Bülent Diken

Diken, Bülent

Name Variants

Diken, Bülent
D., Bulent
Bülent DIKEN
DIKEN, Bülent
Diken, BÜLENT
Bulent, Diken
Diken,B.
Diken,Bulent
D., Bülent
DIKEN, BÜLENT
Diken, B.
BÜLENT DIKEN
Diken, Bulent
B. Diken
D.,Bulent
Diken B.
Bülent Diken

Job Title

Prof. Dr.

Email Address

bulent.diken@khas.edu.tr

ORCID ID

0000-0002-2661-8568

Scopus Author ID

9335633100

Full item page

Scholarly Output

25

Articles

9

Citation Count

9

Supervised Theses

14 Scholarly Output Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 25

Citation Count: 0
Money Religion and Symbolic Exchange in Winter Sleep
(Berghahn Journals, 2017) Diken, Bülent
Winter Sleep is the latest film from Nuri Bilge Ceylan a Turkish director and screenwriter who has received international acclaim. For the purpose of social and cultural analysis this article critically focuses on the film's key themes and maneuvers that have diagnostic value from a social theoretical viewpoint. These themes are religion the relationship between religion and capitalism and symbolic exchange. Organized around these topics the article examines the religion-capitalism-symbolic exchange nexus by analyzing the motifs of formation intervention and intelligibility as these themes arise. This site of intersection is the conceptual pivot around which the article configures itself. It explores Winter Sleep based on what the film shows and says on screen how its thought processes emerge and at what points this thought supports or conflicts with dominant societal opinions.
Citation Count: 3
"Life is a state of mind' - on fiction, society and Trump
(Routledge Journals, 2017) Diken, Bülent; Laustsen, Carsten Bagge
The article undertakes an allegorical double reading of Being There and Trump as instances of what we call socio-fiction. Crucially in this respect, reality and fiction are not two opposed realms. The two realms always interact in subtle ways, which is why cinema can be a resource for diagnostic social analysis. We first articulate a general commentary on the relationship between cinema and society, introducing the concept of socio-fiction'. Secondly, we analyse Peter Sellers' Being There, an interesting film focused on the relationship between reality and fiction. In this analysis, we elaborate on different ways of approaching fiction in a sociological prism. And finally, we discuss Trump as a fallout effect of Being There. After all, a film is not just an image of a reality, a shadow or appearance of a social fact; sometimes the reality itself seems to have become an appearance of an appearance, a shadow of a shadow.
Cultural heritage - its digital preservations, and collateral damage
(Kadir Has Üniversitesi, 2022-12) Diken, Bülent; Bülent Diken
The fundamental goal of this thesis is to examine the relationship between cultural heritage and 3D visualizations of them, stretching and challenging the definition of simulacra in order to better understand what role the concept of digital preservation plays in contemporary cultural heritage preservation practices. At the basis of my argument is the allegation that digitalization of cultural heritage preservation shares with virtual reality a new mode of production, a rhetorical position employed to specific, cultural, and symbolical ends. The purpose of this connection is two-fold: first, I examine 3D visualization in cultural heritage preservation apart from CGI or CAD, which only mimics the computational creation; this position investigates and questions how capturing reality in 3D within all dimensions (only appearances) brings a new dissolution of heritage that we can put any material object or site in any scale into Virtual Reality or reproduce it up to 3mm accurate representation. Second, I make a conceptual analogy of the Baudrillardian perspective of digital imagery to criticize the virtual solutions to preserve cultural heritages. I also describe that those solutions might open more expansive windows to a new visual culture, a new production pipeline within the Deleuzian perspective. Situating the digital blueprints of cultural heritage under the banners of their most repeated utilities and functions (immersion, dissemination of knowledge, human-computer interaction), the thesis uses case studies to illuminate and illustrate the digitalization of preservation in which digital reproduction technologies have virtually constitute the shape of the cultural heritage in the last couple of years. It also creates a creative visual study to provide the necessary demonstration of theoretical argument and the digitalization process itself in order to express the new territorial practices of cultural heritage under the transmission to the digital infrastructures.
Citation Count: 0
The despotic imperative: From Hiero to the circle
(Duke University Press, 2019) Diken, Bülent
The article thematizes the actuality of despotism through a double reading of Xenophon’s Hiero and Dave Eggers’s Circle. A key text on despotism, Hiero is interesting to reconsider in a contemporary context because of its explicit focus on the economic element in the nexus of despotism, economy, and voluntary servitude. Discussing this nexus in an ancient context, the article turns to The Circle, a dystopic novel from 2013, which elaborates on how the attempt at creating a transparent society results in the perversion of democracy to the point where a despotism fueled by economization and voluntary servitude becomes immediately evident. Notwithstanding the significant differences between the two perceptions of despotism that proliferate in Hiero and The Circle, their shared focus on the nexus of despotism, economy, and voluntary servitude testifies to an interesting case of convergence in divergence. Offering an account of this continuity, the article ends with reflecting on this nexus itself, arguing that it should be rethought in a new way today. The concept of use is suggested as a key concept for such reconsideration.
Sinematik terör : sinemanın terörü ve terörün sineması
(Kadir Has Üniversitesi, 2018) Diken, Bülent; Diken, Bülent
Bu çalışma terör ile sinema arasında bir analoji kuruyor ve bu bağlamda terör sinema ilişkisine odaklanıyor. Bu etkileşimli yüzeyi görünür kılabilmek için önce Zizek ve Baudrillard’ın felsefeleri bağlamında sosyolojik bir terör analizi yapılarak Agamben’e varılıyor. Ardından sinemanın kavramsal tanımı yapılıyor. Bu bağlamda imgeyi sinemanın düşünme tarzı olarak alıyor ve bunu Deleuze’ün hareket-imge, zaman-imge kavramları ile açıklıyor. Buradan hareketle Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), Kurtuluş Günü (Roland Emmerich, 1996) ve Yedi (David Fincher, 1995) filmleri sinema ve sosyoloji bir arada tutulmaya çalışılarak analiz ediliyor. Bu çalışmada iki metot kullanılıyor. İlk olarak terörün analitik sosyolojik bir tartışması yapılıyor. İkinci olarak ise film çalışmaları ve film sosyolojisinin ortak paydası gözetilerek film analizi yapılıyor. Son kertede bu çalışma terör ile sinemanın benzer işleyişe sahip aygıtlar olduğunu iddia etmektedir.
Kültürel miras—dijital korumaları ve istenmeyen hasar
(2022) Diken, Bülent; Diken, Bülent
Bu tezin temel amacı, dijital koruma konseptinin çağdaş kültürel mirası koruma uygulamalarında oynadığı rolü daha iyi anlamak için simülakr tanımını genişleterek ve sorgulayarak kültürel mirası ve 3 boyutlu görselleştirmelerinin arasındaki ilişkiyi incelemektir. Tartışmanın temelinde, kültürel mirasın korunmasının dijitalleşmesinin sanal gerçeklikle yeni bir üretim tarzını, belirli kültürel ve sembolik sonuçlar için kullanılan retorik bir konumunu paylaştığı iddiası var. Bu bağlantının amacı iki yönlüdür: Birincisi, kültürel mirasın korunmasında yalnızca hesaplamalı yaratımı taklit eden CGI ya da CAD'dan ayrı olarak 3D görselleştirmeyi inceliyorum; bu pozisyon, gerçekliği tüm boyutlarda (yalnızca görüntüleriyle) 3 boyutlu olarak yakalamanın, herhangi bir maddi nesneyi ya da herhangi bir ölçekteki alanı Sanal Gerçekliğe koyabileceğimiz veya 3 mm'ye kadar doğru temsile kadar yeniden üretebileceğimiz mirasın yeni bir çözülmesini nasıl getirdiğini araştırır ve sorgular. İkinci olarak, kültürel mirasları koruma yönelik sanal çözümleri eleştirmek için Baudrillard'ın dijital imgeleme perspektifine kavramsal bir benzetme kuruyor. Ayrıca bu çözümlerin yeni bir görsel kültüre, Deleuze'ün perspektif içinde yeni bir üretim hattına daha geniş pencereler açabileceğini de tarif ediyorum. Kültürel mirasın dijital planlarını en çok tekrarlanan yararları ve işlevleri (içine gömülme, bilginin dağılımı, insan-bilgisayar etkileşimi) başlıkları altında konumlandırılan bu çalışma, dijital yeniden üretim teknolojilerinin içinde korumanın dijitalleşmesini aydınlatmak ve göstermek için son birkaç yılda giderek artan örnek vaka çalışmalarını kullanır. Ayrıca, kültürel mirasın dijital altyapılara aktarımı kapsamındaki yeni bölgesel pratikleri ifade etmek için gerekli teorik argümanı ve dijitalleşme sürecinin kendisini göstermek için yaratıcı bir görsel çalışma oluşturur. Anahtar Sözcükler: 3D görselleştirme, dijital koruma, simülakr, hiper gerçeklik, yersiz-yurtsuzlaştırma, dijital miras, kültürel mirasın dijitalleştirilmesi
Citation Count: 1
COMIC SOCRATES? The Clouds, Taste, and Philosophy
(Duke University Press, 2022) Diken, Bülent; Laustsen, C.B.
In the Clouds, Aristophanes apparently ridicules Socratic philosophy as a useless, essentially passive preoccupation, which, “twisted” in the wrong hands, can seriously harm the City. But such an instrumentalist reading of the Clouds (and of philosophy) misses a crucial point regarding the relation between philosophy and comedy. Insofar as philosophy, love of wisdom, is irreducible to wisdom — insofar as, in other words, philosophy is also a matter of taste (a concept which seeks to combine knowledge and pleasure) — the Clouds can be read as an ironic-comic defense of philosophy. To discuss this, the article reads the Clouds in the perspective of free use. This reading makes it possible to articulate two distinct but related senses of perverting philosophy, which are evidenced with material from within the play: the reduction of reason to instrumental reason and/or to state philosophy. To end with, the article discusses the relationship between comedy and philosophy in more general terms. © 2022 Duke University Press.
On the crossroads of ethics and form: The dialectical image in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue
(Kadir Has Üniversitesi, 2021) Diken, Bülent; Diken, Bülent
In On Painting (1435), Leon Battista Alberti describes the rectangular frame as an "open window" (aperta finestra), which lays the ground for framing in painting, photography, and cinema. Considering this metaphor and taking the 'framing gesture' in Camera Buff (1979) as my starting point, I explore how Kieslowski's oeuvre is related to the frame and how he deals with Alberti's model of finestra and its potentialities in The Decalogue (1989). Kieslowski's artistic quest for the truth of the cinematographic image and its ethical course creates a dialectical tension between the two. This dialectical tension finds its visual expression in the fissures on the surface of the image. Fissures, appearing as cracks, tears, or slits and serving as thresholds, openings, and passages, that haunt and distort the frame, are approached as visual devices and a metadiscursive figure. As the point of encounter and contact and its failure, an opening is where a haptic urge to touch, the scopic drive, and its ethical restraint occurs, thus leading their way to the origin and the primary object. Keywords: frame, finestra, fissure, ethics, form, dialectical image, Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieslowski
Citation Count: 0
Migration the sociology of mobility and critical theory
(Taylor & Francis, 2018) Diken, Bülent
Being one of my PhD supervisors John’s influence on my intellectual life has been decisive in many respects. However his work has inspired me especially in relation to three fields: immigration the sociology of critique and the critique of mobility. The following is a reflective account of this. First I focus on immigration in the prism of mobility. Then I turn to the sociology of critique in the framework of mobility. Finally I revisit the link between critique and immobility relating this to the sociology of the camp. © 2019 selection and editorial matter Ole B. Jensen Sven Kesselring and Mimi Sheller.
Third cinema movement as a virtuality
(Kadir Has Üniversitesi, 2020) Diken, Bülent; Diken, Bülent
The struggle against capitalism was gaining power in the 1960s, both in Europe and in Latin America, and cinema was considered as one of the fields of conflict by the activists. In this context, Fernando Ezequel Solanas and Octavio Getino created the Third Cinema Movement as a strategy to revolutionize the cinema as a form that attracted the masses to the struggle. They declared in their manifesto (Towards a Third Cinema, 1968) that one of the most important objectives of the Third Cinema Movement was to produce revolutionary subjectivities. In this thesis, I argue that the Third Cinema Movement's understanding of cinema and their suggestions are still effectual. In this regard, first the theory (manifest) of the movement is read on the basis of the studies of Maurizio Lazzarato Gilles Deleuze. Then, the mechanism of capitalism today, namely, that of the Post-Fordist era, is analyzed to re-establish the material basis of the arguments of the Third Cinema Movement. Meanwhile, the increasing importance of the production of subjectivities in the Post-Fordist era is mentioned. Finally, on this basis, after summarizing the Deleuzian understanding of cinema, the movies that contain the main characteristics of the Third Cinema Movement are analyzed respectively: The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1928), The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman, 1975) and The Hour of the Furnaces (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968).These analyses are made mainly with the guidance of Deleuzian concepts such as "movement-image", "time-image" and "affect". In this context, it is demonstrated that the Third Cinema Movement has evaluated cinema and the audiences as well as history, even the universe, both as actuality and virtuality and that therefore, the production of subjectivities was carried out on this basis.