Having emerged in May 2013 and started as „Gezi Park occupation“, the social insurgence was the emergence of another political practice which had not been experienced in the Turkish political sphere. It intersected with a molecular struggle and a Minor Polic1. This formed a link with the ideas that such thinkers and philosophers as Deleuze & Guattari and Foucault institutionalised in the 1960s and 1970s (the fact that this overlapped the social and political theory which I described in my books entitled Singular Thought, Michel Foucault-Power and Foci of Resistance, Minor Policy especially made me excited). It bore great similarities to what I referred to as „New Forms of Struggle“. Apart from the liberal economist circles, anti-capitalist Muslims realised that, in the form by which it infiltrated into the unconscious of human beings, global capitalism was a movement which also infiltrated into the Islamic bourgeoisie which also exploited globalisation. The link between the conservatism and global capitalism started to show up here . A rent lobby and interest lobby had already started to make themselves visible against the capitalist fraction called interest rate lobby. The „keep constructing“ discourse was valid at all times, but a quick interest lobby which turned the whole urban memory upside down had recently started to prevail.

This incident showed us that fear which had cowed Turkey into submission for a period of more than thirty years was suddenly abandoned with an insurgence. When there was no economic crisis, a social crisis unfolded. All Turkey learned that a crisis did not only have an economic aspect. Gezi events showed us with what kind of media Turkey was living. We encountered a concept referred to as „Partisan Media“. As a matter of fact, there was always media which was partisan and there were columnists and journalists who existed and resisted in such media. After all, newspapers and televisions working with such heterogeneous staff were perhaps so good as to conceal this fact from us. „Taksim Everywhere, Resistance Everywhere“ slogan caused not only those living in Turkey but also the whole world to realise how the media was functioning.
In that case, dissemination practices and horizontal struggle emerged as two poles which interact. As a ‚horizontal struggling movement’, Gezi Park broke the routine: What does this mean? It combined roadblocks with strategies instead of directly coming up against the governmental power. It reminded that roadblocks were not based on any political rationality but were irrational and nothing but a defence and a movement which activated subjectivities. It showed that there were no suppressed psychoanalytical words in the society, that ‚unconscious was not structured as a language’ but only a productive struggle. In that aspect, language was fluent and slippery and formed so clean a line of escape. It avoided applying violence against the State through language. On the contrary, it chose to abandon material and linguistic violence to the monopoly of the State, Government, Governorate, Ministry of Internal Affairs and General Directorate of Security. This event was not entirely the last straw to break the camel’s back. It assumed an attitude against the symbolic violence of the consumerist society and the shopping malls which operate based thereon. It was horizontal, classless, non-hierarchical; it was both disorganised and rallying. Horizontal Struggle opposed not only to violence but also to a hierarchical social structure and to ‚us’ who parcelled out the society and who tried to contain and integrate it. It searched for a new way out against the violence of an organisation trying to reduce the society to some consumption. It employed a deviation device against bureaucracy. It surprised a concept which was based on the opposition of political parties. For that reason, the Government finds it difficult to understand. Government and bureaucracy of political parties had to go on the defensive.

In the 1970s, students wanted to occupy the universities in this type of insurrection. The occupation of Sorbonne was mythical in this sense. And Turkey also experienced it in a similar policy. However, this time the movement developed through the occupation of a park in the public realm and the struggle possessed a horizontal transitivity. Unlike the labour unions, political parties or direct organisations sitting for negotiations, horizontal struggle chose to expand and spread instead of containing such types of organisations: Forums were held in other parks. It did not prefer an autonomous organisation based on self-management; but it created a pragmatic strategy based on imagination. Horizontal struggle did not therefore ever retreat but proceeded at all times. It sought for new opportunities and found the weapons of new thinking and humour along the way. Creativity was revealed within pragmatism and process. Unlike those who advocate a pioneering policy and arts, it developed a horizontality and extensity which did not capitalise such perspective. Those who said It is now time to become conscious formed a pragma which drew a line. It expanded the ways of struggling through expression but not through conscious nor through political surrender. It maintained an attitude which rejected the approaches of those who tried to transfer the struggle to labour unions, political parties, organisational hierarchy, etc. It neither liked to bear the political legacy of the past nor erased the social values which had become conservative. However, it agreed not to isolate conservatism and did not want to become avant-garde. It horizontally responded to a government which was pyramidal in form. Against the politics that heard the top of the pyramid, it assumed and maintained an attitude which refuted its words by disseminating them. It showed how ridiculous, trivial and outdated such centricity was. It made us experience the fall of such a perspective. Horizontal struggle drew the lines of the fact that any oppressive government could not function. It revealed that an ideological perspective would damage not only politics but any and all movements as well. It introduced and proved those who said „They are ideological!“ to be ridiculous. It impeded their functionality and proved that it was not ideological. It silently told that it took action from a material perspective. And it reminded how talkative those masses that were called silent were. It produced the evidence to show by what kind of an ideology that which was called democraticwas functioning. It made us think over the regime of democracy2. It made us feel how a hierarchical unification would injure the movement. It strongly underlined how important the freedom of expression was and that democracy would function not with the vote of the majority by the election system but with freedom of expression. It once again reminded that anti-fascist movement might cross our minds as well. It produced the practices of how women’s queer movement would function in each gender of society except in masculine and machist violence. It remonstrated all violence which was material or symbolic. It demonstrated that politics was not the work of a technician but an affair of courage. It introduced how important it was to protect oneself from such types of organisations: A horizontal struggle seems to be our „formation“.

What is going on at Taksim?

Dissatisfaction about the political attempts of the government and the power groups which have simmered for a long time is now crystallising in the Gezi Park issue. This includes the external perceptions which started to be unbearable in people’s life with the Taksim pedestrianisation project, gentrification of Beyoglu, Inci Cake Shop, Emek Cinema House, 1st May and other similar events. Legal weaknesses, murders of transsexuals, anti-war and conscientious objection movements, youth’s despair for the future, extrinsicality and precarity in the business world all burst out at Gezi Park. A variety of impacts are included in the occurrence of the events here. Feelings are swelling.
At present, the distinction between what is politic and what is vital has disappeared: We are living in the policy of every day life. We are living in the feelings formed by those policies which affect and hit our spirits and bodies not in an ideological but only material way. Fear has become the device of a policy which functions through such emotional impacts. There is discomfiture about the material life and the future everywhere: Urban memory is disappearing, forests and trees are disappearing, traffic and urbanisation are eradicating the middle and lower classes from the life-world. Within the economy of rent, crisis is perhaps not economic but it is excessively social. May no one tell us that there is no crisis! May no one say „Oh, we are all right! “ by comparing us with the western crisis, with Spain, Italy and Greece. Crisis is the same crisis. Fear is the crisis of the concern about the future; common crisis of the multitude living under control. There is no West or East nor South or North. Fear policy is roaming everywhere in a common, horizontally transitive way.
Crisis lies within the fear policy. Governments are incapable of doing something. Police do their task in the form of violence as if they do not have any other function. They have become police of defence but not of protection. There is anxiety and fear which is wanted to envelop not only Taksim and Istanbul but the whole of Turkey. The peace process is functioning as part of this world of fear. We are facing a situation in which every one is afraid of the other. This was also the case during the military coup of 12th September. Every one was afraid of the other. Those who were afraid of the other within political polarisations buried politics in their discourses „Communism coming! “, „Fascism coming! “ and „Islam coming! “. In his article in which he expressed violence with post-politics, Zizek described bio-politics as a case in which „every one was afraid of his neighbour“.
One wrote, „If the national anthem of a country starts with ‚Fear not!’, then there is fear in that country.“ And courage against fear lies in the Gezi Park resistance. If there are thousands of people there and if they resist the one who threatens their lives not to leave the place, it means that challenge to fear has started there. They are in a resistance to the post-politics of fear which threatens the future just like those in Madrid, in Athens, in Seattle and in Genoa. A resistance with fun, a resistance in a carnival atmosphere. This is not only a resistance to neo-liberalism and neo-fascism and neo-authoritativeness but a movement against those anti-life powers which concern every one and which interfere with every one’s every day life and against an attitude which wants to see every one ill and in mourning. It is the resistance of life to any type of approach such as liberal, neo-liberal, statist, planning, etc.

Gezi Park Micro-Policy

Are we reaching the end of such policies basing upon political parties? Micro-policy of desire is resisting tête-à-tête with feelings, effects and befallen events. Let none of the parties –neither government nor opposition – try to take credit for this resistance. Despite the fact that there are overlaps, a great majority started to uprise and resist as there was no true material party policy. Youth are placing their desires in the squares and streets and do not want their desires to be grasped by political parties. Of course, resistance for Taksim needs support, but they do not want to be captured and co-opted by political parties.
Today, when one mentions some desire, the desire of a collective expression is mentioned, but not that of a subject. We mention the insurrection of „tiredness“ against an event. This is not the indulgence or desire of an individual; if it were, then it might be a desire which would be grasped by political parties at the utmost. However, a collective process of individualisation is facing desire. As analysed by psychoanalysis, there is no desire in suppressed self in these events, but on the contrary, explosion and crystallisation appear when desire and suppression encounter the reality of a social realm.
Gezi Park stands before us not as a symbol of a place where collective desire crystallises but as a true area of struggle. However, political parties dwell upon the symbolic one, regardless of where they come from. The symbolic is tried to function in the transcendence of social reality by the political parties. And the youth and horizontally transitive form of struggling resist this as it is: Youth are not only against the structure being erected at Taksim now. They are trying to protect their lives which are tried to be broken and restrained. They consider the violence of the police and the attitude of the government to be an insult committed against their collective life which combines fun and resistance. They resist more to the self-indulgence of the government and take their collective desires to the streets. We can only understand the resistance movement through the micro-policy of desire.
Despite the macro-policies by which the political parties try to grasp their desire, the youth are now after a micro-policy which has crystallised in many cities and which is a policy of desire. The desire which spontaneously organises by being influenced puts into operation a micro-policy against a bureaucratic neo-fascism. They proclaim – in the streets – their micro desires and their being minor against the State power, police power, government and governorate power, family power, customs power, linguistics power, power at schools, power of centrality of bureaucratic political parties, power of phallus and power of macho masculinity and against the tiredness which the former stimulate. They try to respond to the police violence with songs; all – those in the streets and those at home – make music and sing songs with the pans and coffee pots and those at home accompany those in the streets.
They thus challenge the government and opposition duality which the government and political parties have established as a dichotomy. We are experiencing a collective micro-political formation of the desire which impedes dichotomies which create the same type of government. Against a macro-policy which puts people into an array and organises them around political slogans and against class dualities and against such theoretical dichotomies as bourgeois capital and working class, oppressors and the oppressed, employed and unemployed, youth and elderly, women and men, the micro-policy of the desire which collectively overlaps with such distinctions as young, old, man, woman, employed or unemployed, employer or employee crystallises at Gezi Park and Taksim. It draws not only the Turkish youth and elders but the whole world into a horizontal resistance, a sphere of resistance from New York to Cologne, from Izmir to Adana and Antalya, from Ankara to Bursa.

 

Translated by English Transtlation: Cenk Alter

 

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