Abstract
The security bill that was proposed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in 2014 has sparked controversy both within and outside the Parliament of Turkey. Yet, with AKP’s majority, the bill – which includes an anti-masking regulation for protests – was passed in spring 2015. In this article, first I demonstrate a partial mapping of the rhetoric employed by mainstream politics in Turkey, to underline that any oppositional political activity on the streets has the potential to be labeled a ‘terrorist’ one – and most have been. Then, by taking one of the most prominent examples of these events, the Gezi uprising, I discuss the affirmative biopolitical potentialities of the uses of masks that the law criminalizes. Lastly, I situate the law globally in relation to the protest movements, on the one hand, and anti-masking laws on the other.
The security bill which was proposed in November 2014 by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government passed the Parliament of Turkey on 27 March 2015 and was signed by the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on 3 April. Along with expanding police powers, such as detention and search capabilities, the new law foresees three to five years of imprisonment for any individual ‘who conceals or partially conceals their face during a demonstration or public assembly that turns into propaganda for a terrorist organisation’ (Human Rights Watch, 2014). In other words, it criminalizes the use of the mask that the concealment of the face denotes in protests. In this short piece I am going to discuss what this law suggests in the present political situation by taking the case of Turkey as a departure point to explore the contemporary biopolitics of the mask. Furthermore, I will situate it globally in relation to the protest movements, on the one hand, and anti-mask laws on the other. In a recent TCS special issue, ‘Governing Emergencies’ (2015), Peter Adey, Ben Anderson and Stephen Graham set out to map the ‘proliferation’ of the terms ‘emergency’ and ‘exception’ in the global context. In this piece, however, I am going to focus on Turkey, which has quite a particular history in regards to these.
Night-time mass protests in Ankara: events of 7–8 June 2013. Mstyslav Chernov (Creative Commons).
Terrorism(s)
Let us start unpacking what this law indicates. The last decade has proved that Turkey is home to some novel types of terrorism that may be unknown to the rest of the world. As the then Interior Minister Idris Naim Şahin put it in 2011, referring to a wave of operations targeting people associated with the Kurdish political movement at various levels, these categories include ‘artistic’, ‘scientific’, ‘poetic’ and ‘journalistic’ terrorism (Çubukçu, 2011). Oddities are not restricted to kinds of terrorism but also are present relating to the quantity of convictions. According to an Associated Press report, Turkey accounts for a third of the total of 35,000 terrorism convictions worldwide in the decade after 9/11 (Mendoza, 2011). Considering the abundant usage of the term and the number of convictions, one might think that any oppositional political assembly is on the verge of being labelled a terrorist one, and this is not far from reality – as has been proved in the last years.
The techniques and discourses of state of emergency rule (Olağanüstü Hâl – OHAL) that characterized the reality of the predominantly Kurdish provinces of Turkey – at times de jure, at other times de facto – from the late 1980s onwards has started to become more familiar to the wider public in the first half of the 2010s (of course, considering Turkey’s history with military coups and martial law, we cannot assume citizens anywhere are complete novices). Along with banning access to Taksim Square, which has been a Mecca for the labour movement for decades, a virtually complete lockdown on transportation networks and public spaces was realized in Istanbul by the militarized riot police during May Days in the last three years. These events, where interventions to right to freedom of assembly and use of excessive force are regular practices, have become vastly mediated realities that have pervaded the collective memories of the peoples of Turkey. Yet perhaps the most crucial point in this timeline is the Gezi Park demonstrations.
With Gezi, individuals of any political affiliation (or lack thereof) experienced what has been well known to the Kurdish and labour movements. What started as a small-scale peaceful protest to preserve a public park quickly evolved into a nation-wide uprising with an unprecedented level of participation against the undemocratic actions of the AKP, with police brutality as its catalyst (Kuymulu, 2013). One of the greatest challenges the AKP government had to face in their 13-year continuous rule, it did not take long for them to employ the regular rhetoric that is crystallized in the words of the then minister of European Union Affairs, Egemen Bağış, on 16 June 2013: ‘from this point on anybody who remains there [in Gezi Park] will be treated as terrorists’ (Hurriyet Daily News, 2013). It is in these circumstances that concealment of the face – in other words, the use of the mask – that the law criminalizes becomes vital to protesters. To explore why and how, I will discuss the prevalent uses of the mask in Gezi under two categories: first, the concealment of the face to prevent identification (e.g. through the use of a balaclava, bandana or Guy Fawkes mask), and, second, the use of gas masks to maintain respiration.
Gezi Park, 11 June 2013. Burak Su (Creative Commons).
Mask(s)
In his book Terror from the Air, Peter Sloterdijk demonstrates how, in the 20th century, both through ‘gas warfare’ of the First World War and ‘genocidal gas extermination’ during the Second World War, ‘the active manipulation of breathing air first became a cultural [hence, a political] matter’ (2009: 47). Through this genealogy, then, we can start locating the use of ‘negative air conditioning’ by riot police as a contemporary tool of control, and hence the use of gas masks by protesters as a tool of resistance. As media theorist Jussi Parikka posits in his article, ‘McLuhan at Taksim Square’, due to the excessive use of tear gas during Gezi, utilization of gas masks by protesters was a necessity in order to access public spaces – for the public to reclaim such spatiality and perform their right to demonstrate (2014: 91–3). Here, following Parikka, we can say that the gas mask operates as a medium in a McLuhanian sense, as an extension of the body, that renders the hostile environment habitable to its user. And the habitability that is attained through the mask signals a biopolitical condition.
I propose to consider this through contemporary political philosopher Roberto Esposito’s ‘paradigm of immunization’. In search of an affirmative biopolitics, Esposito’s project does not consider ‘life’ and ‘politics’ as two separate domains in relation to each other, but as two elements of an ‘indivisible whole’ with immunity at its core. In his words, ‘immunity is the power to preserve life’ (2008: 46). The gas mask in our case then can be seen as an immunitary medium that sustains life, hence political action, in settings rendered hostile as such. And this law is a way to strip off the vital medium from the (potential) protester – a measure of pre-emption coupled with ‘negative air conditioning’. Yet maintaining the attack on respiration is only half of what this law denotes.
Whether it is deemed functional or symbolic, the use of masks in most cases conceals the identity of the wearer and, in the present maybe more than ever, this too indicates an immunitary capacity. Ubiquitous surveillance, to quote common knowledge, is an essential part of our lived realities in the 21st century. CCTV networks, like the MOBESE system in the case of Turkey, represent only a part of the instruments of this regime of surveillance. One of the less obvious tools here is participatory media platforms such as Facebook that contribute to the techniques and technologies of identification in this biometric age. In a special section on privacy in the journal Science, John Bohannon reports that Facebook’s DeepFace algorithm ‘is now as accurate as a human being at a few constrained facial recognition tasks’ (2015: 492). Soon automated tools of facial recognition will exceed human capacities, and this will further complicate issues of mass identification for coming protests. So perhaps more than ever our faces are obstacles for political expression and we shall be immunized from the machinic gaze. This law, then, is also a way to negate such immunization through the mask.
The Global Context
Examples like the Guy Fawkes mask, which is now present globally – both on the street in not-directly-related gatherings, such as the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring and Gezi, and also on screens, as exemplified with its use by the hacktivist group Anonymous – manifest a complex epidemiology that transcends the borders of the nation-state. It indicates a politics of images in the networked screen culture where dissemination of the mask can be seen as a contagion of an image – an immunizing image. Thus, this law is a local means of containment of a global phenomenon.
Indeed, Turkey is not the only country with anti-masking laws in operation. In the first days of Occupy Wall Street five protesters were charged with violation of a (revitalized) 150-year-old law that banned the use of masks in gatherings (Gardiner and Firger, 2011). Canada passed their own new law in 2013 that decrees up to 10 years of imprisonment for the same action (RT, 2013). Comparable laws also exist in European countries such as France (Assemblée Nationale, 2010) and Denmark (Mills, 2010).
It is under these conditions of governance and criminalization that the mask’s biopolitical significance amasses. And its border-crossing presence might be a material sign for the emerging solidarities between movements around the globe.
Footnotes
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http://theoryculturesociety.org/yigit-soncul-on-masks-and-emergency-in-turkey/