writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

impossible within, the impossible constitutes our very being. Lacan elaborates the central place of
the Thing as “the intimate exteriority or ‘extimacy’”:
The reason is that das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded. [In]
reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that is impossible to
forget […] something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on
the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent. 3
The function of the real is found at the heart of the symbolic order, precisely because it is excluded
from that very order, as a non‐symbolizable traumatic element. Lacan writes, “[T]he real is just as
much inside as outside, and the unconscious is not a purely interior psychic system but an
intersubjective structure (‘the unconscious is outside’).” 4 As the extimacy is the traumatic,
antagonistic kernel of otherness at the very heart of the subject, the real is situated inside as much as
it is outside.
Karamustafa’s work, “Memory of a Square (perceived from an interior),” reveals how this
traumatic otherness, such externality is located in what is internal. One cannot engage in what is
happening in the interiors without referring to the exteriors, to the traumatic events happening in
the square. The other way around is equally plausible: in order to make a commentary about the
events happening outside, one should contemplate on movement, behavior and mood of the
residents in interiors. Because of this continual awareness of the second screen on the part of the
spectators, throughout their engagement with this work, the spectators find themselves
simultaneously both inside the imaginary, domestic interiors and outside of that world which is
coded as exteriority, as reality.
Karamustafa’s work achieves such ambivalence for the spectators, the effect of being
simultaneously inside and outside of one screen. This feeling of ambivalence, instilled upon the
spectators, could be best described as a topology marked foremost by spatial uncertainty, the nondifferentiation
between inside and outside. The questions regarding spatial ambiguity are thrust
upon the spectators, causing a subtle, but strong effect that both facilitates and prevents the
viewers’ collaboration in producing the signification of the work.
The coexistence of the two narratives creates an ambivalent, unstable effect for the spectators: as
they concentrate on one screen and being pulled into the fiction of the residents’ lives, while at the
same time, the other screen becomes a centrifugal force, taking the viewers away from that
imaginary world and its confined space. The spectators, on the one hand, engages with this effect,
therefore, emerges when the rigidity of the boundaries separating inside/outside, intimate/foreign,
and external/internal are rendered unstable.
However, this is not only a spatial ambiguity but also a temporal one. In order to better
understand this narration‐wise strategy, we need to utilize a different temporal topology that
traverses the fundamental assumptions of Euclidean time and space. This new topology can be
demonstrated through the figure of the Moebius strip. 5 As Dylan Evans explains:
The figure illustrates the way that psychoanalysis problematizes various binary
oppositions, such as inside/outside, before/after, signifier/signified, truth/appearance.
While the two terms in such oppositions are often presented as radically distinct, [i]n
terms of the topology of the moebius strip […] the opposed terms are thus seen as to be
not discrete but continuous with one each other. 6
The structure of the Moebius strip, therefore, invites us to conceptualize the binary pairs not as
strictly disparate but as merging/blending into one another. On a Moebius strip, Slavoj Žižek writes,
“if we progress far enough on one surface, […] we find ourselves on its reverse side.” 7
436