Social Conflict and the Politicization of Cullture in Turkey

It is no coincidence that current political debate over the Islamist Welfare Party revolves around the term “lifestyle.” The dominant camps in this conflict draw their bases of support from groups with quite different lifestyles. The Islamist Welfare Party, while developing its own bourgeoisie and its new intellectuals, grew by winning broad support from the old and new gecekondu populations with its populist motto of “pure and just order.” Opposed to it is a loose group consisting of the radical bourgeoisie, state bureaucrats, the army, the urban middle classes, Kemalist intellectuals, the “Second Republicans,” and some radical intellectuals. Secularism and the Western–modern way of life are about the only common ground this otherwise incompatible alliance has.

It is clear that class does not correspond “properly” to political culture because class boundaries in Turkey have been increasingly crosscut by contradictory and hybrid cultural constructs of religion, ethnicity, nationalism, lifestyle, and gender. The culture of the popular classes can be opposed as “alienated” or “backward” by their supposedly counterpart intellectuals, as has been the case with arabesk culture. At the same time, regressiveness and racism can become popular among the subordinated, as is epitomized in the Sivas massacre and the rise of a popularized nationalist fervor suppressing the Kurdish issue. It is not just because the official, public political sphere in Turkey is so very restricted that social conflicts have been increasingly expressed in the language of culture since the 1980s; the politicization of culture itself has been a major factor in and consequence of the project and process of Turkish modernity from its inception. In that sense, the contradiction that inheres in the formation and appraisals of arabesk culture continue with Turkish society: the contradiction between a dominant nationalist and paternalist incapacity to live with difference and a deep, unrealized popular capacity to change and accept difference through hybridization.

Meral Özbek, “Arabesk Culture: A case of modernization and Popular Identity,” Sibel Bozdogan and Resat Kasaba, eds., Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) 228.

be strategic. be-e strategic. s-t-r-a-t-e-g-i-and-c.

…interventions in places become self-constitutive acts. The state intervenes to control space, to dictate the meaning of urbanity, to shape the evolution of the public sphere, and to suppress contending ideologies. It does so by strategically placing squares, parks, statues and monuments, cultural centers, and public buildings; by monitoring architectural styles; by dictating urban design and development agendas.[1]

One quote that didn't make it into my paper for Schoeberlein's Culture Wars, but which reminds me at this juncture of the usefulness of the concrete. Although Çinar is operating more at the level of urban design here, what we do as architects is generally, I think, a similar act of strategic spatial arrangement, only deployed at a different scale. I've been wading somewhat self-indulgently (and unapologetically) in cultural theory and all that talk doesn't necessarily inspire doing or making...which is why it's safe and indulgent and warm and fuzzy. Okay, time to get strategic and specific.

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[1] Alev Çinar. Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places and Time. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005: 101.

Ideology, Cultural Politics, Intellectuals

"...analysis...must also recognize that knowledge and cultural values play a central part in maintaining and transforming social orders, and that defense of one or another value participates in this. As a result, culture and intellectual activity are inherently political (not underlain by politics, but interwoven with it), at two different levels: that of their encounter with alternative values within their own sphere, and that of their place in reproducing society."

"Political struggles are quintessentially about 'the very representation of the social world...[which] can be uttered and constructed in different ways' (Bourdieu 1985: 723,726)."

Katherine Verdery (1991) in Introduction to National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausecu's Romania (19, 17).

Culture Wars readings

"As David Edwards has pointed out, establishing the other as fanatical denies him or her moral status, since he or she exists beyond the realm of rationality, and gives those whose moral superiority is thus affirmed a free hand in defending their interests."

from Khalid, Adeeb. (1998) Chapter 2: "The making of a colonial society" in The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia , p.52. Berkeley: University of California Press.


"...borderlands are not just arenas of civilizational struggles, of semiotic inequality, that produce and reflect relations of power where the colonizer seeks to define and program the borderland as 'other' and 'same' and, as Ashis Nandy argues, its inhabitants as an 'intimate enemy,' but are sites subject to peculiar social contradictions and interactions. THese spawn, by a kind of local magic, the possibility of a new community and a subtle, not always conscious, but genuine resistance to colonial situations."

from Lazzerini, Edward J. (1997) "Local accommodation and resistance to colonialism in nineteenth-century Crimea," in D.R. Brower and E.J. Lazzerini, eds: Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917 , p. 172. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

snippets

"Where there is consumption, there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure, there is agency."
Appadurai MaL-7
Shopping, terrorism, architecture. Take your pick.

"...global processes involving mobile texts and migrant audiences create implosive events that fold global pressures into small, already politicized arenas, producing locality in new, globalized ways."
Appadurai MaL-9


"...concerned not with forms/objects, but with shaping the conditions under which forms or objects emerge..."
M. Speaks, Any 24:44-47