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Activism, Perception, Memory

12 Eylül Museum of Shame

The source of much of the key material analyzed in this book lies in the poetic descriptions of Istanbul’s terrors and transformations communicated by ex-militants in extensive interviews. Given that 1970s activism and the coup occurred decades ago, I played particular attention in interviews to questions about activists’ present-day remembering. Although heavily reliant upon those accounts, in this chapter I move back and forth between more and less subjective analytic discussion, seeking to distil from the experiences of individual partisans key social practices germane to understanding the city in those years.

The theoretical and methodological perspective known as phenomenology illuminates all of these processes. For phenomenology, human perception of the meaningful world is always intentional, experienced according to our interests, concerns, and attitudes, and thus also temporal and spatial. It is always also intersubjective, too, given the centrality of our knowing and perceiving in relation to others—with or against them—through which our varying intentions emerge. For phenomenology, subjects do not passively relate to given entities, people, events, and so on; rather, they constitute them—in Moran’s words, make them acquire “objectivity-for-subjectivity” (2000: 15)—through making them the subject of attention according to their shifting intentions, moods, interests, and positions. Luft gives the example of a real estate agent who sees the house as an object of sale and business, and not primarily as a place for living (1998: 156). The dynamics of constitution can be described in other ways. For example, modifying the perceptual capacities or skills of people (i.e., through pedagogy in activism, say in the musical education that factions give to members through protest songs and marches) transforms the phenomenal world for them. It is through these modifications of perceptual attention, in which particular aspects of situations or environments are brought to the foreground while others fade to the background, that both the temporality of subjects’ experience of the world, and the creation in history of perceiving subjects themselves, is made manifest.

As I show in this chapter, this quality of perception as a temporal process is vital for understanding the experience of militants during the years immediately before and after the coup. It also characterizes the emergent character of ex-activists’ remembering (and forgetting) in the years thereafter, mediated as that is both by the state’s project to discredit or even erase public knowledge of their activities, and by certain efficacious political developments in the 1990s and 2000s posited by activists themselves as significant in reforming the meaning of their past acts and experiences.

There are many benefits in bringing a phenomenological perspective to bear on activism and activists in Istanbul in the 1970s and ’80s and on their transformation of urban environments. The minor intentional modifications effected in the interview process (as described in chapter 1) are best understood in relation to processes of perception more generally, described by phenomenology in its identification and exploration of an elementary stance through which humans live their lives. The prime dimensions of that stance most germane to the study of urban activism include the intersubjective condition of being-in-the-world; the emergent properties of both persons and environments that dwelling entails; the life-world as a field of practical engagement in everyday existence; and the significance of the moving ground of our bodies in perceiving, experiencing, and acting in the world (see Ingold 2000; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002; Luft 1998). In discovering this elementary stance—following Husserl, Bourdieu (1977) calls it the natural attitude— phenomenology also posits the necessity of its modification as prelude for individuals’ more reflective self-awareness about it.

According to Luft, for Husserl the natural attitude “undergirds the everyday life that we live, as it were naturally, i.e. dealing in a ‘straightforward’ way with other human beings, animals, plants, things, making plans, performing actions, pursuing interests. . . . To call this ‘situation’ natural would be absurd for someone living in the natural attitude, yet making this mode of daily life explicit and thematic requires that we are no longer in it” (1998: 155). Levinas explains it somewhat similarly: “In the ‘natural attitude,’ man is directed toward the world and posits it as existing. . . . The existence of the world is ‘the general thesis of the natural attitude.’ This attitude is, according to Husserl, essentially naïve. . . . This naïveté consists in accepting objects as given and existing, without questioning the meaning of this existence and of the ‘fact of its being given’” (1995: 121).

In Ingold’s words, the availability of the world “is evident in our everyday use of the most familiar things around us, which, absorbed into the current of our activity (as indeed, we are ourselves), become in a sense transparent, wholly subordinated to the ‘in-order-to’ of the task at hand” (2000: 168) (my emphasis). To make a familiar thing nontransparent, or noticeable, requires an intentional modification, so that our sense of it changes as a consequence of our way of engaging with it (Duranti 2009: 209). For Husserl, this involves the bracketing, modification, or reduction of the natural attitude, particularly of its sensible assumption that the existence of entities, objects, values, and so on is independent of the work of consciousness in perceiving or constituting them. More specifically, Husserl’s critique of the natural attitude involves “what is taken for granted in a culture that has been influenced by modern science” (Casey 1996: 13). As Levinas notes above, for Husserl, the naivety of early twentieth-century science consisted in its assumption that the natural world existed independently of the subject’s—in this case the natural scientist’s—apprehension or objectifying of it. To give just one example, an artist might notice a rock for its possibilities in an installation. A child might treasure a crystal given to her from a favorite aunt. A mining geologist may appreciate it for its mineral and chemical composition, its permeability or porosity, and for the size of its particles. By contrast, Myers (1991) tells us that for many Pintupi aboriginals in central Australia, a rock may be valued through its connection to Dreaming events, one small feature in a region of known and sacred places. In all cases, different educated, imaginative and affective perceptions govern actors’ ways of reckoning with (the same) rock. Nothing, of course, stops an aboriginal geologist or artist from shifting between such perspectives. More generally, we might note that scientific disciplines (including anthropology and activism) teach novices and students a particular way of constituting the world.

Yet how does the “neutralization” (Levinas’s term) of the natural attitude occur? Phenomenologists have posited different ways through which a more lucid ability to sense, identify, and describe one’s subjective constituting of the world, including of the “interests that govern my manner of dealing with things” (Luft 1998: 156), may be activated. For example, the poet Wallace Stevens recommends cultivation of a hyper-attentiveness to the minutia, apparent ordinariness, multiple appearances (to consciousness), and constant (yet routinely unnoticed) changes of place in everyday existence as a method to modify ingrained perceptions arising from individuals’ engagements in their everyday worlds (see Houston 2015a). Merleau-Ponty echoes such a method when he notes how a reflective break with the presupposed basis of any thought results not in the “return to a transcendental consciousness” ([1945] 2002: xii) but the opportunity to “wonder in the face of the world. . . . [The reduction] slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice” (xv). Heidegger posits another well-known route out of the mundane, practical world: the breakdown of instruments or technologies—including our own bodies—habitually encountered only in their taken-for-granted “availableness.” As Ingold explains, “things have to be rendered unintelligible by stripping away the significance they derive from contexts of ordinary use” (2000: 169) (emphasis in original). For Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2002), analysis of people’s experiences with impairments or with malfunctioning systems highlights the crucial importance for perception of the capacity for motility and action rooted in having a body. When we no longer can do things, due to assault, illness, injury, or age, our perspectives toward those things change. In Outline (1977), Bourdieu identifies how the event of social crisis may fracture the natural attitude and its conditioning by the habitus, whereas in Masculine Domination (2001) he argues that the ethnological investigation of another society facilitates reflexivity about one’s own.

These analyses of existential situations—and deliberate methods—whereby people are made aware of their bodily enmeshments in place or of certain aspects of their mode of perceiving are particularly relevant in thinking about how Istanbul’s politicized inhabitants sensed the city. Skilled and unskilled practices of urban militancy broke apart its existing and familiar spatial orchestration and intelligible rhythm. For example, we have already noted how militants’ use of and attitudes toward places (such as the Kömürlük coffeehouse) involved careful monitoring and assessment of their relationship with its current occupiers. The self-security of partisans depended upon instantaneous acts of judgment, vital in a city of shifting intersubjective alliances and authority. Attunement to micro changes in the environment—a single word erased from a slogan daubed on a wall—constituted an active tracking of emergent properties of urban space. Activists cultivated a hyper-attentiveness to the city, 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 intersubjective relations with residents. Thus, according to Şahin (from Partizan Yolu [Partisan Path]),

You had to learn how to talk and act to older people. When we went to a house, they would prepare the sofra. You had to know where to put your legs. We had to know how to sit on the floor together. You wouldn’t look eye to eye with the women nor shake their hands. I still don’t shake the hand of covered women even when extended to me. The women in the house were covered; these suburbs didn’t have “modern girls.” They wore long dresses, with baggy trousers underneath and headscarves. To drink water we used a bowl, not a glass. You had to act as if this was natural to you, wait to talk; you shouldn’t talk during the meal but only after the tea came.

Third, like any learning activity, activism involved apprentice militants in an attuning or sensitization of their perceptions to others’ ways of sensing “by joining with them in the same currents of practical activity” (Ingold 2011a: 314). Factions and organizations were places of collective pedagogy and instilment of skills. Ideologies, too, are well understood in this way, disciplines that educate novices to direct attention toward things in their own particular terms as much as cosmology about the world. They are lived out before they are written out. Further, learning to perceive the city as crucible for revolution through practical activity crucially involved an ethical/sentimental education, the cultivation (in militants) of ethical dispositions that would notice (or infer) particular aspects of the environment—poverty, injustice, and inequality—or be moved by certain dimensions of people’s lives. More generally, the moral sensitization of the perceptions of apprentice militants through socialization in activist practice reveals how perceiving the world involves or possesses intrinsically ethical and affective dimensions. In turn, this indicates that the anthropological study of ethics should be supplemented by an attention to “ordinary” perception.³

Fourth, the perceptual modifications incurred in becoming an activist involved ceaseless talk: the city became a differently inhabited place for militants in being spoken for as much as through being acted in.⁴ A flourishing speech economy invested in oral interaction, dialogue, exchange, and debate at countless meetings, seminars, study groups, clubs, and commemorations produced more than transmission of, or knowledge about, Marxist theory, the Turkish nation, or the political economy. In being spoken for, selected aspects of place were disclosed to novices’ perception. Equally important was “companionship in conversation.”⁵ This was a crucial element in stirring and suffusing affective states (emotions, sentiments, and moods) in both militants and in the city itself, and in generating intimacy and affection between members of a group or a faction.

In sum, and as each point above affirms, activism itself—like any skilled practice—is a mode of embodied phenomenological modification, transforming activists’ attunement to the city and their interpretation of the “affordances” (Gibson 1979) that its parts provide. Revolutionary activity and intent provoked both new constitution of and new receptivity to the urban environment’s opportunities for action.⁶ In discovering and pursuing new spatial practices, both revolutionaries and state authorities activated an affinity between the city and mass political action that does not exist in either the house or in the village: walls for inscribing dissonance; boulevards for marching in or barricading; public buildings for occupation; places for the amplification and feedback of attack and reverb; private associations for secrecy and dialogue; audiences to broadcast one’s message to; strangers to address; passers-by to solicit; statues to drape with flags or slogans, to climb on or demolish; state cemeteries in which to commemorate or desecrate the famous dead; squares for mass meetings or punitive massacres; streets for mob lynching, or for dumping mutilated corpses. The city accommodates assassinations in crowded streets, and beatings in deserted lots or unlit alleys; it enables public hangings, and suicides, off bridges and tall buildings or in front of trains. It facilitates begging, and the showing of poverty. As Merleau-Ponty famously put it, “consciousness [of place] is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that,’ but of ‘I can.’ In the action of a hand which is raised towards its object [say a wall on which the activist wishes to paint a slogan] is contained a reference to the object, not as an object represented, but as that highly specific thing towards which we project ourselves” ([1945] 2002: 137–38).

Significantly, however, activists’ sensing and utilization of architectural affordances raise vital questions about the role and qualities of places in both soliciting and foreclosing on particular perceptions or embodied experiences of them. Thus, the processes by which activism charges or “electrifies” the affordances of the urban and built environment needs careful discussion (see Houston 2015b). Tim Ingold notes that in James Gibson’s original formulation the world in which the perceiver moves around is already there, “with all its affordances ready and waiting to be taken up by whatever creatures arrive to inhabit it” (2000: 168). Further, for Gibson, this appropriation of environmental affordances occurs non-conflictually. Yet the affordances held in places gather residents who may seek to circumscribe the access of others to their offerings, or even to occlude their presence. Ingold’s turn to phenomenology and what he calls a “dwelling perspective” presents a more dynamic, relational model of human interaction with the environment, with its focus on the work of consciousness in constituting environmental objects of experience. As Ingold writes, “Environment is a relative term—relative, that is, to the being whose environment it is” (20). Here aspects of the world emerge for the perceiver in acts of educated and embodied engagement with it, including of course with other beings, both human and nonhuman. In examining perception, phenomenological investigation is analytically acute in identifying the (always temporally unfolding and educated) qualities and capacities—Ingold calls these “skills of perception”—of the actor-subject that enable this engagement or that experience of the world (of objects, environments, and others) to occur. By contrast, sometimes it is less sensitive in identifying the role of architects and their sponsors in intending (through design) the qualities and capacity of the actor-object (the thing that is perceived), which permits this experience or that evocation of it to occur.

Nevertheless, Ingold’s work itself is not particularly helpful in sketching out the violence of architecture, or of the political and conflictual dimensions involved in people’s interactional generation of their environment and its affordances. The claim is as much Ingold’s as it is my own. As he himself notes, “the criticism that the political is conspicuous by its absence from my own attempts to formulate a dwelling perspective is entirely just, and troubling” (2005: 503). The very material affordances of the environment that were malleable to militants’ projects and activities also had embedded in them the political intentions of their makers, configured in pathways and roads, artifacts and machines, buildings and interior design, architecture, zoning and urban planning. Here the fabricated efficacies of places and things themselves exerted perceptual power over their users, seeking to condition particular experiences and uses of them while actively contriving at activists’ bodily motions. Shull’s recent research (2012) on the engineering of experience in poker machine gambling is an awful case in point, where video graphics, ergonomic consoles, surround-sound acoustics, plastic-press buttons, marketing schemes, and player-tracking systems all conspire to trigger addiction through minute and synesthetic scripting of people’s behavior. Such manipulative control of the environment, and the carefully calculated algorithms that seduce players to feed in more money by periodically cascading back a proportion of their losses, are designed by corporations, with their intentions in play.

Moreover, in their own adversarial appropriation of places and in their energetic modification of them, activists contended with other efficacious users of space, entering into conflict with them over access to and adaptation of urban affordances. Neither activism nor dwelling is harmonious. In chapter 1 we saw how for Tschumi the prime violence of architecture involves confrontation between buildings or planned spaces and their users. Yet friction between inhabitants themselves in their bitter performative conflicts over the city and its configured assets is equally important in qualifying users’ spatial experiences and actions. In other words, the urban environment of militants was an intersubjective one, an emerging field of frictional relations and moods that gathered together and encompassed multiple actors. For individuals, regions of places—factories, schoolyards, student lodgments, shantytowns, town squares, houses—and peregrinations between them arose that were rich with the “wildness,” bodily presence, threat, and power of other beings. In response, two key spatial strategies of militants involved the occupation and the breaking of another group’s occupation (in Turkish işgal and işgal kırmak). To occupy meant to take control of a building or place (lodgment, school, factory, university department), to appropriate its resources and to expel members of rival groups so as to prevent their organizing there. Here we see an inversion of Ingold’s insight that lives are led “not inside places but through, around, to and from them” (2011b: 148): the factional apartheid governing Istanbul’s places sought to put a stop to the active perambulations of wayfaring, Ingold’s preferred term for the experience of inhabiting the environment. Post-occupation, users’ relationships with rivals were mediated through their possessive transforming of places’ visual, acoustic, and performative elements.

Equally significant, the perceptual attunements constituted by enacting activism were not only instigated in confrontation with contemporaries. In the urban assemblage itself, the acts, agency, and efficacy of predecessors were also encountered. The intentions of the dead lived on in places, in their socio-material distributions, in their trails for movement, and in their scenes for action, thought, or expression; indeed, given their constant immersion in them places constituted activists’ bodies as much as their bodies marked places. Ingold describes this process in somewhat neutral terms: “Human children,” he writes, “grow up in environments furnished by the work of previous generations, and as they do they come literally to carry the forms of their dwelling in their bodies—in specific skills, sensibilities and dispositions” (2000: 186) “The house is a book read by the body,” says Bourdieu (1977: 90). The words previous generations here are vague, as well as politically naive—in many urban places these past acts of spatial “furnishing” are more precisely described as initiated by militant groups, who may seek to effect a targeted rupture within the environment and its dwellers as much as to ensure continuity or evolution.⁷ Indeed, in deliberate projects of urbicide, places and environments are as vulnerable to forced rearrangement and destruction as the people they house.

As we will see in chapter 3, in the course of the twentieth century Istanbul has witnessed a number of ruptures in its history of dwelling. Most significant is the forced migration or expulsion from the city of its indigenous Armenian, Greek, and Jewish inhabitants in the first four decades of the Turkish Republic (1920–1960), enabling others to benefit from their fashioning of its environment. In the novel Huzur, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1949–2011) describes another rupture, reflected in the perturbation and melancholy experienced by Istanbul’s inhabitants at the Kemalists’ selected transformation (in the same years) of the “sensuous presentations” (Casey 1996: 22) of late-Ottoman Istanbul, including most palpably of the familiar sonorities of the city by the muting of Ottoman music. These two events were aspects of a nationalistic transformation of Istanbul, antagonistically aimed at its cosmopolitanism and at the life-worlds of its inhabitants.

The 1980 military coup and the junta’s subsequent counterrevolutionary reassembling of the city caused a third rupture between inhabitants and environments in Istanbul. Activists in particular were systematically stripped of their ability to place-make, first in the dissolution through torture of the fragile concordances established between their bodies and Istanbul’s places; second, in the prohibition forbidding collective interaction in public with other inhabitants of the city; and third, by denying them involvement in new post-coup political processes that generated revised affordances in the city. In brief, Edward Casey is wrong to say that places are “generative and regenerative on [their] own schedule” (1996: 26). Even as places are sui generis—nothing can ever not be in place—they also allow themselves to be recruited by the political imagination, their ongoing fabrication shrinking or expanding in-built affordances for action, in the process entitling some groups and disenfranchising others.

For a number of reasons, the work of Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space might here be usefully contrasted with Gibson’s naive presentation of environmental affordances, as well as with Ingold’s (absent) political analysis. For one, the book was first published in 1974, making its analysis contemporary enough with the practices described above to have a descriptive, analytic, and politically invested relationship to militant leftist movements in that period.⁸ A shared Marxist vocabulary informs both the broader socialist movement’s effort in Turkey to situate individual experiences in the historical development of the political economy, and Lefebvre’s text, as demonstrated for example in its stress on the centrality of the mode of production in the generation of spatial order. More specifically, the ambitions and tactics of these political movements account for what Lefebvre describes as the “special practical and theoretical status” that he gives to the category of appropriation in the book (1991: 368).

To identify the importance of appropriation, Lefebvre identifies three aspects of social space: first there is a society’s “spatial practice,” “which embraces production and reproduction” (1991: 33) and “secretes that society’s space” (1991: 38). Secondly, there exists “representations of space” or conceptualized space, the space of planners, urbanists and, most paradigmatically, of architects. This is a “visual space, a space reduced to blueprints, to mere images”—the architect has a “representation of space, one which is bound to graphic elements—to sheets of paper, plans, elevations, sections, perspective views of facades, modules, and so on” (1991: 361). Last (and confusingly named) there are “representational spaces,” the spaces of users and inhabitants, spaces as lived (not conceptualized). “When compared with the abstract space of the experts, the space of the everyday activities of users is a concrete one, which is to say, subjective” (1991: 362). It is also the “dominated—and hence passively experienced—space that the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (1991: 39) (my italics).

Lefebvre’s notion of appropriation involves more than inhabitants’ negating of urban space, their using of the city as the setting for political struggle, or even of their diverting of existing space for new purposes (1991: 168). Ideally, it also entails the creation of counter-spaces, of a new urban morphology. Hence Lefebvre gives cardinal importance to class struggle: because the “secretion” of space in capitalist society is dominated by the bourgeois class, only class struggle has the capacity to transcend the passivity of users of space, creating in the process new environments, places, and interrelationships.⁹

Despite the rather schematic nature of his model, Lefebvre’s theory illuminates certain dimensions of activists’ experiences and practices in Istanbul. However, their accounts encourage us to revise certain of its emphases. For example, The Production of Space displays an orthodox Marxist preference for tracing out how the programming of everyday life by the capitalist mode of production renders the users of space passive. Thus, actors enter capitalism’s “secretion of space” after the fact of its production, which simultaneously preconditions their relationships, actions and consciousness in it: “Every space is already in place before the appearance in it of actors; those actors are collective as well as individual subjects inasmuch as the individuals are always members of groups or classes seeking to appropriate the space in question. This pre-existence of space conditions the subject’s presence, action and discourse, his competence and performance; yet the subject’s presence, action and discourse, at the same time as they presuppose this space, also negate it” (Lefebvre 1991: 57).

As we will see in chapters 4 through 7, the situation in Istanbul was much messier. By paying particular attention to the phenomenological dimensions of social life—in this case to how activists perceived phenomena (bodies, factions, violence, places, ideologies, suffering)—we grasp better how urban things were constituted by militants’ intentions and simultaneously reckoned with. It is not a criticism of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space to note that its positing of three dimensions of social space is in its own terms a “representation of space.” Yet Lefebvre clearly values a phenomenological “bias” in urban research when he argues in the same work that some artists, and even a few writers and philosophers “who describe and aspire to do no more than describe” (1991: 39) may engage in their work with space as “directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (1991: 39) (my emphasis).

2.2 REMEMBERING ACTIVISM

Long a world city, Istanbul’s more recent “globalization” is by now old news. Hyped by travel agents, lauded by cultural brokers, marketed as a bridge spanning East and West by the tourism and culture industries, the image makers and money makers agree: Istanbul is fashionably global, its markets and food places, its Sufi lodges and gay bars, its museums, mosques, mosaics, and manzara (landscapes) exhibited and consumed on- and off-line, by a flood of tourists and by the city’s own residents, twenty million people or more.

See Istanbul and die, says the poet Can Yücel.

Istanbul is all this, and much more. Do the extraordinary changes in its built environment and its sense of place post-coup mean that Istanbul, City of the Fearless is a study of a city and of a time that exists only in memory? This side of 12 Eylül, are activists’ spatial politics, experiences, and memories of the years before and after the coup—their private and arcane knowledge—of historical interest only? Are those years sealed off from the decades that succeeded them? Are 12 Eylül and the military government a door that opened to Istanbul’s neoliberal or “global city” future by slamming it shut upon the past?

In these next two sections I show that this is indeed partly true. Revolutionary Istanbul lives on in the memories of its ex-activists. But it lives on, too, in their learned capacities and accumulated reflective wisdom that even now give depth to and partially orient the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens living in the city. Casey describes this process in his book Remembering, noting how “orientation in place . . . cannot be continually effected de novo but arises within the ever lengthening shadow of our bodily past” (1987: 194). In this process, militants’ embodied and emplaced historical memories and perceptions of the city prevent any easy articulation with the shallow self “free of any particularist spatial ties” (Gökarıksel and Mitchell 2005: 150) imagined and mobilized by neoliberalism, and sometimes assumed by analysts to be a plausible account of social agents’ modified dispositions and ethical consciousness (Hilgers 2013). The selves that ex-activists are in the process of becoming—just like the city that they are continually in the process of inhabiting—depends in part upon their memories of and reflections upon their earlier actions, convictions, and experiences. Elsewhere, Casey writes of the “incoming” of places into the body. Places, he notes, “constitute us as subjects. . . . To be (a) subject to/of place is to be what we are as an expression of the way a place is” (2001: 688, emphasis in the original). Accordingly, a history of the sedimentation and hierarchy of places in people’s bodies exists according to the intensity of experience encountered in them, even as places themselves are altered by people’s actions. Although this constituting of self through its marking by places is cumulatively produced over a lifetime, the city before and after 12 Eylül powerfully impressed its presence upon militants, interacting with and reorienting their earlier socialized bodies and personae.

Certainly the material infrastructure of much of the 1970s city has disappeared, in particular in the transformation of Istanbul’s housing. The gecekondu suburbs of the 1960s and ’70s with their small, separate houses have been transformed into apartkondu (four- to ten-story buildings). They are no longer on the periphery of the city. On the other hand, gentrification has conserved and spruced up the buildings of older, more central areas but contributed to the massive emigration of their earlier residents. Even the perduring monuments of the physical environment (mosques, museums, palaces, villas, administrative buildings, etc.) have been upgraded or restored, their lines of sight and their sightlines exposed through simplification of their surroundings, their sounds made more audible (or muted), their occupants changed, their functions transformed.

Of course, not every bit of Istanbul has changed. The three- or four-story apartment blocks put up in the 1960s in lower-middle-class suburbs like Aksaray are still there. Yet when Fırat, an ex-MHP sympathizer, took me on a tour in 2013 of Şehremini in Istanbul’s historic peninsula, where he had lived through the years before and after the coup, we did not encounter a single sign of the spatial politics of the 1970s. Like blood spilled in a stabbing on the stairs of an apartment block at night and washed away by the early morning cleaner, it was as if the era and its acts had never occurred. Fırat recognized few people in his old neighborhood, and Şehremini’s present occupants did not share his or his generation’s intimate memories of emplaced events experienced there. In brief, if memory requires anchoring or harboring in peopled places, activists’ option “to go back to a place [they] know, finding it full of memories and expectations, old things and new, the familiar and the strange” (Casey 1996: 24), is severely compromised in Istanbul.

Nevertheless, sometimes it is the very change of place that compels memory. Differences in places’ inhabitants, activities, appearances, smells, and sounds evoke absences.¹⁰ A peaceful street reminds one of a violent march; polite police stir up fears of a baton: the body remembers in its quickening of breath, sweating, or feelings of nausea. Similarly, the forced transformations of sonic place after the coup made activists remember the mood of a time. Filiz (TKP) recalled how, before the military intervention, singing the party’s song together with a thousand people “made us feel we all shared the same views on life.” The events of 12 Eylül fractured this acoustic solidarity: in our interview (thirty years later) Filiz still remembers weeping a year after the coup at hearing in passing a snatch of a familiar (but prohibited) march hummed in the street under someone’s breath. Aural awareness is a powerful if sometimes backgrounded force bearing memories and carrying political subjectivity. In Nesrin Kazankaya’s play Quintet, bir dönüşün beşlemesi (Quintet: A transformation in five parts), a leftist activist returns to Istanbul for the first time in twenty years after fleeing the coup for Europe: meeting up with her old friends and comrades, the ex-revolutionaries best reconnect with the singing of a march (“May 1st”). The now-businessman husband joins in despite earlier bitter arguments over politics. Like places, then, songs hold memories, as do objects: “There was an urban myth of the ‘gri-mavi van’ [gray-blue Ford van]. We knew among ourselves that it was the van of the undercover police. Whenever we saw one, we would run or duck for cover. In Montreal after the coup, whenever I saw one, I still ran for cover. Of course, in Istanbul most vans of that color were not carrying police. But once it came true: we were stopped and frisked by four police who came out of a gri-mavi van! Luckily, we were going to the cinema, and we convinced them of that” (Kenan, HK).

Further, alongside places, songs, and objects “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (Nora 1989: 7), the city is “physically inscribed” in a generation of activists.¹¹ As described by Kenan above, he fled at the very sight of a gray-blue van in Montreal years after his regular exposure to police practice in Istanbul, an embodied reenactment that referenced a personal and collective history. Similarly, Şahin (as we have already seen) still finds himself reluctant to shake the hand of a covered woman, even when extended to him. Casey calls this “body memory” (1987: 146ff), the way that something kinesthetically learned in conscious (or semiconscious) imitation of others’ mannerisms, movements, and comportment may become habitual action over time, an embodied modification thereafter ingrained in militant habit. In body memory, the past is revived by its active entry into present actions. In just this way both urban violence and torture, too, are remembered by the body, in an ache, an itch, impairment, or trauma—an invasion of the body by its past that transacts memory, whether wanted or not.

Yet activists remembered reflexively as well: habitual body memory is not the same thing as retrospective “memory of the perception of the body” (Casey 1987: 162, original emphasis), as Levent’s recollection of Fatih shows: “By 1978 the sound of gunfire in the night was common in Fatih, as people attacked the university lodgments. But despite all this, the sounds I remember most about Fatih are the sound of people talking, of women neighbors chatting, of children calling from the street to their mothers or neighbors. People had their own whistles, everyone with their own melody, just as with nicknames.”

For Levent, Fatih is a “geometry of echoes.”¹² They are the echoes that similarly give depth to and partially underpin the lives of hundreds of thousands of other ex-activists living in the city, a class of people often highly active in politics still. The emplaced and powerfully affective multisensory memories initiated by the spatial militancy of those years, including from post-coup torture, mingle with (and even limit) ex-activists’ perceptions in the present. Some are unable to participate in political life altogether, as intended by the junta. Interviewees were aware of friends and ex-comrades who had never come to terms with the things that happened to them in the years of martial law. If being unable to come to terms with past experience is another form of remembering, it testifies to how the past “follows us at every instant . . . pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside” (Bergson cited in Ingold and Hallam 2007: 11). None the less, this pressure was also politically generated: after the coup, the State punished many people involved in activist movements through the banning of their employment in government ministries; discrimination against them via expulsion from study and work; and the withholding of passports or, for political refugees overseas, stripping them of citizenship. Nine thousand members from Maden İş (Mineworkers Union) were blacklisted and unable to gain employment in that field again.

Revolutionary Istanbul and its events live on in ongoing legal trials too, petitioning or extracting memories from activists and overturning both the junta’s efforts to mandate closure and different governments’ wishes to enforce statutes of limitations. To give just one example, in July 1980 Kemal Türkler, founder of DİSK and chairman of the union Maden İş, was murdered in the street outside his house in Istanbul. The public prosecutor indicted four Ülkücü militants for the killing, who were acquitted by one court, only to have that verdict quashed by another. Three decades later, in 2010, the first court ruled that the case had to be dropped because of lapse of time.¹³ Outside the court, the then DİSK chairman vowed to continue the legal process, and in 2013 the accused murderer was once again on trial. In court Kemal Türkler’s daughter remembered the event she witnessed: “I was 18 years old when my father was killed in front of me. I saw with my own eyes three people kill my father in interlocking fire. I saw the murderers, and I recognize them. Indeed, I even saw which gun jammed. For a full 31 years I have lived out this scene many times, I am still living it.”¹⁴

In sum, rather than being “lost forever” with the radical transformation of Istanbul, the city of the fearless continues to live on and with its ex-activists. A city that has been experienced “is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometric space” (Bachelard 1994: 47). Indeed, far from sparsity of recall, the power of places, songs, objects, legal techniques, and bodies to evoke memories and affect through their registering of inhabitation and trauma reveals a lingering surfeit of particulars concerning those years. The reason is clear: individuals’ memories of the past and their perceptions of the present are intimately related. This relationship explains how the interview process itself facilitated awareness of things once unnoticed or unutterable: because the past is not set off from the present as completed event (fading with the passing of time), its prompted remembering (in interviews) allowed new impressions to come into being, according to activists’ present perspectives.

2.3 POLITICIZING ACTIVISM

Alongside the dynamic constitution of ex-militants’ memories of revolutionary Istanbul in the ongoing context of their engagements with the urban world, activists retrospectively identified at least two other efficacious political developments as significant in informing and transforming impressions and assessments of their past experiences and actions. One significant event concerns the decades-long legitimation crisis of Kemalism, the foundational ideology of the Turkish Republic. Activists’ first disappointment with Kemalism can be traced back to the 1971 military intervention, which dashed the (in retrospect) naive 1960s hope of many leftists that a progressive faction of the military might join in a “national democratic revolution,” in a replay of the 1920s. An equally important factor in activists’ own critical realization of Kemalism’s repressive character can be traced back to the torture dealt out as a matter of course to hundreds of thousands of people arrested after 12 Eylül. The consequence has been a pressing need felt by activists in the 1990s and 2000s to critically reexamine Kemalism’s pristine years in search of clues to the abuses of the junta. In the process, they have been forced to uproot commitments to previous ways of configuring ethico-political perceptions and urban militancy. As previously mentioned, in the 1970s, both leftists and rightists found powerful support for their respective programs of revolution and nationalism in founding tenets and practices of the state Kemalist project. Indeed, according to Serdar (Kurtuluş),

In the 1970s no one knew that we were all Kemalist. I’ll explain with an anecdote. In 1968 the US fleet came to Istanbul. The left declared that it would never come ashore; they got some boats and prevented some of the sailors from landing. It was said, “we threw them into the sea” [denize döktük]. The phrase was connected to the official history of the “Liberation War,” which anyway is a hoax. The Greek army invaded Anatolia (encouraged by the British), and it was the British who threw some Greeks overboard when they were fleeing from the Turkish army in Smyrna. Now that it’s time for the left to differentiate itself from Kemalism, it is hard for it to do.

Here Serdar identifies how leftists’ response to an ostensibly novel event—the visiting of the US Sixth Fleet as part of NATO arrangements in 1968—was interpreted by protestors through an analogy generated from the official history of the founding of the Republic, a temporally backgrounded aspect of activists’ education deployed to orientate action in a changed situation. Similarly, Ertuğrul (Biliș Trade Union) critically analyses how in the 1970s certain tenets of Kemalism—we might call them horizons of the past that entered into activists’ perceptions both as history of one’s body and as recollections, habits and moods—were taken up by many activists to constitute a political program:

At the 1920 Baku congress, in an act of political desperation, the Comintern declared eastern people were oppressed peoples of the world—oppressed by imperialism. It was a declaration of the right of nations to self-determination. We [the left] began to confuse nationalism with anti-imperialism, which is an aspect of capitalism. Kemalism was nationalist, statist, and populist, never Marxist or working class. It was a national independence movement. If you are not essentially an anti-capitalist movement, then you gravitate to the nation-state, especially when it has the rhetoric of anti-imperialism. You support local elements [bourgeoisie, state, progressive peasants] against foreign imperialism. And there you have the lineage from YÖN [leftist Kemalist journal 1961–67] through Devrim Dergisi [Revolution, a journal in late 1960s] to the fascism of today’s Türk Solu [Turkish Left, journal and name of an ultranationalist, socialist group active in the present]. This is a leftist sickness in Turkey.

Both Serdar’s and Ertuğrul’s comments express a fundamental modification in their present perception of their own faction’s political practice in the 1970s. Many of the ex-activists I interviewed were now acutely critical of Kemalism, its ambiguous history, and its ongoing political influence. Similarly, nearly all had disengaged from contemporary attempts of leftist Kemalists (such as Türk Solu) to mobilize support around a laic-Islamist polarization in their attempt to reinvigorate a Kemalist program, including a continuation of its historic Turkification project directed at Kurds.

A third account of transformed awareness is given by leftist journalist and writer Hasan Cemal, who in 1969 started writing in the left-Kemalist journal Devrim (Revolution), mentioned by Ertuğrul above. In a foreword written in 2008 for ex-Akıncı militant Mehmet Metiner’s book Yemyeşil şeriat, bembeyaz demokrasi (Green shariah, white democracy), Cemal reflects upon his own recently published book: “It is never easy to come to terms with the past nor to confront yourself. I, too, could no longer escape my past. Indeed, this is what I tried to explain in my book Let no one be angry, I wrote myself. In it I endeavored to explain how my political identity developed, where my political ideas derived from and which mistakes I made” (in Metiner 2008: 16). Cemal also references his journey away from the certainties of what he calls “Jacobin” Kemalism. In his book, Metiner, too, describes a parallel political evolution, from his militant years in the late 1970s as a member of an Islamist youth organization, to his rejection in the mid-1990s of the foundational tenets or paradigm of “Jacobin” Islam, including abandonment of his 1970s fantasy of forcing sharia law on the population through establishment of an Islamic state.

A second and equally powerful event identified by activists as crucial in radically modifying the meaning of their 1970s activism, in particular for revolutionaries and parties identified with the communism of the Soviet Union, was the collapse of that regime in 1989. For many activists (especially those affiliated to, or members of the TKP), the demise of Soviet communism as an alternative modernity caused a painful reorientation of perceptions of their acts and ideals pursued in that intense and formative period. T. S. Eliot’s lines from the play Murder in the Cathedral capture something of TKP activists’ discomfited position in the shift to a post–Cold War world: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Akın’s more prosaic words express the same sentiment: “We learned that for all those years we had pursued not an empty [boş] politics, but worse, a wrong one. This was a bigger trauma for us than 12 Eylül.” Testifying to the intrinsically temporal and affective character of consciousness, and to how memory both retains and reinterprets past experience in each new moment of meaning, Filiz (TKP) describes a similarly shattering perceptual modification in 1988 and its reconstituting of other entities and relationships:

My father was a Democrat Party parliamentarian. He was arrested in the coup [1960] and stayed in prison for two years; I remember visiting him in Kayseri when I was six. I was always interested in politics, and realized later that I got my feelings of justice [adalet duygusu] from him. I never knew that my father paid for roads, etcetera from his own pocket. We owned land, were very rich, but I was uncomfortable with our wealth. I first began getting interested in politics through reading novels, and felt uncomfortable at injustice. Sometime in the 1970s my father gave me a Sol­zhenitsyn novel, but I refused to read “bourgeois” lies/literature. When I went to Moscow for three months in 1988, I was criticizing the perestroika politics, and a party historian gave me the same novel. “This is true,” he said, and I began to cry. I was changed.

Softly, almost in passing, she added, “What a pity I was never able to talk about this with my father before he died.”

Both accounts reveal the weighty loss of an esteemed political ethic, so that activists’ past cause of revolution is felt to have lost its footing in any legitimate continuing struggle. Militants’ feelings of shock and sadness were connected to the great sacrifices they had made—in some cases involving a rift with family—for principles that they no longer perceived to be true.

Importantly, it was not just TKP members and sympathizers who in interviews reflected on acts and practices performed for reasons now perceived as wrong. Activists from virtually all factions expressed an intense ambivalence about those years of sound and fury. Thus Nuriye (THKP-C) (Turkish People’s Liberation Party-Front) noted that, “We [the left] also did wrong things that we haven’t come to terms with. How could we have entered into the killing of a seventeen-year-old ülkücü so easily?” Ömer (MHP) felt that “there was no time to think, we were drowning in events/action. There was no balance. Our movement started in love and ended in a lake of blood.” Mehmet Metiner (see above) remembered slapping someone for eating during Ramazan, and confessed that then “everyone sought to gain control before someone else, with the aim of restricting the world of those others. Perhaps the government would change but the logic of authority and nature of it would have been exactly the same. The hand that held the stick would have been different but the stick would still have worked” (2008: 83). Ümit (Dev-Sol) said something similar, that in those years “normal things were abnormal; abnormal things became normal. We saw ourselves as heroes [kahramanlar]. The junta killed hundreds of people, but if we came to power, we would have killed thousands.” And Erdoğan (Kurtuluş) noted pensively that “if we hadn’t been so ambitious or impatient, and just tried to provide services to the poor, we would have been more successful. And if we weren’t so fragmented among ourselves. . . .” Finally, Özlem (THKP-C) diagnosed the reason for the unhappy and asymmetrical relationship between political factions and local people in the shantytowns (see chapter 4): “We wanted to replace the existing order. But gecekondu people wanted to create an order. They didn’t care that someone lived in a köşk (mansion), like we cared; they wanted food, work, and a house. We were valuable to them because we gave: importantly, we looked like we were strong and capable. But they were also scared of us: I raised a finger to a man who hit his wife, and we put them in danger as the fighting spread.”

2.4 COMMEMORATING ACTIVISM

Most significantly, ex-militants’ chastened perspective on the spatial politics of the period before the military coup reveals a profound ambiguity over whether, or how, to commemorate their project of revolution, whose rationale or romance has been modified in the light of disillusionment with Kemalism, socialism, and anti-communism.¹⁵ For many activists there has been no easy acceptance of vindication or vice, victimhood or virtue that might modulate or temper the profusion of affective memories immanent in bodies, places, objects, and sounds; no shared collective memory that might authorize an agreed-upon narrative of the past. Even the military do not celebrate 12 Eylül. Casey argues that commemoration inheres in the action of “carrying the past forward through the present so as to perdure in the future” (1987: 256). He goes on to say that the past can only be honored and preserved in this way “if it has attained a certain consistent selfsameness in the wake of the perishing of the particulars by which it had once presented itself” (256, my emphasis). Which particulars must perish so as to generate the “selfsameness” of the past? Whose past is to be memorialized in its reenactment? If many ex-activists in the forty or more years since those years have elected not to commemorate their acts despite an abundance of particular memories of the city, could not this, too, constitute an honoring of the past? Rather than signifying something negative—say the absence of an ethically efficacious common narrative regarding their past deeds—non-commemoration may express humility on the part of ex-militants, generated by an awareness of the moral ambiguity of their actions. With memorialization is born the first lie.

One consequence, however, as we have noted already, is the difficulty activists have had in translating the dramatic sense and context of their memories of urban politics in Istanbul to non-activist others, even to their own children. Further, alongside this reluctance of many ex-revolutionaries to mythologize or lionize the spatial activism of their generation, we must revisit military actors’ strategies to manufacture a public condemnation of it, so as to better comprehend how up until recently each has combined to make commemoration of those years so problematic. Noting that forgetting is not a “unitary phenomenon,” Paul Connerton (2008) identifies a number of its forms. As we have already seen in their expunging of place names, the junta has pursued his first type, “repressive erasure.” It was exercised most systematically in their prohibition of the publishing of activists’ written or spoken defense or of their petitions in the huge number of court cases opened up by army prosecutors in military courts in the immediate years after the coup. In reporting the list of charges against activists—typically armed robbery, murder, bombing of property, arson, escaping from prison, membership in an illegal organization, communist propaganda, separatist activities and so on—newspapers were forbidden to print that confessions were extracted under torture, or that defendants were not allowed to read to the courts prepared statements.¹⁶ The result was that throughout those years there was no legitimate or sanctioned way for militants to publicly testify to or justify their intentions and experiences. Thus, Filiz felt that “Turkey lived through fascism in the ’80s, though even now it is not said very openly. It was hard to know what was happening after the coup: You heard that so and so was arrested, that x was killed, or y tortured, that this house had been searched. In this way people lived through a massive trauma.”

Connerton’s second and third types, “prescriptive forgetting” and “forgetting that is constitutive of a new identity,” do not apply, as they involve a decision to consciously forget—perhaps in an amnesty (literally, to not remember)—that which once was known, not to assign to oblivion past actions that have never been remembered. His fourth, fifth, and sixth types are not relevant here. However, his last form, which he calls “forgetting as humiliated silence,” is more suggestive. This is a forgetting that is not solely “a matter of overt activity on the part of a state apparatus” (2008: 67) but also expresses civil society’s exhaustion and disillusion with a project, as well as its experiences of shame and fear. In particular, the trauma of mass torture of activists in prison, their returning home injured and broken with no prospect of redress or rehabilitation, and “legal” press censorship in the 1980s and ’90s (engineered through the 1982 constitution) all combined to produce decades of censorship and self-censorship, of buried grief and strictly controlled memories. Jenny White found that still in the late 1990s there was a “lingering pain among a lost generation of men and women who had fought as students in the 1970s for something they had believed in, had lost friends to killings and torture, and had themselves suffered in jail or gone into hiding” (2002: 41). As the poet Abbas Beydoun notes for Lebanon after the civil war, “the right to forget [became] obligatory forgetting” (in De Cauter 2011: 424).

During those decades, activists’ adoption of a fugitive silence as a means of “un-remembering” both their own worst actions and the worst actions done to them must have been an essential act of survival. But the slow demilitarization of Turkey amid the struggle to create a post-coup Constitution in the first decade of the new century—and as chapter 8 explores, this counts as a third political development allowing occluded aspects of activism and Istanbul to be perceived—has released a massive reservoir of activists’ memories of their experiences, especially concerning 12 Eylül and the years of martial law.¹⁷ Published memoirs of political activities and experiences in the years before the coup have been less common but in Havariler (Disciples), Zileli (2002) recounts his years as a founding member of the Aydınlık movement.

Along with this revived facility in recalling perceptions of the city, leftist ex-activists have initiated a new memory-work project, titled 12 Eylül Utanç Müzesi (12 Eylül Museum of Shame). The traveling museum gives visitors permission to remember events and acts that had been long muted in daily interaction. Its website explains that it is “the first serious attempt to create a memorialization site to reveal the brutality of the 1980 military coup while struggling to foster the democratization process in Turkey. Those who initiated the project are victims of the indiscriminate violence of the Turkish Armed Forces, mainly in the 1980s. Therefore, struggling against unjust state practices allowed the organizers to experience a degree of healing.”¹⁸

Here we encounter two further reasons for activists’ publicizing of their memories of the city: the museum enables a counter-recollection for post-coup generations whose memories have already been induced by the junta’s discourse, while also enacting a therapeutic remembering of those years for its creators (and by extension for other ex-militants as well). In collecting and exhibiting various material objects—Deniz Gezmiş’s coat, Mazlum Doğan’s shirt, the mimeograph machine owned by İbrahim Kaypakkaya, Mahir Çayan’s vest—the traveling museum intuits the potent influence these possess empowered by the lived bodies that used them. All four were militants of leftist groups in Turkey killed or executed by the state in the early 1970s.¹⁹ Their names are important, as heard in their recital in the battle slogans of THKP-C, Dev-Yol and Dev-Sol up until the coup: “Mahir, Hüseyin, Ulaş: Kurtuluş’a kadar savaş’ (Mahir, Hüseyin, Ulaş: War until liberation). Similarly, for revolutionaries who experienced the military courts, the exhibited trial proceedings are not just a piece of paper: the museum’s collecting of legal documents and files of prisoners killed or executed under the junta preserves intensely expressive memories, securing the past in the present. The power of these artifacts to incite a visceral affective state in visitors—vivifying body memories—is revealed in Cafer Solgun’s account of his painful visit to the museum:

A few days ago I went to the 12 September Museum of Shame exhibition. It was my friends, the Revolutionary ’78ers, who had curated it. I should confess I had manufactured many excuses, not to go to the museum, but to not go. It took time for me to admit it to myself, but if I went, I would grieve, I would remember, I would weep. . . . But if I didn’t go, it would have been as if I had committed an offence against my friends whose photos, clothes, personal belongings, and last letters were exhibited there. I knew myself: I went. I knew that I would cry, but I went. I wouldn’t be able to say anything to those who asked about my feelings and thoughts, but I went. I wouldn’t be able to write a single word in the visitor’s book because my hands would be trembling, but I went. I went and as soon as I entered the door I found myself in a time tunnel.

Our friends “who had been lost” . . . Our friends who had been killed by torture . . . Our friends who had been killed by execution . . . Our friends who had lost their lives in hunger strikes, in death fasts . . . Our friends who had been killed in “clashes” . . . For us that was 12 Eylül; torture, murder, fascism.²⁰

One final example, that of the opening, almost in the same year, of another, very different museum, demonstrates the alteration that urban activism makes in perceiving, remembering, and commemorating Istanbul. As we have seen, the Museum of Shame assembles things that possess intense affect for leftist activists, bestirring dormant moods and reawakening ex-militants’ sense of places’ presence. Violence is remembered by its configuring of places. Much more famous is Nobel Prize–winning author Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet müzesi), displaying a contrasting set of objects from the very same years (1974–85), artifacts and ephemera commemorating the relationship of two lovers with a now no-longer-existing Istanbul from his novel of the same name. It is a museum of a fictional story. Both museums reflect a labor of love in attending to and conserving things and places that held and afflicted the beloved. Yet it is the peculiarity of each set of objects—the gallows that executed Deniz Gezmiş; the lipstick-stained butts of cigarettes smoked by Füsun (the narrator’s love)—that radiate different memories and emotions, constituting and mourning, in the ensemble assembled in the Museum of Shame, a socialist perspective of the city and its past.

CONCLUSION

In sum, if both the interviews with ex-militants’ and the 12 Eylül Museum of Shame reveal that revolutionary Istanbul lives on only in memory, this does not mean that its existence is any less real. As we have shown, memories exist not just in the mind but also—more so—in the world, in objects and things, in sounds and songs, in the city and in its (absent) places, in legal events, and in the temporal habituation to them of activists’ lived bodies. All of these store and stir militants’ memories of the past even as the value and meaning of remembered practices and experiences wax and wane with new acts of political participation and judgment. Memories can be stabilized but are never completed.

These particular acquired stances of political action, place perception, sentiment, and ethics are urban and activist. In the pedagogic process, the inevitable social friction that activism incites reveals the conflicted interaction that characterizes the sensing and appropriating of affordances of place, both between living beings (including animals and humans) and between the living and the dead in the fraught passage of furnished environments from one generation, or from one group, to another. Activism as a pedagogy and process of skilled practice trains not only practitioners’ awareness of the urban environment but also their ethical capacities, displacing and redirecting existing modes of socialized engagement with the surrounding world and implicating them in particular tasks concerning ways of acting toward and talking about the city and its inhabitants. Here, at the close, is a more adequate description of how political-economic and phenomenological perspectives inform each other: for the rest of their lives, activists’ memory of this key “horizon of the past” (Husserl in Moran 2000: 162) ensures its reawakening or revivification to consciousness in any new auspicious event or appalling episode in Turkish politics, of which, since 1980, there have been many. For ex-militant Ümit, to give just one example, participation in the unexpected explosion of urban activism in Istanbul in 2013, over the government’s proposed privatization and redevelopment of Taksim’s Gezi Park, immediately recalled—and problematized—one certain taken-for-granted aspect of the 1970s. For him, most striking about the Gezi protest were the peaceful relations between the groups, individuals, and civil society organizations that participated in and supported the protest—the rainbow symbol of Istanbul’s emerging LBTG groups, waved alongside the flags of Turkey and those of socialist factions, of football teams, and Kurds. “We weren’t like that,” he commented ruefully. In his remembering, encompassing less resemblances and more contrasts between urban movements and their repertoires of spatial tactics thirty years distant from each other, memories of the past flash up against the unfolding present, instigating a new fragile knowledge of a different history of Istanbul’s inhabitants’ reckoning with the city.²¹

In the next chapter we turn to the past again, but on a different scale. In it I compose a selective and specific history of the development of Istanbul from the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 up until the mid-1970s, to give readers some idea of the origins and development of the key features of the city in 1975 that multitudes of political activists in the years before and after the coup sought to control or revolutionize. What were the primary sociopolitical and economic processes that reassembled the city up until 1974? In brief, in unintended preparation for the emergence of the activists of the 1970s and for the city of the fearless, who set the stage, how did they do it, and what was it like?

1. In a 2005 overview of the literature on cities and globalization beyond Turkey, Davis notes that one consequence of the focus on the capitalist world system, transnational networks, and global trade is the relative paucity of anthropological studies on “urban experience” (2005: 97). This is still true of studies of 1970s Istanbul.

2. Duranti (2009) traces out how instructors in jazz classes try to develop in students a “jazz way” of listening to music.

3. The reference here is to the title of Lambek’s book, Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action (2010).

4. Cf. Ingold: “It is apparent that the world becomes a meaningful place for people through being lived in” (2000: 168) (emphasis in original).

5. The phrase comes from Silverstein’s (2008) fieldwork with Sufi Islamic brotherhoods in Istanbul in the late 1990s. I use it to draw attention to an over-correction in recent anthropological work on perceptual enskilment and apprenticeship that emphasizes the imitative, body modelling, demonstrative, and repetitive dimensions of teaching and learning (see, for example, Marchand 2010: S8 and his phrase “knowledge beyond language”) while downplaying oral articulation, verbal explanation and instruction. By contrast, in activism, talk is a pedagogical and emotional force, generative of the affective bonds experienced between leaders/teachers and militants, and between comrades themselves in activist groups. See Şenay (2015) for a similar discussion of the importance of conversation in the learning of the ney (reed flute) in Istanbul.

6. Indeed, even a “passive” apprehension of place has to be actively absorptive, in the first instance by decisively stilling the body’s movement in and between places. More than this, listening is an action, as the poet Orhan Veli attests: “Istanbul’u dinliyorum, gözlerim kapalı” (I am listening to Istanbul, with my eyes closed). Similarly, consider the key lines in Walt Whitman’s ([1855] 1986) poem “Song of Myself”: “Now I will do nothing but listen, / to accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute towards it.”

7. One such group (in Istanbul) has been modernist urban planners, named by Rabinow (1996) as “visualizers of a socio-technocracy.” See chapter 3.

8. The Production of Space was translated into English only in 1991, which has meant its orientation to the urban social movements of the 1970s is often overlooked. (Lefebvre had already in 1970 published a book on the 1968 Paris events, titled L’ Explosion.)

9. For Gibson, affordances of the natural environment are offered to dwellers for their adaptation and use. By contrast Lefebvre assumes the fabrication of space by human labor through the political economy, in which oppositional socialist groups are forced to seize the (non-neutral) affordances of the city created by capitalism, affordances that advantage the dominant class and incite other inhabitants to attempt to transform them in social movements.

10. In her autobiography about growing up in Istanbul, Ayfer Tunç writes movingly about the relationship between memory and absence:

Painted on one wall were robust and merry young girls and boys wearing white swimming costumes playing with a ball in the sea, and on the other wall was drawn a row of young girls, whose arms were stretched out towards each other’s shoulders. . . . They made Süreyya Beach and the railway cheerful. . . . One day the wall was knocked down, and a wide road built between the beach and the railway line. The absent wall made me ruefully realize for the first time that the small things that add colour to our lives will disappear, are able to be lost. (Tunç 2001: 13)

11. Cf.: “the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. . . . The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands” (1995: 14, 15). Wallace Stevens’s poem “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” reveals how the images of intimacy attracted by the “house” (and collected in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space) can also be extended to the city: “The sounds drift in. / The buildings are remembered. / The life of the city never lets go, nor do you / Ever want it to. It is part of the life of your room. / Its domes are the architecture of your bed’ (Stevens 1990: 510).

12. Cf. Bachelard: “The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little bed chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound” (1994: 60).

13. “Kemal Türkler davası düştü,” Hürriyet, 12 January 2010, accessed 20 December 2018. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/kemal-turkler-davasi-dustu-16423709,

14. “Kemal Türkler cinayet davası yeniden başladı,” Posta, 27 February 2013, accessed 12 January 2018, http://www.posta.com.tr/yazarlar/nedim-sener/kemal-turkler-cinayet-davasi-yeniden-basladi-164407, ().

15. One exception to ex-activists’ general unwillingness to commemorate their past is the celebration of 1 Mayıs (Labor Day) in Taksim Square, which in 2010, 2011, and 2012 attracted huge crowds. Since 2010 a wreath-laying ceremony mourning the 1977 massacre has become an integral part of Labor Day demonstrations. Despite this common front there has been no definitive agreement concerning the identity of the perpetrators of the 1977 killings, and differences between leftist factions concerning events on that day still linger amongst ex-militants.

16. One typical example, from Tercüman newspaper (19 November 1980), reported on one of the mass trials of the “illegal” (yasadışı) organization Dev-Yol. The headline read, “Death penalty requested for 30 Dev-Yol members.” The military prosecutor charged them with being members of an illegal organization “whose aim is to change constitutional law and institutions, and the constitutional order by armed force and to bring in a society founded on the dictatorship of a single class.”

17. For example, see Alişanoğlu’s (2005) Netekim 12 Eylül’de geldiler: Bir idamlığın trajikomik anıları; Mavioğlu’s (2008) Bizim çocuklar yapamadı: Bir 12 Eylül hesaplaşması; Öztunç’s (2008) Ülkücüler 12 Eylül’ü anlatıyor; Küçükkaya’s (2011) Darbe şakacıları sevmez: Bir ailenin 12 Eylül günlüğü; Görsev’s (2011) 3 yılda 6 tutukevinde: 12 Eylül anıları; Asan’s (2010) 12 Eylül sabahı; and Saymaz’s (2012) Oğlumu öldürdünüz arz ederim: 12 Eylül’ün beş öyküsü).

18. See the website, http://www.memorializeturkey.com/en/memorial/309/.

19. Interestingly, in its focusing on the gross human-rights abuses of the Turkish government and military against the leftist movement of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the museum of shame “forgets” the intense factionalism in those years that perturbed so many activists in the interviews.

20. C. Solgun, “12 Eylül utanç müzesi,” Taraf, 23 September 2013.

21. The verb flash up references Walter Benjamin’s Thesis VI: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes in a moment of danger” (1940).