Alignments of Dissent and Politics of Naming : Assembling Resistance in Turkey
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12001/alignments-of-dissent-and-politics-of-naming_assem
Je découvre par hasard cet article du doctorant en anthropologie Emrah Yildiz (qui est d’ailleurs l’un des éditeurs d’un des 1er ouvrage collectif sur le mouvement Gezi ▻http://tadweenpublishing.com/blogs/news/12194385-new-jadmag-resistance-everywhere-the-gezi-protests-and-d). En décentrant entre autre géographiquement son regard des lieux de contestation, pas uniquement concentrés sur Taksim, l’auteur remet en cause l’idée admise que seules les élites séculières ont initié, structuré et contrôlé le mouvement de résistance. Selon lui, la variété des profils sociaux et des revendications observés durant le mouvement qui se sont auto-enrichis entre elles, invite à une reconsidération des anciennes catégories d’analyse des classes sociales en Turquie à travers notamment une lecture de leurs relations avec la technologie et en particulier les technologies de l’information.
Over ten thousand people took over the streets of Ümraniye, a working-class neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul, at around 10 pm on Sunday 2 July to stand in solidarity with the demonstrators not only in the grounds of the Gezi Park in Taksim Square, but also with those demonstrating in sixty-seven cities all over Turkey from Ankara and Izmir, to Adana and Hatay. Gathering on the main avenue of the May 1st Mahallesi (district) of Ümraniye, a neighborhood always imagined as a stronghold of AKP politics and home to a socially conservative lifestyle among the diverse districts of Istanbul, over ten thousand Ümraniye locals marched onto the main artery of Istanbul’s highway system connecting the European and Asian sides of the city via the Bosphorus Bridge, known as TEM in Turkey. Chanting the signature slogans of “shoulder to shoulder against fascism” and “resist Gezi [Park] resist!” of the demonstrations that ensued from Taksim square, the Umraniye locals formed a human blockade and closed the highway artery to traffic. Disregarding all signs alerting the drivers to the blockade miles ahead, a speeding black luxury car, described either as an Audi A6 or a BMW by eyewitnesses, ripped through the crowd, seriously wounding two peaceful demonstrators, associated with the Socialist Solidarity Platform, Sosyalist Dayanışma Platformu (SODAP) in Turkish. The 17-year-old SODAP member and high school student Sezgin Kartal remains in critical condition in Göztepe Eğitim ve Araştırma Hospital as I write this piece. The 19-year-old factory worker, and member of the socialist hackers’ network, Redhack, in Turkey, Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, on the other hand, has unfortunately passed away in the same hospital despite all the attempts to save his life.
What is more upsetting to me, however, is the analytical myopia that underwrites the politics of naming what is happening and the actors who are doing the resisting in Turkey on the one hand, and the utter disregard for stories like that of Mehmet’s, since they do not neatly fit into the banally familiar and mutually exclusive positions of the entrenched elite secularists vs the overly-confident working-class Islamists in Turkey. The seemingly strange alignments the “resistance” has been breeding in Turkey should not be explained away in such abstract and categorical terms, but approached as vital social grounds through which we can rethink these categories, both in our representational practices and analytical endeavors. Mehmet’s story, peppered with information about where he comes from, his participation in Redhack while being a factory worker, for instance, might help us rethink not only the secularist elite/Islamist working-class binary, but also the assumed class positions of social media users and online activists in particular and the more abstract relationship between social class and technology in the age of late capitalism
In other words, there is an ongoing process of seeming strange alignments among many different individuals and groups with wildly diverse ideological stances and social identities that are teaching and learning from one another, yet continue to stand together. Under such indeterminate circumstances, a struggle over context and its overriding meaning produces the problem of managing this assemblage, and the secularists are definitely serious contenders for the role, but not the only ones.