reawakening ex-militants’ sense of places’ presence. Violence is remembered by its configuring of places. Much more famous is Nobel Prize–winning author Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet müzesi), displaying a contrasting set of objects from the very same years (1974–85), artifacts and ephemera commemorating the relationship of two lovers with a now no-longer-existing Istanbul from his novel of the same name. It is a museum of a fictional story. Both museums reflect a labor of love in attending to and conserving things and places that held and afflicted the beloved. Yet it is the peculiarity of each set of objects—the gallows that executed Deniz Gezmiş; the lipstick-stained butts of cigarettes smoked by Füsun (the narrator’s love)—that radiate different memories and emotions, constituting and mourning, in the ensemble assembled in the Museum of Shame, a socialist perspective of the city and its past.
CONCLUSION
In sum, if both the interviews with ex-militants’ and the 12 Eylül Museum of Shame reveal that revolutionary Istanbul lives on only in memory, this does not mean that its existence is any less real. As we have shown, memories exist not just in the mind but also—more so—in the world, in objects and things, in sounds and songs, in the city and in its (absent) places, in legal events, and in the temporal habituation to them of activists’ lived bodies. All of these store and stir militants’ memories of the past even as the value and meaning of remembered practices and experiences wax and wane with new acts of political participation and judgment. Memories can be stabilized but are never completed.
These particular acquired stances of political action, place perception, sentiment, and ethics are urban and activist. In the pedagogic process, the inevitable social friction that activism incites reveals the conflicted interaction that characterizes the sensing and appropriating of affordances of place, both between living beings (including animals and humans) and between the living and the dead in the fraught passage of furnished environments from one generation, or from one group, to another. Activism as a pedagogy and process of skilled practice trains not only practitioners’ awareness of the urban environment but also their ethical capacities, displacing and redirecting existing modes of socialized engagement with the surrounding world and implicating them in particular tasks concerning ways of acting toward and talking about the city and its inhabitants. Here, at the close, is a more adequate description of how political-economic and phenomenological perspectives inform each other: for the rest of their lives, activists’ memory of this key “horizon of the past” (Husserl in Moran 2000: 162) ensures its reawakening or revivification to consciousness in any new auspicious event or appalling episode in Turkish politics, of which, since 1980, there have been many. For ex-militant Ümit, to give just one example, participation in the unexpected explosion of urban activism in Istanbul in 2013, over the government’s proposed privatization and redevelopment of Taksim’s Gezi Park, immediately recalled—and problematized—one certain taken-for-granted aspect of the 1970s. For him, most striking about the Gezi protest were the peaceful relations between the groups, individuals, and civil society organizations that participated in and supported the protest—the rainbow symbol of Istanbul’s emerging LBTG groups, waved alongside the flags of Turkey and those of socialist factions, of football teams, and Kurds. “We weren’t like that,” he commented ruefully. In his remembering, encompassing less resemblances and more contrasts between urban movements and their repertoires of spatial tactics thirty years distant from each other, memories of the past flash up against the unfolding present, instigating a new fragile knowledge of a different history of Istanbul’s inhabitants’ reckoning with the city.21
In the next chapter we turn to the past again, but on a different scale. In it I compose a selective and specific history of the development of Istanbul from the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 up until the mid-1970s, to give readers some idea of the origins and development of the key features of the city in 1975 that multitudes of political activists in the years before and after the coup sought to control or revolutionize. What were the primary sociopolitical and economic processes that reassembled the city up until 1974? In brief, in unintended preparation for the emergence of the activists of the 1970s and for the city of the fearless, who set the stage, how did they do it, and what was it like?
1. In a 2005 overview of the literature on cities and globalization beyond Turkey, Davis notes that one consequence of the focus on the capitalist world system, transnational networks, and global trade is the relative paucity of anthropological studies on “urban experience” (2005: 97). This is still true of studies of 1970s Istanbul.
2. Duranti (2009) traces out how instructors in jazz classes try to develop in students a “jazz way” of listening to music.
3. The reference here is to the title of Lambek’s book, Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action (2010).
4. Cf. Ingold: “It is apparent that the world becomes a meaningful place for people through being lived in” (2000: 168) (emphasis in original).
5. The phrase comes from Silverstein’s (2008) fieldwork with Sufi Islamic brotherhoods in Istanbul in the late 1990s. I use it to draw attention to an over-correction in recent anthropological work on perceptual enskilment and apprenticeship that emphasizes the imitative, body modelling, demonstrative, and repetitive dimensions of teaching and learning (see, for example, Marchand 2010: S8 and his phrase “knowledge beyond language”) while downplaying oral articulation, verbal explanation and instruction. By contrast, in activism, talk is a pedagogical and emotional force, generative of the affective bonds experienced between leaders/teachers and militants, and between comrades themselves in activist groups. See Şenay (2015) for a similar discussion of the importance of conversation in the learning of the ney (reed flute) in Istanbul.
6. Indeed, even a “passive” apprehension of place has to be actively absorptive, in the first instance by decisively stilling the body’s movement in and between places. More than this, listening is an action, as the poet Orhan Veli attests: “Istanbul’u dinliyorum, gözlerim kapalı” (I am listening to Istanbul, with my eyes closed). Similarly, consider the key lines in Walt Whitman’s ([1855] 1986) poem “Song of Myself”: “Now I will do nothing but listen, / to accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute towards it.”
7. One such group (in Istanbul) has been modernist urban planners, named by Rabinow (1996) as “visualizers of a socio-technocracy.” See chapter 3.
8. The Production of Space was translated into English only in 1991, which has meant its orientation to the urban social movements of the 1970s is often overlooked. (Lefebvre had already in 1970 published a book on the 1968 Paris events, titled L’ Explosion.)
9. For Gibson, affordances of the natural environment are offered to dwellers for their adaptation and use. By contrast Lefebvre assumes the fabrication of space by human labor through the political economy, in which oppositional socialist groups are forced to seize the (non-neutral) affordances of the city created by capitalism, affordances that advantage the dominant class and incite other inhabitants to attempt to transform them in social movements.
10. In her autobiography about growing up in Istanbul, Ayfer Tunç writes movingly about the relationship between memory and absence:
Painted on one wall were robust and merry young girls and boys wearing white swimming costumes playing with a ball in the sea, and on the other wall was drawn a row of young girls, whose arms were stretched out towards each other’s shoulders. . . . They made Süreyya Beach and the railway cheerful. . . . One day the wall was knocked down, and a wide road built between the beach and the railway line. The absent wall made me ruefully realize for the first time that the small things that add colour to our lives will disappear, are able to be lost. (Tunç 2001: 13)
11. Cf.: “the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. . . . The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands” (1995: 14, 15). Wallace Stevens’s poem “To an Old
