Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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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 it is” (20). Here aspects of the world emerge for the perceiver in acts of educated and embodied engagement with it, including of course with other beings, both human and nonhuman. In examining perception, phenomenological investigation is analytically acute in identifying the (always temporally unfolding and educated) qualities and capacities—Ingold calls these “skills of perception”—of the actor-subject that enable this engagement or that experience of the world (of objects, environments, and others) to occur. By contrast, sometimes it is less sensitive in identifying the role of architects and their sponsors in intending (through design) the qualities and capacity of the actor-object (the thing that is perceived), which permits this experience or that evocation of it to occur.
Nevertheless, Ingold’s work itself is not particularly helpful in sketching out the violence of architecture, or of the political and conflictual dimensions involved in people’s interactional generation of their environment and its affordances. The claim is as much Ingold’s as it is my own. As he himself notes, “the criticism that the political is conspicuous by its absence from my own attempts to formulate a dwelling perspective is entirely just, and troubling” (2005: 503). The very material affordances of the environment that were malleable to militants’ projects and activities also had embedded in them the political intentions of their makers, configured in pathways and roads, artifacts and machines, buildings and interior design, architecture, zoning and urban planning. Here the fabricated efficacies of places and things themselves exerted perceptual power over their users, seeking to condition particular experiences and uses of them while actively contriving at activists’ bodily motions. Shull’s recent research (2012) on the engineering of experience in poker machine gambling is an awful case in point, where video graphics, ergonomic consoles, surround-sound acoustics, plastic-press buttons, marketing schemes, and player-tracking systems all conspire to trigger addiction through minute and synesthetic scripting of people’s behavior. Such manipulative control of the environment, and the carefully calculated algorithms that seduce players to feed in more money by periodically cascading back a proportion of their losses, are designed by corporations, with their intentions in play.
Moreover, in their own adversarial appropriation of places and in their energetic modification of them, activists contended with other efficacious users of space, entering into conflict with them over access to and adaptation of urban affordances. Neither activism nor dwelling is harmonious. In chapter 1 we saw how for Tschumi the prime violence of architecture involves confrontation between buildings or planned spaces and their users. Yet friction between inhabitants themselves in their bitter performative conflicts over the city and its configured assets is equally important in qualifying users’ spatial experiences and actions. In other words, the urban environment of militants was an intersubjective one, an emerging field of frictional relations and moods that gathered together and encompassed multiple actors. For individuals, regions of places—factories, schoolyards, student lodgments, shantytowns, town squares, houses—and