Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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experienced according to our interests, concerns, and attitudes, and thus also temporal and spatial. It is always also intersubjective, too, given the centrality of our knowing and perceiving in relation to others—with or against them—through which our varying intentions emerge. For phenomenology, subjects do not passively relate to given entities, people, events, and so on; rather, they constitute them—in Moran’s words, make them acquire “objectivity-for-subjectivity” (2000: 15)—through making them the subject of attention according to their shifting intentions, moods, interests, and positions. Luft gives the example of a real estate agent who sees the house as an object of sale and business, and not primarily as a place for living (1998: 156). The dynamics of constitution can be described in other ways. For example, modifying the perceptual capacities or skills of people (i.e., through pedagogy in activism, say in the musical education that factions give to members through protest songs and marches) transforms the phenomenal world for them. It is through these modifications of perceptual attention, in which particular aspects of situations or environments are brought to the foreground while others fade to the background, that both the temporality of subjects’ experience of the world, and the creation in history of perceiving subjects themselves, is made manifest.
As I show in this chapter, this quality of perception as a temporal process is vital for understanding the experience of militants during the years immediately before and after the coup. It also characterizes the emergent character of ex-activists’ remembering (and forgetting) in the years thereafter, mediated as that is both by the state’s project to discredit or even erase public knowledge of their activities, and by certain efficacious political developments in the 1990s and 2000s posited by activists themselves as significant in reforming the meaning of their past acts and experiences.
There are many benefits in bringing a phenomenological perspective to bear on activism and activists in Istanbul in the 1970s and ’80s and on their transformation of urban environments. The minor intentional modifications effected in the interview process (as described in chapter 1) are best understood in relation to processes of perception more generally, described by phenomenology in its identification and exploration of an elementary stance through which humans live their lives. The prime dimensions of that stance most germane to the study of urban activism include the intersubjective condition of being-in-the-world; the emergent properties of both persons and environments that dwelling entails; the life-world as a field of practical engagement in everyday existence; and the significance of the moving ground of our bodies in perceiving, experiencing, and acting in the world (see Ingold 2000; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2002; Luft 1998). In discovering this elementary stance—following Husserl, Bourdieu (1977) calls it the natural attitude— phenomenology also posits the necessity of its modification as prelude for individuals’ more reflective self-awareness about it.
According to Luft, for Husserl the natural attitude “undergirds the everyday life that we live, as it were naturally, i.e. dealing in a ‘straightforward’ way with other human beings, animals, plants, things, making plans, performing actions, pursuing interests. . . . To call this ‘situation’ natural would be absurd for someone living in the natural attitude, yet making this mode of daily life explicit and thematic requires that we are no longer in it” (1998: 155). Levinas explains it somewhat similarly: “In the ‘natural attitude,’ man is directed toward the world and posits it as existing. . . . The existence of the world is ‘the general thesis of the natural attitude.’ This attitude is, according to Husserl, essentially naïve. . . . This naïveté consists in accepting objects as given and existing, without questioning the meaning of this existence and of the ‘fact of its being given’” (1995: 121).
In Ingold’s words, the availability of the world “is evident in our everyday use of the most familiar things around us, which, absorbed into the current of our activity (as indeed, we are ourselves), become in a sense transparent, wholly subordinated to the ‘in-order-to’ of the task at hand” (2000: 168) (my emphasis). To make a familiar thing nontransparent, or noticeable, requires an intentional modification, so that our sense of it changes as a consequence of our way of engaging with it (Duranti 2009: 209). For Husserl, this involves the bracketing, modification, or reduction of the natural attitude, particularly of its sensible assumption that the existence of entities, objects, values, and so on is independent of the work of consciousness in perceiving or constituting them. More specifically, Husserl’s critique of the natural attitude involves “what is taken for granted in a culture that has been influenced by modern science” (Casey 1996: 13). As Levinas notes above, for Husserl, the naivety of early twentieth-century science consisted in its assumption that the natural world existed independently of the subject’s—in this case the natural scientist’s—apprehension or objectifying of it. To give just one example, an artist might notice a rock for its possibilities in an installation. A child might treasure a crystal given to her from a favorite aunt. A mining geologist may appreciate it for its mineral and chemical composition, its permeability or porosity, and for the size of its particles. By contrast, Myers (1991) tells us that for many Pintupi aboriginals in central Australia, a rock may be valued through its connection to Dreaming events, one small feature in a region of known and sacred places. In all cases, different educated, imaginative and affective perceptions govern actors’ ways of reckoning with (the same) rock. Nothing, of course, stops an aboriginal geologist or artist from shifting between such perspectives. More generally, we might note that scientific disciplines (including anthropology and activism) teach novices and students a particular way of constituting the world.
Yet 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