Discourse on the West: Race, Violence, and Protest

A Black Lives Matter protest (November 2015). Photo by Johnny Silvercloud via Wikimedia Commons. A Black Lives Matter protest (November 2015). Photo by Johnny Silvercloud via Wikimedia Commons.

Discourse on the West: Race, Violence, and Protest

By : Sunera Thobani

The West is in freefall.

Liberal-democratic institutions have suffered a near-fatal blow in the United States; Europe, caught leaderless as the United States vacates this position, is in disarray.

Three words have come to define this moment: I can't breathe.

 These devastating words—spoken by George Floyd, Eric Garner, and the legion of Black men and women killed by the US state in a series of murders stretching right back to the nation's founding—rebounded around the world. Black people, supported by a multi-racial array of supporters, erupted in outrage across the United States at Floyd's killing; they were soon joined by Black, People of Colour, and other protestors who rose up in solidarity around the world. The endurance of the protests ignited by these three words ensure that the racial politics that have shaped the West during the second half of the twentieth century—a thin veneer of racial liberalism atop a solid base of white power and privilege—are now no longer sustainable.

That anti-Black racism is a structuring feature of US society has long been argued by Black intellectual-activists, from Ida B. Wells to W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X to Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Angela Davis to Hortense Spillers and Stacey Abrams. From slavery to Jim Crow to the mass incarceration facilitated by the “war on drugs,” the racial structure of the United States has been “redesigned,” not eradicated.[1]  Indeed, the actions of the four members of the Minneapolis police force involved in the killing of George Floyd, like those of the officers who stopped Sandra Bland and those who choked Eric Garner, attest to the endurance of the violence of the “Killing State,” that is, the state that uses violence, capital punishment, and mass incarceration not to punish individuals but to subjugate the Black population in general. Similarly, the actions of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park on the day of Floyd's killing, were on a spectrum with those of the killers of Armaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin and speak to the "civic" practice of lynching that continues to structure the bond between white citizens and this killing state.

The present racial subjugation of African-Americans—poverty, ghettoization, mass incarceration—reproduces the dehumanization of Blackness as a cornerstone of American society.

The present racial subjugation of African-Americans—poverty, ghettoization, mass incarceration—reproduces the dehumanization of Blackness as a cornerstone of American society. This phenomenon helped shape the three-pronged racial formation that is settler colonialism in North America: the extension of rights and entitlements to white nationals; the genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples; the enslavement of peoples of African descent and the indentureship and racial subjugation of People of Colour to build armies of cheapened labour. All were interlinked in the making of race as a global structure of power.

The white supremacist politics that instituted this order were, however, made untenable by the early twentieth-century anti-colonial movements and the political upheavals of World War II. In the case of the United States, this upheaval soon included the rise of Black nationalism and the civil rights movement, and the opposition mobilized by the anti-Vietnam war, left, feminist and “new” social movements. This changing political climate in the 1960s drove the transformation of the United States into a racial liberal-democracy.[2] US political culture became more complex as a result of the inclusionary civil rights instituted by the state, such that increased immigration and multiculturalism became the official response to the nation's “race question.” That this form of racial inclusion helped marginalize and counter the radical anti-racist politics emanating from the ground-up was no small consideration. The resulting liberalization of the racial structure did not put an end to, but rather incorporated, the use of the deadly force of the state along with the promise of inclusion to govern Black, Indigenous, and other People of Colour in a highly asymmetric socio-economic structure.

The white supremacist response to these developments within the United States would later be seen in the culture wars of the 1990s, with the university and the media among the preeminent sites for many public battles. Republicans, as well as Democrats, took on the management of this racial rearrangement by tilting to the right when possible and then to the left as needed. Neither party rooted out the white supremacist tendencies within the population or in their own ranks, nor did they end the public scapegoating and terrorizing of Peoples of Colour.[3] Instead, the political establishment accommodated itself to the incorporation of elite sectors of Black and other Peoples of Colour into racial managerial positions, including into the nation's higher echelons.

This, then, is the “liberal-democracy” now being upended by the white-resentment that fuels and sustains the Trump presidency; this scion of a profiteering landlord rode the waves of anti-Black racism, the “Muslim ban,” and the demonization of migrants as rapists and drug dealers right into the White House. Trump's political ascendance began with the birther movement which questioned Obama's citizenship on the basis of his father being Kenyan, the issue of Obama's birth certificate became a focal point for the Tea Party's mainstreaming of the white backlash against his presidency. Ta-Nehisi Coates famously called Trump “the First White President,” his point being that here was the first US president with nothing other than his whiteness to qualify him for the position. If birtherism rendered suspect Barack Obama's citizenship, it also rendered illegitimate his entire presidency by constructing him as a closeted Muslim. In an inverse racial logic, the birther movement rendered legitimate Trump's suitability for the presidency on the basis of his white supremacist politics and ideology.

The point here is that Trump was hardly an anomaly in terms of the nation's racial politics, as many historians were quick to point out. Rather, a white supremacist Administration was a long time in the making. For a powerful sector of the US corporate elite linked to the radical right as well as the “free-market” conservatives who opposed “big government” was sponsoring and funding the racial counter-revolution during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Their aim was to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement and defeat the liberalism that dominated state institutions by destroying social programs, labour rights, and health and environmental protection regulation.[4] The endeavour had gained traction during the Reagan presidency, its racial investments continued apace with the multicultural trajectory within national politics that eventually brought about the election of President Obama. The creation and promotion of the Tea Party to harness white racial resentment across classes would become the vehicle to political domination.

This counter-revolution now has control of the Presidency and has transformed the US political landscape for the foreseeable future. However, it is not enough to study these developments in terms only of the nation's changing domestic politics. For these “internal” shifts have been simultaneous with, and are structurally connected to, a far-reaching transformation of the international order. Uncannily, the remaking of the international order was also inaugurated by three words, only these emanated from the highest levels of the US state: unlawful enemy combatant.

These three words were institutionalized by the Bush Administration to launch the “war on terror”; they transformed the international juridical order by unleashing a series of invasions, wars, and occupations that also spoke to the foundational violence of the West. The newly minted category—unlawful enemy combatant—remade the figure of the Muslim, Black and Brown, into that of the “terrorist,” now a threat to “humanity” itself. These three words destroyed the idea that the rule of law, such as it was, should prevail in international relations. Instead, the category sanctioned violence as the modality of governance for Muslims, in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also within the West itself and in other parts of the world.

Along with these wars and occupations, vigilante violence became the reality for Brown and Black bodies, that is, Muslims and those who "look Like" them, as the nation-states of the Western alliance calibrated their domestic and foreign policies at the nexus of militarization and securitization. But despite amassing the unprecedented military, political, financial, and cultural resources of the alliance against “radical Islamic terror,” the United States ended up lurching from one monumental disaster to another in the global war. The political and social infrastructure was destroyed in Afghanistan, as it was in Iraq, with hundreds of thousands killed, maimed, and displaced. Despite this, the Taliban remained defiant, eventually forcing the United States to the negotiating table; in Iraq, the occupation gave rise to the Islamic State and with its defeat, strengthened the influence of Iran, Turkey, and Russia in the region. With the entire Middle East plunged into further chaos by these new occupations which also compounded the occupation of Palestine, proxy wars, coups, and counter-revolutionary movements (secular as well as Islamist) enabled the Western-backed regimes to refortify their authoritarian rule by squelching the liberatory possibilities of the Arab awakenings. These momentous shifts have sparked waves of migration that transformed the Mediterranean into a mass grave as Europe responded by shutting down its borders. For the hundreds of thousands of Black/Brown bodies fleeing the catastrophic violence, environmental collapse, and poverty that has been wrought by Western wars and imperialist aggression, the desperate bid to enter Europe offered the only lifeline. Even now, two decades after its invasion of Afghanistan, the Western alliance remains unable to contain the consequences of the conflicts which it so cavalierly escalated.

This inability of the US-led alliance to win its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is a vital factor feeding the white supremacist rage that is now remaking the western political culture; the contribution of these failures to the 2016 electoral fortunes of Donald Trump cannot be underestimated. While his winning slogan, “Make America Great Again,” spoke to the economic consequences of neoliberalism for the “left-behind” white masses in the United States, it also spoke to the diminished stature of the United States on the global stage, a process that began with the lies that were peddled in the invasion of Iraq and escalated with the revelations of the Abu Ghraib torture. While the United States’ loss of status was somewhat mitigated during the Obama presidency with its multicultural administration, this was not to be regained any time soon, despite Obama's personal popularity around the world. Indeed, his very popularity further enraged the Republican base into the white backlash that was Trump's ticket to the White House. Trump was, of course, rigidly confrontational in his racist statements, he was also unrelenting in his denigration of the idea of the rule of law, at the international or domestic level. Not surprising, he brought the generals who fought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq right into the White House.

The linkages between the war on terror and the white supremacist activism, anti-Black racism, and police violence have been palpably visible in the streets of the US capital and the many other cities convulsed by the protests against the killing of George Floyd. The connections can be tracked at many levels. They are evident in Trump's threat to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to put the military on the streets of US cities; his directive to the army and to the police to “dominate” the cities in which protestors came out in such large numbers; his labelling of anti-racist protestors as “terrorists”; his threat to set “vicious dogs” on protestors (recalling the “slave hunts” as well as the Abu Ghraib tortures); the use of humvees and other heavy vehicles, of military arsenal and battle fatigues, on the streets of Washington; the calling in of the National Guard and the stationing of combat troops outside Washington; the assault on protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets; the presence of unmarked para/military personnel on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and the streets of Portland, Oregon; the Black Hawk and Lakota helicopters flying low over Washington; the imposition of nightly curfews on protest cities .... the list goes on.

Such intermingling of military and police forces and functions within the territorial borders of the United States cannot be uncoupled from the use of these tactics in the war zones, the criticisms of Trump by military generals notwithstanding. Indeed, such criticism from the military brass itself reveals the depth of the linkages between the global war and anti-Black racism in the United States. Whatever other considerations may be at work, the public condemnations by high ranking generals of the Trump administration's use of the army in the presidential photo-op outside St. John's Church in Washington DC undoubtedly stems from their alarm about this institution's relation with the nation it supposedly serves, and in particular, with Black communities. The infamous photo-op jeopardized this relation to such a degree that the event has since been defined as "a debacle" not only for the White House but for the military itself.

It is certainly no secret that the US army relies heavily on Black people, along with Native Americans and other People of Colour, to fight the killing state's wars around the world. With regard to the National Guards that were deployed in the nation's capital (sixty percent of whom are People of Colour), The New York Times reported that "... Black members of the D.C. guard objected to turning on their neighbors". Many admitted to feeling too "ashamed" to tell their families that they had been involved in dispersing the peaceful protests. More accustomed to being revered as “heroes,” these troops apparently found unnerving the experience of being confronted by relatives, friends, and neighbors among the protestors. The last thing the military leadership would have wanted at that point was for these guards to refuse orders.

Consider also that People of Colour make up forty percent of the military's active troops and reserve pool. Here too one sees the fragility of the situation. A Black serviceman was reported by The New York Times to be "really distraught" at the events in Washington[5] and CNN Pentagon reporter, Barbara Starr, reported that many Black servicemen were speaking out against anti-Black racism within the military establishment. She quoted a Black general who described himself as "full with emotion" regarding "the many African-Americans that have suffered the same fate as George Floyd", a comment which reflects how seriously these servicemen were being affected by the police violence. Read in light of these considerations, the military leadership's criticisms of Trump that were lauded by liberals take on an entirely different hue. The consequences of such distress among Black servicemen and women is not entirely unforeseeable.

The hold of the military over Black, Native American, and People of Colour in service—and even more important, their buy-in to the system upon which the military depends—is crucial to US operations around the world. Moreover, it is also well known that the US military has been tolerant of the white supremacist recruits who join the army to acquire training, a fact not hidden from the Black and other People of Colour alongside whom they serve. Indeed, the army had to pull back a leaflet with Trump's MAGA slogan—seen as "a possible indicator of covert white supremacist sympathies"—that was recently distributed in Alabama. Pushed to the limit by such practices in the present political climate, there can be little guarantee that Black, Native American, and other soldiers of colour will remain loyal to whatever oaths they may have taken to protect a constitution that upholds the rights of white supremacists to arm themselves and patrol city streets; of the police to brutalize Black and other People of Colour communities; of ICE to incarcerate migrants, including infants, in detention centers described as prisons and concentration camps; of corporations to condemn racialized communities to poverty, dispossession and environmental racism—rights that are to be overseen by the justices appointed to the Supreme Court by a white supremacist president. The Trump Administration's decision to deploy Homeland Security, ICE, Federal Protective Service and unidentified military-style personnel to provoke violence at the BLM and related anti-racism protests in Portland and other cities suggests how deep may be the divide between the army and these other institutions within the state.

Moments of radical upheaval are moments of great peril. The seismic shifts in U.S. and global public opinion regarding anti-Black racism brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement is no small feat. The mass protests and demonstrations, in all their myriad forms, have put anti-Black racism, and racism more generally, on national agendas, not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom, Canada, and across Europe, not to mention in many other parts of the world. Reforms to policing—from banning chokeholds to revamped training, stronger oversight and even defunding—are being quickly adopted by liberal politicians to smooth things over. Meanwhile, political, social, academic, and media institutions, along with corporations and unions, and religious and secular organizations, have now also hastily put together public statements of support for Black Lives Matter, whatever follow-up actions they may or may not take in the near future.

Yet a backlash against this demand for change is not outside the realm of possibility. The police are themselves rioting in certain cities. Radical conservatism has run amok; it is now deeply and explicitly entangled with the white supremacist politics that were considered beyond the pale even in the United States in the closing decades of the twentieth century. This racial turn has been decades in the making in the United States; it is hardly likely to retreat, even should the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, win the presidency in the upcoming election. Likewise, occupations, proxy wars, and coups, like militarized border control and vigilante violence, have acquired greater public tolerance, if not overt support, in the West as a result of the war on terror. The possibilities for the undoing of these interlinked forms of violence depend on a thorough dismantling of the white supremacy that remains global in scope.

The Trump Administration has made starkly visible the two contending trajectories at play within US nation formation: overt white supremacy and a reformist racial liberalism. Both are, however, deeply shaped by and intertwined within, the global structure of racial-capitalism. The war on terror has made visible the coloniality that continues to infuse Western liberal democracy as well as the genocidal violence that underpins the international order. The wars that sustain these formations are not over yet. Not in the United States. Not outside the United States.

The West is in freefall. How long and how low will it fall?

References

Alexander, Michelle (2012) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Baldwin, James. (2016) I Am Not Your Negro. Documentary, Dir. Raoul Peck. Velvet Film. 

Coates, Ta-Nehisi (October 2017) The First White President. The Atlantic.

Davis, Angela (2005) Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire. AK Press. 

Fanon, Frantz. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. 

Malcolm X (1965) The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press. 

Mayer, Janet (2016) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday.

Melamed, Jodi (2011) Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ogletree, Jr., Charles J. and Austin Sarat (eds.) (2006) From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. New York: New York University Press.

Spillers, Hortense J. (1987) 'Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book', Diacritics. Vol. 17, No. 2.

Starr, Barbara (June 12, 2020) 'America's military leaders take a stand as Trump remains silent on racial inequality', CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/12/politics/military-leaders-race/index.html

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta (June 8, 2020) 'How Do We Change America?' The New Yorker.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. (2014) On Lynchings. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications. 

Wright, Richard (1969) 'How Bigger Was Born', in Native Son. New Yo



[1] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012)

[2]  Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

[3]  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “How Do We Change America?” The New Yorker, 8 June 2020.

[4] Janet Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016).

[5] 12 June 2020

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]