Border as “Zone of Indistinction”: The State of Exception and the Spectacle of Terror Along Turkey’s Border With Syria

The Southeastern Borderland as an Exceptional Topology

Agamben (1998) claims that the biopolitical paradigm of the West today is the camp, not the city. Similarly, Graham (2011) has convincingly argued that militarism as a biopolitical tool shapes every detail of contemporary lives. As an apparatus of biopolitical power, militarism and military urbanism is the newest game in town, occurring not only at the colonial frontiers but also spreading in the West. While the United States and other powerful militaries once experimented with and developed security technologies in colonial war zones, today those techniques are returning to colonial homelands.

In the case of the southeastern Turkey, military urbanism and the politics of exception have been operational for more than a quarter century. The state of emergency was enacted due to the perception of threat to the integrity and security of Turkey from PKK terror. Thus, the killing of “terrorists” was made legitimate and legal, while the “terrorist hunt” was glorified. Curfews in Kurdish cities, unidentified murders, the evacuation of villages, ⁵ torture, and humiliation along with “Turkification” ⁶ policies were some of the consequences of the suspension of law in this period.

In the mid-1990s, security measures were increased and technologically refined. Furthermore, infrastructural governance—especially of water systems—became a new tactic for monitoring terror attacks. For instance, the state experimented with blockading Euphrates and Tigris Rivers by constructing dams. This turned water into a weapon, enabling the Turkish authorities to demand from Syria and Iraq that they terminate the activities of PKK guerrillas. The dams also caused major population displacements, the evacuation of many villages, and the destruction of significant natural–historical sites (Jongerden, 2010).

Later, starting with the 1999 arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, a new process began. During this period, the Kurdish Question was a central topic in Turkish politics. The peace process was a significant development within this context, involving supranational bodies such as the European Union, as well as national and regional actors. In 2013, the PKK agreed to a long-term ceasefire.

However, throughout the peace process, the state of exception remained in de facto existence. New military stations with increased security and surveillance technology were built. Routine military controls, arrests, and other disciplinary practices were also put into use to support forced migrations. Some incidents from this period are illustrative: In December 2011, 34 villagers from Roboski were bombarded while smuggling goods from northern Iraq; in October 2013, a wall was erected for security purposes in Nusaybin–Qamishli (on the Turkey–Syria border), which prompted disputes, protests, and hunger strikes, and placed the issue on the global agenda; and in December 2013, two people were killed in Gever protestors of the destruction of a PKK cemetery were fired upon. On June 5, 2015, two explosions hit a pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) rally. The attack was perpetrated by ISIS to threaten HDP sympathizers. And after the general elections, 2 days later, things went back to the way they had been in the 1990s. This example testifies to the use of “exception” as a governmental strategy to dominate, control, and rule the Kurdish population in a zone of indistinction. But how does a border become a dispositif (Agamben, 2009) of governmentality? ⁷

States must mark their hegemonic territory and symbolize their power. In the beginning, in other words, there was fencing. Carl Schmitt associates enclosure with a “nomos” defined as “the production of (political) order through spatial orientation” (Schmitt, 1985, as cited in Brown, 2010, p. 45). In this sense, sovereignty is grounded in the power to decide on the limits of the law, on what the law contains within its domain or abandons. But the sovereign can only draw its border by deciding on its exception. This is why Schmitt (1985) claims, alluding to Kierkegaard, that the significance of thinking via negativa: The exception “explains the general and itself” (Schmitt, 1985, p. 15). Not only is the rule confirmed by the exception but “as such lives off the exception alone” (Schmitt, 1985, as cited in Agamben, 1998, p. 15).

The sovereign suspends the law to protect it. But when the exception becomes the rule, a paradoxical space is opened up: the camp (Agamben, 1998).

[The essence of the camp] consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created. (Agamben, 1998, p. 174)

Although sovereignty is grounded in the clear-cut distinction between inside and outside, between inclusion and exclusion, the camp designates the blurring of this distinction, “the extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion” (Agamben, 1998, p. 18). On the one hand, the camp designates a space outside the rule of law, a space of random punishment with no consequence (Agamben, 1998); on the other, it relies on a prior legalization (Agamben, 1998). Exclusion, in other words, takes place from within the realm of law, as a case of inclusive exclusion. What is crucial in this respect is that the suspension of the law is extralegal, not illegal. Or, better, exception refers to an illegality made possible by the legal system itself. All legal systems are based on an extralegal kernel; every legal order “rests on a decision and not on a norm” (Schmitt, 1985, p. 10). In this sense, sovereignty is the “law beyond the law” (Agamben, 1998, p. 59).

Within this prism, the camp is a machine of abandonment, of the reduction of the “citizen” to a biopolitical subject whose essence is bare life, life stripped of (cultural) form and (political) rights. By the same token, the camp is the point at which the biological reenters the political realm. Technically, the figure of abandonment in Agamben is homo sacer: the person who can be killed (with impunity) but not sacrificed (for only something/someone with value can be sacrificed). In this sense, “sacredness,” the oldest punishment of Roman criminal law, refers to a double exclusion from both the sphere of the profane (abandonment from the legal system) and the sphere of religion (the impossibility of sacrificing homo sacer). And as such, homo sacer and the sovereign are symmetrical figures: The essential condition for the sovereign is the formation of the threshold, the zone of indistinction, where the political and the biological, the inside and the outside, the urban and the wild, become indistinguishable. The Kurd is an exceptional subject in this sense.

The Kurd as an Exceptional Subject

To theorize a case of abandonment or nonrelation, Alain Badiou (1988/2007) makes use of the set theory. He identifies everything as a set, and defines a set as a collection of elements or members. That is, everything both is itself a set and “belongs” to one. It is “included” in another set when all of its own members or elements are also members of that set.

In this sense, both membership without inclusion and inclusion without membership are possible. One can be present (a member of a set) without being represented (included in that set) just as one can be represented without being present. A slave, for instance, is present but without representation. Such an element is said to be “singular” in Badiou. A specter, on the other hand, is a representation without presence. Badiou would call such an element “excrescent.” It goes without saying that a “normal” element in this framework would be both present and represented (Diken & Laustsen, 2006).

From Agamben’s (1998) perspective, exception appears similar to singularity. Yet the defining characteristic of exception is the inclusion of a subject through abandonment. It includes as exception that which cannot be included, opening up a space in which singularity and excrescence become indistinguishable: “the exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included” (Agamben, 1998, p. 25). In this sense, exception signifies the coincidence of excrescence and singularity. As Diken and Laustsen (2006) emphasize, the experience of the camp is grounded in this coincidence, in “an experience of occupying the gray zone between . . . representation without presentation and presentation without representation” (p. 164). Following this, the paradigmatic subject of the camp is simultaneously an excrescent “word without body” and a singular “body without words” (Diken & Laustsen, 2006).

Let us, at this point, return to the figure of the Kurd. On the one hand, we meet the Kurd as the archetypal “slave” or in other instances where she appears as a body without words. On the other hand, the Kurd is an image represented in the media. Thus, the majority of the Turkish population knows her as a specter, an image without body, about whom anyone can say anything, often with paradoxical effect. The Kurd cannot be included in the republic of which she is already a member, but neither can she be a member of the republic in which she is already included. She is similarly, underrepresented in the parliament, overrepresented in the media.

The Kurdish “terrorist” is an extreme yet somewhat paradigmatic case in this respect. As a bandit, she is literally banished from the juridical realm. Only in “the funeral of guerrillas,” organized by their families, do terrorists regain their value as freedom fighters who sacrificed themselves for the Kurdish struggle. With the exception of the peace process period, the figure of the Kurd has been typically framed as that of a “potential terrorist” unworthy of rights.

Ultimately, one could speak of the perversion of democracy in this context. After all, what does “democracy” signify in the context of the war against terror and of the accompanying state of exception? Returning to Badiou may be interesting in this respect, according to whom the ideological motto of contemporary democracy is the following: “there are only bodies and languages” (Badiou, 2009, pp. 1, 34). This democracy can perceive and count only biopolitical bodies, without taking into consideration other cultural or metaphysical dimensions of their being. But it is also “democratic” because the recognition of linguistic and cultural signs or images is indispensible to it. Consequently, its horizon is defined by relations between (biopolitical) bodies and (cultural) images (see also Diken, 2012).

If, then, the Kurd can only be understood as an exceptional subject, as a relation between biopolitics and the image, how should one understand the latter (“democratic”) aspect? This question brings us to the link between sovereignty and governmentality. The conception of sovereignty is genealogically rooted in political theology. Indeed, Carl Schmitt (1985) has claimed that “all significant concepts” of modern political theory are merely “secularized theological concepts” (p. 36). Likewise, governmentality is rooted in economic theology. The Greek terms oikos (household) and oikonomia (household management) play a crucial role in this context. With Christianity, the term oikonomia moved into the domain of theology, its meaning shifting to become the “divine plan of salvation” (Agamben, 2011, p. 20). As such, the term oikonomia seeks to learn “what is to be done in a world ontologically created by God, which must be redeemed by the religious praxis of a separate person, the Son” (Diken, 2015, p. 25). In this sense, Christian theology reconciled two seemingly different ideas: the creation of the world (God) and its management and salvation (the Son). This relation between creation and management, sovereignty and governmentality, does not lead to a synthesis but forms “a bipolar machine, whose unity always runs the risk of collapsing and must be acquired again at each turn” (Agamben, 2011, p. 62). Neither fully coinciding nor completely separable, the two constitute a single “functional system” (Agamben, 2011, p. 79). Thus, whereas sovereignty (political theology) functions in terms of absolutism, governmentality (economic theology) moves along a democratic model which mirrors the divine economy (see Agamben, 2011).

The point at which sovereignty and governmentality intersect in this model is the spectacle. Power needs glorification. Ceremonies, rituals, exclamations, and other parts of the spectacle are necessary because they structure public opinion and express consensus (Agamben, 2011).

Contemporary democracy is founded upon glory; that is, on the efficacy of acclamation, multiplied and disseminated by the media beyond all imagination. (Agamben, 2011, p. 256)

And insofar as “democracy” is another name for consensus politics, it is worth noting that the spectacle is indispensable to the production of the Kurd as an exceptional subject. Against this backdrop, it is tempting to claim that the confrontation with the Kurd is an acid test that brings into play the scandal of liberal democracy. In this prism, the Kurd conveys an indefinite, ambivalent zone as to her internality/externality in relation to the republic, and this incites an elementary undecidability. It is as if the republic cannot decide whether the Kurd is the subject of rights. The Kurd is, like Simmel’s (1971) stranger, “both inside and outside,” close to and remote from the context in which she “comes today and stays tomorrow” (p. 143). As the Kurd cannot belong precisely to “Us” or “Them,” she becomes a menace to the vision of order. Hence her political exclusion: whereas she demands to “participate without identification,” she is required to “identify without participation” (Sennett, 1996, p. 193). The crucial point here, however, is that sovereignty does not only mean exclusion. The Kurd is excluded from the law but is excessively subject to its effects. To discuss this, let us turn to city life in the border zone.

The Urban Geography of Exception: The Border City of Mardin

October 6-7, 2014—Protesting the siege of Kobanê by ISIS, Kurds of Kızıltepe district set governmental buildings and banks on fire, depredated global trade markets, pulled out flagstones, and erected barricades at settlement entrances. State security forces tried to quell the resistance with tear gas and subsequently declared a curfew.

December 21, 2015—State security forces blockaded the city of Nusaybin and declared a curfew. For months, Nusaybin remained closed. Some neighborhoods were razed and many civilians died.

In the meantime, daily life in the Artuklu district of the city of Mardin went on as usual. ⁸

Graham (2004) convincingly argues that a city can be simultaneously “a refuge,” “a safe haven,” “a target,” and “a death trap.” Exemplifying that, in Mardin city, the provincial center, daily life seems to be continuing as usual while demonstrations and conflict characterize life in neighboring Kızıltepe and Nusaybin. In that sense, “two Mardins” may be identified. The first of these is the military space of conflicts and the (bio)politics of the body and identity. Exceptional conditions, such as identification checkpoints on the roads, tanks at provincial entry points, the corpses of guerrillas being repatriated, shop closures, civilian Fridays, ⁹ and so on, become norms of daily life. Meanwhile, patriotic and/or nationalistic sentiments scrawled onto mountainsides, forcibly evacuated villages, and the cemeteries of the nameless (guerrillas) serve as indicators of military urbanism. The second tendency characterizing the city is “spectacle.” From the early 2000s, a tourism agenda has been designed pointing the presence of Assyrians, churches, and monasteries proving a pseudo-“cosmopolite” and “multicultural” generation of the city (Öktem, 2005). Beginning with the peace process, political discourses such as “tolerance” and “Islamic fraternity” also appeared. Urban myths thereby replaced “fear of terror.” An urban spectacle of Mardin, which became a candidate for UNESCO’s word heritage list, was produced.

This bipolar tendency contains juxtaposed settlements struggling for sovereignty, which play out as spatial conflict, disintegration and closure. Thus, each major ethnic community in the region (Kurds, Arabs, and Assyrians) tends to form a different camp. Following Diken and Laustsen (2006), some of these could be identified as voluntary, involving self-exemption; others are compulsory, involving straightforward exemption or exclusion from the surrounding society. The common feature of both camps is that they are simultaneously inside and outside the city. The starkest difference appears in the moment of entry or exit. While in the voluntary camp entry is restricted but exit is free, the opposite is true of the compulsory camp. While the former seeks to repel outsiders to keep insiders safe, the latter is designed to keep undesired groups “inside,” a polarity that Diken and Laustsen exemplify with gated communities and refugee camps.

In our case, this is expressed in the formation of ethnic and political camps supported by imagined borders. These are compulsorily closed zones in which Turkey’s Kurdish citizens are reduced to biopolitical subjects. However, these camps have the potential to become spaces of revolt and resistance, a potentiality that is often actualized when biopolitically reduced Kurds defend their rights against the sovereign power embodied in Turkish security forces. Adjacent to these camps are the voluntary camps of self-exemption. These are the exceptional spaces constituted through (self-)separation from the political space of the Kurdish movement and the trouble surrounding it. This is why military forces representing the power and existence of the state block and control entrances to those camps, limiting and interrogating flows.

As symmetrical camps in this sense, the city of Mardin and the town of Kızıltepe are located 20-minutes driving distance apart. For any stranger, a cultural–geographical contrast is immediately apparent on arrival: In Mardin life seems to go on peacefully, and conservative ambiance characterizes the emotional structure of the city. Kızıltepe, meanwhile, is a hotbed of Kurdish politics. While in Mardin beggars can speak three languages (Turkish, Arabic, and Kurdish) the dominant language in Kızıltepe is Kurdish, including billboards, signboards, and posters. This contrast can be traced back to the history of segregation and ethnic, political, and class conflict between Kurds and Arabs. As Biner (2007) puts it, Mardin has traditionally been a “castle city” consisting of fortified neighborhoods sensitive to mental, political, and social boundaries. Arabs and Assyrians, keen to distinguish themselves from Kurds, describe themselves as Mardin’s natives, and are proud to claim that their homeland has never challenged the sovereignty of the state. “The trouble was created down the hill by the Kurds” (Biner, 2007, p. 41). This tension between Mardin and Kızıltepe, between the Arabs “here” and the Kurds “down the hill,” is consolidated as a differentiation between urbanite and peasant:

Arabs ironized the ignorance of Kurds. Whenever our elders went shopping to the center (Mardin city), they were frequently deceived and cheated, and would return embarrassed. (U. Gunes, Personal communication, January 3, 2013)

Geographical features and urban topography also support the class distinction. With its panoptic, topographically superior position, Mardin is a castle-like “voluntary camp,” highly secured and under surveillance by the military stations located at all four entrances to the city. Kızıltepe, in contrast, is a “compulsory camp” located at a considerably lower altitude. However, the municipality of Kızıltepe, ruled by the HDP, conducts a democratic urban planning strategy cultivating loose and open public spaces. Since the halay traditional folk dance is the most common and significant practice of Kurds both in celebration and as a sign of solidarity, open public spaces are used widely. On the other hand, these places are also symbolic memorials. ¹⁰ Parks and monuments designed in honor of those lost in the political struggles of the 1980s and 1990s form significant landmarks throughout the city’s public spaces.

For upper Mardinites, Kızıltepe is an uncanny space of terror. While arrests, hunger strikes, strike tents, and the funerals of guerrillas define daily life there, in the center of Mardin shopping continues under surveillance. Mardin is capable of keeping out illegal actions, protests, and political struggle, especially the Kurdish resistance. When attempts are made to organize such events, active participants are lacking. This situation, which tourists and other visitors cannot help but find astonishing, becomes meaningful only if one remaps the “region” not as a city in the traditional sense but as a palimpsest of splintering camps that appeal no longer to a common good but to competing and clashing political and ethical values.

However, upper class Kurdish groups conducting business in the construction sector break this binary composition, and show that passage between symmetrical camps becomes possible through economic capital. Class distinction between peasant Kurds and educated, high-income Kurds in Kızıltepe can also be traced through living conditions and neighborhoods. Even slums constructed after the forced migration in the 1990s are segregated and marginalized places.

Immigrations in the 1990s barbarized Kızıltepe. After that, theft, prostitution, and drugs increased here . . . (A. Kelepir, Personal communication, February 2, 2013)

Those neighborhoods are destitute, are not compatible with our Kızıltepe. (E. Yasar, Personal communication, December 12, 2012)

As a border settlement constituting another compulsory camp of Mardin, the city of Nusaybin resembles Kızıltepe in sociospatial and economic terms as a space of exception in the form of war, absorption of Syrian refugees, and Kurdish struggle. Despite similarities, the most important differences between Nusaybin and Kızıltepe are revealed on particular occasions. When war broke out in Kobanê, Kızıltepe, through resistance and revolt, it became a voluntary camp of self-exemption, leaving the state out. However, the collapse of the peace process has intensified the formation of “compulsory camps.”

The June 2015 election, which brought with it a historic achievement for the HDP, was a significant trigger in this regard. In addition, when on 20 July of the same year, an ISIS suicide bomber killed 34 and injured about one hundred others in the border town of Suruç, the government was blamed for supporting ISIS. The PKK responded to the flow of events with new armed attacks against the Turkish military and police. ¹¹ At the same time, several Kurdish municipalities along the Syrian border demanded self-rule. In response, the government halted the peace process and established a new “terror agenda,” including an intensified biopolitical and media war; it also set curfews and cut urban electricity and water supplies. Many civilians, including children and elders, became casualties of war; many urban areas were ruined, damaged, or bulldozed. ¹² Especially in border towns such as Nusaybin, Cizre, and Silopi, the majority of inhabitants were displaced. ¹³

Meanwhile, Nusaybin was transformed into an extreme form of compulsory camp, a battle-space blockaded by the repressive forces of the state. For several months, it was a space of destruction and death where exit became impossible. By declaring the state of emergency, the state performed inclusionary exclusion on Kurds, legitimizing death and torture through their stigmatization as “terrorists.” On the other hand, no such divisions and contrasts emerged within the Kurdish movement in Kızıltepe, which exemplifies the instability of compulsory camps; on the contrary, they are constantly transforming.

The State of Exception as a Spectacle

After the June 2015 general election, the state’s new strategy became to blockade, evacuate, and even destroy the cores of Kurdish cities. In cities where modern and historical centers coexist—such as the case of Diyarbakır’s Sur district—both became sites of destruction. Those areas in which Kurds had declared self-rule were particularly targeted. It was not solely cities and urban life that were under attack but spatial memory, political identity and the Kurdish collective culture. The state of exception was transformed into a spectacle of destruction, presented through the mainstream media in such a way as to confirm the image of “Kurds as terrorists.”

Having been a rural war for more than 30 years, this was now a war of adaptation in accordance with the spatial organization of the city as battlefield. The formation and physical aspects of streets, buildings heights, even the materials and production techniques of buildings started to specify the direction, volume, and possibility of conflicts. Barricades were erected and large ditches dug to prevent military tanks from entering neighborhoods. Built by forced-migrant villagers, these original, unplanned urban settlements were well known by Kurdish activists. ¹⁴ There were also experiments with camouflage on street level to obstruct the view of soldiers; for example, the roofs of buildings were tarped to thwart air strikes. Despite these efforts, however, rocket projectors and artillery fire damaged the top floors of most buildings. In some settlements, the mobility of the guerrillas was enhanced by covert passages between rooms within buildings and from building to building. A 40 km tunnel was also found leading from the basements of urban buildings to the rural peripheries. ¹⁵

Against the state strategies of blockage, immobilization, and annihilation of cities, guerrillas used the urban syntax to increase their mobility. The notion of “inverse geometry” is significant in this context. The term refers to “the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions” (Weizman, 2007, p. 185). This tactic of “walking through walls,” borrowing from the zoological lexicon (like “swarming” and “infesting”), reverses the relationship between the domestic and the public, between inside and outside, to achieve invisibility and unpredictability. Urban space thereby becomes not only a source of refuge or a pathway of escape but a deadly weapon. For instance, in Nusaybin, concrete buildings were booby trapped against the police and military units, ¹⁶ while the labyrinthine urban pattern of the historical Sur district of Diyarbakır made hiding easy within neighborhoods that had been turned into prisons by police blockade.

In the aftermath of the conflicts, blockaded cities and towns were either partially destroyed by cannon fire or bulldozed and cleansed of “terrorists,” becoming the dead cities and buildings as cadavers of forensic architecture (Weizman, 2012) that prove these war crimes were not randomly executed. Like elsewhere (see, e.g., Weizman, 2007, on the Israeli conduct of war in Palestinian cities), “bulldozing has been used as a weapon of collective and individual punishment and intimidation, and as a means of shaping the geopolitical configuration of territory” (Weizman, 2004, as cited in Graham, 2004, p. 197).

In southeastern Turkey, the mass bulldozing of self-governed Kurdish cities in the name of security is also a medium of urban transformation projects being conducted by the government-supported Housing Development Administration (TOKI). Interestingly in this respect, several sources have already claimed that primarily “Arab refugees” will be placed in the prospective housing since they are seen as a manageable, obedient population by the state. ¹⁷ There is also suspicion that the state aims to use displacement to shift the demographic distribution along the border. Inevitably, this process will intensify “camping” in the region as a governmental tool. ¹⁸

Another rather obvious aim of this destruction-by-design was gentrification, especially targeting historic Sur. ¹⁹ However, UNESCO’s classification of the city’s fortification walls and Hevsel Gardens as an urban protected area in 2015 have so far disrupted the intended urban transformation project, which had been on the agenda since 2009 and legitimized by the disaster law that declared the city core as “risky” in 2012. ²⁰ Nevertheless, many significant pieces of civil architecture and memorial buildings in designated neighborhoods had already been destroyed. Meanwhile, expropriation as a pseudojuridical spatial weapon was used to evacuate Kurdish inhabitants from these areas. This process of “urbicide” has already occurred under the pretext of the war against terror. The Chamber of City Planners Division of Diyarbakır’s observation report ²¹ dated May 23, 2016, described hostile, traumatic sociospatial destruction, adding that police stations had been constructed, narrow streets and public squares had been widened in the name of control, and residential areas had been vandalized.

Today, most of the Sur population—lower income Kurds and Syrian refugees—have already migrated, and their displacement has enabled the state to market its urban transformation project by likening it to Spain’s restoration of historic Toledo. ²² One can therefore safely guess that in the near future, Sur will be transformed from a compulsory camp (inhabited by homo sacer) into a voluntary camp, a museified tourist spectacle. As shown in the advertisement “Sur Once Again” ²³ prepared by the Office of the Prime Minister, Sur will be beautified through “recovery and reconstruction” and Islamized with the construction of mosques. This is museification as gentrification.

This deliberate destruction of resilient camps, or “counterterrorism,” correlates with efforts to redevelop the area to open a new rental portal, thereby producing an “Islamist capitalism of terror,” As a globally hegemonic political and economic order, neoliberalism appears in the southeastern Turkey through Islamist capitalism reducing Kurds into “homo economicus” as well. ²⁴ Naomi Klein (2008) explains “the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism” through economic, terror, war, and disaster crises. From these societal shocks emerge opportunities for right-wing politicians to put in place radical free-market economies from which they can profit. In the Turkish case, counterterrorism becomes not only an excuse for the process of destruction but also a tool of Islamist capitalism and gentrification strategies with the public’s blessing thanks to its presentation as public spectacle in the mainstream media. This both justifies the destruction and reconstructs the national unity against “bandit, terrorist Kurds.” The economy of this politics and the territorial hegemony of the sovereign power are both strengthened in this way.

But is this spectacle-ization merely a coincidence? As noted, although terror has always sought spectacular means and ends, new terror, especially in the post-9/11 era, is particularly sensitive to the spectacle, to the extent that one is tempted to claim, as Virilio does, that terror cannot exist if it cannot become a media spectacle (see Lotringer & Virilio, 1997). Contemporary terror always involves using the media—normally a weapon of the system—against the system itself. Thus, terror today is a “theater of terror” (Burke, 2004). That said, the same applies to the war against terror. To be sure, state terror normally proceeds in the dark, presenting a legal façade in front of an illegal background (see Diken, 2006), but in the contemporary war against terror, the distinction between foreground and background has become blurred:

In the twentieth century almost 200 million people were killed through state terror, primarily aimed against its own populations. In the twenty-first century, state terror is called the politics of security, justified with reference to terror, which can be used to curb citizenship rights in the name of democracy, kill people to protect them from despots, and legalize torture to preserve human dignity. (Diken, 2006, p. 83)

This lack of difference between foreground and background is best captured by Baudrillard’s (2008) conception of the transpolitical society, which is primarily characterized by “the obscenity of all structures” (p. 25). The age of the political was the age of illusion, play and the scene; the age of the transpolitical is that of the obscene. But this obscenity must not be confused with pornography, which would only “distract us from conceiving of obscenity in its general form” (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 79). Pornography is there to hide the fact that the society as a whole has become obscene. As such, transpolitics is a system wherein there is no longer a difference between being on- and off-scene, in which everything becomes hypervisible. Traditional obscenity was related to that which was not representable; contemporary obscenity relates more to overrepresentation (Baudrillard, 2008).

Let us, in this light, return to some “iconic” images left by the war against terror on Turkey’s southeastern border. The naked corpses of a male and female guerrilla tied to a tank—a spectacular image widely distrusted by the Turkish media—is a testimony to the way biopolitics reduces the citizen to bare life. But there is more to it. Most important, the image depicts a rule, not an exception, because the sheer possibility of transmitting such an image and the blatant indifference with which it is received by the majority of the non-Kurdish population are more terrifying than what it depicts. This is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s (2004) comment on the scandalous Abu Ghraib pictures in which American soldiers pose with naked, tortured, and humiliated inmates. What Sontag saw in the pictures was not the exceptional perversity of a few “bad apples” but the familiarity of their resemblance to ordinary trophy pictures. “Considered in this light, the photographs are us” (Sontag, 2004; quoted in Diken, 2006, p. 87). In the same manner, the photograph of the tank with the dead terrorists reveals the normalization of exception while also signifying the simultaneous escalation of media-fueled obscenity. Above all, the coincidence of biopolitics and the spectacle of a body without text, an image without a body, is revealed in the figure of the dead, naked terrorist. In this sense, we are no longer spectators of a real war against terror but are also part of a theatrical simulation through which war achieves its new discourse and penetrates daily life.