parts and instigating in their place a “socialist (or fascist) way” of reckoning with it.2 In redefining and politicizing selected intersubjective relationships of activists, factions and groups tried to reorient their perceptions of certain properties of those situations and things. Thus, workers were taught by leftist groups to re-recognize their employers as members of the bourgeoisie class or of the “oligarchy”; and rightists were encouraged by ultranationalist organizations to perceive that the nation demanded certain duties from their Turkishness. Skills mastered in engaging and inhabiting the city in a new way produced urban events, the collision of militants from different factions struggling to realize realities and assert interests. Some events were powerful enough to radically modify the consciousness of individual actors, rupturing previous political visions and practices, and recomposing them as transformed, singular subjects in the process (Humphrey 2008, Houston and Şenay 2017).
In brief, activist training aimed to politicize what Husserl called the “phenomenological epoche”—that is, the “method[s] by which an individual is able to modify his or her orientation to the everyday world of experience so as to dislodge ingrained commitments to seeing only particular aspects of it” (Throop 2015: 75). Organizations, parties and factions used the term consciousness-raising to describe the strategies whereby impersonal backgrounds or horizons of experience that mediated activists’ ordinary perceptions were brought to the foreground of attention. Like any acquired, new embodied knowledge, these intentional modifications were only partial, directing critical attention toward some identified social or ideological determinants of the natural attitude or of consciousness about something while leaving others unavailable to reflection. Up to a point, political groups “confirmed” Bachelard’s claim that “it is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality” (1994: 61).
Second, the sponsored modification of activists’ perceptions and experience toward the city and its places of work, study, and public engagement involved more than their learning of new theoretical knowledge about society and history so as to discern its exploitative “determinate structures” and project how to transform them. More concretely, consciousness-raising involved activists in a range of new practices and relationships, including work in the shantytown (gecekondu) suburbs, where student-militants regularly went to sell journals, teach literacy classes, provide services (clinics, roads, legal and medical advice) and to protect the gecekondu from attacks on its places of meeting (see chapter 4). For male and female student-activists from Istanbul’s more middle-class areas, successful service to and mobilization of gecekondu inhabitants required their conscious acquisition of a modified and gendered corporeal style. Awareness of techniques of the body (movement, comportment, mannerisms, and clothing) and communicable dimensions of affective existence (expressions of mood, sensibility, and humor) were crucial in forging intersubjective relations with residents. Thus, according to Şahin (from Partizan Yolu [Partisan Path]),
You had to learn how to talk and act to older people. When we went to a house, they would prepare the sofra. You had to know where to put your legs. We had to know how to sit on the floor together. You wouldn’t look eye to eye with the women nor shake their hands. I still don’t shake the hand of covered women even when extended to me. The women in the house were covered; these suburbs didn’t have “modern girls.” They wore long dresses, with baggy trousers underneath and headscarves. To drink water we used a bowl, not a glass. You had to act as if this was natural to you, wait to talk; you shouldn’t talk during the meal but only after the tea came.
Third, like any learning activity, activism involved apprentice militants in an attuning or sensitization of their perceptions to others’ ways of sensing “by joining with them in the same currents of practical activity” (Ingold 2011a: 314). Factions and organizations were places of collective pedagogy and instilment of skills. Ideologies, too, are well understood in this way, disciplines that educate novices to direct attention toward things in their own particular terms as much as cosmology about the world. They are lived out before they are written out. Further, learning to perceive the city as crucible for revolution through practical activity crucially involved an ethical/sentimental education, the cultivation (in militants) of ethical dispositions that would notice (or infer) particular aspects of the environment—poverty, injustice, and inequality—or be moved by certain dimensions of people’s lives. More generally, the moral sensitization of the perceptions of apprentice militants through socialization in activist practice reveals how perceiving the world involves or possesses intrinsically ethical and affective dimensions. In turn, this indicates that the anthropological study of ethics should be supplemented by an attention to “ordinary” perception.3
Fourth, the perceptual modifications incurred in becoming an activist involved ceaseless talk: the city became a differently inhabited place for militants in being spoken for as much as through being acted in.4 A flourishing speech economy invested in oral interaction, dialogue, exchange, and debate at countless meetings, seminars, study groups, clubs, and commemorations produced more than transmission of, or knowledge about, Marxist theory, the Turkish nation, or the political economy. In being spoken for, selected aspects of place were disclosed to novices’ perception. Equally important was “companionship in conversation.”5 This was a crucial element in stirring and suffusing affective states (emotions, sentiments, and moods) in both militants and in the city itself, and in generating intimacy and affection between members of a group or a faction.
In sum, and as each point above affirms, activism itself—like any skilled practice—is a mode of embodied phenomenological modification, transforming activists’ attunement to the city and their interpretation of the “affordances” (Gibson 1979) that its parts provide. Revolutionary activity and intent provoked both new constitution of and new receptivity to the urban environment’s opportunities for action.6 In discovering and pursuing new spatial practices, both revolutionaries and state authorities activated an affinity between the city and mass political action that does not exist in either the house or in the village: walls for inscribing dissonance; boulevards for marching in or barricading; public buildings for occupation; places for the amplification and feedback of attack and reverb; private associations for secrecy and dialogue; audiences to broadcast one’s message to; strangers to address; passers-by to solicit; statues to drape with flags or slogans, to climb on or demolish; state cemeteries in which to commemorate or desecrate the famous dead; squares for mass meetings or punitive massacres; streets for mob lynching, or for dumping mutilated corpses. The city accommodates assassinations in crowded streets, and beatings in deserted lots or unlit alleys; it enables public hangings, and suicides, off bridges and tall buildings or in front of trains. It facilitates begging, and the showing of poverty. As Merleau-Ponty famously put it, “consciousness [of place] is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that,’ but of ‘I can.’ In the action of a hand which is raised towards its object [say a wall on which the activist wishes to paint a slogan] is contained a reference to the object, not as an object represented, but as that highly specific thing towards which we project ourselves” ([1945] 2002: 137–38).
Significantly, however, activists’ sensing and utilization of architectural affordances raise vital questions about the role and qualities of places in both soliciting and foreclosing on particular perceptions or embodied experiences of them. Thus, the processes by which activism charges or “electrifies” the affordances of the urban and built environment needs careful discussion (see Houston 2015b). Tim Ingold notes that in James Gibson’s original formulation the world in which the perceiver moves around is already there, “with all its affordances ready and waiting to be taken up by whatever creatures arrive to inhabit it” (2000: 168). Further, for Gibson, this appropriation of environmental affordances occurs non-conflictually. Yet the affordances held in places gather residents who may seek to circumscribe the access of others to their offerings, or even to occlude their presence. Ingold’s turn to phenomenology and what he calls a “dwelling perspective” presents a more dynamic, relational model of human interaction with the environment, with its focus on the work of consciousness in constituting environmental objects of experience. As Ingold writes, “Environment is a relative term—relative, that is, to the being whose environment
