Jouissance

When we are in a flow, we don’t realize reality, which has a suspicious body, that is created by the reification of the imaginary. “Reification” is the key notion to make the system approvable because people need to believe in terms when they are sensible and even embodied. In this conjuncture, photography, in fact, is a social ritual, a defence screen against concerns and a means of exhibiting power. (1) In my “Jouissance” Project, I illustrated the form of resistance in a woman’s body because of the essence and the meaning of woman’s body. Also in “Jouissance”, colour is one of the tools for supporting the effect of resistance. From this perspective, I emphasized contrast and saturation between colours to make the power of resistance more conspicuous. Using the contrast of red and green, I created a relationship between green colour which includes meanings such as calmness, peace, nature, and red, which has the energy to evoke passion. This shows us an apparent reality of the paradox that we can not run away from the system, yet transform the system by using visual expression. Therefore, the reversal and paradoxical relationship between resistance and transformation gives us a gaze on the imaginary system which consists of the lack in desire that I try to explain in a Lacanian perspective.

Lacan gives us a perspective to illustrate reality, which we need to understand, that reality has a connection with symbolic, that is also an expression of the lack, which is both an output and an input of desires. I want to emphasize the reciprocity amongst an output and an input of desires because when we have a desire for something new, we create a new lack that needts to be satisfied. Thus, there is a dialectical reformation of desires and gaps. Owing to this dialectical reformation, we will always have conflicts in our identities which are also shaped and constructed on a controversial base. In this sense, reality and imagination should be analysed because both of them have a connection with the reciprocal relationship between desire and lack, also they are substantially based on a confliction. When reality occurs, the imaginary takes shape as a response to reality. The reality in itself has a reestablished nature which causes a re-production and re-shaping of the real. Following the construction of the real, alienation is going to be an inextricable part of the identity. In addition to this, false consciousness is consecutively going to merge with alienation to their own subjects.

“The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself.”

Guy Debord

Throughout the articulations of reality, lack and desire, we also should focus on cuts, which appear in our conflicted identities and they represent the split between conscious and unconscious. As I mentioned on alienation and false conscious before, these cuts are inseparable parts of alienation and falce conscious due to I represented the formation of alienation, false consciousness and cuts in a praying woman body by using the power of yellow which has different means such as happiness, clarity, enlightenment, remembrance, intellect, honour and loyalty controversely, it represents cowardice and deceit. Additionally, the chair which is covered by an authentic rug reinforces the structure of the system by using an ironic expression because of the resistance of cultural withstands.

To sum up, Jouissance, as an excess of life, can make alienation stronger from a sociological perpective and having awareness about being and becoming is important to shape our lives and enlightenment of being and becoming is eventually going to be a resistance to alienation.

(1): “On Photography” by Susan Sontag.

Didem Yilmaz