A “Magic and Poetic” Moment of Dissensus: Aesthetics and Politics in the June 2013 (Gezi Park) Protests in Turkey

Introduction: Turkey’s Longest Summer

On the night of May 31, 2013, a protest against the destruction of part of a public park at the heart of İstanbul became the spark of nationwide protests and clashes that went on for more than a month. The protests, later dubbed the “Gezi protests,” “Gezi movement” or the “June Uprising,” took place in all but one of the provinces of Turkey, were attended by millions of people, and as such, can be considered the biggest mass movement in the history of modern Turkey after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution in the Ottoman Empire. The extent and intensity of the popular anger against the government unleashed after the forceful eviction of the activists from the park was a surprise to everyone. No observer or expert could predict that millions of people would take to the streets for weeks and persevere despite heavy police repression. The balance sheet of the protests is staggering. Public places were occupied in 79 cities; the police used 3,000 tons of pressurized water and 150,000 tear gas grenades to disperse the protesters. As a result, six protesters and a police officer lost their lives and around 7,500 people were injured—200 severely; the number of people taken into custody exceeded 3,000 (Gürcan & Peker, 2014).

Although the trigger was the determination of a handful of activists to protect a park, the diversity in the demands voiced by the protesters who were in the streets for more than a month reflected the multiplicity of factors that was behind the eruption of the protest movement. One major cause of the protests was the construction-based economic growth strategy of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—Justice and Development Party) government, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As this strategy has its economic, ecological, and social limits, its continuation required blatant disregard for the environmental and social costs of the government’s rent-seeking and building frenzy. Such systematic disregard has in the recent years been met with an array of urban and rural based social movements that try to oppose evictions, gentrifications, and the destruction of nature with increasing tenacity and popular participation, and an enlarging repertoire of tactics of resistance. ¹ In this vein, the protests that centered on the Gezi Park in Istanbul showed that the reaction of the public against the vicious effects of the building frenzy had reached a boiling point. The construction project in the park was one too many.

The Gezi Park had a special significance as well. The park is adjacent to Taksim Square, the central square of Istanbul. It has been a symbol and a contested site for the Turkish left at least since 1977 when a Mayday Rally held in the square ended with gunfire coming from the rooftops of nearby buildings and an ensuing bloodbath. The Erdoğan government introduced a further ideological element to the controversy over the park as its project involved a reconstruction of the former Artillery Barracks, which had been built in 1806, severely damaged during the reactionary rebellion against the constitutional regime in the Ottoman capital in 1909 and demolished in 1940.

The protests can also be considered as the culmination of years of discontent and anger against the policies of the conservative AKP government. The bulk of the discontent stemmed from AKP’s increasing intervention into the lifestyles and values of secular citizens. In May 2012, Prime Minister Erdoğan initiated a wide-ranging controversy about abortion, calling the practice “tantamount to murder” (Ahmadi, 2012). Erdoğan repeatedly fueled similar debates by declaring in various occasions that single adults should get married as soon as possible and families should have at least three children. Heated debates about the consumption of alcohol also played a role in the accumulation of popular rage against the government. On May 23, days before the eruption of the protests, the parliament passed a new law restricting the sale and advertisement of alcoholic drinks. It is not surprising that many protesters defied the law by drinking beers in the parks that they occupied, for example, in the Kuğulu Park in Ankara, by raising their bottles and cans and chanting “Cheers Tayyip!”

This article ² starts with a brief account of the temporal and spatial extension of the protests. A discussion on the class character of the protests follows. Several commentators and analysts (Ete & Taştan, 2013; Keyder, 2013; Tuğal, 2013; Wacquant, 2014a, 2014b) have seen the movement as a middle-class one because a public park lay at the center of the protests; professionals and white-collar employees heavily participated; lifestyle-related concerns, such as reproductive rights and alcohol consumption discussed above, were visibly involved; and artistic and cultural symbols played an important part in the protests. Some of those analyses have been inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology (Gürakar, 2014; Öğütle & Göker, 2014; Wacquant, 2014b; also see Yalçın, 2015, pp. 98-115). After a critique of such approaches on theoretical grounds and on the basis of their inapplicability to Gezi protests, an empirical criticism of the middle-class movement thesis is offered. I then argue that Jacques Rancière’s approach to politics provides a much more promising starting point for understanding social movements such as the June protests in Turkey. Rancière’s theory of dissensus, as well as his refined discussion of the relation between art and politics, constitute the ground on which the pervasiveness of art and aesthetic political arts in the protests is dealt with in this study. Drawing upon a Rancièrean notion of politics and inspired by Peter Weiss (2013), I focus on the aesthetic political acts within the movement, in particular, on the visibility of the Second New Wave (SNW) (İkinci Yeni) poetry.

“Distinction”: A Middle-Class Uprising?

During and after the June uprising, some commentators have argued that the protests had a dominant middle-class character (Keyder, 2013; Tuğal, 2013). They have stressed the extensive participation of better-paid professionals and the relative reluctance of some white-collar (waitresses, salespersons, subordinate office clerks, etc.) and blue-collar workers to participate (Tuğal, 2013). These analysts have seen the protests as basically a resistance of secular middle-class Turks who wanted to protect their lifestyles and living spaces against what they perceive as the persistent encroachment of an Islamist government in alliance with a parvenu bourgeoisie.

One of the most prominent figures to present the Gezi protests as a middle-class movement is Loïc Wacquant, a student of Pierre Bourdieu. Wacquant argues that

[i]n Gezi we saw a fraction of the Istanbul population, the new cultural bourgeoisie of intellectuals, urban professionals, the urban middle-class rising to assert the rights of cultural capital against an incipient alliance of economic capital—commercial interests—and political capital—the state deciding to transform this park into a mall (. . .) We see bearers of cultural capital, the new cultural bourgeoisie of the city rising, and in a sense protesting this and wanting to propose a different use of the construction of the city. (Göker, 2014; also see Çavdar, 2014; Wacquant, 2014a, 2014b)

This characterization of the Gezi protests is in line with what he has argued in his previous works (Wacquant, 2008, 2015). Wacquant has put forward that neoliberalism has largely weakened and pacified the urban poor and the working class. As a result, it is urban classes with cultural capital that defend their urban spaces against the neoliberal onslaught. Their struggles are often based on a desire to protect and augment their cultural capital against the state and the economic capital (see Saraçoğlu, 2015). According to Wacquant, when this happens, when those with high cultural capital begin to defend themselves, their lifestyles and urban spaces against the holders of economic capital and the state, they, whether deliberately or inadvertently, exclude those without any form of capital from those spaces which now acquire a new meaning in line with the class interests of middle classes, intellectuals, and professionals. This, so the argument goes, is what happened in the case of Gezi Park protests where middle classes tended to exclude lower classes and close the space to the latter by marking it with their own cultural capital and symbolic markers. The aesthetic practices and art works so conspicuous in the protests were thus instruments that gave the movement a middle-class character.

The Gezi protests indeed involved symbols, cultural objects, aesthetic practices, and art at an unprecedented scale in Turkish political history. Thus, it seems at first sight plausible to argue that the middle-class activists used their cultural capital as reflected in such practices to distinguish themselves not only from economic capital but also lower classes and the urban poor of Istanbul.

This tendency to make Gezi into a middle-class movement is problematic, however, from a number of respects. The first and more general problem is related to the inability of such analyses to contextualize the protests as they focus on the profile of participants and limit the discussion of the “Gezi activist” to the park itself and to the initial phases of the protests. Moreover, disregarding the political context in the country, they miss the continuity between the protests and certain events and similar protests of the previous years. Therefore, these analysts fail to see that the protests were a counter-hegemonic challenge to the domination of the power bloc embodied in the AKP government (Saraçoglu, 2015).

In his very influential work Distinction, Bourdieu argues that (a) patterns of cultural production and consumption are determined by the socioeconomic structure and (b) the approach and theories that attribute supreme value to the purity of art were historically developed to serve as weapons in the symbolic exercise of class power. Symbolic systems, which aesthetics and art are part of, reinforce class relations as “their specific logic confirms the general logic of class determined practice” in the habitus of the dominant class (Garnham, 1986, pp. 423-424).

The cultural field is not autonomous and serves to reinforce class relations also because of the specific characteristics of cultural objects and practices and the historical development of art. It is occupied by objects and practices that have minimal or no use value, which are precisely for this reason in a perfect position to reinforce and legitimize the domination of the bourgeois class. According to Bourdieu (1984), all cultural practices and aesthetic preferences are closely linked to the educational level of the individual and to his or her social origin. Therefore, there is no such thing as innocent taste; taste is a powerful marker of social class. Rejecting the notion of pure gaze and an aesthetic disposition isolated from class habitus, Bourdieu links the ability to appreciate art works and cultural objects to a cultural competence that is acquired in the family and/or learned during formal education. In that sense, the capacity to see (voir) depends directly on the extent and the level of internalization of knowledge (savoir; Bourdieu, 1984).

Works of art, then, require two conditions for being appreciated. First, an aesthetic disposition is necessary, that is a willingness to see the world from a distance, to isolate objects and practices from the immediacy of social reproduction. Second, specific competences, such as knowledge about art objects and practices must be acquired either through family settings or formal education (Garnham, 1986, pp. 427-428). Both of the prerequisites are incorporated in the habitus of the bourgeoisie; the workers lack the aesthetic disposition as described by Bourdieu, as they lack the competence acquired in informal family or neighborhood settings, or a good formal education that would teach them how to appreciate art. The conclusion is obvious: The working class cannot appreciate and therefore appropriate art.

In a literary work, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Peter Weiss (2013) focuses on the same question in a more nuanced way and his answers are invariably more complex and fecund. Starting from the opening scene of the novel in which the three young proletarian protagonists engage into a long conversation in front of the Pergamon Frieze about that particular art work, Weiss repeatedly brings up the same issue: Can the working people make sense of and appropriate art works that have been produced for utterly different reasons, such as to show the power of powerholders, to solidify religion, to please the bourgeoisie, or, to make a Bourdieusiean injunction, to culturally exclude the proletariat? After a discussion of more than 200 pieces of paintings, literary works and other works of art, Weiss’s answer is affirmative. As part of his attempts to answer a similar set of questions in a more philosophically grounded way, Rancière (2010) mentions how the “militant workers of the 1840s broke out of the circle of domination also by reading and writing—not popular and militant but—‘high’ literature” (loc. 2228), ⁵ something that the protagonists of Weiss also strive to do.

Moreover, Bourdieu categorically denies seeing appropriation of art as an aesthetic (meaning sensory—see below) experience. At the least, recent developments in neuroscience which suggest that contemplation of art works, especially visual ones, might have neurological bases (see Kandel, 2012) contradict the claim about the irrelevance of the real for the symbolic field. Finally, he refuses to see an alternative to two extremes: (a) the popular (working-class?) aesthetics as an ethos—the aesthetic culture of necessity and (b) the notion of pure gaze and autonomous art—the Kantian notion of aesthetics. Rancière shows that alternative positions are possible and the questions about the relevance of art for progressive politics can be best answered from that middle ground. Contrary to the gist of Bourdieu’s analysis of the cultural field, Rancière argues that the contemporary aesthetic regime of art provides a certain degree of autonomy to art works vis-à-vis both the conditions of their production and a specific social function.

Whether inspired by Bourdieu or not, the analyses that underline the middle-class character of the protests also suffer from empirical deficiencies. First, relevant data suggest that middle class in Turkey has not shown any significant growth in the recent years (Tonak, 2013). Therefore, it is not meaningful to associate the protests with a rising middle class. Second, that Gezi was a middle-class uprising is based on the assumption that certain groups were missing: slum residents, blue-collar workers, non–university graduates who work in lower positions in the service sector, and students (Boratav, 2013). Although decisive research about the profiles of the participants has not been produced yet, the existing evidence indicates otherwise. The majority of the participants of the June uprising both in the park and elsewhere in the country were individuals who were unconnected to formal political and social organizations. On the other hand, there were organized groups in the protests who were very instrumental in repelling the initial police attack on the park and Taksim Square. In addition to a number of left-wing organizations, residents of Gazi neighborhood in Istanbul, among others, and football fan groups, in particular Besiktaş’s Çarşı group served as the organized vanguard of the movement (Öztürkmen, 2014). Gazi neighborhood is one of the poorer areas in Istanbul and football fans, often accused of hooliganism and vandalism, are anything but middle class. Moreover, the park and Taksim was indeed marked with a number of cultural symbols, but such markings were not meant to exclude lower classes of the city. I discuss these markings in detail below. The profile of the victims of police violence during the protests suggest likewise: All of them were young men of modest backgrounds. Admittedly, this could also be explained by the possibility that they took greater risks than the average protester. Even so, we can at least be sure that working-class youth were present in the movement, although we might never know the actual proportion of working-class participants in the protests.

One can indeed see the June Uprising, as Korkut Boratav does, as a working-class movement in the larger sense of the term. For Boratav (2013), the protests constituted a mature, class-based resistance as skilled, educated workers, students (future proletarians), unemployed high-school and university graduates, service-sector employees working in unskilled jobs blue-collar workers, and professionals reacted against the attempts of the bourgeoisie-state to create huge profits by confiscating urban public land. Groups such as unemployed engineers, unemployed or substitute teachers, those who work on a temporary basis in sectors like health, IT, advertising, and publishing, in small law and architecture companies, those who are employed on a project basis in NGOs, universities and research companies, and call-center workers joined the ranks of protesters (Doğan, 2013, p. 97). Such “new” members of the working class were joined by the blue-collar workers of poorer neighborhoods, especially predominantly Alevi ones where the threat of political Islam was felt more acutely.

The ranks of the protesters, in short, were heavily populated by the groups most directly threatened by the neoliberal hegemonic project of AKP in three senses. First, some of the protesters were those who had suffered from the labor and economic policies of the government which forced an increasingly more precarious labor market upon employees. Second, the rent-driven spatial policies of AKP meant that many segments of the above-mentioned groups would be pushed away from the city centers (Doğan, 2013), resulting in a decreased capacity to express themselves culturally. Third, the AKP government had implemented policies which forced a decisive shift from a redistributive urbanization from which the urban poor can benefit to a certain extent to an urbanization controlled by finance capital and big construction companies (Gündoğdu, 2013).

Whatever the objections the protesters raised against the economic policies of the government, there is no question that a visible resentment against AKP’s increasingly authoritarian politics united the various middle- and working-class groups that joined the movement. Yet the obvious anti-authoritarian tendency of the Gezi movement should not be considered as an attempt of groups rich with social and cultural capital to protect their lifestyles from conservative encroachment. Indeed, there is a strong link between the authoritarianism of AKP and its economic policies, in particular, its spatial policies and politics. During the AKP years, the rapid commodification of space has triggered an equally rapid movement of the political system in a nondemocratic direction. According to Tarık Şengül (2015), the speed with which the urban transformation projects have been carried out has required the suspension of democratic mechanisms of decision making and control, which were seen as impediments to speed. In addition, coercive means amounting to a campaign of accumulation by dispossession has often accompanied commodification of space, especially wherever there were signs of resistance.

Therefore, that a public park constituted the center of attention of protesters by no means justifies the conclusion that the protests were part of a middle-class movement. In fact, the Gezi Park itself should be incorporated into the discussion about the class character of the protests as its importance for the movement was more than symbolic. When talking about the Gezi Park protests, Wacquant made an analogy with the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, stressing that if these gardens in Paris, which are very close to his home, were to be demolished, he would do the same (Büyükokutan, 2014). This would have been simply an inopportune analogy had it not been for Wacquant’s insistence that the movement was a middle-class one. The Luxembourg Gardens lie in one of the most expensive areas of Paris. The Gezi Park, however, is situated in the commercial and transportation center of Istanbul through which hundreds of thousands of people living in very diverse parts of the city pass. As a result, the park is used by people with very different class backgrounds; it had not been an exclusive area of the middle class or those with cultural capital before the protests broke out.

The main dividing line in Turkey during the summer of 2013 was not class or culture, but the differing attitudes toward the form of politics practiced and imposed by the ruling party. In general, rather than creating distinctions between those who have cultural capital and those who do not, the June Uprising in Turkey has actually bridged those gaps by bringing a very large and diverse body of people around a common political position. Moreover, it was not only the discontent felt toward the government policies or nature of demands formulated during the protests that made people from very different walks of life come together. The protest movement itself, its language, its evolution, its ambiguity and more important, for the purposes of this article, the forms that the protests took made it appealing to Turkish citizens with very diverse backgrounds. Here, I specifically refer to the aesthetic and artistic activities which were an integral component of the movement. The “aesthetic political acts” were very influential in (a) enlarging the space of the protests and (b) making masses feel connected to the movement.

“Aesthetic Political Acts” and Rancière’s Theory of Dissensus

Rancière criticizes the common tendency to see art and politics as two separate fields of human thought and activity. In contrast, according to him, the specificity and the commonalty of art and politics is that both entail “suspension of the rules governing normal experience (. . .) [and] an innovative leap from the logic that ordinarily governs human situations” (Corcoran, 2010, loc. 108). Rancière calls this disruption via suspension as “dissensus,” as opposed to “consensus,” which is based on the idea of the proper and the normal order of things. Art and politics disrupt consensus by verifying the presumption of equality in different ways. While politics operates through an open-ended set of practices based on the principle of equality of all in and as the community, art brings the assumption of equality into the modes of representation (Corcoran, 2010, loc. 412).

As to the subject of those set of practices, Rancière does not reduce politics to an exercise of power by a predetermined subject over other predetermined ones. Politics “does not simply presuppose a break with the ‘normal’ distribution of positions that defines who exercises power and who is subject to it. It also requires a break with the idea that there exist dispositions ‘specific’ to these positions” (Rancière, 2010, loc. 670). To return to the Gezi protests, if politics has no preexisting subject, the argument that the subject of the protests is middle class is to completely miss the specificity of politics involved in the movement. The expectation that people occupying certain positions (middle class, professionals, the poor, blue-collar workers, those who have cultural capital . . .) will have definite and foreseeable propensities in the political field is to misconstrue the very meaning of the political.

The subject of egalitarian democratic politics is the dēmos, which is necessarily ambivalent, fluid, and constantly in formation. Rancière gives different names to the subject of politics: the anonymous, the uncounted, the unaccounted, those who are not to speak, those who have no part, and so on. The anonymous demands to be identified, the uncounted wants to be counted (in), the unaccounted pushes for being accounted for, those who are not to speak would like to make their voices heard, those who have no part plea to take part . . . These demands to be heard, seen, and recognized are effective, however, when they do bring about a change in the perception of social space. According to Rancière, therefore, politics is aesthetic in this basic sense; it is grounded in and acquires meaning through sensory experience.

Rancière’s notion of politics is aesthetic in another sense which can be understood in relation to his concept of partage du sensible (distribution of the sensible; see Panagia, 2010). Partage du sensible involves a double movement of inclusion and exclusion “in which the abstract and arbitrary forms of symbolization of hierarchy are embodied as perceptive givens” (Rancière, 2011, p. 7). Politics is the challenge to and the disruption of the existing distribution of the sensible. Either affirmed (“the police”) or disrupted (the politics), the system of what is shared and what is exclusive is determined in sensory experience because the self-evident facts of the distribution are based on the horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible and what can be said, thought, or done (Rancière, 2004, loc. 1543; Rancière, 2010, loc. 785; also see Rancière, 1999, pp. 28-31).

Politics is aesthetic in a third and final sense: “The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen” (Rancière, 2010, loc. 796). As opposed to the space of the “police,” where people just move along, circulate, appear, and disappear simultaneously, politics transforms the “space of ‘moving-along,’ of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens” (Rancière, 2010, loc. 802). All of the actions that “act upon” and transform the space are necessarily aesthetic as there is no way they can be performed but sensually.

In these three senses, therefore, as Slavoj Žižek (2004) underlines, radical emancipatory politics is necessarily and inherently aesthetic (loc. 1279). Conversely, in order to be emancipatory and egalitarian, art should be “political.” At the intersection of this mutual relationship between art and politics lie aesthetic political acts. The “aesthetic” in the concept of “aesthetic political acts” should be understood in its ancient Greek sense: sensual perceptive experience; a way of knowing and understanding via bodily sensory mechanisms (Bakçay Çolak, 2014, p. 338). An aesthetic political act is by definition transformative of existing social relations. It does not limit itself to voicing a concern or expressing a demand but is an attempt to realize, here-and-now, at least part of what is being demanded for the future.

Moreover, aesthetic political acts constantly blur boundaries—between what is acceptable and what is not, what is possible and what is not, what is political and what is not, and so on. Such acts might include festivity, joy, humor, and laughter as forms of resistance but cannot be reduced to them. ⁶ Joy, festivity, and irony are not necessarily emancipatory or do not always transcend boundaries (Bakçay Çolak, 2014). The participants of the Gezi protests witnessed this quite clearly as, toward the end of the protests, humor and irony which had been part and parcel of the effectual subversiveness of the movement degenerated into cynicism and defeatism. Moreover, the artistic and humorous element in oppositional movements could easily fall prey to mainstream media and simply reproduce the “spectacle” (see Debord, 1995).

Aesthetic political acts, then, can be defined as transformative (of the relation of human beings to other human beings, to space and to society) actions that use the common ground created by the aesthetics of politics and politics of aesthetics to make egalitarian claims on the part of those who are excluded in the distribution of the sensible, who are not allowed to partake (the uncounted, the unaccounted for, those who are not to speak, the unseen, the anonymous). Aesthetic political acts affect a new distribution of the sensible and a concomitant subjectivization of the anonymous.

Disrupting the “Distribution of the Sensible” in June 2013 Protests

In modern times, politics is reduced to a series of technical processes that are supervised and carried out by professional politicians and bureaucrats. In parallel, the people are generalized into larger notions in an attempt to make them into apolitical sociological categories (Corcoran, 2010). The AKP government in Turkey has used both of these techniques extensively and skillfully since 2003. Erdoğan and other AKP officials time and again have reiterated that the political system gets input from “the nation” every 4 years and in between every election, all critical decisions should be left to the politicians who have gotten elected. As a result, the government has labeled all attempts to limit and check its power as attempts to curb the “national will” as expressed in the elections.

The concept of the “national will” has operated as a tool to depoliticize for the demos, but it has been particularly exclusive in the context of the distribution of the sensible. The government has consistently refused to count all of the people as part of the “nation.” Only those who voted for and supported the AKP have been considered as eligible to partake in the nation and the leading political elite have lost no opportunity to symbolically affirm this massive exclusion. Those who voted for the Kurdish party, for example, were at best naïve citizens manipulated by the Kurdish separatists and at worst, a bunch of traitors. The supporters of the center left secular CHP were against the authentic values of the nation as the nation was supposed to be pious. The Alevis were by definition not part of the nation as it was necessarily Sunni.

Thus, it would be a violent reduction to see the Gezi protests only as an attempt of certain segments of the population to protect their secular lifestyles. We see this clearly in the disproportion between the radicality of certain steps that the government took and the intensity of the protest movement that erupted. The regulation of the sale of alcohol was controversial, but it was not an extremely harsh one. There was always a visible divergence between the discourse of the government in gender-related matters and the actual steps taken. Finally, the Gezi Park was not the first green area in big cities to be targeted for land rent and construction profits.

Yet the protests erupted and turned into a nationwide movement against the government. The movement, then, was the culmination of anger and disappointment of a large segment of the dēmos for being systematically excluded and discounted. The protests showed that sustaining a distribution of the sensible that leaves almost half of the population out was impossible. In this sense the “June Uprising” was a formidable moment of politics against “the police.” Of course, all of the participants were not among the poorest of the society. Many white-collar workers and professionals filled in the ranks of the protesters. And, to use Bourdieusian terminology, there were those with significant social capital. The protest movement, however, was a moment of subjectivization, not of the wretched, but the anonymous.

“The Poetry of June”: The Second New Wave

Poetry was perhaps the single most important field of artistic practice that left its mark on the protests. Countless verses were written down on walls as graffiti, put up as signs, posted as Tweets or Facebook status updates or simply recited in spaces of protest. Especially strong among the younger protesters was a tendency to embrace “İkinci Yeni” poetry movement. It is indeed curious that poetry figured so prominently during the Gezi Park protests. Dubbed the “Second New,” “Second New Wave,” or “Second Turkish Avant-garde” in English, this was a poetic movement of the 1950s and 1960s associated with names of Cemal Süreya, Edip Cansever, Ece Ayhan, İlhan Berk, Turgut Uyar, ⁹ and so on. The SNW poetry treated “the poem as an object of the deepest subjectivity, to emphasize the self, the individual, and the poetic possibilities of the wounded unconscious” (Messo, 2009, p. 10). Having been influenced by surrealism, the SNW poets played with language, consciously deformed word structures, and experimented with syntax. Despite their differences, these poets were united in rejecting literary and aesthetic conventions and transgressing formal, moral, and aesthetic boundaries. In the highly politicized atmosphere of pre-1980 Turkey, the SNW poetry was criticized for being abstract, obscure, ambiguous, introverted, formalist, and unintelligible. Socialist critics condemned this avant-garde poetry as elitist, individualist, and detached from the people, their lives and language. It is, thus, very interesting that the SNW poets, who produced ambiguous and metaphorical verses, but not socialist realist poets and the familiar names often associated with oppositional politics in Turkey, became artistic heroes of the Gezi movement.

I suggest five factors in trying to explain this rather intriguing phenomenon. The first is related to the exigencies of the movement in its early days. The SNW poetry is known for its intensive use of irony; as the language of SNW was fragile, irony was a protection for both the language and for the poets against the “external world” (Fedai, 2009, p. 1011). The Gezi movement was also very fragile in its initial phases; most people, including the participants expected it to disintegrate soon. Among other things, it needed ambiguity to survive that period; it needed a language powerful enough to attract masses but vague and ironic enough for the members of the dēmos who had different concerns to feel themselves at home in it. The highly ambiguous, humorous, ironic yet sentimental language of the SNW was quite suitable for this:

I had planned on three places all three suitable for you and me

One among the sunflowers one thirty years old don’t ask about the third

Don’t ask me about the third someday I will tell you myself

If I can muster courage and tact I’ll probably tell you

But first let’s shed light on this heart-broken darkness

Let’s build new cities just like the ones we have

Let’s start anew with sesame and bread and overseas and love affairs. —Turgut Uyar (Adalı, 1997)

The second factor that made the SNW poetry so popular especially among the young participants, who had often been considered apolitical in sociological analyses until the June Uprising, was a desire to distance themselves from the “old” opposition to the government. In its decade of rule, the AKP government had been very skillful in delegitimizing all opposition as militarist and authoritarian. At least part of the youth in the protests wanted to dissociate themselves from the Kemalist opposition often perceived as elitist and stress that there was something new there, something unfamiliar and perhaps uncanny, something in the making. The SNW poetry, dubbed as “civilian poetry” by Ece Ayhan, served that purpose well. It is no wonder that when some of the Kemalist participants of the movement chanted the slogan “We’re the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk)” the response developed into the slogan “We’re the verses of Turgut Uyar.”

Third, the adoption of the SNW poetry can be considered as an attempt to politicize art without instrumentalizing it. As such, the widespread practices of reading the SNW poems and copying them to the most unexpected places in cities constituted aesthetic political acts. Such practices also speak to Weiss’s argument that art could be autonomous, but still trigger, support, and help perpetuate resistance.

Fourth, one of the components of the social context that gave rise to the SNW poetry was the rapid urbanization that Turkey witnessed during 1950s and 1960s (Tüzer, 2011). The SNW not only emerged as a characteristically urban poetry but it also reflected the sense of restlessness and alienation that people are exposed to in modern urban life. It is indeed not a coincidence that it became the “official” artistic school of a movement aimed at repelling a neoliberal attack on people’s “spatial practices” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39).

6. Our poem is of the city, old chaps

When changing calendars you lose a day

A city up to the sea with its translators

How does one build a city white-washed in indigo blue and with no steps, old chaps? —Ece Ayhan (Violet Rascal, n.d.)

Fifth, the appropriation of the Second Wave by the youth is related to the organizational aspect of the movement. The role of the Internet, especially social media, in the formation of the movement has been pointed out and cannot be exaggerated. ¹⁰ Although we should continue to discuss the role of nonconventional methods of organization in the eruption and evolution of the protests, we should also consider that organization is not only a technical but also emotional issue. The verses that had been condemned as apolitical by activists of previous generations sounded to the young activists of Gezi as calls to take it to the streets and occupy public places. No doubt, poetry helped create those affective bonds necessary for the formation of any movement.

You are inclined to that carnation and there I am giving it to you

And you’re giving it to an other, more beautiful

From that someone to the next

The carnation passes on.

You see there’s a passion you and I are growing

I keep touching upon you, warming up to you, this is not that

See how, like the seven colors turning into white

We are silently casting ourselves into unity. —Edip Cansever ¹¹

Last, I would like to tackle the question why the highly visible presence of the SNW poetry did not produce any effect of distinction during the protests on the grounds of cultural capital. This is a legitimate question as poetry is not an art form that is particularly appealing to less-educated segments of the population. Moreover, the SNW is in general known for its obscure and ambiguous verses. The combination of these two facts could have easily generated a Bourdieusian distinction that would then act as a divisive force in the ranks of the protesters. This did not happen, I believe, due to two factors. First, the verses of SNW that were written as graffiti, put up into parks and squares as signs, in short, that were popularized during the long summer of 2013 were the ones which are both simple and striking. These were poems or verses that could be memorized and recited quite easily. For example, probably the most popular verse during the Gezi movement was “We may both rejoice, let’s look at the sky” by Turgut Uyar (2013, p. 135). In addition, the poems of SNW got mixed during the protests with slogans, songs, football chants, and so on. They were rarely appropriated and “used” by protesters in pure form. A bus stop in the vicinity of the occupied Taksim square was renamed “The Stop to Look at the Sky” by protesters. Forms of art that could definitely possibly work to distinguish those who have cultural capital from those who do not, played an opposite, unifying role in this case.

Just as the young communists of Weiss, the young activists of the Gezi movement appropriated this SNW poetry written half a century ago, made it their own, and were inspired by it for dissensual politics. What they did was in a sense a response to a call the Die Ästhetik des Widerstands makes: All generations have a right to reinterpret art, regardless of their original conditions of production. The presence of the SNW in Gezi was one of the ways in which a generation which had been accused of being apolitical became engaged in politics without reproducing what they perceive as the dull, exclusionary, and pointless politics of elder generations:

1. Dark is our poem, old chaps

It’s the poem of smart youths in tight-fitting pants

Who start wrestling with themselves

As soon as they hear the sound of a drum and flute

With no players, in portable toilets of gypsies

Love is a matter of organization, just think of it, old chaps. —Ece Ayhan (Violet Rascal, n.d.)

Conclusion

The June 2013 protests constituted one of the most important events in the recent history of Turkey. In addition to the sheer number of people who participated by taking to the streets all over the country, the protests also witnessed the successful articulation of a number of demands around a common demand, which was the preservation of a central public park in Istanbul as green space. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this article, the protests unleashed a vast repertoire of aesthetic political acts. Drawing largely on Rancière, I have defined aesthetic political acts as transformative actions that use the common ground of politics and aesthetics to make egalitarian claims on the part of those who are excluded in the distribution of the sensible, who are not allowed to partake: the uncounted, the unaccounted for, those who are not to speak, the unseen, the anonymous.

Although Turkish politics was no stranger to protests that also employed aesthetic political acts, the aesthetic political acts were the predominant form of protest in the Gezi movement. The vastness of the repertoire is impressive: music (both popular and “high” music), dancing, graffiti, and other forms of street art, puppet show, video art, ironic slogans, football fans’ chants adapted to politics, poetry, public book readings, standing, jumping, arbitrary noise, ornamenting barricades, and so on. The high visibility of poetry and especially SNW poetry has been one of the issues that I have investigated in detail in the article. I have argued that the popularity of this poetical movement that had once been accused of being individualistic and apolitical for the young activists of Gezi stems from five factors. First, the movement especially in its early days needed the not only irony, ambiguity but also powerful poetics of the SNW, which worked to bring the multiplicity of protestors together. Second, at least part of the youth in the protests wanted to dissociate themselves from the “old” opposition to AKP and underline the civilian and nonauthoritarian aspects of their resistance. Third, the adoption of the SNW poetry by the activists was an attempt to politicize art without instrumentalizing it. Fourth, as a predominantly urban poetry, SNW fitted well into people’s attempts to defend their living spaces against a repressive neoliberal government obsessed with construction. Fifth, SNW helped create those affective bonds necessary for the formation of any movement as organization is not solely a technical issue. Finally, it is important to stress that the presence of the SNW poetry did not produce any effect of distinction during the protests on the grounds of having or not having cultural capital.

In general, the Gezi Park protests which depended principally on aesthetic political acts, did not produce “distinction” in the Bourdieusian sense. In addition to the problems that Bourdieu’s framework has, the argument that the ranks of the movement were mostly populated by the middle class is not supported by empirical evidence. Moreover, conceiving politics as a power game between preconceived subjects and the expectation that people occupying certain positions in society will have foreseeable propensities in the political field are both problematic. In the Rancièrean sense, politics is the process through which such subjects are formed in a constant contestation over the distribution of parts in society. As a political moment par excellence, rather than creating distinction between those who have cultural capital and those who do not, the protests have actually bridged the existing gaps by bringing a very large and diverse body of people around common demands, values and symbols. The aesthetic political acts created a movement on the basis of the demands of equality of the dēmos and also considerably expanded the spatial scope of the politics of Gezi. The protests did not constitute an attempt of certain segments of the population to protect their secular lifestyles and living spaces. They amounted to a magic, violently poetic moment ¹² of political subjectivization of the anonymous by disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible.