Pokémon.

22
The inability to acknowledge a proven fact, as
translated into an appeal to an authority to
“unfortunately” disregard some person
(me, in this case)

4+ years ago, I had submitted the abstract “Gameplay is politics” (the first
chapter of Dialectics of Game Design) to the 4th ICTs and Society meeting
that was to take place in Uppsala, Sweden.4
I did an e-mail submission before the announced "deadline". According to
the e-mail server logs of alternatifbilisim.org, the submission was technically
successful.
However, for some unknown reason, my submission had not landed into the
organizer’s (Marisol Sandoval) inbox (“junk”? “spam”? classification?)
As a result, she was unable to acknowledge my submission, eventhough I
was able to prove by the server logs that it indeed took place.
This inability to acknowledge a proven fact led the organizer Marisol San-
doval to appeal to the authority of the “main organizer” Christian Fuchs.
She encrypted her appeal to him in the notion of a “slot” that was “unfor-
tunately already filled.”
I had written the e-mail below to inform the organizing board members
about the incident.
They did not respond.
The name of the meeting they organize, “ICTs and Society” means:
“Information and Communication Technologies and Society.”
PS: I had written another very short text at the time about the four kinds
of discrimination mentioned in the e-mail (informal discrimination, physical
discrimination, formal discrimination, electronic discrimination) that just
makes their distinction and does not elaborate much about their specifics.
4 The Turkish translation can be found in the 34th Placeless Book, Kaplan Kaplan.

24
dear icts and society board,
i want make you aware about what happened with my application and ex-
plain why it was electronic discrimination. in summary, the communication
went like this:
– i’ve sent you an abstract, but you did not return?
– i’m sorry. i received your second email but i cannot find your first email
in my mailbox. presentation slots are full anyway.
– but my first mail reached your mail server as well as my second email.
here are the logs. thus, i managed to do what was required on time. can
you check with your system admin to see why it did not reach your mail-
box?
– i don’t know where exactly the error occured - but i did not have it on
time. i appealed to the main organizer. i am now authorized to disregard
you. i’m sorry.
– i see... ok then. good luck discussing effects of communication technol-
ogy on social relations.
as you can see here, the key obstruction is the wall of "i don’t know why"
and the "appeal to authority" that relieves the burden of finding out.
the "hidden" knowledge here might be a "spam filter": a machine that
ignores emails based on their appearance on the communication medium.
this is functionally the same with, say, a "racism filter" in a brain that
automatically disregards black people. the answer can be translated thus "i
very sorry, i just couldn’t take you seriously at the time, i don’t know why,
it just happened that way..."
we might be physically separated from these "filters", but this does not
relieve us from our responsibility for their functions: we use them in our
communication, they keep logs of their actions and we have admins that
manage them. we can know why, therefore, we must know why.
only in this way can we realize and diminish the effects of electronic dis-
crimination, alongside older forms of informal, physical and formal discrim-
inations.
nice to meet you, and good luck with the conference,

25
 A sentence

August 2013

here is a sentence:

Ex-amples are in-turnal ex-amplifications of ex-pression.

1) Ex-amples : Examples carry an “amplitude” of goodness-appropriateness

with them that is not automatically a “service of goods” or “utility” as a
“positive” thing.

2) Are : They be, they are thrown, they receive names.

3) In-turnal : En-tropic. Their being is a turning-into-self, they are en-

tropic.

4) Ex-amplifications : They subsist by amplifying a voice that cannot

be indexed down on a list or tableau, thus you cannot have one-to-one
correspondence between examples and what they are examples of.

5) Of : They belong-to, they are placed tempo-rally (in a repetition that

rallies with a tempo).

6) Ex-pression : Examples come into existence by belonging to you in a

manner of hitting you in the head.

27
 United state

March 2015

 Messages will continue after these messages 

(US PSA)

— I am a coffee
I am the coffee with milk that I’m not —
— I am the coffee with cream that I’m not
— I am a state
Me too —
— I am a united state —

— I am a worker
I am the better-off manager that I’m not —
— I am the worse-off beggar that I’m not
— I am a state
— We are another —
— We are a united state —

— I am a student
I am the morbid lecturer that I’m not —
— I am the bustling rioter that I’m not
— I am a state, I have other states
— I am a united state —

— I am the applicant
I am the officer that I’m not —
— I am the paperwork that binds me

28
— I have states, I’m written
— I am a united state

— I am the hectic one

I am the dial that is not me —
— We form the dialectic
— We are the united state

— I am a worthless chinese
I am the unique chinese that I’m not —
— The counting that counts itself
We are the process with states —
— I am united states

(US flag, producer logo, copyright notice, FBI warning, etc.)

 now we are back with the messages 

29
 The card-carrying human kindness seeker

April 2016

In Boston, there’s a famous flow of people called the Orange line. It comes
from Forest Hills and it’s well-known among white people for its black peo-
ple.
_ _ _ At where’s called a State, some part of this flow splits to join an-
other flow called the Blue line that is headed for Wonderland. Said that,
it’s probably a minority of people on the Blue line that actually reaches
Wonderland.
_ _ _ In fact, it’s also likely a minority of the Orange line people that
actually comes from Forest Hills. It’s reasonable to say that it’s a much
smaller minority that does both. So neither origins nor destinations can be
held as representative of these flows.
_ _ _ But something can be found at the State where they intersect. What
or who? The reason to write this post, namely, the card-carrying human
kindness seeker.

So who is the card-carrying human kindness seeker? It’s a young man that
may be still standing at the State, carrying a card that says “SEEKING
HUMAN KINDNESS”.
_ _ _ Besides the card, he is carrying a plastic glass that seems to be
empty. He is probably still carrying the card and the empty plastic glass.

30
_ _ _ He is likely a student, even if he is not one still, because people are
not born as human kindness seekers, they are taught to do that.
_ _ _ It is also likely that his plastic glass is empty, even if it is not still
empty, because seeking identifies with a State of emptiness, or maybe it’s
the other way around, I cannot be sure.

And what about the audience of the card-carrying human kindness seeker?
_ _ _ Most of them did not come from Forest Hills and most of them will
not reach Wonderland. Still less of them do both. It’s simple multiplica-
tion.
_ _ _ It can be a bit confusing when multiplications are reductive. But
that’s how we perceive the passing time. That’s also how the card-carrying
human kindness seeker perceives the passing time. People come and go.
Reductions multiply.
_ _ _ But what is being reduced? What is there being multiply reduced?
The flow.

But what is a flow to be reduced? The flow itself is a reduction of other

flows.
_ _ _ At each intersection, some flow cuts another flow. When such an
intersection subsists, it’s called a State.
_ _ _ These intersecting flows are occasionally called nature. But it’s the
humankind that calls them nature. It’s the humankindness that calls them
nature.
_ _ _ It’s the humankindness that is seeking itself in these flows, that calls
them nature.
_ _ _ These flows, a so-called nature, a second nature.

31
 Presenting VNIS
November 20165

In order to celebrate my first seven months as a postdoc researcher in

Northeastern University in Boston6 wherein I had moved seven months ago
when I had left İstanbul, Turkey, I hereby launch a new e-mail service called
VNIS, which means Visual Noninformative Indication Service.

As is well known, clock alarms have been one of the favourite auditory
noninformative indication services used by the citizens of the United States
as well as the immigrants and the nonimmigrants (such as myself) and even
the Native Americans or those who are much more African than the rest of
us who happen to live in this country for that matter.

These devices have very been popular as evidenced by the Daylight Saving
Time (DST) convention to regulate their use.7
5 The Turkish translation can be found in the 30th Placeless Book, Boston Raporu.
6 Thereby I definitively left behind the notorious “six months threshold”, which is
absolutely irrelevant by the way — not sure who introduced that phrase.
7 DST is such a fruitful convention that there are even countries (such as Turkey)

that have switched to permanent DST the whole year to completely abandon “winter
time” and enjoy “summer time” all year long.

Bkz: "Turkey to stay on summer time all year round" (theguardian.com)

32
As successful as auditory indications have been, visual indications have also
presented a very useful and feasible opportunity as a noninformative indica-
tion alternative eventhough they have remained unregulated and relatively
underutilized.

I hereby present VNIS: Visual Noninformative Indication Service “for the

boats that float by visual means”:

http://www.redkid.net/generator/sign.php

VNIS is a procedure where noninformative e-mails are sent by me with an

expected frequency to a person who already know what to expect to see in
those e-mails.

VNIS procedure:

— VNIS applicant fills the VNIS application form below and sends it to me
at:

— VNIS application will be either accepted or rejected and the applicant

will hopefully be informed about this decision within the 72 hours following
the application.

33
— If the application was accepted and the applicant was informed, then
the applicant may expect to receive the VNIS that (s)he applied for.

— Otherwise, (s)he may expect nothing.

See the VNIS application form below.

Visual Noninformative Indication Service Application Form:

1) Please tick “Yes, I have been informed” below to indicate that you have
been informed that this is a noninformative indication service that aims
to convey exactly zero information, although service quality may vary and
temporary incidental informative transfers of negligible positive amounts
might take place.8

[ ] Yes, I have been informed.

[ ] No, and I’m not sure who have been informed.

[ ] In fact, I’m not even sure what this is all about.

[ ] To tell the truth, I’m not sure about anything, let alone whatever this

8 If you receive any negative amount of information that exceeds 1 bit in total, please

hesitate at most 10 seconds to contact me to ask for the reason. Refer to Figure 1 for
any other possibility.

Figure 1. Refer to this plot for any other possibility.

34
is all about.

[ ] What’s going on here?

2) What is this all about?9

3) Of course!

4) Please indicate the expected frequency.10

5) Here is a sample VNIS e-mail:

9 Please leave the answer blank and consider this question not mentioned at all.

The present absence of any answer to this question will serve as the incontrovertible
evidence that the VNIS indications have indeed been perfectly and entirely noninforma-
tive.
10 Recommended setting: once a week.

35
 The arrow of time and the shitters

December 2016

Those who think that they write using other people’s blood really write
using their own shit. Those who think that they themselves are exempt
from the arrow of time, that they are the directors and correctors of the
arrow of time are in vain. Orient the arrow of time onto them and they
shall humble. Show them their own blood and they will stop shitting on
your face. They are the sick fruits of a sick tree. They think they carry the
seeds but they are only the dirt around the seeds. They are the wastefulness
that pretends to be an abundance. Stand your ground and their pretension
shall quickly melt and pass like clouds and soon the sun will shine on the
seeds of time.

36
 About my situation

Dr. Işık Barış Fidaner11 — January 2017 — Somerville Public Library

This morning, I wrote this short text About my situation to read here in
the first Boston Lacan Study Group meeting of 2017. I will also send it as
an e-mail afterwards.

I’m going to make the briefest and most abstract comment about what I
went through: I’m just going to state the three criteria that weren’t met
by my university group and conclude with a quote on Lacan.

I think these criteria are relevant because (1) it’s highly probable that these
problems are already being brought to you in the clinic by students, by
postdocs and researchers like me, and even by the professors themselves,
and (2) these criteria are my reasons to favour this Lacanian group over
the “research” group in the university.

I already wrote a 55-page Boston Report in the weeks following my resig-

nation, that the professor forced me into, and I’m planning to translate it
from Turkish into English when I have the time, primarily for the Lacanians
here. It’s a general assessment after the fact, so I would call it a “post-
mortem”, borrowing this term from digital game design practice (and not
from medicine or forensics).
11 See the Turkish translation of this text in the 31st Placeless Book, Boston Raporu:

B yüzü.

37
Firstly, the fields of studies involved: In my PhD in İstanbul, Turkey, I
studied Bayesian probabilistic models, and applied these statistical models
to bioinformatics. Approximately one year ago, I was invited to be a post-
doc here in Boston and the field is BCI: brain-computer interfaces. They
are working on a system for typing through EEG brain signals, electroen-
cephalograms triggered by a sequence of letters displayed on a computer
screen. In the literature, there’s a famous brain signal called P300 that is
triggered like a surprise in observing “deviant stimulus”, called “oddball”.

Even though my engagement there eventually led to a forced resignation, I

have been making several points to myself and others through this experi-
ence, and I conceive this resignation as an inevitable outcome of a Lacanian
separation, whose only alternative was to supposedly “actively participate”
and to supposedly “become a productive member” (to use the professor’s
own words) of an alienation, a sickness.

As a side note: I think the conflict here can be traced all the way back
to the foundation of psychoanalysis. As you know, the alternative that
emerged in Freud and Breuer’s studies on hysteria, was interpretation and
free association as opposed to suggestions and hypnotization. And it’s the
same alternative that is at stake in my conflict, and in the criteria that
emerged from this conflict.

For the three criteria I will mention, I think the best testing ground is e-mail
communications, because that’s where people express the content of their
symbolic castration. Institutional e-mail correspondences have a tendency
to turn into a fictional world of a supposed “Progress” so that everything
else may only function as a number of excuses to justify and maintain this
symbolic fiction of “Progress”, divorced from reality.

First criterion: Can people relate to each other as colleagues? Or,

is their potential communication undermined, debased, sabotaged by some
absurd interventions and a number of impulsive interruptions by those who

38
are considered the authorities, who are called “professors”? It is crucial
that there is a possibility to relate as colleagues, if the notion of “career”
is to make any kind of sense.

Second criterion linked to the first one: Are people able to inform each
other? Or, is their communication externally regulated and channelized
through requests and reports, in essence, through suggestions? This is a
critical criterion especially because: when people aren’t able to inform one
another about their experience and their environment, they are also forced
to ignore emergent states of urgency. To give an example from my case,
a fire alarm goes off and the building gets evacuated, and this incident
never gets reflected to e-mail communications. One can see that the most
extreme consequence of this inability to inform is the climate change.

Third criterion. (This is linked to the second one and it’s not included in the
Boston Report. Maybe I should extend the report to include this one too.)
Is there a circulation of demonstrations among the people, i.e. can
people make themselves into a medium to circulate demonstrations?
Demonstration here refers to any kind of symbolic articulation, e.g. a proof
or a formulation that takes part in a reasoning. Or, are all demonstrations
requested by the so-called “professors”? Instead, are demonstrations made
for them, to them? This is indeed the most important criterion that could
have rendered the group a properly scientific community. But it was and
still is absent.

I am going to Turkey but my plan is to find a job and move to Europe.

When I wrote the 55-page report, simultaneously, I also wrote a long and
elaborate job application to a center of ethics in Sweden. I may apply
elsewhere depending on their response.

I am going to attend BLSG virtually next month and afterwards.

Let me conclude with a quote from Roudinesco about Lacan:

39
In Boston, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, La-
can met Roman Jakobson again and spoke before an audience
of mathematicians, linguists, and philosophers, among them
Willard Quine and Noam Chomsky. . . Lacan scandalized ev-
eryone with his answer to a question by Chomsky on thought:
“We think we think with our brains; personally, I think with
my feet. That’s the only way I really come into contact with
anything solid. I do occasionally think with my forehead, when
I bang into something. But I’ve seen enough electroencephalo-
grams to know there’s not the slightest trace of a thought in
the brain.”
When he heard this, Chomsky thought the lecturer must be a
madman.

40
 Neuroscience can devise a dialectical
philosophy of sociotechnical cognition

January 201712

1. Fundamental Hegelian and Freudian insights can resolve the logi-

cal link between what-ought-to-be & what-is by a shift to linguistics
& a surpassing of the technical domain, towards an epigenetic ap-
proach to human literacy

In this section, especially for CRB’s Task to investigate the role of contexts
and cultural imprinting in understanding the brain’s functional architectures,
but also concerning the philosophical and ethical challenges of modelling
cognitive processes in silica, I address the question articulated at the end
of "Can we be epigenetically proactive?" [0] regarding norms vs. facts.13

The normatively loaded difference of what-ought-to-be from what-is, is

dynamically derived from the factual difference of what-is-not from what-
is; for any normative statement ’It ought to be X!’ derives its moral force
from a perceived unfortunate fact that ’It is not X...’ This "what ought to
be but is not" was already at stake in Hegel’s intervention to Kant’s critical
philosophy:

"The real infinite, far from being a mere transcendence of the

finite, always involves the absorption of the finite into its own
fuller nature. In the same way Kant restored the Idea to its
12 Ibegan the Turkish translation. I’m working on it.
13 This text, originally addressed to Kathinka Evers of CRB, was written as part of a
cover letter to become a researcher in Uppsala University. I regret to inform you that
Kathinka Evers had nothing to say regarding this letter that was addressed to herself.

42
 proper dignity: vindicating it for Reason, as a thing distinct
from abstract analytic determinations or from the merely sen-
sible conceptions which usually appropriate to themselves the
name of ideas. But as respects the Idea also, he never got be-
yond its negative aspect, as what ought to be but is not." (The
Logic of Hegel translated by Wallace, 1892, p. 93, emphasis
mine)

This negation, what-is-not, depending on the circumstances of its reception,

(1) can be taken to be a neutral objective fact of limitation or barrier
that one encounters or confronts in one’s world or space, or (2) it can be
registered as a negative affect like frustration or anxiety that emerges as
part of one’s subjective awareness to be endured for a duration of time.
The presence of this negative fact thus remains "narrowly focused in space
and time" [0] in the individual brain that perceives it.

In philosophy, this opposition of objectivity vs. subjectivity can be found

in Kant’s critical philosophy, as the opposition between the transcendental
faculties of ’I’ & the Thing-in-itself left out of this ’I’. In his Logic, Hegel
objects the isolated status of the Kantian Thing-in-itself by asserting the
objective status of human thought. Hegel’s dialectical thought moves away
from the cognition of an individual ’I’, towards any human cognition of
concepts. In this way, dialectical philosophy surpasses the limitation of an
individual brain, and recognizes the diversity of phenotypical neural expres-
sions, albeit in an implicit manner.

In the contemporary situation, however, the objective manifestations of

human thoughts most strongly emerge in the external technical domains
where people interact with technological devices. Dialectical philosophy is
unable to operate in these domains, because there is a question of pur-
posefully coding those devices, a question of algorithms. In Hegel, such
challenging questions about human purposefulness and the use of language

43
unfortunately turn into theological discussions about God; and it would be
absurd to conceive the algorithmic programming of a machine in terms of
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Actually, one can localize the contemporary
question of algorithms in the notion of ’user’ along with the ’technical’
assumptions that isolate this notion.

By questioning the isolated status of ’user’ in technical domains, just like

Hegel’s intervention against the isolated and finite status of ’I’ in Kant’s
critical philosophy, Neuroscience can surpass the limitations of this con-
temporary manifestation of technical objectivity, and devise a dialectical
philosophy of sociotechnical cognition.

How? Simply by reflecting the cognitive presence of a what-is-not, a neg-

ative fact, onto the technical domain itself:

When ’It is not X...’ is interpreted as a technical failure, its two modes
of reception becomes (1) access failures and (2) process latencies, as the
spatial vs. temporal, objective vs. subjective modes, respectively. This
simple reflection onto the technical domain liberates an individual’s "narrow
focus in space and time" [0] by giving it a sociotechnical status.

There is a dialectical interaction in between these two modes of a failure,

objective and subjective:

1) The emergence of an access failure can retroactively determine the ac-

tual meaning of an experienced latency in the ongoing process, e.g. by
revealing an underlying incompatibility. This side of the interaction affects
the individual’s identification as ’me’: ’Is this for me or not?’

2) Any latency in processing can modify the possibilities of access failures

in the future, e.g. according to a set of associated risks and probabilities.
This side of the interaction gives the individual a sense of urgency as ’I’:
’Should I wait or leave?’

These two sides identification and urgency are already recognizable in the

44
linguistic difference between the pronouns ’me’ and ’I’. These two modes of
suspense are also recognizable in the story of the three prisoners in Lacan’s
"Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty" in Écrits, 1966.
This dialectic moves to a lower cognitive level, surpassing the ’technical’
assumptions about ’the user’, and it articulates a problem of authorization in
the user’s place, which can find its counterpart in a problem of embodiment
for a ’player’ [5].

This dialectic enables a reformulation of what psychoanalysis calls symbolic

castration. One can reinterpret Sigmund Freud’s famous statement "There
is no such thing at all as an unconscious ‘No’" (Fragment of an Analysis
of a Case of Hysteria, 1901) as follows: The cognitive presence of a nega-
tion is not a non-cognition or non-computation, but an actual or potential
failure in computation. One can then explore the negations in Freud, such
as Verwerfung (foreclosure, rejection), Verdrängung (repression), Vernei-
nung (denial), Verleugnung (disavowal) as a variety of failures in neural
computations.

Software engineers already have a common term to designate the entire

spectrum of failures in computation: They are called bugs. There is an
entire jargon about handling and dealing with bugs: debugging, tracing,
watching variables, profiling parts of code, etc. Having done with ’users’,
one can directly identify a ’bug’ as a Freudian Fehlleistungen (parapraxis,
bungled action, failed action) whose exemplary instances are observable in
the form of slips of tongue and typos.

Engineers usually consider their own mistakes and parapraxes, not as bugs,
but as causes that generate bugs, since the bugs themselves are assumed
to reside only in the software code and not in developers’ cognitive fac-
ulties (nor in ’users’), just like the Kantian Thing-in-itself left out of the
transcendental faculties of ’I’.

The technical isolation of a ’bug’ actively puts it at a distance from ’users’.

45
In conceiving bugs as Freudian parapraxes, one can traverse this distance
by problematizing the ’technical’ assumptions about ’users’. In this way,
bugs can be resolved dialectically by their conception and articulation (just
like a classical neurotic symptom) as opposed to the standard way of being
isolated and eliminated. The standard elimination process avoids the thor-
ough reflection that would discover the generating sociocognitive causes;
it thereby leaves the ’mother bug’ (’technical’ assumptions about ’users’)
untouched.

Let us now address the original question: How are norms derived from neg-
ative facts? How is what-ought-to-be derived from what-is-not? – By the
Freudian superego agency. This agency can take a variety of forms, from
moral injunctions that operate on one’s guilt (as in classical psychoanalysis)
to hedonistic injunctions that operate on one’s enjoyment (as in contempo-
rary societies). The dissociative effects pointed out in [0] can be localized
in this same psychic agency.

I think the question of superego agency warrants a shift towards linguis-

tics: By taking Sigmund Freud’s Das Ich und Das Es (1923) literally as the
linguistic pronouns "I and it" (thereby correcting the standard Latin trans-
lation "The Ego and The Id" as Bruno Bettelheim suggests in Freud and
Man’s Soul, 1983) the virtual agency of the superego (Über-Ich: Over-I)
can be reconceived as a structural function of the linguistic pronoun for
oneself, ’I’ or ’Ich’, the word at the heart of German idealism.

The speakers of a language align their realities by the help of the pronouns
in their language. The socialization of individuals is articulated via the
relationship of singular pronouns through the plural pronouns. These may
present specific circumstances, e.g. the absence of gendered pronouns in
Turkish. To illustrate the significance of these special words, it suffices to
mention the role of "They" in xenophobia and "He" in religion.

When translated by the pronouns ’I’ and ’it’, Sigmund Freud’s remarks

46
on natural heredity attain a linguistic sense with synchronic & diachronic
dimensions:

"It is here that the gulf between an actual individual and the
concept of a species becomes evident. Moreover, one must not
take the difference between ’I’ and ’it’ in too hard-and-fast a
sense, nor forget that ’I’ is a specially differentiated part of ’it’.
The experiences of ’I’ seem at first to be lost for inheritance;
but, when they have been repeated often enough and with
sufficient strength in many individuals in successive generations,
they transform themselves, so to say, into experiences of ’it’,
the impressions of which are preserved by heredity. Thus in ’it’,
which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of
the existences of countless ’I’s; and, when ’I’ forms its ’over-I’
out of ’it’, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former ’I’s
and be bringing them to resurrection." (modified translation
from Sigmund Freud’s ’I’ and ’it’, 1923)

Here Freud has a synchronic notion of ’it’ that is so wide to include human
genetic code as well as human literacy, all of which are recognized at the
final remark as constituting the diachronic determinants of the superego
agency. This passage points the way towards a conception of human literacy
as an epigenetic process.

Any observable attribute of Homo Sapiens or any other species may count
as a phenotype. Nevertheless, even when a phenotype is as clearly observ-
able as a pair of blue eyes, the actual presence of its expression cannot
avoid a constant change in circumstances and a fact of relativity in the
environment and the surrounding ecosystems.

Human genetics and human literacy share a common fate in face of this
fact of relativity: Genetics is the nature’s way to protect its forms from the

47
unavoidable fact of environmental relativity: It codes its existence chem-
ically in DNA and guards them in cell nuclei. And the same goes with
human literacy: Literacy is the humanity’s way to protect its forms from
the unavoidable fact of neural relativity: It codes its existence in literature,
builds libraries, writes books and respects them.

This common fate of relativity, which Freud calls ’over-I’, grounds a conti-
nuity between the natural genetic heritage and the human literary heritage
in Freud’s synchronic ’it’; the global phenomenon of climate change pro-
vides a perfect illustration of this continuity, and the best way to express
this continuity is through the concept of phenotype, not only that of Homo
Sapiens but also the entire wealth of phenotypes to be found in all the
species of the Earth.

We could imagine that, if Sigmund Freud had the time and energy to
write another book called Die Wir und Die Sie, ("We and They") he would
perhaps have dealt with the limit of this synchronic ’it’ where ’we’ as the
literate humanity (as a version of the Hegelian Geist) is distinguished from
’they’ as all natural sentience (including humans’ bodily existence), so that
the symbolic codes preserved ’for us’ (literature) and ’for them’ (genetics)
would be separately identifiable.

The scientific study of phenotypes constitute a special use of the pro-

noun ’they’, where Freudian superego cannot gain dominance as a separate
agency, insofar as the knowledge about ’them’ (as natural sentience includ-
ing humans) requires a universal articulation on behalf of the entirety of
human knowledge. The scientific version of ’they’, as the complete op-
posite of the xenophobic version of ’they’, requires an empathy towards
natural sentience, a kind of xenophilia (borrowing philia from philo-sophy).
In literature one can find the scientific ’they’ of xenophilia in many works
of science fiction.

Hegel’s intervention to Kant’s critical philosophy, when read in terms the

48
"We and They" of human literacy and natural sentience, shows the way
towards a universal articulation of phenotypes:

"[Critical philosophy] argues an utter want of consistency to

say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phe-
nomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this
knowledge, by such statements as ’Cognition can go no further’;
’Here is the natural and absolute limit of human knowledge.’
But ’natural’ is the wrong word here. The things of nature are
limited and are natural things only to such extent as they are
not aware of their universal limit, or to such extent as their
mode or quality is a limit from our point of view, and not their
own. No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or
defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it." (The
Logic of Hegel translated by Wallace, p. 116)

To conclude:

1) What appears as ’natural’ limits and defects in human cognition are

in fact humanity’s own limitations to conceive and express the qualities
present in nature: It concerns ’our’ knowledge about the phenotypes.

2) The fact that ’we’ (literate humanity) encounter a limit or defect in ’our’
cognition of ’them’ (natural sentience) proves that ’we’ have stepped "above
and beyond" ’our’ present mode of cognition of ’them’: This encounter is
a ’bug’ identified as a ’parapraxis’. This bug that is "narrowly focused in
space and time" [0] has a sociotechnical status given by the dialectic of
identification (’me’) and urgency (’I’).

3) As a result, it is legitimate for ’us’ to associate epigenetic knowledge

directly with human literacy in general, the ability to read and write, as
mentioned in [0].

49
2. Computer engineer, PhD; a methodology in combinatorial statis-
tics; gene expression analysis application in bioinformatics; strong
enthusiasm in philosophy and psychoanalysis; a schematic model for
subjectivity; many e-books of compiled translations

In this section, I summarize my research background: I was born in 1983

in Ankara, Turkey. I am officially a computer engineer with a PhD. I would
call myself a computer scientist, a translator and a philosopher.

An artificial neural network that can recognize images of lowercase letters

in different typefaces was one of the first things I developed after learning
C++ programming language in İzmir Science High School fifteen years ago.
I won a national award by co-developing a software that generates, projects
and takes cross-sections of N-dimensional geometric objects.

During my BS and MS in Boğaziçi University Department of Computer

Engineering in İstanbul until 2008, I did a variety of projects on machine
translation, artificial intelligence, image processing, computer vision and
computer graphics. I coded face animations. I implemented an object
tracker. I did a survey on image inpainting and texture synthesis. I wrote
on human gait, on biomechanics. I implemented web interfaces for collab-
oration. I worked part-time in a software company and developed audio-
video-data streaming applications. I studied Bayesian probabilistic models.

For my PhD in the same department until April 2016, I particularly focused
on Bayesian Nonparametric methodology and its application to bioinformat-
ics. We addressed a long-standing statistical question that had emerged
in the bioinformatics literature by devising a novel methodology for combi-
natorial statistics that operates by counting the cumulative occurrences of
the subset memberships of generic elements of any kind [1]. It’s founded
on Cumulative Occurrence Distributions: triangular integer matrices that
expand like a tree of all possible combinatorial structures. To quantify
and plot the complexity involved in each of the particular nodes of this

50
tree, I defined Per-Element Information, akin to Shannon’s entropy, and
designed an agglomerative algorithm that explores the entropic correlations
that are present among the generic elements that constitute a combinato-
rial dataset. I implemented this algorithm as a Python application called
REBUS (inspired by Freud’s rebus metaphor for dream-work) and explored
the entropic correlations of words in the full text of James Joyce’s Ulysses
[2]. To complete my dissertation, with our chemical engineer colleagues
from the University of Cambridge, we developed a cluster analysis applica-
tion for gene expressions. The software detected a number of clusters of
genes and phenotypes that led our colleagues to novel biological insights
about two model organisms: yeast and mouse [3, 4].

In the meantime, I have been an avid reader of philosophy and psycho-

analysis for ten years now. We have a social network group Žižek and the
Slovenian School where thousands of members can share links and par-
ticipate in discussions. I attend the regular Boston Lacan Study Group
meetings where psychoanalytic clinicians study literature and improve their
practice.

In parallel to my PhD work in computer science, I devised and published

some philosophical models for subjectivity, based on the duality of autho-
rization & embodiment as the two fundamental problems. This dialectical
duality is irreducible to any other duality; it can traverse any other duality.
I presented this idea in "Postmodern Alienation Model" [5] in Turkey’s first
national New Media Studies Congress. In a follow up text called "Antipro-
gression Chain" [6] I speculated on the structural dynamics of this duality.
I recently proposed a logical comparison between the well-known Prisoner’s
Dilemma of game theory and Lacan’s Three Prisoners [7]. I also wrote and
self-published texts to investigate the philosophical relevance of Žižek and
Badiou for digital game design.

My greatest philosophical motivation in recent years has been my website

Yersiz Şeyler [Placeless Things] where I handpick English texts every week

51
and translate them into Turkish [8]. I also publish translations done by
others. I compiled the last few years’ translations in 29 e-books with 2066
pages in total. I perceive this work as a neural exploration, a continuous
and cumulative effort to match the available means of my mother tongue
with the distinctions expressible in English. The grammar rules of these
two languages are quite different, which makes the effort more difficult and
interesting.

After defending my PhD dissertation in İstanbul, I was invited to be a

postdoc researcher at Northeastern University in Boston. I were to overview
and improve the software code for the brain-controlled typing device that
they had been working on, though I could only have the chance and time to
devise and present a conceptual framework that can help them to resolve
the logical fallacies in these ongoing efforts. In the 6th Brain-Computer
Interfaces (BCI) meeting that we had attended from Boston, I was surprised
to notice that, in clear contrast to the field of bioinformatics, nobody in BCI
seemed to have devised any standard way for sharing data and information
with their colleagues. This observation gave me an additional reason to
prepare this job application. I will be back in Turkey a few days before the
new U.S. presidency.

I have a strong sense and belief in the power and necessity of conceptuali-
sation through words and grammar. It’s not quite recognized that linguistic
notions like synchronicity & diachronicity have natural, neural and evolu-
tionary relevance (as explained in Section 1). It’s also not quite recognized
that ’we’ even have the statistical means [1] to express such relevances,
as illustrated by the entropic analysis of James Joyce’s Ulysses [2] that
revealed a diverse variety of entropic correlations among the words.

52
References

[0] K. Evers. (2015). Can we be epigenetically proactive? In T. Metzinger

& J. M. Windt (Eds.) Open MIND. Frankfurt a. M., GER: MIND Group.

[1] I. B. Fidaner & A. T. Cemgil. (2013) “Summary Statistics for Parti-

tionings and Feature Allocations”. In Proceedings of Advances in Neural
Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2013. Available on NIPS website.
papers.nips.cc

[2] I. B. Fidaner & A. T. Cemgil. (2014) “Clustering Words by Projection

Entropy.” Poster accepted in Modern ML+NLP Workshop at NIPS 2014.
fidaner.wordpress.com, arxiv.org, Workshop

[3] I. B. Fidaner, A. Cankorur, D. Dikicioglu, S. G. Oliver, B. Kirdar & A.

T. Cemgil. (2015) “CLUSTERnGO: a user-defined modelling platform for
two-stage clustering of time-series data.” Bioinformatics.
fidaner.wordpress.com, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

[4] C. Mulvey, C. Schröter, L. Gatto, D. Dikicioglu, I. B. Fidaner, A. Christo-

forou, M. Deery, L. Cho, K. Niakan, A. Martinez-Arias & K. Lilley. (2015)
“Dynamic proteomic profiling of extra-embryonic endoderm differentiation
in mouse embryonic stem cells.” STEM CELLS.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

[5] I. B. Fidaner. “Postmodern Yabancılaşma için Bir Model Önerisi,” [A

Model Proposal for Postmodern Alienation] In Yeni Medya Çalışmaları Kon-
gresi [New Media Studies Congress] 2013.
English translation, ekitap.alternatifbilisim.org, yenimedya.org.tr

[6] I. B. Fidaner. "Antiprogression Chain," In Amber Conference 2013.

fidaner.wordpress.com

[7] I. B. Fidaner. “Conditional Counting of Qualia,” In Democracy Rising

Conference, Athens 2015 by Global Center for Advanced Studies.
fidaner.wordpress.com, gcasblog.wordpress.com

53
[8] I. B. Fidaner. "Yersiz Kitaplar," [Placeless Books] In Yersiz Şeyler
[Placeless Things] 2017.
yersizseyler.net

54
 What is a scientist?
Who are “we” and who are “they”?

February 2017

Thanks to the recent political developments, the present referent of the

nomination “scientist” is no longer “a person that’s historically recognized
as a scientist through his/her scientific contributions” but the actual con-
crete movement that’s organized around #ScienceMarch #BilimYürüyüşü
who vocally demands that “Evidence Based Peer-Reviewed Information”
(EBPRI) indisputably establishes facts by getting perceived as the self-
evident state of affairs.

Yet this quality of EBPRI-ness obviously relies on certain exclusive circles of

recognition14 so that these scientists themselves will never become willing
to acknowledge other (“their fellow”) scientists’ EBPRI as a self-evident
state of affairs. As an inevitable consequence, it is impossible for them
to ask, let alone agree on, most basic questions regarding their notion of
EBPRI, such as: What do you call an evidence? What makes a proof?
How do demonstrations work? Who is your colleague?
14 This implicit exclusivity, in face of the public, dons the guise of an obvious fact

that truths naturally exclude falsities, but in private, it is reduced to a merely arbitrary
regulation of affairs that can at best be called convenience. The same implicit exclusivity
can be found anywhere a Publisher employs an Editor, most prominently in journalism,
including its most extreme forms of existence such as WikiLeaks.

55
In other words, the message of #ScienceMarch is not “You must accept
science!” but “You must accept science to be nothing other than us!”
This is the message of alienation that was already being contracted and
emitted by each of those exclusive circles of recognition. It is impossible for
#ScienceMarch to combine these several messages of exclusive alienation,
so they are only left with “nothing other than us”, i.e. their claim on the
pronoun “we”.

This leads to a very interesting situation that exhibits a hierarchy of na-

tional languages (or “natural languages” as the engineers call them) where
the self-perceived stakeholders of the first person plural pronoun “we” in
the English language have absolutely no interest regarding the stakes of the
first person plural pronoun “biz” in the Turkish language. Likewise, these
self-entitled defenders of Science has absolutely no interest in defending
Bilim, the Turkish word for Science. The extremely significant implication
is that the real content being conveyed becomes absolutely irrelevant to
what we may call the maintenance regulations concerning the form of
a written language.

However, this absolute irrelevance of content also has a content of its own,
which becomes embodied in another pronoun, “they”, which is the way of
politics: What do politicians do? They help the ego-formations of their
witnesses by declaring stuff irrelevant. “They” thus mediate the content
of irrelevance and thus they mediate the usage of the pronoun “they”.
But this essential “they” of politics is fundamentally incompatible with the
abovementioned maintenance regulations organized around “us”, and this
incompatibility is the basis for a separation, which is no longer an alienation.

The essential separation happens between the first and third person plural
pronouns within each national-natural language, such as We//They in En-
glish, and Biz//Onlar in Turkish, but the essence of this separation always
relates to the content of the distances between national-natural languages,
so that the duality nation vs. nature gets reflected to particular pairs of

56
languages, such as English vs. Turkish, or Turkish vs. Kurdish. As this sep-
aration happens between the essence of politics (the mediation of “they”)
and that which is not political (the maintenance of “we”), the separation
itself is extremely political and extremely apolitical at the same time.

It would be a quite interesting undertaking to conceive the “double-slit”

of Quantum Physics in terms of this separation and thereby investigate
what really motivated this civilization to build and operate a Large Hadron
Collider to observe and register natural phenomena by calling them names
like MACHOs and WIMPs.

IBF

57
 Topology as Tautology

TR & EN, February 2017

Topology is the turning-into-itself of spatiality.

But the restrictions that topology articulates are not spatial restrictions.

Topology articulates combinatorial restrictions over spatiality.

In general topology indicates the restricted state of the spatial in face of

the combinatorial. [*]

Topology, in this sense, is a ‘tautology’. [ ]

IBF

[*] So for instance the ‘depth’ [+] that indicates the restricted state of 2D
in face of 3D, is not the third dimension of 3D. [-] It is the restriction of
the integer assignment of D. [%]

[+] The intuition of depth is the intuition of the combinatorial. It is the

intuition of qualities as opposed to quantities. It’s actually the qualities
themselves. [♥]

[-] Physics has been calling this a “holographic universe”. http://www.

southampton.ac.uk/news/2017/01/holographic-universe.page [♦]

58
[%] Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and only a little more)
mentions this question about D. See. https://yersizseyler.wordpress.
com/2017/01/24/ayrimcilik-enformel-fiziki-formel-elektronik/
One should deal with the formal restriction of physics with regards to
Noether’s theorem and the symmetry & conservation relation of energy.
[]

[] The “Quantum Computer” that people cite by referring to Feynman,

is an illusion. Feynman has already called it “Simulating Physics With
Computers”. One should ask questions like “How does one simulate the
proportionalities?” How is something “due” or “undue”? [♠]

[♠] Transference gives context to such questions.

[ ] The tautology articulated in “I think therefore I am” is this very topology.

[♦] Actually they merely succeed in referring to the spatial restrictions of

the screens and the ‘paper’s given to their use. That’s why colleaguehood
does not issue from what they call ‘peer-review’. They merely say “Let this
be issued without any issue.”

[♥] Qualities by themselves remain silent, they are only intuited. So it is

possible that they speak up and make their voice heard, not probable.
They may or may not be probable. They are allowed to be or not be
probable. Therefore one cannot say that they are probable. One can only
say that they are possible.

59
 Riddles

October 2014

Space has three

Time has one
It has me
I have none
What is it?



It’s not chaos

Nor is there a cause
What is there?

turn page to see the answers

61
Dimension



Correlation

62
 RESIST QUANTUM!

Ceren Büyüktetik — September 201315

In the Istanbul KCK trials, ‘Quantum’, ‘Big Bang Theory’ and ‘Evolution
Theory’ courses given in BDP Politics Academy have been added to the
criminal charges by the prosecutors. In the Van KCK trial, voluntary physics
teacher Meral Güngör’s courses where she taught quantum physics have
been depicted as “organizational activity”.

During Van KCK trial, in the criminal charges where all activities of the ac-
cused have been said to have been done in behalf of “organization”, courses
of Meral Güngör where she taught quantum physics have also been depicted
as “organizational activity”. She is one of Van Municipality’s educators in
the Education Supporthouse.

The criminal charges claimed that Politics Academy, appearing to work in

direction with BDP’s political tasks, in reality was supplying ideological
education for KCK instead, teaching KCK philosophy to the participants.
According to statements of hidden wittnesses, Meral Güngör, one of the
voluntary educators in Politics Academy and Education Supporthouse, was
claimed to give “organizational” educations. Being a physics graduate,
Güngör, in her defence which she made in Zaza language, said she was vol-
untarily giving quantum physics courses in the academy. Stating that there
is no concrete grounds to accuse her courses about quantum to be “organi-
15 The Turkish version was apparently removed from the BirGün website. That’s the

greatest problem with Newspapers and journalists: They will never value Oldspapers.

63
zational activity”, Güngör said “I am a physics graduate. And quantum is
a topic of physics courses. Naturally it is unlawfulness to depict quantum
courses that i have given as organizational activities. Then tell me, are
faculty members giving quantum courses in universities also guilty?”.

‘ONLY BDP IS BEING INVESTIGATED’

Murat Timur, president of Van Bar Association, told that it was an abstract
accusation to describe Güngör’s lessons in academy as “organizational ac-
tivity”. Timur said “Politics academies of CHP, BDP and AKP have been
founded after 2006. The recommendation to found such politics academies
was made by Sayın Öcalan. In a short time it was reflected to all of the
political parties. But only BDP’s politics academies encountered investiga-
tions.”

QUANTUM WAS HEAVY FOR THE PROSECUTOR

In the Istanbul KCK trials, courses like ‘Quantum’, ‘Big Bang Theory’ and
‘Evolution Theory’ given in BDP Politics Academy had been added to the
criminal charges by the prosecutors, but their audio surveillance documents
in the criminal charges were not read in the trial, because chief judge did
not want them read. The 50 pages consisting of philosophical theories were
skipped by Ali Alçık, Chief Judge of Istanbul 15th Heavy Penalty Court, by
saying “These parts are too heavy” and he stopped early the hearing in 17
December 2012.

Notes:

KCK is an organization of Kurdish movement in Turkey.

Istanbul is a city to the west of Turkey, Van is a city to the east of Turkey,
a city in Kurdistan.

BDP is Kurdish movement’s legal party in Turkey.

AKP and CHP are the establishment parties, two sides of the same coin.

64
“Organizational activity” is a prosecutor term that refers to organized ter-
rorist activity.

Zaza is a language close to Kurdish language, mainly spoken by people

from Kurdistan.

“Sayın” is a word of official respect like “Mr”. It is significant and untrans-

latable.

Abdullah Öcalan is the founder and leader of PKK.

During his time in prison, Abdullah Öcalan read science books among other
books, and wrote his own interpretation of quantum theory among other
topics.

65
 Those who think they have found the black
hole without even observing the solar system

Aslı Erdoğan — December 201616

I observe that law has become a means for digestion.17 I’m going to do
my defense as if ‘law existed’. I’m not going to lecture this roomful of legal
experts about law. It’s your duty to defend justice. Law can’t solely defend
the state and the politicians. Free Agenda is a newspaper with permissions
and yellow press cards, it’s distributed by Turkuvaz Distribution. We are
members in a symbolic advisory board of a legal newspaper. The advisory
board has not gathered once, has not taken a single decision in 5 years.
Legal principles are being violated. A few words being tweezed out of
eight books and hundreds of texts, manifest a medieval inquisition. The
sentiments are bitter, the respect and conscience is literature. As justice
cannot exist without a conscience. . .

A woman of letters actualizes herself in books. My notes, my texts are in

the hands of the police as criminal material for months. An empty and in-
coherent bill of indictment. . . The only concrete evidence for ‘organization
membership’ is that my name is in the masthead. I’ve always expressed
that I’m against war, that I’m anti-militarist. Not one of my texts got a
legal accusation for 18 years and I’ve never been a sloganist writer. I always
wrote about torture and the prisons. If what I did there makes me a KCK
member, then there is certainly no organization that has not been to my
books.
16 The Turkish source of this translation can be found in a number of websites, including

but not limited to Yersiz Şeyler.

17 t.n. Turkish word for digestion indicates silencing and oppression in political con-

texts.

66
I think that publications like Free Agenda are still needed. An alterna-
tive emerges to the main stream who doesn’t write the reality of Kurds.
There’ve been numerous corner writers18 like AKP’s Muhsin Kızılkaya and
Mehmet Metiner. The interviews with KCK chairmen and their statements
were featured in the main stream in 2013-2014. The advisory board has no
authority to decide in any matter regarding the newspaper. I am not aware
of the texts written under nicknames.

In this century, I became the historical record of the first woman of letters to
be put on trial for an ‘aggravated life imprisonment’, regulated in place of a
death sentence. Those who impute me this accusation are those who think
they have found the black hole without even observing the solar system. It is
irrational and impossible to remotely control a newspaper from a distance.
I haven’t taken or given any commands or directions from or to anyone. I
consider it an ethical state of affairs to be in solidarity with a newspaper
that is being silenced.19

18 t.n. Turkish expression for a columnist.

19 t.n. The full text of the defense can be found in Yersiz Şeyler in Turkish.

67
 Combinatorial problems inherently require
questions of non-spatial presence

February 2017

Problems that deal with combinations and compositions of elements con-

stitute the heart of chemistry; reactions –the subject matter of chemistry–
originate from such compositions.

These problems involve situations that require questions about non-spatial

presences, such as: "Is A present (here and now)?" "Is B present (here and
now)?" "Is A and B present together (here and now)?" etc. for any generic
set (say, ’alphabet’) of generic elements A, B, C, ...

As these questions concern non-spatial presences, they cannot rely on a

coordinate space like Rn . To be sure, a coordinate space may help one
to articulate some reduced representations for the combinatorial problems,
but in the problems themselves, there is always more at stake.

There is more at stake, because there is a fundamental question of an addi-

tional presence: "What else may be present (here and now)?" It concerns a
non-spatial additional presence, since adapting it to a spatial context –as in
"What else may be present (in this particular coordinate space)?"– would
merely articulate a reduced version of the combinatorial problem. The orig-
inal question of an additional presence doesn’t involve a space. It doesn’t
concern itself with the distances to hyperplanes organized around the origin
of a particular coordinate space.

68
To assign an attribute to a presence is the external imposition of a
binary dilemma

Another common temptation is to assign an attribute to a presence, turning

the question "Is it present (or not)?" into a binary dilemma: "Does it have
its presence attribute equal to 1 (or 0)?"

The artificial nature of an assigned presence attribute becomes self-evident

when it’s exemplified by the question of an additional presence. It’s self-
evident that the following two questions are not equivalent:

What else may be present (here and now)?

What else may have its presence attribute equal to 1 (here and
now)?

It is an artificial operation to assign an attribute to a presence. Nothing

needs an attribute to become present. That something is present, simply
means that it is present; an attribute of presence is not implied in any way.
In other words, the presence attribute of something that may or may not
be present, is not to be found anywhere else, but among the fabrications
of one’s mind.

Formally, the presence attribute is an external imposition of a binary dilemma

over an already-existing question regarding a non-spatial presence. One can
pinpoint this imposed binary dilemma of presence, generally speaking, in
modern physics. It grounds and confirms their notion of a ’particle’.20

As for the combinations and compositions of elements, which constitute

the stuff that makes up the fundamental subject matter of chemistry, the
external imposition of a binary dilemma does not represent a relevant contri-
bution, as the actual questions of presence that make up the combinations
of elements inherently require non-spatiality.
20 Famous British physicist Brian Cox recently asserted on a radio show that "Large

Hadron Collider provides proof that ghosts don’t exist." (sciencealert.com) On the other
hand, one can detect the re-emergence of non-spatial presences (after being reduced by
externally imposed binary dilemmas) elsewhere (such as marchforscience.com) under a
variety of terms such as diversity and intersectionality.

69
On the other hand, one can legitimately articulate these questions of pres-
ence configurationally, as exemplified by the following valid version of the
same question:

What else may be present (in this configuration)?

Data modeling is inappropriate for combinatorial problems due to its

basic assumptions

The combinatorial problems’ inherent non-spatiality brings about a fun-

damental and surprising consequence: Data modeling is structurally in-
compatible for dealing with these problems in their generality, due to the
following basic assumptions that data modeling requires by default:

1) "A model is not present in data. A model is something ’we’ decide to

use for modeling the data."

2) "Data is not present in a model. Data is something ’we’ encounter in a

problem."

3) "Data is only ever present in a space. ’We’ imagine data as spatially

placed over a coordinate space."

4) "A space becomes present only via a model. ’We’ assume that all
spatiality assumptions originate from the model that ’we’ had decided to
use."

By putting certain restrictions on the possibilities of presence through the

use of the pronoun ’we’, these four inescapable data modeling assumptions
effectively prohibit ’us’ from asking certain questions of presence, thereby
rendering it impossible ’for us’ to deal with ’our’ combinatorial problems in
their generality.

70
Assumptions on behalf of ’us’ function as prohibitions over certain
vital questions

The first person plural pronoun ’we’ (invoked by the abovementioned built-
in assumptions of data modeling) comes to displace the original vital ques-
tions of non-spatial presence.

The invocation of ’we’ in each of those assumptions comes to impose a par-

ticular prohibition over the original questions of non-spatial presence which
inaugurate (as demonstrated above) the vital conditions for establishing
any proper approach to ’our’ combinatorial problems.

Here are the four prohibitions imposed by those four built-in assumptions:

1) ’We’ decide to use the model.

This assumption prohibits ’us’ from asking questions regarding the presence
of a model in the problem ’we’ have encountered, since (1) any information
obtained about a problem is required to be represented in the form of data,
and (2) models may never be present in data by definition.

2) ’We’ encounter data.

This assumption prohibits ’us’ from sharing particular forms of representa-

tion between models and data, since (1) any representation to express the
problem at hand is required to have the form of a model, and (2) data may
never be present in a model by definition.

3) ’We’ imagine data spatially.

This assumption prohibits ’us’ from assuming any kind of continuity be-
tween the data that is already at hand and the data that is expected to
come in the future, since (1) it’s assumed that data may only ever be
present in a space, and (2) an assumption of spatiality may never have a
legitimate coverage over all data that is yet to be observed, except for a
reduced version of the combinatorial problem.

4) ’We’ assume that the assumptions of spatiality originate from our model.

71
This assumption prohibits ’us’ from questioning the present assumptions of
spatiality in any way, since (1) the assumptions of spatiality are assumed
to originate from the model that ’we’ had decided to use, and (2) as in-
dicated above, the assumption that it is ’we’ who had decided to use the
present model, either (a) prohibits ’us’ from addressing any question that
may negate this assumed model decision, or (b) forces ’us’ to introduce ad-
ditional assumptions for the purpose of managing the deciding party that
the pronoun ’we’ may legitimately refer to.21

All four prohibitions function through the use of the pronoun ’we’. When
an authority invokes the person ’we’ to direct a collective body, those who
are willing to ask incompatible questions are effectively invited to simply
not identify with the group who have been physically convening through
the directions and invocations by that particular authority.

The ultimate consequence is that these assumptions make it impossible to

really contemplate the most basic question of all:

Why had ’we’ decided to use this particular model in the first
place?

In face of this question, there is solely one possible answer left, which tends
to be taken for granted and remain unquestioned as it’s an excuse that’s
not acceptable on scientific grounds:

’We’ had decided thus, due to its convenience.

Rendered an abstract non-negotiable state of affairs due to the interlock-

ing prohibitions imposed by the four abovementioned basic assumptions of
data modeling, the convenience that the model affords is unquestionable
in practice and is therefore indistinguishable from its opposite, an inconve-
nience.
21 One may legitimately call this practice of introducing an additional spatiality for the

purpose of managing an already-existing spatiality, ’bureaucratization’.

72
On the other hand, one can avoid the spatial pitfall by articulating the
questions configurationally. A configurational approach may enable one to
gather much more strength by asking much simpler questions such as:

What else is possible (in this configuration)?

73
 On Physics and the Real of Woman

TR: November 2015 & EN: December 2016

Some questions I directed on Twitter to my friend who is a doctor of

quantum physics.

“Exposing harassment is the women’s form of resistance.”

Üniversiteli kadınlardan erkek medyaya açık mektup

Barış: Uğur do you think that we can take this as an axiomatic basis
like a law of Physics? I mean, can we abstract woman-being from all of
its biological determinations and then characterize any case of harassment
exposure as a contingent emergence phenomenon by the social woman
subjectivity? This may also reveal a dialectical link between sexuality and
evolutionary dynamics.

Uğur: Of course we can say that exposing is one of the prominent forms
of resistance practiced by women. But I would call it a fact rather than an
axiom. Instead of defining womanhood from such a negative, reactionary
basis, wouldn’t it be better to define it from a more active basis?

Barış: What I suggest is not a redefinition of woman, but a redefinition

of Physics. Let the observing of a collision be one particular kind of a
harrassment exposure. So that, for instance, let the woman’s statement
also be the basis for answering the question “Did the particles collide or
not?”

74
Uğur: You may find it difficult to convince the people at CERN about this.

Barış: Why should it be difficult? In each experiment design, the gaze

of science will be incorporated into the system as a pair of co-observers
or co-scientists. Since any scientific experiment is an intervention against
nature and a denial of the real of woman, the male one will do it, the female
side won’t touch a thing. Since everything observable in the environment
is painted in the color of patriarchal domination, all observations will be
based on woman’s statement.

Uğur: Why should any experiment be the denial of woman? There are so
many female scientists. Do they deny themselves by doing experiments?

Barış: But I didn’t call it the self-denial of woman, I called it the denial of
the real of woman. The real of woman as such is not a woman.

Uğur: Whatever. . . The existence of woman’s sex is established by exper-

iment, by observation. Science cannot deny it.

Barış: What is denied is not her existence but her real. As what? For
instance, as difference, as differentiation. But not as speciation, note it.

Uğur: There must certainly be a hundred thousand researches on the

differences between women and men.

Barış: But the real of woman does not refer to the measurable differences
between female individuals and male individuals. So it can’t be detected
by the psychological point of view.

Uğur: The world of particles is quite different from the world of women
and men. You can’t even paint atoms. The statement of the measurement
device is the basis.

Barış: Should the measurement device be able to do measurements on its

own?

Uğur: If what you suggest is not to require the existence of a consciousness

75
that will look at the measurement outcomes, then yes it should do it on its
own.

Barış: Do each of the indispensable component parts of a measurement

device count as a measurement device?

Uğur: Let them be.

Barış: Does the eye count as a measurement device?

Uğur: It does. For instance, if you are measuring whether a die is loaded
or not, you can measure the outcomes of the die with your eye.

76
 To prepare the revolution

TR: April 2011 & EN: January 2017

The spark that starts the revolution. The forms of relations whereby the
revolution can propagate. The people, the communities that can carry the
revolution. The power and want to take and implement such an enormous
decision, the manner, the attitude, the personality that it takes. To be able
to bring such a personality to maturity, the blows undergone, the impasses
fallen into, the turnings back, the givings up. The decisiveness. The ability
and want to be decisive, to know and to assert this possibility. Not to be
buried in fear, to recognize fear on sight, to be able to overcome fear.

To recognize each and every false hope and to abolish them, but not to take
refuge in despair. The courage to confront the void that shall emerge in the
peeling off of all of those false hopes. To hang on not to the world but to
one’s spirit, to hang on to the spirit of one’s own and to the common “holy
spirit”. To abandon the seeking for guarantees. To be liberated from the
subordinating needs like confirmation, authorization, sanctification. The
present world conditions subordinate us to the hegemony of this or that will
in the short term, but our power to change ourselves, our power to change
totally as a community, is also a power that abolishes this subordination
and makes us independent in the long term. In fact, I don’t know whether
terms like power or ability are appropriate. Can we see one’s will as an
energy? In that case, what is a state, an attitude, a manner, a personality?
When are the experiences permanent and when are they temporary? When
is this permanence positive and when is it negative? It might not be proper
to use Physics metaphors, so we may move to other scientific domains to
borrow terminology, like probability.

77
 The Eyes of History

Published in Turkish in the e-book compilation

Brave New Media (April 2011)
by Alternative Informatics Association

Camera had long been deemed as marking a secure and obscene enthusiasm
that’s inclined to interesting sights. War photographer journalists whose
occupations were deemed sacred were a more specific party exempted from
these weaknesses. But the cameras that were turned into a device of action
by the people participating in the Arab rebellions of 2011, marks the collapse
of both of these privileges. The world approaches a point where we might
not need journalists to witness what goes on far away, where we can get
out of this sanctity also by all citizens becoming journalists, a point where
the camera watching over world streets cease to be an intruding foreign eye
to become the world peoples’ own eyes.

78
Speaking of war photography and weaknesses, we cannot avoid to men-
tion Kevin Carter’s photograph “The vulture and the little girl” with 1994
Pulitzer prize. According to those who accuse Carter for not helping the
baby he photographed, the camera was the passive gaze of the West to-
wards the East. The West, in coming across these evils far from home,
having forgotten that they had originated from itself, was in turn consum-
ing each of them as an image. But much water has flowed under the bridge.
Now the cameras handled by those Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans of the
same age with that Sudanese girl, turn into a unrivaled device of action that
exposes the Western fake democrats that have been seizing these countries’
wealth for years.

This video was taken by a Libyan camera. It documents the toppling of

a statue that symbolizes Gaddafi’s green book, its turning into a pile of
rubble.22 The subjectivity in this symbolic action that takes place like a
ceremony, with all its details, was able to fit into the short gaze of this
camera: the slow turning around to watch the surrounding crowd’s joy, the
participation by shaking with the ecstasy of those toppling the monument
under its eye, the bewildered examination of the remainders of a fragmented
plaque, being all eyes and ears for each and every little triumph ripped
out of their rulers. . . The fire of revolution in Tunisia had leapt first to
Egypt, then to Libya and other countries through videos like this. Tunisians,
having known this from the beginning, was already pouring to the streets
“a rock in one hand, a cell phone in the other”.23 Discerning the power of
visual sharing devices, Egyptian government deployed world’s first national
Internet blackout to stop the actions of January 25, but it was too late.

What about us? Are we aware of the power of visual communication de-
vices? Having complained so much of our real relationships falling out
under the strain of time-killing videos of a “virtual world,” now that we

22 The video that contains the image above.

23 “How Tunisia’s revolution began” by Yasmine Ryan

79
witness real kingdoms that had stood up for decades being overthrown by
the help of this virtual world, along with their every political grounding and
all ideological polarizations, what do we think?

Let’s remember those lines from the Communist Manifesto:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and

venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-
formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All
that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions
of life, and his relations with his kind.24

The melting into thin air in question has been going on for centuries. At
first, the capital destroyed many things that connected people to each
other and to life. Then, by its own consumer products and communication
devices, it filled this emptiness that it had opened up. For this new filler
stuff to take hold, that initial destruction had to be disclaimed and denied,
the destroyed traditions had to be replaced by fake ones.

In an age where “cultural structures dissolve, relationships weaken, people

don’t value one another”; the cellphone, the camera, even visual sharing
and new media devices have quickly improved and entered our lives. The
the initial emptiness opened up in our world of meaning was marketified by
slogans like “store the voice and sight of those you love” and entered the
capital’s circle of movement. But the capital was compelled to continuously
reshape our needs to protect this circle that it had acquired. The production
of leisure was, first of all, the production of the demand for leisure. And the
so-called “leisure” was the ephemeral satisfaction provided by consumption.

The demand for leisure that the industries created to market their products
relies on the repression of the demands for permanent rights and freedoms.
24 Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

80
Let’s remember that the melody of “O freedom”25 used in a 3G cellphone
advertisement had drawn much reaction, even obliging Zülfü Livaneli (the
singer) to withdraw his composition. With the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan
activists that pour to the streets with cellphones, having liberated them-
selves from this denial, we confront a new generation of “consumers” that
are “compelled to face with sober senses” the communication device in
their hands.

Let’s say, the global production system is a giant construction site. Global
capital cares about nothing other than “working” for ever and ever, namely
that this construction continues no matter what. And this construction
site’s working scaffold whereto the world’s workers are condemned, has
been fixed to this building for decades, through the political status quo
and the alliances between governments in these workers’ countries. If all
were left to the capital, the construction would never get completed, and
the workers on the scaffold would need to spectate this building –that
have been being constructed by themselves– from the outside with fear and
fascination. Now in 2011, this plan was interrupted. If the communication
devices constitute a tower in this castle, the peoples in the Arab revolutions
have captured this tower and have toppled the working scaffold that was
left behind. The communication devices thus have been freed from the
bullshit fed by the advertisement, to arrive at their own truth, completing
the construction, in a way.

It seems that the time has come to free the communication devices from
fake dreams of freedom to go towards real freedom, the time for these
devices to cease to be the privileged foreign watcher to become peoples’
own eyes, to become the eyes of history. Nonetheless let’s not lose sight that
these devices depend on the capital’s production and distribution networks.
Like the government cutting Internet and cellphone networks in Egypt,

25 The lyrics are from Paul Eluard’s poem “Liberty".

81
there will be many crows that will attempt to scratch these eyes out.26
The world capital will try to globally control the communication devices’
improvements, it will try to eliminate its destructive effect on the existing
markets, and may have partial accomplishments. But, in any case, what
has happened in the year 2011 cannot be erased from the memories. We
have now learned by experience the real purpose served by the cellphone
and the Internet.

26 Turkish idiom: “Feed a crow and it will scratch your eyes out”

82
 Just as there can be no meta-language,
there can be no meta-data

pen-international.org27

Isik Baris Fidaner of Alternative Informatics (Turkey), said:

We think that net neutrality matters. We also think that it

should not be reduced to technical solutions.
The first aspect that we would like to emphasize is accent-
neutrality. The letter accents used in our country have con-
stituted a vessel of modernisation since they were invented a
hundred years ago. They have also constituted a vessel of
exploitation and colonization by denying and forbidding other
letter accents. The use of Unicode hence should be seen as a
world-historical matter that concerns net-neutrality.
The second aspect is content-neutrality. A text’s meaning is
determined by the organisation of its elements. But this or-
ganization is also a part of the text’s content, it cannot be
something separate and above this content. Therefore, net-
neutrality cannot simply be regarded as a technical problem, it
is a matter immanent to the text-operative content with which
one is engaged on the internet. In other words, just as there
can be no meta-language, there can be no meta-data. Fields of
study like digital humanities and big data hence should also be
seen as belonging to the matters that concern net-neutrality.

27 The Turkish translation of this text can be found in the 28th Placeless Book, Bili-

nen Son İyi Yapılandırmayı Hep Bir Tık Daha İyiye. It’s ironic that PEN international
overlooks the accents of the letters in my name in reporting this very statement.

83
 The addressee28

Their advertisement is addressed to the control group that shall enable

them to conduct experiments to obtain a series of confirmations for the
possible paternal metaphors that probably have been being proposed for
the proper replacement of the Freudian superego.

In other words, they are looking for Einziger Zug, the unary trait, the single
stroke.

“What are the signs of anxiety?”

An apology, a confession, a self-criticism.

“What is the likelihood?”

They are looking for a reality principle.

I wonder if they are social psychologists.

(Boston Red Line)

28 One can find the Turkish translation of this text in the 31st Placeless Book, Boston

Raporu: B yüzü.

84
 Scientific Stakeholding

hello, my question is: can a scientist be a stakeholder as a scientist?

in other words: can the stakes of one’s science be “held” by oneself?

if yes, how?

if no, then does this not mean that multistakeholderism automatically ex-
cludes scientific activity?

thank you, barış



thank you for the response; helpful to clarify my problem:

“your stake can be held by you only”

this is not valid for science. stakes of one’s science cannot be held by
oneself only. the whole point of science is for its stakes to transcend and
outlive its creator, the scientist.

if the stakes of something can be held by its creator only, if the stakes
cannot transcend and outlive the creator, therefore that something cannot
be science, and the creator cannot be a scientist in this creation.

this means: (1) a scientist cannot be a stakeholder as a scientist. (2)

multistakeholderism automatically excludes science.



intgovforum.org

85
 We reject the terminations in
DTCF Department of Theater

ÖKM Stage — February 2017

The terminations of academics in DTCF Department of Theater, Ankara,

the first academic department in Turkey to give theater education, is the
most noticeable example of the activities that have been getting worse and
worse in Turkey each and every day, to dismay, to erode and to destroy
everyone that have been producing in theater and contributing to these
productions.

We reject the silencing of artistic production! We reject the silencing of all

constituents that have been contributing to artistic production! We reject
the attempt to expel art to a point where it’s difficult and even impossible
to reach! We reject the dysfunctionalization of a department that have
made inappreciably high contributions to the world of theater!

As we have said before the theaters will produce will live will not be de-
stroyed!

88
 Amed City Theater opens with its first play

Vecdi Erbay — 10 February 2017 — gazeteduvar.com.tr

Etimesgut subprefect Cumali Atilla who had been appointed as kayyım [*]
to Diyarbakır in November 2016 had de facto shut down the City Theater
by not renewing the agreements of the 31 actors/actresses of the theater.
In the time being, the actors/actresses of Diyarbakır City Theater weren’t
able to perform the plays that they’d prepared for the new season. They
also went through hard times economically.

Şanoya Bajer ya Amedê (Amed City Theater) consists of actors/actresses

in Diyarbakır that produce theater in Kurdish, and it will open the curtain
for the stand-up show “Dawiya Dawi” by the artist Özcan Ateş [+].

These artists who had spent years in theater work and had gulped the dust
of the stage [-] did not stay idle despite these hard times. They first took
the decision not to disperse, and then they went on to find a stage. Almost

Amed City Theater has prepared its first play. The theater will perform its
first play on Saturday

89
all of the stages available for theater plays belong to the municipalities,
and since kayyıms were appointed to the municipalities, it wasn’t easy to
find a hall. Finally they found the hall too. Actors/actresses, directors,
writers and the technical team, all of them cooperated to convert the stage
from an unusable state into a usable state. Working day and night, they
prepared the seats, the lights, and the stage in order to perform their new
play.

FIRST PLAY ‘DAWÎYA DAWÎ’

On February 11 Saturday, 3 pm, Amed City Theater will launch in Diyar

Galeria. In the stand-up show “Dawiya Dawi” (Eventually) directed by
Kemal Gökhan Gürses, [%] Özcan Ateş tells about social reactions via the
stories that he experienced. It will be performed on 3 pm and 6 pm.

The event will also include an exhibition of paintings by Zehra Doğan [ ]

made in prison. Doğan’s oil paintings will be presented for the appreciation
of those interested in art with the exhibition “4 Months 25 Days”.

[*] t.n. “Kayyım” is a meaning-

less Turkish word that’s used to say
“trustee”.

[+] t.n. “Özcan Ateş : Essence-Soul

Fire”. Most Turkish names are mean-
ingful like that. They are like Native
American names. e.g. my own name is
“Işık Barış Fidaner : Light Peace Tree-
man”.

[-] t.n. “To gulp the dust of some-

thing” is a colloquial expression in
Turkish to indicate a significant expe-
rience in a particular domain.

[%] t.n. “Kemal Gökhan Gürses : Maturity Sky-Chieftain Strong-Voice”.

[ ] t.n. “Zehra Doğan : Beautiful Born”.

90
 ‘Life is us, art is us’

11 February 2017 — dihaber.net

DİYARBAKIR – Diyarbakır City Theater actors/actresses, after their jobs

were terminated by the kayyum appointed to the City Municipality, con-
vened with theater lovers by performing the stand-up show “Dawiya Dawi”
that they prepared by gathering back together. The artists said “life is us,
art is us” and that good days are coming.
The 31 theater actor/actress whose jobs in Diyarbakır City Theater were
terminated by the kayyum appointed to Diyarbakır City Municipality, gath-
ered back together despite obstructions and pressures, and convened with
theater lovers by performing the stand-up show “Dawiya Dawi”. The play
performed in Diyar Galeria İş [*] Center attracted great interest. Many cit-
izens attended, including HDP Urfa MP Osman Baydemir, HDP Co-Chair
Selahattin Demirtaş’ spouse Başak Demirtaş, HDP Diyarbakır MP Ziya Pir,
and DBP Deputy Co-Chair Gülcihan Şimşek.
‘THE STAGES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN OURS’
Theater worker Berfin Emektar, in a short speech on behalf of theater
workers, said that they are not without alternative even though the kayyum
have terminated their jobs. Emektar said, “The stages have always been
ours. We have been the first ones to cut the stone too, we have been
the first ones to battle to protect our lands and our food too. We have
been the first magicians, the first austeres [derviş] on the way for truth too.
We have sung the first lullabies for the newborn, we have wailed requiems
for those who bade farewell to life too. We are the ones to write loves
and experience them too. We too have been the first ones to undergo
oppression, and again the ones to resist too! We have been the narrators
who carried the legend of Spartacus to this day. We have also been the
ones to witness the cries of people like Mehmet Tunç!”

91
‘LIFE IS US, ART IS US’
Saying “life is us, art is us”, Emektar said that they were going through
hard times but that the good days are coming. Emektar said “We are on
the side of the human, on the side of the art. Since the first human being,
by saying ‘No’ to everything that wants to destroy goodness and beauty,
we shall summon a new world.”
After her speech, the stand-up show “Dawiya Dawi” was performed. The
play dealt with the government’s view of the Kurdish people and told about
the problems through ironic language. Theater lovers experienced fun mo-
ments during the stand-up show.
BAYDEMİR: THE PEOPLE WILL NEVER OBEY THEM
HDP Urfa MP Osman Baydemir took the stage after the theater perfor-
mance, congrulated the theater workers, and gave them roses. Baydemir
hailed the MPs and municipal co-chairs that were elected by people’s will
and condemned the shutdown of the theater that had been operating under
Diyarbakır City Municipality. Baydemir said: “People’s institutions are now
being forcefully seized. People are being fired. But this people will not
obey these impositions. The people will never obey them. Even primitive
tribes would deem such impositions shameful when one tribe would burn
the other tribe’s crop. They would say “Don’t play with their bread.” But
now they are playing with the breads of everyone, from academics to theater
workers. Never doubt, alma mazlumun ahını çıkar aheste aheste. [-] This
winter will be the last winter for the members of the cause for freedom.
We have never committed unconscionable acts.”
‘THE EXHIBITION WILL BE OPEN UNTIL MARCH 1’
After the theater performance, the participants attended the painting ex-
hibition of Zehra Doğan, among the editors of JINHA, [%] journalist and
painter, who reported news for months during the “curfew” in Nusaybin.
The exhibition of the paintings by Doğan, who continues her work in both
of her professions in Mardin E-Type Prison, opened up in the ground floor
of Diyar Galeria İş Center. It will remain open until March 1. The exhibition
called “141” indicates Doğan’s 141 days in prison.

92
Art lovers wandered through the exhibition and got informed about the
paintings.
https://www.facebook.com/BBAmedSehirTiyatrosu/
[*] t.n. “İş” is the Turkish word for “work” but it’s used to say “business”
in the commercial sense.
[-] t.n. It is a proverb that means “Don’t hurt the aggrieved, or you will
eventually pay for what you’ve done.”
[%] t.n. Women’s News Agency. It was shut down.