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.
