After Gezi: moving towards post-hegemonic imagination in Turkey.

• Author: Yel, Ali Murat
• Position: Essay

"There is no hegemony and never has been. We live in cynical, post-hegemonic times: nobody is very much persuaded by ideologies that once seemed fundamental to securing social order" (Beasley-Murray, 2002)

Introduction

Adapting from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophical propositions, Jon Beasley-Murray challenges the concept of hegemony, advanced by Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (1) and later developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2). According to Beasley-Murray, ideology is no longer the determining agent in shaping the politics of contemporary society, where individuals maintain complex relations with the state apparatus and the dominant class in a given society. The idea of hegemony advanced by Gramsci emphasizes the efficacy of ideology; which is, the bourgeoisie ideology managing to reproduce consent over individuals belonging to different social classes. The decline of ideology with the rapid development of a consumption-oriented society in the postmodern era gave rise to the visibility of differentiating identities, which were included in a process of accumulating different sorts of capital and (cultural, social or practical) power. Politics can no longer produce unified collective identities but at the micropolitical level a wide variety of differentiated identities emerge through new media technologies.

While the term hegemony refers to the set of social relations, which is regulated by the dominant class who manages to reproduce the consent of the underprivileged members of the society, Beasley-Murray suggests that hegemony is no longer sufficient to explain the contemporary dynamics of social order. With reference to Deleuzian concepts of "habit" and "affect" (3), he underscores that the social order is maintained through the complex web of relations between the individuals on the basis of multiplicity of differences as well as conflicts in-between, rather than concrete ideologies determining the limits of certain discourses shaping our social realities. Moving beyond the Marxist formula towards Foucauldian conception of power, which draws attention to the horizontal dispersion of power relations that act upon and subjugate individuals in differing social settings, the term post-hegemony refers to "the dispersion of power, the fragmentation of politics and the multiplicity of identities". (4)

The particular realization, which has been debated within the Marxist and poststructuralist circles within academia regarding the assertion of post-hegemony, as the characterizing force in contemporary society, might explain the course of events that Turkey has recently been experiencing, namely, the Gezi Park activism. This essay aims to point at various dynamics introduced into our universe of discourse with the unfolding of the Gezi events, especially the paradoxes that the "Gezi Spirit" is founded upon. We suggest that the Gezi upheaval was a reactionary response against the particular social class, which is represented by Prime Minister Erdogan's personality as the "other" as opposed to those of secular, middle class individuals who associate themselves either with the paradigms of Kemalism or leftism. The argument, which defines the Gezi events merely as a "reactionary" response does not mean to insult or degrade the importance of the demands of a particular social class. It rather suggests that all social oppositional movements in contemporary society are necessarily reactionary since it is not possible to mention a concrete revolutionary body of social classes, which would carry the potential to radically transform the society. Revolution is no longer possible since a revolutionary program with the potential to offer "salvation" to a certain class or the society as a whole cannot be coherently established. With the decline of ideology and the differentiation of individuals within social classes, we suggest that it is no longer possible to maintain particular hegemony, however, post-hegemonic dispositions can be instrumentalized for democratic politics.

Beyond the Power-Resistance Dichotomy

The particular reaction that occurred due to the repression of environmentalist concerns on cutting trees down in Gezi Park turned into a collective activism, which targeted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It seems that Erdogan had intentionally drawn attention to himself with his speeches on the Gezi unrest, where he insistently said "We made our decisions on Gezi Park and we will go through with them!." However, a possible step back by Erdogan could have caused disillusionment among his supporters and a loss in faith in their charismatic leader. As such anti-democrat discourse asserted its existence, as the groups targeting Erdogan became even more aggressive. Reaching its peak at this particular instance, the tension opened the doors to the manifestation of discriminative discourses with cultural references, which were already existent in the subconscious of the activists, who were oriented around the politicization of Kemalist or Islamophobic impulses among the middle and upper-middle classes.

The unrest in Taksim Square extended to Istanbul's other neighborhoods and several cities around the country. The masses gathered and insulted Erdogan with slogans; the outrage headed towards the government buildings; the public transportation busses were set on fire; barricades were built on the roads, which reached Taksim Square. Gas masks became a popular product to sell among the street vendors around Taksim. The "state of exception" in Giorgio Agamben's (5) terms, became the "norm." Violence provided the visuality of an "other urban setting" and concretized this possibility in our memory. We saw people taking photos with their friends and families, among the ruins that turned Taksim into an "open air museum" by the normalization of destruction, aestheticization of violence, differentiating the urban setting from its daily, ordinary existence.

Foucault's (6) very popular argument explains, "where there is power, there is resistance," however, again as pointed out by Foucault, the performativity of power is diffused throughout the society without any certain structures where you can vertically locate power. Power-resistance dichotomy does not point at stable positions. Gezi activists claim that Gezi Park is a model of resistance against power. Yet for those supporting the anti-Kemalist, faith-based politics, Gezi Park became a site of power in itself. Due to the outrage at Gezi uprising which positioned itself against the AK Party, religious-conservative individuals were reminded of the February 28, 1997 coup in Turkey: a military intervention against the Islamist "Welfare Party" and versus the perceived "Islamization" of the country. The "banging of pots and pans" in balconies in protest of Erdogan daily at nine at night under Gezi activism reminds many in Turkish society of the traumatic experience of February 28, when the religious, Islamist and conservative voters of the Welfare Party led by Necmettin Erbakan were targeted by a discriminating discourse of 'otherness.' While Gezi Park was the most peaceful, least militarist space of the protests, all other gatherings became the sites of similar demonstrations of "Republic Protests," which were organized similarly back in 2007 against Abdullah Gul's candidacy for presidency, calling upon the Turkish army to prevent the "uncivilized Islamists" of taking control of the top state position, symbolic for the Kemalist republic. After the Gezi Park events along with all the Islamophobic republic meetings, all places of resistance referenced Gezi Park: everyone was chanting, "Everywhere is Taksim, everywhere is resistance." We see the reproduction of the so-called...