When I was a kid, one day at school, me and my friends found a play box in conference room.. Somehow we really liked the box, without even looking inside of it, we started to play with it. We threw it to each other like a ball. Shook and swang. Hit each other with it. After our game ends, we left the room with happiness.
An hour later our teacher came and asked “who broke the photographer's camera?” no one replied, nobody show up. At that night, I figured it out that the box was we were playing was the camera bag. I did not say a word after that day. I was afraid. Nobody talked about it later.
This memory made me think about it years and years after.
Ok, we have science. We have thinking capacity. We have technical stuff, philosophy, religion, experiences… whatever. What if we are, all humanity is mistaken? We think it is a world, space, stars, mountains, rivers, faculties, institutions and civilization. What if it is just a camera bag?
As humanity, we built schools, faculties, research centers, foundations, institutions, made archives, send spaceships to space… We were and we are always in a search. But, maybe we are all looking in the wrong direction to find an answer. Yeah, most of the inventions and discoveries work for us practically, however, maybe we are missing something more precious and vital.
You know Plato’s allegory of the cave. The people in the cave live their lives with the shadows of things: foxes, trees, horses etc. If a person goes out of the cave and see the originals of the objects, and go back inside with the new knowledge, and try to tell the cave-dwellers, they would probably try to kill him.
Maybe we should look at the people who we are prisoning, isolating and killing. I don’t say everyone of them are heroes or completely right. But some of their words can be inspiring. While we are partying with the community, there are some outsiders trying to tell us, in a hard way, that we are making some crucial mistakes. Maybe the names like Alan Turing, Mandela, Che, Lennon, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King would tell you something…
Deleuze says that schizophrenics are a threat to capitalist society because of being outside of the oedipal complex. I think even the mental illnesses can teach us good things.
According to Foucault, traditional power builds a society and isolates the misfit population. For me, this is a paraphrase for “society isolates the unproductive, unbeneficial.”
Examples may vary…
Let’s look at Handmaiden, a genius movie for me, it is about that our realities may not intersect, even we try to be fully aware. Even if it is a life and death situation.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
Lady Hideko lives in a context that prevents her to escape and accept the life as it is presented by Uncle Kouzuki. She needed an outsider, an information box that can change the context.
And Sook-hee… She made a plan with Count Fujiwara, till nearly the end of the movie, she did not know a thing. She was nearly ending in an asylum. With her context, she could not succeed. Her vision was not enough, she was like a pawn in the game between three others.
Count and Uncle were the people who deceived. They were clearly misinformed and believed the information. They were the ones with the strong hands.
Even in the end, Uncle’s men were searching for two women. However, one of them was disguised as a man.
Yeah, Individuals make mistakes, we know that. Societies can make mistakes, we know that too. This knowledge leads me to the idea that whole humanity can be mistaken. I will never be sure that we are doing the right thing.
