Making a People: Turkey’s “Democracy Watches” and Gezi-Envy

Abstract

This article investigates a surplus quality that a “politics out of doors” embodies. It argues that forms of mass appearance and protest manifest an aesthetic and affective making of a people—a people that enjoys its togetherness through visualized, vocalized, and performative expressions of its presence. Generating and generated by a collective desire, this figure of a people exceeds “the people” understood as a legally authorizing and legitimating entity. I contend that the excess of desire can make popular protest a source of “envy” for political authorities even at the height of their electoral power. In conversation with Melanie Klein and Joan Copjec’s accounts of “envy” and René Girard’s formulation of “mimetic desire,” I analyze the Turkish regime’s orchestration of the 2016 “Democracy Watches” as an attempt to create, harness, and appropriate a counter-equivalent desire to the 2013 antigovernment Gezi protests. In so doing, I reconceptualize peoplehood as the synergetic enjoyment of assembled collectivities.