***

I dream I’m on a college campus in Istanbul, editing a radio show with two friends in my office. The office has two doors, one opening onto a courtyard, the other to a busy hallway.

Two professors are having an uncomfortable conversation in the courtyard. We can’t figure out how to close the courtyard door so we go into the student hall, where free food is being served. We get in line. 

When it’s my turn, the only scrap of food left is a single dolma. As soon as I put it on my paper plate someone snatches it from me. I’m furious, but when I turn around the thief has already disappeared. 

My friends say we should go and eat out in the city. On my way to their car, I realize I’m starving and I stop at a little kiosk in the car park. 

Sandwiches start from $30, soups $40. I ask for three cookies, one for each of us, and pay without looking at the price. When I get the receipt I realise the cookies cost me $70! I try to return them, but the woman just stands there staring at me.

This is insane, I scream. I curse, then apologize immediately. I know it’s not your fault, I say. 

She shrugs. 

I steal three candy bars and give them to my friends in the car.

The next day, in real life, I go to the Ideal Market, which is actually a Whole Foods masquerading as a small business. 

I get in line to pay for a loaf of bread and an avocado, feeling pleased with myself for not falling into the corporate grocery labyrinth’s traps and buying more than I intended. When I scan my two items, the total comes to $10! I must have seen the prices when I picked them up, but I guess my brain didn’t process the fact that their total would be $10. I tap my card. 

The store is next door to my paper-walled building. Across the street are my vagrant unhoused neighbors, who’ve been starting fires to stay warm at night. When I exit, my dream-self asks how I could be so obedient, so quiet, at its daring to charge $10 for so little.

In a society where everyone behaves so politely, it’s not easy to react to injustice the way we know, deep down, that we should.

According to Deleuze, this sort of “motor helplessness” is at the foundation of neo-realist new-wave, and new American cinema’s switch from action-image to time-image. After World War 2, he writes, people no longer knew how to be in the world, and sensory-motor-based action-images, at least in arthouse cinema, gave way to optical-sound images that are set in what Deleuze calls “any-space-whatevers.”

Deleuze borrows this term from anthropology. In this field, “any-space-whatever” refers to a “non-place” like a grocery store, an airport, or a waiting room where our singularities are flattened. Applying it to film, he writes:

“Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as the pure locus of the possible.”¹

I like that, but I like this re-appropriation by Laura Marks even more:

“any-spaces-whatever are not simply the disjunctive spaces of postmodernism, but also the disruptive spaces of postcolonialism, where non-Western cultures erupt into Western metropolises”²

This identifies World War 2 and the field of postcolonialism as two of the faultiest spheres of influence over our violently interconnected personal geographies: as a distinct line between a globally shared past and present. 

But I like the territories that Deleuze and Marks break open in these quotes.

***

In Warsha, a 2022 French-Lebanese short film directed by Dania Bdeir, a migrant construction worker rises so high above the city of Beirut that the crane he operates transforms both himself, and us, the viewers, into subjects we can barely recognise as ourselves: as our freest selves.

***

Karl Rossman of Kafka’s Amerika has always wanted to be a machinist, but he never got to study the trade. Halfway through the novel, when he is barely eighteen years of age, he feels lucky to be a lift boy at Hotel Occidental.

“He… had the option of increasing the [elevator’s] usual speed by pulling on a cable… but the elevator regulations stated that this was prohibited and even dangerous. Karl never did so while riding with passengers, yet whenever he dropped them off upstairs and there were others waiting below, he became reckless and worked on the cable with strong rhythmical tugs, like a sailor. Besides, he knew that the other lift boys were doing likewise and did not wish to lose his passengers to those other youths.”

From Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka, translated by Mark Harman

***

As a child, one of my favorite games was the Elevator. 

Every summer night, all the pre-teens in our apartment complex would gather to pick one of the fifteen connected seven-story buildings and race into its elevator. Those who made it in would push random buttons until someone from the other team—climbing up and down the stairs, sweating and out of breath—caught up with the elevator. Then, the teams had to switch. 

The first of us to stop playing was one of my best friends. She had turned thirteen over the school year. When the school year ended, I rang her doorbell to invite her to walk to the Elevator meeting point with me, as we’d always done. But this time, her mother opened the door and stood between the two of us. 

My daughter can’t play with you anymore, she said. She’s a young lady now. 

There are only so many moments in our waking lives when we dare to mess with the machine.

When we’re kids, when no one’s looking, when we’re mad.

In the any-space-whatevers of our dreams, we put ourselves into the settings in which, when we’re awake, we don’t know how to be ourselves. Asleep, we let our imaginations operate the crane and we experience the world beyond the confines imposed on it by the dominant languages of waking life.

Nazlı Koca, Anyspacewhatever of dreams

***

“Landscapes are mental states, just as mental states are cartographies, both crystallized in each other, geometrized, mineralized.”³

To many ethno/neuro/x/y/z-diverse voices, the literary landscape feels like a series of action-images located within an arena where they must fight against traditional methods of writing—writing designed to entertain the masses—until someone says cut.

The odds have always been against minor voices in this uneven fight, but the desire to disrupt the ahistorical narratives of a past, present, and future that they can’t imagine themselves within, creates a vibration that cannot be stilled–not even by lead-fuelled constructions of power.

___

[1] Gilles Deleuze, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam: Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983, Les Editions de Minuit)

[2] Laura Marks: The Skin of the Film (1999, Duke University Press)

[3] Gilles Deleuze, ibid.

___

All images courtesy of Nazlı Koca