***

I dream I’m on a college campus in Istanbul, editing a radio show in my office with two friends. The two opposing doors of this office open to a courtyard and a busy hallway.

Two professors are having an uncomfortable conversation in the courtyard. We can’t figure out how to close the door, so we go out to the student hall where they’re serving free food for all. We get in line. 

When it’s my turn, the only food left on the entire table is a single dolma, and as soon as I put it on my paper plate, someone snatches it from me. I’m furious, but he’s already disappeared with the dolma when I turn around. 

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

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 realize 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, 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 that their total would be $10. I tap my card. 

As soon as I step outside, my dream-self wants to know how I could be so obedient, so quiet, when the store next door to my paper-walled building, across the street from my rotating unhoused neighbors who’ve been starting fires to stay warm at night, dares to charge $10 for so little.

It’s not easy to react to injustice the way we know deep down that we must in a society where everyone’s acting so well.

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 says, people no longer knew how to be in the world. And the sensory-motor-based action-images, at least in arthouse cinema, left their place for the optical-sound images set in what Deleuze calls “any-space-whatevers.”

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

“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

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

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

***

In Warsha, a 2022 French-Lebanese short film directed by Dania Bdeir, a migrant construction worker will rise so high above the city of Beirut that the crane he’ll operate won’t just transform him, but also us, into someone we can barely dream of as ourselves, as our freest self.

***

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, at 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 one to stop playing was one of my best friends who’d turned thirteen over the school year. As soon as the school year ended, I rang her doorbell so we could walk to the Elevator meeting point together 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.

So in the any-space-whatevers of our dreams, we put ourselves in settings where we don’t know how to be ourselves when we’re awake and let our imagination operate the crane as we experience the world beyond the blocks arranged 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 of an arena where they must fight against traditional methods of writing 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 their past, present, and a future they can’t imagine themselves in, is a vibration that cannot be silenced. Not even by lead-fueled 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