Arkhe, ilk olan’ı, temel’i vurgular, esasa referans verir.  Arşiv bu prensipleri kollarken farkında olmadan kendini açabilir, otoriteyi bazen elinden kaçırır. Arkeoloji ise sesi olmayan objeleri dillendirir, anıtlarla ilgilenirken aslında maddesel bir geçmişi diğer yerel tarihlerle beraber toprak üstüne çıkarır. Öte yandan belgelerden anıtsal söylemler vücuda getirmek tarihyazımının işi olmasa gerektir. Destansı mitler anıtlar gibi önümüzde durur, farklı öykülere ve öznenin kendi anlatısına fırsat vermezler. Troya’daki höyükte savaşın kalıntılarını aramak hayal gücümüze ket vurur, İlyada’nın kör ozanını gözden düşürür. Benjamin’in dediği gibi, geçmişi yorumlamak onu olduğu gibi  görmek değil, bir tehlike anında hafızaya sahip çıkılmasıdır. Bu da ‘şimdi’ye ait bir edimdir. Yani tarih, sonsuzdan gelip sonsuza doğru giden ‘boş bir süre’yi dolduran şey değil, yaşadığımız bu ana sıkı sıkıya bağlı bir kolektif hafızadır. Buna rağmen savaşı (devrimler gibi) tarih içindeki tekil dönüm noktaları, dönemleri açıp kapayan eşikler olarak tahayyül etmek tehlikeyi görünmez kılar, yıkımın acısını milli davalara havale edip hafifletir. Tarihyazımı, ayrık kompartmanlar halinde ele aldığı savaşları sebep-sonuç ilişkileri içinde anlatmaya, istatistiklere, ölmüşleri ve her anlamda yaralanmışları sayılara göndermeye meyillidir. Destanlar aracılığı ile geçmiş savaşı bugüne yakınlaştırmak, kitleleri teyakkuz haline sokup hiç bitmeyen ‘acil durum’lar yaratır, düşmanlıkları körükler. Arşiv, eğer savaşan bireyin tekil hissiyatını açığa çıkarabilirse barışa katkı sunabilir, savaşan öznelerin sözcülüğüne soyunanlar ise muktedirlerdir. Topyekun savaş halindeki küresel ahvalde bugün  ‘barış’ havada asılı duran ne idüğü belirsiz boş bir kavram değil, herşeyden önce, toplumsal barıştır. 2015

If nationalism ought to be denounced in all its manifestations, as it should, then surely the wholesale attributes of a nation are outright rubbish. The projects for official histories in nation building and for hate campaigns as their counterpart have proven to be the least trustworthy. That is why one can follow Freud undertaking an archaeology of the Jewish mind late in his life, in analogy to the individual psyche and its formation that he had worked on for so many years. If there is a collective  unconscious of a nation, then mass hysteria is a possibility.

The ninety year history of the Turkish republic shows a case of mass neurosis in line with the symptoms laid out by Freud in Moses and Monotheism. Whatever remained in the unconscious of the nation comes back to haunt time and again in view of reflexes shown in the conduct of everyday life today. Although the brutal deeds of the Turkish state go back much earlier, the original sin for modern Turkey appears as the Armenian genocide of 1915. The cadres that have planned, initiated and justified the tone for the atrocities blended into the young republic and their train of hatred and xenophobia has persisted, rarely discretely, in much of the political class, their mentors and followers throughout these years. Unlike the holocaust, the banality of evil, in this case, is through an analogy to the vengeance of a repressed and abused child, that is the late Ottoman psyche, who with all its ‘innocence’ thought it could get away with murder. The practical outcome of such a purification of the population, that is the transfer of capital from Armenians and Greeks to the Turkish subjects is an intended but by no means the sole reason.

Apparently, these facts provide an answer as to why the modern Muslim/Turkish subject is subtly tormented by the signs left by the previous inhabitants of this land, a constant reminder of ghosts from a blurred distant past. This mostly shows itself in attitudes towards archaeology in Anatolia: long viewed as the place for treasure hunting, an ancient site is a constant reminder of a past that the current residents find harder to relate to or to totally forget. One would assume that this was not so in longer Ottoman centuries, where one’s neighbors personified the original builders of the ruins and other buildings, with a talent and craft to match, an object of envy.

In the light of Turkish history, one is pressed hard to explain atrocities committed in the name of the state, religion or the nation. The stereotype of the “Turk” that long circulated in the western world up until early 20th century does not offer a simple answer, just as the notions of Germanic or Slavic or Islamic or Cambodian or the Rwandan despotisms do not offer relief in the face of mass murders. Apart from the trials of  reconstructing the past ‘as it is’ in the form of official and non-official histories, and outside all the documents, counter-documents and insinuating circumstances, how should one to understand the the evil deeds of the political class and the frenzy of complacent subjects to commit atrocities? The just and unjust wars waged in the name of the free world, democracy, Islam or else aside, how should one to understand the bloodbath in Anatolia that extends to our time? Why is the human life so worthless in this part of the world? How do the masses turn into a lynching mob, as they did in Sivas, Maraş, Çorum and in larger scale in the rest of the Muslim world? How do groups develop ‘sensitivities’ that when pressed turn them into brutal gangs? How do these compare to the short history of Arab uprisings? How should one explain the brutality of the army in Egypt, and by the same token, the brutality of the police during protests in Turkey?

The Muslim/Turkish (male) subject is a schizoid personality, very much spoiled as a child, but at the same time whose will is frequently broken down brutally by the father whenever necessary. This oscillation in indefinite relations is transferred through generations, bringing up insecure subjects in the face of  the figures of authority, who in turn are of a similar mould. In the public sphere, the distrust of the authoritarian father figure in the form of political leaders either create complacent masses, insecure yet obedient, or a revolting camp, branded as the enemy of the state. In an extremely polarized political atmosphere, the ‘debate’ is dominated by accusation and indictment and the democratic culture of peaceful protest, settling disputes and co-existence can never be possible. The head-on collusion of moralizing and authoritarian world views among political actors is contagious and is easily transmitted from top to bottom. This is the state of affairs in the land of utterly insecure and neurotic masses, who, somewhere in between the unconscious and the ego, know well that the wrath of the father can, in an instant, be on the most obedient and the favorite son, as it is now unleashed on the rejected ones at Taksim Square. September 2013

Dissent in Turkey and the Discourse on the Young:

Youth, that ambigous entity is the subject of a number of direct and indirect analysis and projections everywhere in Turkey during and after the protests that started in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. The tone that surrounds the discourse on young people stems from the false belief that they beg for representation in the public realm, as though their actions on the street need an explanation, which, in turn, may outline the conditions of the “nation in turmoil.”

The paternalistic take on the future of the young people in this country had always been enhanced by a conservatism of parenting, an overprotection in the face of an uncertain future. Sometimes this future is pre-shaped to order on bodies all across and this is precisely the case in which the young started a revolt against a dominant father figure, this time in the shape of a prime minister. And police brutality, in return, is what the father deemed apt for the young, a kind of ‘beating’ to tame revolt, a pedagogical strategy to set the record straight.

But within the nuclear family, other forms of  protectionist  tendencies reign freely. The most liberal of the parents in an otherwise traditional and conservative culture are barely loose enough to “distant-monitor” their offspring, made available by new technologies of communication. Just as very few people are sure of the resilliance of their dwelling in an earthquake prone country, very few are assured of the safety of their sons and daughters in their teens and early adulthood: anything can happen anywhere anytime. This scepticism and the sense of doom is precisely the sign of old age, from which the young are free. A sense of failure and conformism and blurred images of a past shapes the unconscious of the not-so-young to accommodate this bleak view, because too much blood had been shed on this land.

Meanwhile, the speech on “the better world” to be left to the young for an ecologically sustainable future is a total hypocrisy in the face of the rites and habits of the nuclear family, rich and poor and left and right. It appears to be in the primordial instinct of the family to consume more and protect its right to consume and ‘prosper’ to the best of its abilities. And this, to the disadvantage of its rivals, ie. all other similar institutions with fathers, mothers and children, and nature at large. On the other hand, for the Islamist-conservative power, the family is the god-given entity, in other words, it is ‘nature’ per se, in its heterosexual form. This intelligent design sets up its hierarchical structures starting at home and transfers these relations across generations, meanwhile extending its dominion on all other living beings. For the islamist neo-liberal  power in Turkey, ‘environmentalism’ means planting a couple of more trees in the forcefully evicted Gezi Park, while the whole country, its resources, forests, rivers, minerals and coastal regions are all up for ‘development’. When one meditates nature through the god given scripture adopted to neo-liberal economy, the result is catastrophic.

In public sphere, an extremely manipulated set of thresholds mark the border between the youth and the adults: the age to consume alcohol, to vote, to be elected for office, to do military service and indeed the age for capital punishment, when it was possible in this country. The oppressive state apparatus always had the right to meddle on these thresholds, and the executed left-revolutionaries in 70s and 80s were in their early twenties, and in one case, barely seventeen (Erdal Eren). But then, the nuclear family as an institution in modern – islamic societies may cut across beliefs and ideologies in its backwardness and conservatism. The unpredictable nature of the young is tamed in every opportunity, its creativity is suspect, even when it is encouraged to revolt on the streets of Istanbul for other reasons. The family dictates its own timeline regarding adulthood, and only an ideological consensus may provide a leeway for the youth to dissent.

Being young is everything that the left-liberal intelligentsia claims it to be after these protests. It is peaceful, creative, cheerful, stubborn, full of good humour, egalitarian, and post-ideological. But the real admiration stems from a kind of self-reckoning on the part of the old left, unfulfilled desires in the past projected unto these ‘kids’ on the streets, exacerbated by claims of a genetic continuation so dear to parenthood. June 2013

The year 1999 marks the 700th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire. Aside from the official history and the official speech that sets this date as the glorious celebration of the Turkish past, the event deserves special attention especially when Istanbul is concerned. Any interest in the present state of Istanbul as the metropolis of centuries intersects, inevitably, with the Ottoman history of the city, as well as the more distant past that involves the Byzantium. Today, looking in retrospect, what remains to be seen (or discovered) is a kind of continuum that is expected to reveal itself through the remnants as one sifts through the metropolis. In “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” Walter Benjamin writes, and I quote: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again…. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

Except for some artifacts of the physical nature (ie. architectural), a kind of link with the past is hard to pin down in Istanbul. Strange enough, the missing link is of a different traumatic order when compared with other cities of the same rank. The reason for this is apparently the gradual transformations that the city has undergone for a long time, bypassing the major catastrophes (like the setting of a battle, or grand scale social upheavals or a major earthquake), except for the occasional big fires during the Ottoman times. Going through historical documents, one undoubtedly senses that Istanbul has always been a scene of a number of social contracts (official or unofficial), and of an endless series of compromises between different nationalities, ethnic groups, religions, and most of all, commercial and financial interests. Even today, the city’s autonomy is marked by the daily routine of commerce, business and an economic struggle of survival for a majority of its inhabitants despite the centralized governing concerns of Ankara.

This autonomy, a unique character of the city, helps one to get a glimpse of a tradition that makes the present time somewhat comprehensible. Despite the so called ‘New World Order’ or ‘Globalization’, and against the grain of multinational corporations, grand scale business ventures and free floating capital, the major part of the city’s economy is built on small scale commercial interests, crafts and a massive trade of goods -off the book and unaccounted for. One tempts to liken the situation to late Ottoman period, and especially the 19th Century, when especially the European imports have prospered. Furthermore, there is more than enough evidence that the social contract of the early and pre – Ottoman Istanbul was based on the division of commerce, labour and production (a guild system rivaled by no other Western city) among the Muslims, Jews, Genovese, Venetians, Armenians, Greeks and other multinational residents, as evident in the 22 different languages spoken in the Ottoman court at its peak. (*)

Nostalgia is nothing new for Istanbul even (and especially) in periods of rapid physical deterioration. Although perhaps less than 10 percent of its inhabitants have ancestors of several generations born in the city, helped by a media hype, everyone has something to yearn for the past. With the recent abundance of exhibitions, books (more than half being the doctoral thesis by a number of historians that find the venues for publication) and other documents that came out of the closets, the glory of the Imperial City is once more resurrected, and mixed with a kind of touristic exoticism, Istanbul is once more revered by the western mind. In a country with its citizens experiencing a continuous lapse of memory, a hypocrisy supported with ignorance and a degree of naiveté brings out anything from the past (recent or distant, and even, never lived) as the object of nostalgia. This is how the nouveau riche of Istanbul constructs the bourgeois-aristocrat (and virtual) past of its own, armed with the artifacts-antiques supplied through the auctions.

In the meantime, inevitably, a kind of elitism segregates the masses living in the peripheral city, flooding the center in the daytime, engaged in a daily routine of survival. In the worldwide fusion/confusion of ideologies where a wholesale liberation is abandoned (let alone the definition of the ‘masses’), Istanbul leads the schizophrenic life of its own, divided into many of the personalities, but nevertheless still holding together with a kind of ethics again rivaled by no other city of its rank. That is why the tension is always at a maximum, but the city (the crime, killing sprees, street fights and most of all, the revolution) does not explode. (as a matter of fact, as one may expect, the tension mostly concentrates around the presence of officials expected to avoid the very same high voltage, namely the police and the military)

As far as the logistics of the city goes, one is able to define an axis of forces starting from Taksim, going all the way to Beyazit with Galata Bridge as the hinge. Along the way it is easy to observe, to use Virilio’s terms, the kinetics of real space concentrated around the young, the expectant, the buyer and the seller, the bordello, the shop window, Chinese imports, cheap goods, expensive tourist traps, seedy hotels, and a varied number of characters. That is, an autonomy rarely let be distracted by a central authority, and in this sense, that can come closest to a liberation. Also, the heavy load of history shows itself on the building façade or on the minaret and the silhouette, but then the whole setting is so detached from the activity itself that it becomes the stage in a Brechtian play, totally alienated and made bearable through its alienation. This is the setting left for the tourist and the underdog of the city, for the rich and the cultural elite has already moved out in preference for the suburban villa and the American shopping mall.

And topographically, the weakest link on this axis of forces is the Galata Bridge, but then again that is saved by another chain, a food chain that involves the men and the fish.

 April 1999

*Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of World’s Desire. London: Penguin, 1997