Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
becoming, as Wallace Steven recommended, poets of place-change. In brief, training or pedagogy in activism also neutralizes certain taken for granted, “natural” attitudes toward urban places and environments.
Sustained frictional interactions in city places were significant in generating an affective mood of activists, accustoming them to urban breakdown or crisis. “We went to Düzce for something in 1978, and I remember the immense, sudden relief of being out of Istanbul where no one knew you, with no danger of being killed or attacked. In the city everyone looked at each other with suspicion” (Ertuğrul, HK). Temporary removal from the situation made Ertuğrul aware of his natural attitude, of previously non-attended-to feelings intimately related to specific qualities of the city, majorly contributing to his experience of it. This backgrounded but embodied sense of danger meant “crisis” became an expectation, an event to be reckoned with, as Reşat’s story about something that didn’t happen reveals: “Once we heard the ülkücüler were marching from Sarıyer to Beşiktaş. We didn’t want them to enter the lower gate [of the university], so we got a gun. We went into a dormitory to have gun training. The person teaching us accidently fired the gun, and someone fell over, screaming ‘Mother, I’m ruined!’ We panicked, sure that we had killed him. . . . When he recovered with no injuries he said, ‘I was told it didn’t hurt, so I assumed I was shot.’”
In the main, phenomenological perspectives have had little influence over orthodox Turkish political science, as can be seen in the accounts and analyses of the 1970s summarized in the previous chapter. For good reasons, perhaps, scholars have been more concerned with the political efficacy and genealogy of Kemalism, including with debate over its historical emergence and its key ideological components (nationalism, civilizationalism, modernism, etc.); with questions concerning its attempted remodeling of social life; with an interest in identifying its core producers/consumers, and by analysis of both the benefits that have accrued to its advocates and the repression (and social opprobrium) incurred by its opponents; and finally by its historical fate in relation to contemporary political changes. All of these have of necessity been considered both in the broader context of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and developments in the global economy. Further, until recently, many university academics themselves have been committed Kemalists, resulting in a synthesis between their perception and ethical approval of its political project and the scientific categories used to analyze its effects. Kandiyoti (2002) describes conventional social scientific analysis in Turkey in a somewhat similar way, claiming that it has generally privileged the juridico-political and institutional realms as its field of inquiry, while being less preoccupied with theorizing the connections or disconnection between everyday practices and state-driven modernization.1
By contrast, I hope to show in Istanbul, City of the Fearless how phenomenology’s emphasis on human intentionality and its constituting awareness of entities, events, places, people, and so on may both inform and relativize more mainstream accounts of political and social relations in Istanbul in the 1970s and early ’80s. Phenomenological anthropology contends that people’s purposive actions, their affective states, their embodied experience, as well as the essential interactive quality of their lives should not be reduced to epiphenomena of objectified political-economic structures, simplified by cause-and-effect explanations, subjected too quickly to abstract theoretical or cultural models, or attributed to their following of rules. Similarly, social theories, philosophies, and historiographies should be assessed as much for their contribution to the transforming of their proponents’ perceptions of, and scope for action in, the world as for their objective truth. Thus, one virtue of a phenomenological approach is its utility in exploring the conflicted intersubjective character of everyday, lived experience in Turkey in the years between 1974 and 1983, through its concentration on “human consciousness in all of its lived realities . . . and its priority given to embodied, inter-subjective, temporally informed engagements in the world” (Desjarlais and Throop 2011: 4).
Although in anthropology explicitly phenomenological approaches have often privileged individuals (in their interrelationships) as the mediators of broader cultural processes (e.g., Desjarlais 2003), one major advantage of extensive interviewing of militants about their experiences is that it enables analysis of a more diverse account of their feelings and perceptions than would have been experienced by any one particular actor, given the variation of political practices across the city. From them the analyst may hazard wider conclusions. Indeed, Zigon notes that this is one key tool within the phenomenological kit: the ability to make analytic distinctions between (in this case) the lived sociability of activists’ everyday spatial politics, and a more totalistic account of spatial politics in Istanbul made “after the fact of articulation in speech and thought” (Zigon 2009: 287). However, in analyzing interviews, I do not wish to create too hastily in ethnography or in analysis a more comprehensible assemblage of urban practices and places than was experienced by militant subjects themselves, given the way that their own collective actions often caused unbearable uncertainty regarding changing conventions of spatial relations, movements, and engagements. As Hüseyin (from Aydınlık) said, “It was a civil war, and death was very close.”
2.1 ACTIVISM AND PERCEPTION
Alongside their practical and affective encounters with a “revolutionary” city, the event and experience of activism itself involved militants in specific perceptual (phenomenological) modifications. Activism involves a pedagogic method. Activist groups sought to educate militants, neutralizing in novices previously deposited attitudes toward the city and its parts and instigating in their place a “socialist (or fascist) way” of reckoning with it.2 In redefining and politicizing selected intersubjective relationships of activists, factions and groups tried to reorient their perceptions of certain properties of those situations and things. Thus, workers were taught by leftist groups to re-recognize their employers as members of the bourgeoisie class or of the “oligarchy”; and rightists were encouraged by ultranationalist organizations to perceive that the nation demanded certain duties from their Turkishness. Skills mastered in engaging and inhabiting the city in a new way produced urban events, the collision of militants from different factions struggling to realize realities and assert interests. Some events were powerful enough to radically modify the consciousness of individual actors, rupturing previous political visions and practices, and recomposing them as transformed, singular subjects in the process (Humphrey 2008, Houston and Şenay 2017).
In brief, activist training aimed to politicize what Husserl called the “phenomenological epoche”—that is, the “method[s] by which an individual is able to modify his or her orientation to the everyday world of experience so as to dislodge ingrained commitments to seeing only particular aspects of it” (Throop 2015: 75). Organizations, parties and factions used the term consciousness-raising to describe the strategies whereby impersonal backgrounds or horizons of experience that mediated activists’ ordinary perceptions were brought to the foreground of attention. Like any acquired, new embodied knowledge, these intentional modifications were only partial, directing critical attention toward some identified social or ideological determinants of the natural attitude or of consciousness about something while leaving others unavailable to reflection. Up to a point, political groups “confirmed” Bachelard’s claim that “it is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality” (1994: 61).
Second, the sponsored modification of activists’ perceptions and experience toward the city and its places of work, study, and public engagement involved more than their learning of new theoretical knowledge about society and history so as to discern its exploitative “determinate structures” and project how to transform them. More concretely, consciousness-raising involved activists in a range of new practices and relationships, including work in the shantytown (gecekondu) suburbs, where student-militants regularly went to sell journals, teach literacy classes, provide services (clinics, roads, legal and medical advice) and to protect the gecekondu from attacks on its places of meeting (see chapter 4). For male and female student-activists from Istanbul’s more middle-class areas, successful service to and mobilization of gecekondu inhabitants required their conscious acquisition of a modified and gendered corporeal style. Awareness of techniques of the body (movement, comportment, mannerisms, and clothing) and communicable dimensions of affective existence (expressions of mood, sensibility, and humor) were crucial in forging