(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
place there. Depiction, more or less, always includes exaggeration; especially if the
narrator has been praised by the audience previously: All what you hear after the
applause is a performance to be appreciated and it is to your advantage to be suspicious
about what is being told. The narrator starts to solo, in other words improvise; the “real”
experience is replaced by the beautified and / or comical anecdote and representation
becomes the parasite of experience, exploiting it incessantly.
3. Reality vs. construct
Going back to photography from the latter statements that negates the notion of an
ideal truth, Mark Kingwell asserts that “photographs are not multiple depictions of some
single reality, waiting out there to be cornered and cropped, and somehow regulating,
even in the cornering and cropping, how / what the image means. Rather, photographs
offer multiple meanings. The presented image is not a reflection, or even an
interpretation, of singular reality. It is, instead, the creation of a world.” [Kin06] The
concept of objectivity, similar to the above mentioned illusion of single reality, is also
criticized by Flusser: “The apparent non-symbolic, ‘objective’ character of technical
images has the observer looking at them as if they were not really images, but a kind of
window on the world. He trusts them as he trusts his own eyes. If he criticizes them at
all, he does so not as a critique of image, but as a critique of vision; his critique is not
concerned with their production, but with the world ‘as seen through’ them. Such a lack
of critical attitude towards technical images is dangerous in a situation where these
images are about to displace texts. The uncritical attitude is dangerous because the
‘objectivity’ of the technical image is a delusion. They are, in truth, images, and as
such, they are symbolical. [Flu00]
Since we deal with symbols at this point, the notion of representation comes in. As
Fritjof Capra states in his Tao of Physics; “representation of reality is so much easier to
grasp than reality itself, we tend to confuse the two and to take our concepts and
symbols for reality.” [Cap75] This is also very much in parallel with Jean Baudrillard’s
statements in his philosophical treatise “Simulacres et Simulation” where he asserts that
simulated copy has superseded the original object, therefore representation has replaced
the reality it illustrated. Since representations are personal definitions of particular
personal experiences and perceptions, it becomes rather problematical to talk about
objectivity when reality is concerned. The denial of objectivity can be taken as the
acceptance of multiple subjectivities. This approach leads us to the theory of
perspectivism, which “is the philosophical view developed by Friedrich Nietzsche that
all ideations take place from particular perspectives. This means that there are many
possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives which determine any possible judgment of
truth or value that we may make; this implies that no way of seeing the world can be
taken as definitively ‘true’, but does not necessarily propose that all perspectives are
equally valid.” (Wikipedia definition of perspectivism)
Once we accept the presence of multiple subjectivities we can start talking about the
notion of construct. Let’s first start with the bigger picture: "Construct" is a temporary
process that exists for a while and finally transforms itself into an end "product": A
building, a culture, a society, an idea, a freedom, a dogma, etc... Not only buildings and
structures are built; the major components that constitute the spine of the society we live
in, such as tradition, culture, religion and identity can also be constructed. Societies,
nations that perceive life in longer terms take this “immaterial” construction process
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