The Spirit of Gezi: The Recomposition of Political Subjectivities in Turkey

Abstract

There is a peculiar affinity between the global uprisings of the last few years--from Tahrir Square, to Syntagma, Zuccotti Park and the Indignados. Not only do these uprisings seem to share similar forms of political protest, they also appear to represent a cycle in which elements are passed over or imitated. In this chain of struggles, every event is also singular, shaped by the respective specificities of its spatio-temporal context. However, those differences, should not be read in an essentialist manner, as if Cairo and New York were incomparable and thus incompatible cases. Instead, we take those differences as different expressions of a common case--an understanding of democracy that challenges the established boundaries between the spheres of the economic, the political and the social. Within this context, the Gezi Uprising, during the summer of 2013 in Turkey--in all its singularity--has something to say about the general patterns of revolts in contemporary capitalism. In this article we aim to provide a theoretically informed account of the Gezi Uprising, which started with a small initiative to prevent the demolition of Gezi Park in the heart of Istanbul, next to Taksim Square, during May 2013 and grew into a nationwide uprising on 31 May 2014. It was an unexpected event, emerging at a point when oppositional forces began to lose hope in the face of the rising authoritarianism of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi --Justice and Development Party) government. (i) It was 'sudden and puzzling', 'abrupt and spontaneous' for all. (1) According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, two and a half million people took part in the uprising in seventy-nine cities of Turkey. It was undoubtedly the most significant spontaneous uprising in modern Turkish history. Our account gives a glimpse of the immediacy of the uprising based on the participatory observation of the authors (which was limited to its centre, Gezi Park in Istanbul) and also provides a discussion on its background conditions, inner dynamics and transformative nature as well as on the novel and emergent forms of collective political action, affects, language and subjectivity. We do acknowledge the limits of Gezi Uprising's novelties and that the forms we aim to reveal and discuss have not induced social change on a broader scale. They were rather emergent forms, which appeared to sprout during the uprising and weaken afterwards. However, we still think that those emergent forms were important as they signify new potentialities of collective political action and new understandings of democracy that are not bound by the hegemonic forms of politics and representation. One of the common features of the global uprisings was the heterogeneity of the participants. The protests did not only represent the concerns of a particular social group, but typically resonated with the desires of the 'multitude'. (ii) Indeed, resonance and heterogeneity were two important features of the Gezi Uprising as observed by the authors of this article, among many others. (iii) The heterogeneous composition of these events though, is often seen as a sign of their lack of a common ground. Following this argument, a common narrative on the new cycle of uprisings claims that due to the very diversity of their composition, they cannot result in an enduring movement, let alone a political party. We aim to contribute to the broader discussion on the global chain of uprisings through developing an alternative line of argument in the context of the Gezi case. We conceive these elements of heterogeneity and resonance as the conceptual infrastructures of a new virtual political subjectivity, which we analyse with the concept of recomposition. By using the concept of recomposition, we shift the emphasis 'from identity to becoming'. (2) Our analysis does not see the heterogeneity of the protestors as a weakness; on the contrary, we see it as a window of opportunity in the sense that Lefebvre defined the revolutionary moment as 'the spontaneous coming together in a moment of 'irruption; when disparate heterotopic groups suddenly see, if only for a fleeting moment, the possibilities of collective action to create something radically different'. …