Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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the occupation and the breaking of another group’s occupation (in Turkish işgal and işgal kırmak). To occupy meant to take control of a building or place (lodgment, school, factory, university department), to appropriate its resources and to expel members of rival groups so as to prevent their organizing there. Here we see an inversion of Ingold’s insight that lives are led “not inside places but through, around, to and from them” (2011b: 148): the factional apartheid governing Istanbul’s places sought to put a stop to the active perambulations of wayfaring, Ingold’s preferred term for the experience of inhabiting the environment. Post-occupation, users’ relationships with rivals were mediated through their possessive transforming of places’ visual, acoustic, and performative elements.
Equally significant, the perceptual attunements constituted by enacting activism were not only instigated in confrontation with contemporaries. In the urban assemblage itself, the acts, agency, and efficacy of predecessors were also encountered. The intentions of the dead lived on in places, in their socio-material distributions, in their trails for movement, and in their scenes for action, thought, or expression; indeed, given their constant immersion in them places constituted activists’ bodies as much as their bodies marked places. Ingold describes this process in somewhat neutral terms: “Human children,” he writes, “grow up in environments furnished by the work of previous generations, and as they do they come literally to carry the forms of their dwelling in their bodies—in specific skills, sensibilities and dispositions” (2000: 186) “The house is a book read by the body,” says Bourdieu (1977: 90). The words previous generations here are vague, as well as politically naive—in many urban places these past acts of spatial “furnishing” are more precisely described as initiated by militant groups, who may seek to effect a targeted rupture within the environment and its dwellers as much as to ensure continuity or evolution.7 Indeed, in deliberate projects of urbicide, places and environments are as vulnerable to forced rearrangement and destruction as the people they house.
As we will see in chapter 3, in the course of the twentieth century Istanbul has witnessed a number of ruptures in its history of dwelling. Most significant is the forced migration or expulsion from the city of its indigenous Armenian, Greek, and Jewish inhabitants in the first four decades of the Turkish Republic (1920–1960), enabling others to benefit from their fashioning of its environment. In the novel Huzur, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1949–2011) describes another rupture, reflected in the perturbation and melancholy experienced by Istanbul’s inhabitants at the Kemalists’ selected transformation (in the same years) of the “sensuous presentations” (Casey 1996: 22) of late-Ottoman Istanbul, including most palpably of the familiar sonorities of the city by the muting of Ottoman music. These two events were aspects of a nationalistic transformation of Istanbul, antagonistically aimed at its cosmopolitanism and at the life-worlds of its inhabitants.
The 1980 military coup and the junta’s subsequent counterrevolutionary reassembling of the city caused a third rupture between inhabitants and environments in Istanbul. Activists in particular were systematically stripped of their ability to place-make, first in the dissolution through torture of the fragile concordances established between their bodies and Istanbul’s places; second, in the prohibition forbidding collective interaction in public with other inhabitants of the city; and third, by denying them involvement in new post-coup political processes that generated revised affordances in the city. In brief, Edward Casey is wrong to say that places are “generative and regenerative on [their] own schedule” (1996: 26). Even as places are sui generis—nothing can ever not be in place—they also allow themselves to be recruited by the political imagination, their ongoing fabrication shrinking or expanding in-built affordances for action, in the process entitling some groups and disenfranchising others.
For a number of reasons, the work of Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space might here be usefully contrasted with Gibson’s naive presentation of environmental affordances, as well as with Ingold’s (absent) political analysis. For one, the book was first published in 1974, making its analysis contemporary enough with the practices described above to have a descriptive, analytic, and politically invested relationship to militant leftist movements in that period.8 A shared Marxist vocabulary informs both the broader socialist movement’s effort in Turkey to situate individual experiences in the historical development of the political economy, and Lefebvre’s text, as demonstrated for example in its stress on the centrality of the mode of production in the generation of spatial order. More specifically, the ambitions and tactics of these political movements account for what Lefebvre describes as the “special practical and theoretical status” that he gives to the category of appropriation in the book (1991: 368).
To identify the importance of appropriation, Lefebvre identifies three aspects of social space: first there is a society’s “spatial practice,” “which embraces production and reproduction” (1991: 33) and “secretes that society’s space” (1991: 38). Secondly, there exists “representations of space” or conceptualized space, the space of planners, urbanists and, most paradigmatically, of architects. This is a “visual space, a space reduced to blueprints, to mere images”—the architect has a “representation of space, one which is bound to graphic elements—to sheets of paper, plans, elevations, sections, perspective views of facades, modules, and so on” (1991: 361). Last (and confusingly named) there are “representational spaces,” the spaces of users and inhabitants, spaces as lived (not conceptualized). “When compared with the abstract space of the experts, the space of the everyday activities of users is a concrete one, which is to say, subjective” (1991: 362). It is also the “dominated—and hence passively experienced—space that the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (1991: 39) (my italics).
Lefebvre’s notion of appropriation involves more than inhabitants’ negating of urban space, their using of the city as the setting for political struggle, or even of their diverting of existing space for new purposes (1991: 168). Ideally, it also entails the creation of counter-spaces, of a new urban morphology. Hence Lefebvre gives cardinal importance to class struggle: because the “secretion” of space in capitalist society is dominated by the bourgeois class, only class struggle has the capacity to transcend the passivity of users of space, creating in the process new environments, places, and interrelationships.9
Despite the rather schematic nature of his model, Lefebvre’s theory illuminates certain dimensions of activists’ experiences and practices in Istanbul. However, their accounts encourage us to revise certain of its emphases. For example, The Production of Space displays an orthodox Marxist preference for tracing out how the programming of everyday life by the capitalist mode of production renders the users of space passive. Thus, actors enter capitalism’s “secretion of space” after the fact of its production, which simultaneously preconditions their relationships, actions and consciousness in it: “Every space is already in place before the appearance in it of actors; those actors are collective as well as individual subjects inasmuch as the individuals are always members of groups or classes seeking to appropriate the space in question. This pre-existence of space conditions the subject’s presence, action and discourse, his competence and performance; yet the subject’s presence, action and discourse, at the same time as they presuppose this space, also negate it” (Lefebvre 1991: 57).
As we will see in chapters 4 through 7, the situation in Istanbul was much messier. By paying particular attention to the phenomenological dimensions of social life—in this case to how activists perceived phenomena (bodies, factions, violence, places, ideologies, suffering)—we grasp better how urban things were constituted by militants’ intentions and simultaneously reckoned with. It is not a criticism of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space to note that its positing of three dimensions of social space is in its own terms a “representation of space.” Yet Lefebvre clearly values a phenomenological “bias” in urban research when he argues in the same work that some artists, and even a few writers and philosophers “who describe and aspire to do no more than describe” (1991: 39) may engage in their work with space as “directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (1991: 39) (my emphasis).
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