The production of intelligibility

Süreyyya Evren: Does a desire exist to contrive global polarization? Or has polarization occurred by itself? This game of contriving and aggravating polarization started after 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraqi wars and continued after the bomb attacks in Madrid and London and the Danish cartoon crisis…

Mahmut Mutman: It depends on what we mean by polarization. Marx predicted that polarization would be a class polarization and that it would take place in Europe. In the twentieth century, however, workers in Europe were mostly defeated and later absorbed into the system, while actual polarization arose between the western capitalist centres and the so-called Third World peripheries – a long and incomplete process which coincided with that of decolonization. The new conjuncture has been brought by technological transformation as well as the collapse of Soviet industrialization and the defeat of the Chinese Revolution. Polarization was certainly not invented by Samuel Huntington and it is not a cultural conflict or a clash of civilizations but social polarization. While rich people (mostly located in western metropolitan centres) enjoy high living standards and buying power, people in Africa are starving.

The classical working class has not disappeared, as some claim, just because they can’t see steel workers or coalminers anymore. It might be said that the working class has had a sex-change operation, since it is now mostly women between 15 and 30, from the US-Mexican border to Malaysia, who produce the jeans and shirts that you and I wear and place the chips in the computers that we use. If they demand a higher wage in Mexico, their boss will simply put his 20 sewing machines on a plane and take his factory to somewhere in Asia where he can easily find their counterparts. There is no communication between the people he left unemployed in Mexico and those he has employed in Asia.

Mobility for capital, slavery for labour: that’s what globalization comes down to. The system of relations of production tries to halt the development of forces of production. For instance, in the process of publishing an article, all correspondence is done through e-mail, but when it comes to signing the contract, that is the moment of property, you get sent a hard copy! I strongly hope that our wonderful system of private property will one day invent a technology of virtual signing. But will it be safe? Marx said that when value circulates like thought in one’s brain, at extreme speed, then it will be impossible to resolve the crisis, because it will be impossible to separate the stages of production and circulation. What was hypothetical for him is real for us now. Someone types a few numbers in New York or Tokyo and a country’s economy crashes! To emphasize: polarization is not cultural but social.

As for Huntington, his thesis is an attempt to give form to the emergent field of forces. Even though capitalism depends on reason, it always produces chaotic situations. That’s why ideologists such as Huntington must create some sort of intelligibility, so that there will be targets to aim at, forces to redistribute, and relations to change – so that the field of forces will be governable. The thesis that world history is a struggle between civilizations is an old one, with more respectable representatives such as Arnold Toynbee. What Huntington did was to give strong political shape to this thesis. He had in mind those areas that pose a problem for global western capitalist hegemony, for instance, China and Asian capitalist countries in general. With the exception of Japan, the new Asian capitalism is ideologically authoritarian, nationalist, and organicist; its paradigm is Hegelian Sittlichkeit (the perfect Turkish equivalent is Fethullah Gulen).

The Middle East is a rather different and complex story with many dimensions. Despite superficial anti-economist analyses, the Iraq war was clearly entered into in order to maintain hegemony over oil. Years ago, Simon Bromley defined oil as a “strategic commodity”; James O’Connor has argued that oil is an impenetrable black hole into which economics and politics collapse. In the US, the structure is so interlocked that if you threaten oil (economics), you threaten the national security system (politics), and if you threaten the Pentagon (politics), you threaten oil (economics). We need not even mention the mega-sector of the global auto industry or the petrodollars without which global stock markets would simply not work. But at the same time, there is the question of Palestine, which is actually the question of Israel. And last but not least, there is western racism and Orientalism in general.

Before going into these, I’d like to say a few things about the so-called Islamic movement. The recent politicization of Islam emerged has a complex set of causes, including global socio-economic structures as well as the crisis of secular nationalist regimes and ideologies in Muslim countries. Islamic political movements show an immense variety and include all kinds of voices, including small merchants, youths, women, and workers. Organizations such as Hamas or Hezbollah demonstrate fundamentalist characteristics on the one hand; on the other hand, if we make an effort to set aside our cultural and political prejudices, they also resemble organizations such as the Black Panthers in the US in the 1960s. Iran is run by an Islamicist patriarchal group of mullahs who basically control the oil. Ahmedinejad came to power by attracting and mobilizing the urban poor’s anti-American as well as class feelings. Saudi Arabian Wahhabism is a completely different story. I also believe that Al-Qaida does not have much significance in the long run. In human history, no political force has ever won a struggle by targeting large civilian masses in the way they do.

Despite its variety, the general social pattern of Islamic political movements is an alliance between the nationalist sections of native bourgeoisies and poor urban masses. From a leftwing perspective, there is much to criticize in a religious movement with fundamentalist characteristics. But one must also avoid paranoid, across-the-board, reductionist approaches. Islamic movements have also become a channel for expressing protest against alienation, oppression, and poverty.

Huntington is an elaborate instance of “culturalized” racism, of a learned and sanctioned ignorance. Pundits and academics who take Huntington’s thesis seriously also misread him seriously. Huntington clearly saw that Islam was becoming politicized under given circumstances, yet he defined it as a “civilization”. Of course this is not wrong in itself: every great religion historically constitutes a civilization as well. But his move was carefully designed. Islamic civilization requires the inseparability of religion and politics; insofar as Islam is concerned, it is impossible to achieve such a separation. By attempting to secularize Islam, Huntington is negating its religious difference. This involves a fantasy, of course, but it is also a clever move by which to create a target, something to deal with. The same kind of move can also be found in the increasingly popular works of the Orientalist Bernard Lewis. Of course, one should be very sensitive with regard to this kind of essentializing move. Throughout its history, Islam has seen various moments of politicization (its first great politicization was to turn from a tribal religion into an imperial regime). But it is an invested reading or misreading to say that these various forms of politicization can be reduced to essentially the same thing.

This is what I mean by the ideologist as expert who tries to create some sort of intelligibility. Of course, the production of intelligibility is not merely a scholarly or rational kind of operation. It involves the production of something visibly present, something the hegemonic force can deal with, fight, and govern: a problem, an enemy, an “Other”, if you like. This kind of operation involves all kinds of non-rational factors: mimesis, mimetic rivalry, racism, the production of a subject, agenda-setting by the media, and so on. As long as an imperial relationship exists – and we know that global capitalism has only re-constituted imperial structures – there is always desire for an enemy. Racism is a very difficult problem. Unlike fever, it does not have a cause. It cannot be entirely destroyed and one must deal with it permanently. New social, economic, and cultural arrangements, as well as constant education – what Gramsci called “permanent persuasion” – are necessary. We are now at a juncture at which the old universalism no longer works. But we must develop a new reading of universalism rather than simply giving it up.

Of course, once you have created an enemy, you have a real one – even though its creation involves a phantasm, an unconscious aspect. In this sense, no one can predict what will happen and nothing is simply manipulated. Look at what happened in Lebanon. No one knows who the winner was. Lebanon was destroyed, but not Hezbollah, which may now be even stronger. On the other hand, Israel clearly has the upper hand. What will come out of these struggles? I hope for a new Islam that will not belong to the fundamentalist project and for a new Middle East that will not belong to the imperial project.

SE: An international leftist wave based on horizontal organization emerged with the Zapatistas, Seattle ’99, and later in the world social forums. It may still exist, but the impact of a combination of security paranoia, police-state legislation, phobia, and nationalisms has caused an overall loss of momentum. Will the concept of the international have to be replaced with something like inter-locality that would transcend the unit of nation-state?

MM: It is not only about a loss of momentum. The Zapatista movement emerged out of very specific circumstances; I don’t know if this can be repeated elsewhere. As for Seattle and other protests in western metropolitan centres: of course, when the big bosses get together, it’s very important to show that their decisions are not the final word on anything. But the problem is that, as a result of the routine operation of media, the “centre” is already the centre of our attention, and hence the significance of these protests is overestimated. They are not even a half of what is going on around the world. When something of this nature happens in Genova, Seattle, or Paris, of course CNN, the BBC, or Reuters cannot ignore them. But did you know that, in a region of Southern India, the inhabitants of two villages recently got rid of a transnational food corporation? These social struggles exist all over the world, very real struggles on a daily basis, which are won or lost. You don’t hear this from any international news agency or on the so-called global TV channels. What qualifies as news is a fundamental question for me. There is a strong metropolitan bias. I am not saying “long live the rural and the natural”. Cities in general, especially western metropolitan centres, are spaces of deterritorialization and freedom. But they also bind us, make us biased – this is one reason why I don’t always agree with Negri. We don’t know who is struggling, where, and how. We hear snippets of news here and there – I found the news of the Indian villages while looking for something else on the Internet. We can thank those in Seattle or Genova because they were close to the cameras. But let’s not forget that we don’t even know who else to thank!

I am glad you referred to the world social forum. This might be one place where very different people from all over the world can get together and learn from each other. I am not against general strategic debates or programmes, but the most valuable thing for me is the kind of exchange that will give people an opportunity to compare, contrast, and learn. Sometimes you learn a lot from a stranger’s gesture or a word she said. Unfortunately, most of the time people seem to be more interested in global programmes and strategies, even though they themselves are actually a lot more interesting! Consequently, I can’t really say if the situation today is better or worse for the left: you’re asking the wrong man! In the worst street of a Nairobi slum, two prostitutes have completed a night’s work. Long live breakfast!

SE: Those who fan the flames of global polarization always operate in both directions. Consider the Danish cartoon crisis, for instance. The Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten complicated things when it appropriated the slogans of “freedom of the press” and “the battle against self-censorship”. This undermined the position not only of those who advocate freedom of expression in Islamic countries, but also people in the west who stand up for minority and immigrant rights. There are always those who ride the wave of such crises. You’ll remember how, back then, cartoons aiming to raise anti-western sentiment, as well as reproductions of the original cartoons with additional, even more incendiary material, were circulated on the Internet.

MM: In the British journal Radical Philosophy, Heiko Henkel published a brilliant piece on the so-called cartoon crisis. The whole train of events showed once more how inept, ignorant, and disingenuous the majority of European leaders are. Of course, everything can and must be criticized – all religions, all ideologies, all ideas. But as Henkel pointed out, if you look carefully at those caricatures, the first thing you are reminded of are the caricatures of Jews in the 1930s. Given this unashamed racism, if a prime minister says, “I can’t apologize, because there is freedom of expression in my tradition”, this is called ignorance and abuse of the very concept of democracy. If Rasmussen had any idea of the great European tradition of political thinking and political philosophy, he would know that, from Machiavelli to Spinoza and Rousseau, freedom cannot be separated from responsibility. If there is freedom without responsibility, why is Moses not represented in this way? Because then you would be called a Nazi, Israel would protest, and everyone would teach you a lesson. But who cares if you’re a Muslim?

Recently, Günter Grass, a genuine democrat, admitted that when he was young he joined the SS. The same people that demanded that all his awards be revoked watched Muslim civilians getting killed in Lebanon. That is the hypocrisy of bourgeois political culture. Henkel pointed out that the newspaper that published these caricatures is close to the rightwing party that is Rasmussen’s coalition partner. Rasmussen made a speech claiming it was his political tradition that mattered to him, and all the while was thinking of nothing but his own political interests. Welcome to Europe’s political culture; here is the European politician’s genius. An apology would have been an important step towards mutual understanding and peace, while sending out a strong message that racism is not tolerable. But no, it was beat the Muslims, teach them a lesson.

Of course, fundamentalist Muslims made use of these racist caricatures to engender cultural hatred. But mass and popular protests are something else, even though they might be manipulated by fundamentalists. You can’t change people’s minds overnight, faith is a very complex issue about which one has to be sensitive. Let us not forget that what is called political abuse is something that westerners do a lot too, teaching ideological lessons at every opportunity. But, as everyone knows yet no one cares, George W. Bush came to power on the back of massive Christian fundamentalist support. Why is that not a problem? What about Guantanamo? Would the great democrat Rasmussen care to explain that this too is western tradition? Of course there is complicity between Orientalism/racism and fundamentalism, because fundamentalist Islamism emerged out of a relationship with the Orientalist west. That’s why they feed into each other – it’s Huntington’s world.

SE: Let’s take a look at the social polarizations in Turkey. It’s as if the EU-accession process is being carried out in order to make the Turkish public opinion see Europe, and the west in general, as “the Other”. Some observers maintain that in every accession state, opposition to the EU tends to increase for a while. However, while local politicians benefit to a certain extent from exploiting this, the trend reverses once the candidate is accepted. Since Turkey’s “special status” means a prolonged process and conflict-ridden basis for negotiations, it seems implausible to rely on this model. Even at moments when Turkish accession was taken seriously, an opposite discourse about “the Other” gained currency and support in Europe.

MM: The perception of the west as “the Other” did not begin with the EU accession process. It is also never clear in these matters who is whose “Other”. The west itself has seen the rest of the world as the “Other” for centuries. The norm has always been the west, which is regarded as the “natural” owner of universality. I think that’s where the “special status” comes from. Accepting Turkey is not the same thing as accepting Ukraine. This is not simply an issue of human rights. Religious difference is no small matter to the European mind.

To put things in another light: one shouldn’t forget that modern democracy did not appear because people decided to be democratic but that it accompanied the emergence of modern industrial capitalism, that there is some kind of link between the two. The democratic deficit in Turkey has to do with the historical fact that capitalism emerged not as a result of internal social dynamics but in articulation with the global economy. If Turks were unable to produce a capitalist economy and European-style Enlightenment, civility, and democracy, then that is a deficit. But something else is also true: that those who did produce all this before the Turks and others were able to do so not simply because they were culturally, religiously, or economically more intelligent, but also because they were able to dominate places like Turkey. They therefore must also have a hand in the lack of civility and democracy in places like Turkey.

If you look at what is called the “eastern question” in the nineteenth century, if you remember Caglar Keyder’s political-economic analysis of Ottoman society in the same century, you have a different kind of picture. The same structure is maintained in different ways in the twentieth century: Turkey’s geopolitical position, NATO membership, and so on. In all military coups until now, some western countries gave explicit support, while others “opposed” but in reality did nothing to promote democratic development. In sum, this huge capitalist society we call Turkey today has not been created by Turks alone: the west has significantly contributed to the historical, political, and economic formation of contemporary Turkish society. This is what the west denies. Turks (and all peripheral peoples) too do not understand how much they have contributed to the emergence and formation of the identity of this thing called western civilization.

I admire the idea of the European Union, even though it seems to have failed. I support the idea of regional unities, for instance I’d be happy to see an African Union or a Middle Eastern Union. Europeans’ justified criticisms about deficits of democracy and rights are a great support but are also no substitute for the struggle for democracy in Turkey itself. In the final analysis, it is a matter of political economy from the EU’s point of view. It’s naive to think that this is a question of democracy for Europe, except for a few honest European democrats. There are, on the one hand, cultural racists such as Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, who makes the difference between “lifestyles” an issue. Here, the real issue is, I think, cultural racism in the form of Islamophobia. On the other hand, there are realists who clearly see Turkey as both economically and politically profitable and therefore want to see the Turkish political elite try to give the country a new democratic face. But for reasons that also involve the Europeans themselves, the Turkish political elite keep failing in this area, since they are trapped in a vicious circle of Oedipalism. From the EU’s point of view, the question is who will win the struggle between cultural racists and realists. From the Turkish point of view, the question is whether a democratic culture will emerge, and that is a long-term struggle.

SE: A consensus oriented towards opening an eastern front against the west, and a western front against the east, seems to be growing. To follow the readers’ commentary on the web pages of daily papers may be interesting in this respect. I am not interested so much in the opinions of certain people as in which opinions can be expressed openly and legitimately and which cannot be voiced at all or would be subject to suppression. On those pages one can see how a permanent state of anger, animosity, or conflict with the west is gaining legitimacy from one day to the next. Whether it is because the imperial legacy is being revived or not, you can see explicit scorn, quasi or virtual racism, and sometimes a desire for historical revenge. The east is deemed deserving of our empathy only when it has demonstrated submission or gratitude towards Turkey (as Afghanistan does sometimes, and South Korea all the time). For example, in the comments to news reports about Israel’s assault on Lebanon, Arabs were often denigrated…

MM: I agree entirely. In Turkey, there has always been hostility and racism towards Arabs, even among the defenders of the Republican Revolution. But in the last decade this has also become a new fashion among liberal columnists and pundits who unquestioningly take the western liberal norm as an ideal. Most of these people consider themselves civilized when they snub Arab culture. This embarrassing attitude has now become commonplace in the media. It has to do with Turkish liberalism’s incredible superficiality and ignorance.

Once this machine of hatred gets into gear it is very difficult to stop it. On the one hand, a hatred of Europeans and European culture, on the other, a hatred of national culture and identity. Twenty-five years ago, these people were on the left. Now that totalitarianism has ended and democracy has progressed, we have this kind of political regression!

What is to be done? I think we must invent a way of speaking and doing things that makes terms such as “west” and “east” insignificant. Of course, no one can act as though such a distinction is not there, because this distinction is founded by Orientalism and is part of the language and culture in which we live. Orientalist distinction is a material “spacing”, not a simple ideological or cultural prejudice that can be overcome in the mind. It constitutes the geography and the geopolitics, the language and the culture in which we live. Hence the incredible vigilance it requires!

For instance, the feeling of hatred that one feels everywhere. If it applies to both sides, then the question is not the content of an identity but something else. This hatred has to do with a more general and structural feeling that Nietzsche has identified as ressentiment. What are the characteristics of a period in which there is strong and widespread feeling of resentment? It appears that a morality is being established. You can see this kind of moralistic discourse everywhere today, in academic writing too. If you ask whether it really does construct a morality, my answer would be that it constructs without constructing. The subject of such a discourse speaks and writes as if everyone knows what the Good is, and can therefore say who should go to hell on the basis of what everyone knows. It is certainly an aggressive but at the same time a very weak discourse. A discourse that refers to a positivity that it can neither name nor produce, that it always merely presumes. Yildirim Türker described the subject of this discourse very well when he described it as “the impotent powerful”. It might be a rightwing MP or a leftwing intellectual, it does not matter. There is nothing surprising in the fact that open fascism is gaining votes, because micro-fascism is everywhere. Turkish society has never been in such bad shape.

I think in the general context of this micro-fascism, one of the most important intellectual tasks today is a critique of contemporary Turkish identity and subjectivity, or Turkishness as a contemporary formation of identity and subjectivity. There are two approaches to the question of who we are today. The first is developed from a traditional social scientific perspective and can be found in the historical or anthropological works of Dogan Avcioglu, Taner Timur, and Bozkurt Güvenc. These are all important contributions. But although these works show variations in methodology or style, they seem to share a common characteristic. In order to understand the contemporary Turk, they begin with the Asiatic origins of Turks. Of course, as an ethnic group, Turkish people come from Asia. However, I wonder if we can consider common origins as a major characteristic of contemporary Turks. Can we instead ask why Turks go back to their Asiatic origins in order to understand themselves and their place in the world? In this common desire, might we Turks be trying to repress or hide something from ourselves, or generally the things that disturb us here and now?

The second approach is more unique, and is represented by Murat Belge. Belge has also been a pioneering figure in developing a critical understanding of our contemporary Turkishness, the contemporary cultural state in which we find ourselves, our habits, ways of thinking and acting, and so on. But there is also an aspect of his approach that I find problematic. In recent years, Belge’s criticism has increasingly depended on a norm and model: namely the Anglo-American one. Of course, in a democratic struggle one depends on democratic norms. But when the whole thing is reduced to stating transcendent universal truths residing somewhere else and to be applied here, one loses the critical edge of one’s discourse. While trying hard to change society and to transform culture, one finds oneself telling society what it must do. This implies an elite and authoritarian relationship with society. This kind of strange reversal, which applies for most Turkish liberals, is increasingly heard in Belge’s discourse too. While Belge’s criticism in the late 1970s was a searching and open kind of criticism, it has become more and more closed. In this kind of problematic of progress, Turkishness turns out to be a matter of feudalism, of Middle Eastern culture, in other words, a kind of cultural backwardness. Within such a restricted, old-fashioned, and closed approach, there is no way of seeing how Turkish identity itself was produced in a strange agonistic and mimetic relationship with the west. Therefore, there is no way to see how so-called Turkish backwardness is also at the very heart of western civilization itself.

Let me emphasize the implication of this argument: critique of contemporary Turkishness is also a critique of the west. Democracy will come out of these criticisms, it will come from being critical. It does not come from transcendent truths, but from struggles, from within a style of criticism that does not depend on transcendent norms and models. Of course, this kind of criticism is an intellectual enterprise and requires a good deal of theory. Unfortunately, this kind of theoretically informed approach is what Turkish intellectuals, including Belge, have lost. Meanwhile, we can take an alternative route to the usual west vs. east talk by means of a critical reading of Turkish liberalism. I personally find the most vital source for this kind of intellectual activity in postwar French radical thinking, especially Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. I think this approach is capable of producing an affirmative openness that seems very important to me.

SE: The Turkish left either accepts given polarizations or opts for the exact opposite of whatever pole is offered. Various nationalist fractions have gained legitimacy within the left. I think one factor contributing to the reactionary turn on the left is the prolonged EU process. All reforms, starting with the abolition of the death penalty, are being made from the top down, and demands for freedoms hinge upon entry into the EU. The alternatives seem to be either a left that waits for the EU to change Turkey in a positive way, standing by as if it has suspended its efforts to transform the world – one of the fundamental aspects of its identity; or a left that builds upon reactions, that focuses on obstructing the forces of change with reference to both the east-west divide and ethnic divisions, and that perceives the EU, from its government down to its people, as an “Other”.

MM: Again, I agree. The question is: who are the nationalist left? Social democrats who have come from the party that established the Turkish Republic and not from the trade unions (the more usual route for social democrats). This implies that they have some kind of anti-imperialist tradition. To be fair to them and to history, it is not the kind of anti-imperialism that arose from a long and protracted anti-colonial war. There is no doubt that had it not been for Mustafa Kemal’s leadership we would have been born slaves. But it is also true that imperialists did not insist on colonizing Turkey – compare us with Algeria, India, or Latin America. Therefore the Republicans’ anti-imperialism is not very strong. They don’t have a serious objection to the EU; this is partially politics and the rest is the Kurdish issue. As for Dogu Perincek, leader of the Turkish Workers Party, it seems to me that he and his group struggles for power rather than socialism, and they need a certain sense of victory, since it is obvious that they have no chance of leading a mass movement. On their side, I cannot see a serious criticism of imperialism other than conspiracy theories. It is also very hard for me to understand people who think of themselves as on the left and ally with the National Movement Party. The problem is not the escalation of nationalism on the left, but the left’s gradual disappearance.

SE: A new phenomenon has emerged in Turkey that might be called the culture of lynching. The idea of a Turkish-Kurdish conflict, which even in the 1990s, when the fighting was much more intense, was non-existent, is now spreading to the streets. Official data aside, I have witnessed on a city bus somebody openly and loudly deploring Kurds; or in the neighbourhood where I grew up, have heard the owner of the grocery store, whom I used to know as just a religious man, complaining that Kurds have too many children. These are observations from daily life; there is also the attitude of the media. How should we read this situation? Can we talk about continuity with the polarization mentioned above? Or is it more sensible to think that it arises out of local dynamics.

MM: I’d say it has to do both with local dynamics and global polarization, as well as the games being played in the region. First of all, there is a significant Kurdish population who migrated to the big cities. Most of these people suffer from dire poverty and are simply trying to survive. From Istanbul to Adana, the places they migrated to and the poor and depressed neighbourhoods they live in are also places where there is a good deal of social tension, strain, and violence; places where people are looking for an object of hatred for all the social and economic reasons known so well. As for the region, the situation in the Middle East is now such that northern Iraq is constantly on the agenda and the possibility of military involvement makes people nervous. When you put all these circumstances together, Kurdish citizens are turned into almost enemies.

The important thing here is to educate people against hostility, hatred, and racism. But though the government and the political elite – not to mention the media – keep talking about national unity, they cannot even name the problem. For instance, the political elite support no kind of social or sociological research. Democracy is supposed to fall from heaven one day in the form of EU membership and the only thing we can do is to pray! Everywhere is the culture of resentment, the culture of hatred and hostility. This may lead to something much more serious in the future, like a sudden explosion. It’s frightening.