STANDING UNDER METAPHORS OF POWER: ANKARA CITY GATES
A Master’s Thesis
by
KADİR YAVUZ EMİROĞLU
Department of
Political Science and Public Administration
İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University Ankara July 2019 KADİ R Y A VU Z E Mİ R OĞ L U ST A NDI NG UN DE R ME T AP HORS OF P OW E R B ilk en t U n iv er sit y 2 0 1 9
To Nurdan and my Family
STANDING UNDER METAPHORS OF POWER: ANKARA CITY GATES
The Graduate School of Economics and Social Sciences of
İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University
by
KADİR YAVUZ EMİROĞLU
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS
THE DEPARTMENT OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION İHSAN DOĞRAMACI BİLKENT UNIVERSITY
ANKARA
ABSRACT
STANDING UNDER METAPHORS OF POWER: ANKARA CITY GATES
Emiroğlu, Kadir Yavuz
M.A. Department of Political Science and Public Administration Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Alev Çınar
July 2019
This thesis examines Ankara City Gates in terms of how they metaphorically reproduce a mode of subjecthood, a cultural citizenship corresponding to the understanding of citizenship of the AKP and the state, of which Melih Gökçek, former metropolitan mayor of Ankara is a representative. Doing so, it observes and analyzes these city gates as they function to
reproduce the above-mentioned mode of subjecthood, a cultural citizenship whose substance represents an Ottomanist, nationalist, Islamist, neoliberal ideological mélange. The case of Ankara City Gates is analyzed by taking the city gates as textual material, looking at Gökçek’s statements on these structures, considering various instances of public response and comparing this original gate-building practice to various experiences of gate-building in other Anatolian municipalities. Location of the city gates, and how they are placed in relation to the city (e.g. presence of a police control point near the gates) are interpreted to see if they constitute a newer sense of dominion in Ankara. This observation leads this study to observe that Ankara City Gates function to draw new boundaries to Ankara. Religious, national, historical references (e.g. Seljuk Stars, Turkish flags, Mevlana statutes), material qualities (e.g. building materials of these gates) are interpreted with regards to another metaphorical function of these structures: Ideological spolia. It is a practice of selectively attaching elements to represent how the ideology of the AKP imagines, envisions, marks their dominion, the area where the subjectified citizens enter to. These two functions constitute a final one, which enabling the city gates to subjectify citizens of Ankara, rendering them under-standers, citizen subjects who stand under the city gates. Keywords: Ankara, Citizenship, Metaphors, Space and Politics, Subjectification
ÖZET
GÜÇ METAFORLARININ ALTINDA DURMAK: ANKARA ŞEHİR KAPILARI
Emiroğlu, Kadir Yavuz
M.A. Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü Tez Danışmanı: Prof. Dr. Alev Çınar
Temmuz 2019
Bu tez çalışması Ankara Şehir Kapılarını, bu yapıların metaforik olarak bir tabiiyet kipini, Ankara Büyükşehir Belediyesi eski Başkanı Melih Gökçek’in temsilcisi olduğu Ak Parti ve devletin vatandaşlık anlayışına tekabül eden bir kültürel vatandaşlık durumunu nasıl yeniden ürettiği sorusu üzerinden ele almaktadır. Böylece bu çalışma, bahse konu kapılar üzerinden, Osmanlıcı, milliyetçi, İslamcı, neoliberal bir ideolojik karışımın içeriğini belirlediği bir tabiiyet kipini, yani bir kültürel vatandaşlık durumunu gözlemlemiş ve analize tabi tutmuştur. Şehir kapılarını bir metin olarak kabul ederek, Gökçek’in bu yapılar üzerine sunduğu ifadelere bakarak, kamuoyu tarafından verilen çeşitli cevapları değerlendirerek ve bu özgün kapı-inşa etme eylemini diğer Anadolu belediyelerindeki çeşitli kapı-inşa tecrübeleriyle kıyaslanmıştır. Böylece, şehir kapılarının konumları, şehirle ilişkili olarak yerleştirilme şekilleri (örneğin kapıların yakınında bir polis kontrol noktasının bulunması) yorumlanmış ve bu yapıların Ankara’da yeni bir hakimiyet alanı oluşturup oluşturmadığı sorgulanmıştır. Bu gözlem de bu tez çalışmasını Ankara Şehir Kapılarının Başkent’e yeni sınırlar çizme fonksiyonuna sahip olduğu çıkarımına ulaştırmıştır. Dini, milli, tarihi referanslar (örneğin Selçuklu Yıldızı, Türk Bayrağı, Mevlâna heykeli), materyal özellikler (örneğin yapım malzemeleri) yorumlanarak ikinci bir metaforik fonksiyon, ideolojik spolia kullanımı gözlenmiştir. Bu fonksiyon dahilinde, seçici bir şekilde yerleştirilmiş belli ögeler, Ak Parti’nin ideolojisinin, hakimiyet alanlarını, yani tebaalaştırılan vatandaşların girdiği alanı nasıl tahayyül edip işaretlediğini göstermektedir. Bu iki fonksiyon nihai ve üçüncü bir fonksiyonu ortaya koymaktadır. Bu da şehir kapılarının Ankara’daki vatandaşları
tebaalaştırmaya tabii tutması, onları kapının altında duran birer tebaa üyesi vatandaş haline getirmesidir.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to start this series of acknowledgements with an impossible one. I am deeply grateful to Prof. Alev Çınar for her wise guidance and clement patience in supervising the novice author of this master’s thesis. It would not be possible to pursue such research objectives without Prof. Çınar’s encouragement and academic expertise. I also would like to state the excitement and honor I felt by having
defended my thesis before a jury consisting of two figures I admire. I cannot express my gratitude enough towards Assoc. Prof. Bülent Batuman and Prof. Savaş Zafer Şahin for their invaluable comments and suggestions.
As the witty Picasso line suggests, nothing is made in the duration in which it is made. This thesis took approximately a year’s work, but I am indebted to ones who carried me to the moments I wrote this piece. I actually have written this thesis in 5 years plus a year. I started to seriously deal with questions of how power and politics work after I met Assistant Professor Meral Uğur Çınar in an introductory course to Political Science. I thank her with my all heart and mind, as she taught me in becoming a good student and a good person. I also would like to thank Dr. John William Day for his eye-opening course, and heart-warming personality. I am also thankful to my professors, Dr. Selin Akyüz, Assoc. Prof. İlker Aytürk, Assoc. Prof. Nedim Karakayalı, Assistant Prof. Luca Zavagno and Prof. Pınar Bilgin for teaching me to think, read and write in a critical manner. I thank Gül Ekren for her weariless watch over the department, and the cheer she sparked in the lives of the students. As a receiver of the BİDEB (Directorate of Science Fellowships and Grant Programmes)
2210/A scholarship, I would like to thank TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) for the support provided during my master’s studies.
In an emotional note, I am obliged to thank my friends. It would not be possible to write this thesis without the support of Hamdusena Eşrefoğlu, Cihan Eryonucu, Ertuğrul Altınözen, Musa Bendaş, Selahaddin Harmankaya, Ahmed Halid Kayhan, Burak Aydemir, Furkan Ün, and, Furkan Işın. There is a special place in the Bilkent Campus. It is wherever my office folk sits down and work along with laughter and warm conversation. I am grateful to Ayşe Durakoğlu, Fatma Nur Murat, and Ozan Karayiğit for the great adventure during the two years of master’s.
I would like to state my thankfulness to my family, my beautiful extended family. I am grateful for having Mehmet Emiroğlu as my father, Saliha Cirit as my mother. These two figures made everything possible for me to experience the festivity around the Earth. I thank and kiss in cheeks of my brother Ali Bahadır, and my sister Zeynep Aybike, and my brother-in-law Mehmet Tarık. I also would like to thank my mother and father in law, Kevser and Necati Tatar for accepting me into their family, and further decreasing the stress of writing a master’s thesis.
Lastly, and mostly, I thank my soulmate, the person who laughs at my uncanny jokes about my thesis and everything else in the universe, Nurdan. Without her presence, I would only stand under the city gates of Ankara, and not write a single word about them.
TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSRACT ... i ÖZET... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ... v LIST OF FIGURES ... vi CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ... 1
CHAPTER II: MASTER’S STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY: A LITERATURE REVIEW... 12
2.1 Conceptual Frame ... 14
2.1.1 Formation of Citizen-Subjects and Cultural Citizenship ... 14
2.1.2 Metaphors: A Theory of Imagination and Reason ... 20
2.1.3 Space: Another Theory of Imagination and Reason ... 27
2.1.4 A Tale of Two Functions: Ideological Spolia and Boundary Drawing ... 30
2.2 Background and the Ideological Context of Ankara City Gates ... 36
2.2.1 Modern Gates of Ankara... 36
2.2.2 Ideological Basis of the AKP ... 38
2.2.3 A Myth of Gate-Building: Yenikapı and Murat the 4th ... 42
2.2.4 An Ideological Source Revisited: Evliya Çelebi’s Gates ... 44
2.3 Political Use of Space in Turkey ... 49
CHAPTER III: FORTIFYING A CITY WITHOUT WALLS: AN ANALYSIS ... 54
3.1 Standing Under and Under-standing Gates ... 57
3.2 What a Mayor Talks About When He Talks About Gates ... 73
3.3 Angry Architects and Confused Citizens: A Sketch of Public Response ... 82
3.4 Lives and Deaths of Gates in Anatolia: A Story of Dissemination ... 89
CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION ... 99
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Locations of Ankara City Gates... 57
Figure 2 Konya Road City Gate ... 59
Figure 3 Samsun Road City Gate ... 62
Figure 4 Istanbul Road City Gate ... 65
Figure 5 Eskisehir Road City Gate ... 67
Figure 6 As the Author Sees a Construction Project “NORTHGATE” ... 70
Figure 7 As the Author Goes through the Airport Road City Gate... 70
Figure 8 Virtual Boundaries of Gökçek's Ankara ... 71
Figure 9 "Yaren Gate" built in Çankırı (Çankırı Belediyesi) ... 90
Figure 10 One of the two Kütahya Gates (Ayhan, 2018) ... 91
Figure 11 Göynük Gate with a piece of inscribed advice from Akşemseddin ... 93
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
In March 2014, just before the municipal elections at the end of the month, Melih Gökçek, the former mayor of Ankara, organized an opening ceremony for the five city gates he erected on main highways of the Turkish capital city. The festive event was open to public and included a firework show and even a concert given by late Murat Göğebakan, an artist of Anatolian Rock genre. In the ceremony, Gökçek declares the opening day as “one of the most important days of our Ankara,” and goes on describing the “magnificence” of these structures. With a heavy reference to Ottoman-Seljuk history, Gökçek finishes off his speech by putting forth how the legacy of city’s history was conflated with steel, “which is the modern technique of construction” (Habertürk, 2014). In another interview conducted for the elections, he suggests that these gates will enable the municipality to “greet visitors” with their design, ornaments, and compatibility with the rest of Ankara’s aesthetics and
modernity (2014). The former metropolitan mayor of Ankara seems to believe in the importance of building gates for the capital city. Gates matter in Gökçek’s Ankara.
Unlike a pragmatic use of city gates in the history of Anatolia and other geographies, in the 21st century Ankara, gates described by Melih Gökçek have almost nothing tangible attached to them, they are not parts of a fortification around the city literally marking the entrances. In modern standards, they are not open to touristic visits, they do not let pedestrians to pass over the highway. While in the 17th Century Ankara,
Evliya Çelebi suggests that the commander would have been killed off if he had passed outside the gates (2005, p. 521); Ankara’s new city gates do not bear such a consequence, and they solely “greet” the passerby. However, ultimately Ankara City Gates are material entities that exist in the city, interact with ones standing under, bear stories and symbols, and more importantly, carry out metaphorical functions implying a sense of entering into a dominion and reinforcing the presence of the state.
In this paper, the research problématique is born out of this somewhat counter-intuitive, antinomic gaze at these city gates, which were built amidst a turbulent political atmosphere, deprived of a practicality but simultaneously open to a deeper political-metaphorical reading. What these gates represent and reproduce as spatio-metaphorical structures; how the relationship between the citizens and the AKP and the Turkish State is established through these structures are the main research questions driving this project. Therefore, this paper is in an attempt to locate and understand the modern city gates of Ankara in terms of their metaphorical functions leading them to reproduce an understanding of a cultural citizenship (Ong, 1996). As cultural citizenship is a concept to refer to the negotiation between the state and the citizen regarding the cultural substance of citizenship (p. 738), Ankara City Gates present us the opportunity to see how the understanding of citizenship of the AKP and the Turkish State is represented and reproduced in a spatio-metaphorical level. Rather than legally positioning the citizens in the Turkish polity, Ankara City Gates puts forth an ideological-historical narration and a sense of metaphorical dominion where the citizenship is recognized and favored. This way, as Ong’s conception suggests, citizenship is formed through a subjectification process. Ankara City Gates function to subjectify citizens of Ankara -thus Turkey- into a certain cultural
citizenship. Ünlü (2018) for instance recognizes this type of formation of citizenship with another metaphorical negotiation process between the state and the citizens. Using the metaphor of “contract”, Ünlü argues that there is a “Turkishness Contract” imposed upon the citizens of Turkey around the cultural and ideological identity of Turkishness. Although it also includes a legal aspect of citizenship, the cultural substance implied by Ünlü’s metaphor of “Turkishness Contract” can be read along with the Turkishness and the Ottomania, and the Islamism which are reproduced as a conflated cultural substance to the citizenship put forth by Ankara City Gates. This type of formation of citizenship as producing boundaries to citizenship which is both observable in Ünlü’s work and in the case of Ankara City Gates can be also
discussed in relation to the concept of “citizenship regimes.” Citizenship is a concept used to define how boundaries of citizenship in a particular state is drawn (Jenson, 2007, p. 55-56). The tricky part in understanding how citizenship regimes
conceptually relate to Ankara City Gates is to understand that citizenship does not only operate in a legal domain. As Ankara City Gates, in a totalistic-obliging manner, greet each motorized citizen into a cultural citizenship whose substance is marked and reproduced in parallels to the ideological mélange of the AKP, a certain type of citizenship regime is constructed around these structures. Ankara City Gates in drawing boundaries, and marking these boundaries with an ideological-historical narration, they actually put forth an understanding of citizenship, both its cultural substance and how it is making the citizen subjects enter into its dominion.
The mode of citizenship reproduced through metaphorical functions of the city gates positions the state hierarchically advantaged, and the citizen under the city gate, and thus under the state. In other words, Ankara City Gates open to a research venue where the relationship between the state and the citizen, and the understanding of
citizenship as a result of this relationship can be observed through different metaphorical functions served by the city gates. Through these so-called
metaphorical functions, individuals are recruited into a subjecthood, called out to be members of a cultural citizenship corresponding to what the AKP and the Turkish State conceives as citizenship, simply by standing under these gates, understanding them, and -in the belief of the author of this thesis, poetically- becoming
under-standers. This position of being an under-stander, however, does not correspond to
an actual practice of standing, or idly experiencing the city gates’
material/metaphorical presence. On the contrary, the actual mode of experiencing these structures is a mobile, motorized one. The citizen who is rendered
under-stander is metaphorically standing under the gate, thus under the builder of it. The under-stander has to understand Ankara City Gates without the ability to literally
stand under these structures due to the extremely fast mobility taking place around these structures. Rather, the under-standers of Ankara involuntarily enter into the dominion of the state whose boundaries are metaphorically drawn by these city gates.
These poetic processes of subjectification and the formation of the substance of the cultural citizenship are constantly marked by the ideological mélange of the AKP because the city gates of Ankara are made to bear a conflation of ideological patterns, conceptions, and symbols referring to a multi-faceted Ottomanist-nationalist-Islamist-neoliberal ideological basis. Ankara City Gates provides the observers with an occasion that is involuntary, mandatory for the citizen to
experience. The under-stander does not have the opportunity to avoid metaphorically standing under the city gates of Ankara since these structures are located on main highways of the city. Their imposing, totalistic presence within the city and the polity constitutes a significant chance to observe how an individual is called into a mode of
citizenship whose substance is reproduced in accordance with the conflated ideological basis of the AKP, and the Turkish State.
Noting that most of Gökçek’s -thus the AKP’s- traces in the city will be politically contested with the arrival of the new mayor from the main opposition party, the Chp, the presence of Ankara City Gates becomes more meaningful. Each second they exist within the city and the Turkish polity, they remind and reproduce a cultural
citizenship whose substance is filled by with concepts, symbols, and values from the AKP’s multi-faceted, Nationalist-Islamist-Ottomanist-Neoliberal ideology. The citizen who stands under the gate, under-stander is invited into a mode of
subjecthood that is Ottoman-Seljuk, Muslim and Turk at the same moment. Seljuk stars, Mevlana statues, patterns constructing the concept of Ottoman-Seljuk
architecture1 are all components of the subject-forming side of Ankara City Gates. In this way, they put citizens of Ankara in a subjecthood in line with the understanding of citizenship of the AKP and the Turkish State. Until the moment these city gates, if ever, are abolished, they will remain political-metaphorical structures; and more dramatically, their death will be birth of another political-metaphorical intervention into space by another actor who is becoming a part of the Turkish State and thus pursuing to form a new cultural citizenship in line with its ideological basis.
This thesis further shapes its argument around the metaphorical functions of the gates which ultimately construct, reproduce a power relation schema that results in calling the citizens into a particular mode of cultural citizenship corresponding to the
1 “A fictitious label,” “at best anachronistic to speak of” Ottoman-Seljuk style, Batuman (2017)
suggests, since Ottoman Empire and Seljuks are not regarded to be constituting a continuity in terms material culture and architecture (p. 161, 194). The constructed term can be taken into consideration as an investment in meaning to represent the conflated nature of the ideological basis of the AKP, and the Turkish State.
understanding of citizenship of the AKP and the Turkish State. Therefore, the paper answers the research question by discovering specific metaphorical functions of the gates which are boundary-drawing, use of what I refer to as ideological spolia2, and,
ultimately, subjectification. Boundary drawing is the initial connotation of building gates to a city. The builder -the AKP and the Turkish State- becomes able to draw new boundaries to the dominion which is aimed to be metaphorically seized.
Moreover, metaphorically drawing boundaries also suggests that there is citizenship practice of entrance. The under-standers, the citizens “greeted” by the city gates are involuntarily made to enter into a dominion where a specific mode of cultural citizenship is recognized and favored by the Turkish State. Ankara City Gates
primarily calls forth the sense of entrance, as they are gates and located in points that are accepted to be entrance points to the Turkish capital city, therefore this
connotation of entrance is substantiated with how drawing of boundaries help to form a dominion and the cognitive space for a specific mode of cultural citizenship to take place.
Following the formation of the boundaries of the dominion, gates function to enable the builder to use ideological spolia so that the dominion can be ideologically marked and a selective ideological-historical narration that is empowered by various ideological sources can be presented to the citizens. Ideological spolia is a concept produced by the author of the thesis, who benefits from the original concept of spolia theorized by historians of Roman Empire, to refer to use of ideological symbols,
2 Spolia is Latin word for “spoils” or “anything ‘stripped’ from someone or something”, and is a
concept used to refer to an architectural practice which is simple reusing materials in the making of a new structure (Kinney, 2006, p. 233). It is a concept mostly used by researchers of history of Roman Empire and architecture. It should be noted down that spolia is also used in modern sense to denote the reusing of materials in new structures, the concept of “ideological spolia” is invented to analytically position Ankara City Gates reusing ideological elements from different sources. The original conception is more of creativity, while ideological spolia is used to define a banal reuse of ideological borrowings.
patterns, and concepts in the making of a new structure. As a result of these two metaphorical functions, Ankara City Gates puts forth an ultimate metaphorical function, which is interpellating3 the citizens of Ankara, inviting them into a specific mode of subjecthood, a cultural citizenship which is marked, narrated by an
Ottomanist-nationalist-Islamist-neoliberal ideological group, and ultimately the state.
In this thesis, gates open up a refined, if not new, way of studying Turkish politics. Although still operating in similar domains, where the research is bound to study, for instance, Islamist politics, gates are entirely a product of ideological construction processes aiming to shape power relations between the state and the citizen. This means that gates as objects of study enable the researcher to look beyond mainstream developments of Turkish Politics, elections, system crisis, polemics. Studying gates points at a new level of understanding the relationship between the state and the subject. At this new level, political figures, events become secondary. The primary research object is at the metaphorical level, it reveals itself in studying beneath what the power-holders and the powerless of the polity is building and experiencing in the space, which is inevitably social and political. Therefore, this thesis project finds it meta-rationale in this manner of studying Turkish Politics and believes in the possibility of at least shedding a thin beam of light to inner workings of power relations that continuously put forth, reproduce a mode of subjecthood, a cultural citizenship.
3 Although this concept of “interpellation” is discussed at length in following sections, it is a concept
used by Althusser to define how the individual is invited, “recruited” into a mode of subjecthood. The French thinker gives the example of a policeman shouting out “Hey you!”. As the individual turns back and looks at the policeman, he/she is interpellated (2014, p. 191). This thesis draws on the Althusserian notion of interpellation to explore the function of the gates as interpellating the citizen-subject.
While this new vista is discovered, the prior distinction to be made in terms methodology is to avoid mistaking data collection for analysis. It becomes vital to this study because perceiving the gates in modern Ankara entails a micro-analytical moment. Although it is a complication, this aspect of studying gates actually foreshadows the metaphorical value of the structures. As the “data” is collected around these gates, the metaphorical schema reveals itself to the citizen subject, renders him/her an under-stander. Mere collection of data is nearly impossible, therefore outlining methodology of the thesis becomes a fundamental task in order to occupy a critical point where the researcher can put the gates as objects of study.
This thesis project designs the data collection as a two-fold process. On the one hand, gates of the modern Ankara are put at the center. Gates themselves comprise an indispensable part of the data collected. In order to inquire into the gates, visual data is collected. Visual data is composed of photographs of the gates, maps taken from an online database (Google Maps), project files from the contractor firm,
municipality advertisement videos, and flyers. In addition to the visual data collected around Ankara City Gates, textual data is collected in order to be able to conduct a full-fledged textual analysis around these urban structures. Although the design process does not entail a wide public discussion, starting from the 1970s, there have been various design competitions for “urban gateways” in the Turkish capital city. The change in the participant projects and the ultimately-realized gates actually constitutes a textual data. In the second phase, as the absence of the discourse of designers partly requires the thesis to do so, this research piece collects Gökçek’s remarks on the gates in different media, such as newspaper and online news outlet interviews-reports, recording of talk-shows. It also collects textual material to exemplify the public response to the construction of the gates such as columns,
online news commentaries, a press release made by a conglomerate of architects’ associations. Lastly, this thesis collected both textual and visual data on various gate-building practices experienced in different parts of Anatolia under municipal
authorities belonging to the AKP.
In order to analyze the data collected via different means, the fundamental method of analysis is textual analysis. Although it has certain methodological derivatives while taking different objects as textual entities (a slightly different textual approach is taken towards a historical book in comparison to an architectural structure, e.g. a gate), the main target of analysis is always textualized. Textual analysis is, in the simplest of terms, a scientific effort to understand how a text might be interpreted by an audience (McKee, 2003, p. 1). In this first-page-text-book definition, the most significant part is the concept of text. McKee once again points at the
“post-structural” aspect of what text is. Rather than taking only movies, books, magazines as text, “production of meaning” can be observed in any entity where there are differences in value judgments, the existence of abstract and concrete things, relationships, reason, and “seeing things” (p. 5-9). As the object of study of this thesis is mainly material structures, gates on the main highways of Ankara, this approach is established to regard them as texts, and to understand how meaning is produced through them.
As Hartley rightfully argues “what people, individually and in collectivities both formal (institutional) and informal (cultural), said and thought, was also a material phenomenon with material effects,” (2006, p. 72), this thesis regards both material-architectural and traditionally “textual texts” as worthy of textual analysis. As Geertz (1973), for instance, takes the Balinese cock-fighting as a text (p. 449), Ankara City
Gates can also be studied with the same approach. In conducting textual analysis, one thing to always bear in mind is to dismiss the concept of an ultimate or a superior interpretation, thus a reality. However, it does not mean that the textual analysis conducted in this thesis is utterly relativistic. Rather, Geertz’s concept of thick description further enables the observer to understand “… what goes on” (p. 16). This question of what is going on does not call forth a descriptive analysis, but an interpretive one taking both context and the thickness of the social phenomena. This emphasis on the thickness of the data collected around Ankara City Gates is a relativistic manner of data collection and analysis. Both denying a realist-positivist and a relativistic approach towards the gates and the text around these gates, this thesis is after an interpretation that is put in the right context, using the right analytical tools and only claiming to provide “a plausible interpretation amongst many”.
Dealing with how to textually analyze the collected data, the author benefits from a vast literature that acts sometimes as a mélange of methodological applications, and sometimes as a corpus where theory and practice get along. In especially analyzing the gates of modern Ankara and the textual data accumulated around them, certain works attempting to conduct a discourse analysis by studying both architectural structures and the discourse produced around them are taken as models. Although this thesis work is built on textual analysis and does not qualify as, or include critical discourse analysis, the methodological contributions of works that combine critical discourse analysis with urban studies (Cameron, 2003; Fairclough, 2003; Yacobi, 2010) are deeply influential to this study. Moreover, the foundation of the
interpretive analysis in this thesis project is built upon theoretical cues from
that signs (and with a stretch, metaphors) gain importance in parallel to the rise of motorways and with the pedestrian life is more and more erased from the urban (p. 94). Accordingly, Ankara City Gates are also semiotic, metaphorical structures that are built on highways and open to be experienced mostly in vehicles. This
methodological inspiration also resonates in the following sections. A theoretical revelation in line with this observation of the accelerated experience of the “cityspace” can be found in the works of Boyer (1996). She suggests that the invention of the train, and the accelerated mode of processing the image of the city put forth a newer conception of “city as panorama”. Travel by trains replaced “the old continuum of space and time,” as the distances became easier to overcome (p. 40-41). Boyer implies that the image of the city became a faster experience through the screen -the window- of the train. Ankara City Gates’ locations on the main
highways also render these structures parts of an accelerated experience which do not provide a static mode. City gates of Ankara become a part of the panoramic image of the Turkish capital city, the metaphorical functions they entail serve to form new cultural citizens in this motorized, accelerated mode. The image of the gates and the ideological-historical narrative they present are to be analyzed as a part of the cityspace.
CHAPTER II
MASTER’S STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY: A
LITERATURE REVIEW
Janet Abu-Lughod starts off her inquiry into what constitutes an Islamic city with a somewhat relevant reference to the tradition of isnad (p. 155, 1987), an Arabic concept used to explain how words of the prophet are transmitted from one person to another, as if they rely on, rest against each other, like a chain. What she is trying to do with the Arabic concept is to put forth a metaphor to suggest that conducting a literature review on the Islamic city is familiar to the tradition of the science of recording words of the Prophet Muhammad. She implies that the works on the Islamic city are connected to one another, certain notions are conveyed through this connectedness. As much as this is a delicate metaphor for a literature review of the Islamic city, it also shapes Abu-Lughod’s approach towards how Islamic city has been narrated, studied and designed. Pursuing the notion of the Islamic city, Abu-Lughod surveys different characteristics of various Islamic instances of urbanism, however, in this important research piece there is almost no place for the gate in Islamic city, except for the section in which she talks of harats and gates of these quarters (p. 171). Moreover, the notion of Islamic city pursued by Abu-Lughod does not correspond to the city which is allegedly Islamicized by the AKP. While Abu-Lughod talks of neighborhoods, different judicial divisions of the city, and the cultural label of “Arabo-Islamic” (p. 164); Ankara City Gates tell us a different story
of modern Ottomanist-nationalist-Islamist-neoliberal urbanism and monument-building.
Despite all the differences between Abu-Lughod’s Islamic city and the kind of city Ankara City Gates implies, this thesis project talks to its audience from a point where there are different chains, isnad practices and, in short, pieces of literature
constituting a complex problématique that is different from the question of the Islamic city. It is a complex research task, because Ankara City Gates reside in various social, ideological registers requiring the observer to employ distinct
analytical tools. Although these structures are static, they are in a dynamic relation to the Turkish polity, and this dynamism can only be captured using different pieces of literature. Therefore, this thesis project shapes its approach towards what has been written in relation to the metaphor of writing a guide to a galaxy4 which is both
wonderful, and terrifying at the very same moment.
Although it is almost impossible to link these distinct and complicated chains to one another, this study should be able to provide a guide to the galaxy where Gökçek’s gates are built, somehow made a part of the Turkish political space and taken as objects of study by a master’s student. Therefore, in the following sections, the conceptual framework of the study, definitions of the concepts to be used in the analysis of Ankara City Gates will be put forth. Then, the background of the idea of building gates in a modern capital city and the literature discussing the AKP’s ideology -to which Gökçek subscribes- will be presented to provide a foreshadowing of the analysis of the gates as representatives of a certain ideological outlook, a
4 A humble tribute to the legacy of Douglas Addams, the person who has written the most magnificent
mélange of Ottomanism, nationalism, Islamism and neoliberalism. This part also includes examples from sources of the AKP’s ideology regarding how a modern ideological reading of history can provide a schema of power relations, a mode of subjecthood and an understanding of citizenship in relation to building gates. Then, in order to put this thesis project in the most convenient register and show similar studies, the guide to the master’s student galaxy ends with a discussion of how political -and, metaphorical- use of the Turkish space is problematized by combined literature.
2.1 Conceptual Frame
2.1.1 Formation of Citizen-Subjects and Cultural Citizenship
In a rather classical point of view, one may suggest that Ankara City Gates only stand in a merely materialistic, non-textual way that does not establish a meaningful relationship with the individuals who pass by, under, or through them. When this suggestion is answered with the argument of study by stating that these city gates help to reproduce a certain mode of subjecthood, a cultural citizenship; the response back would probably be an unpleased objection on what constitutes citizenship. For most of the classical vistas that are employed in the analysis of society, politics and other registers citizenship is problematized, the genesis of citizenship is placed in the moment of having rights. For instance, T.H. Marshall (2006) is one of the initiators of these legal, rights-centered outlook. Or, the famous distinction between French and German nationalism and citizenship (Brubaker, 2009) is a comparison made for the sake of the legal realm. In other words, who gets to naturalized by a state is a simple question to see how different theories of citizenship all -explicitly, or
implicitly- emphasize the legal attachment citizenship bears. However, this vista is disrupted, contested by different contrasts such as citizenship-as-status vs.
citizenship-as-activity (Kymlicka & Norman, 1994, p. 354). More and more
researchers and theorists start to many more aspects, spaces citizens experience their special mode -or phase- of subjecthood. Naturally, the classical outlook of
citizenship positioning the citizen in a solely legal framework becomes a certain theoretical vista among a sophisticated crowd.
Staeheli (2011) compares the complicated, dynamic state of citizenship theories to the books of “Where is Waldo” (p. 393). More than a decade before Staeheli’s witty Waldo reference, Kymlicka and Norman (1994) uses the word of “buzzword” for citizenship in an attempt to describe the rise of the use of the concept. As they mean a significant rise including certain inaccurate uses of the concept, the quest to locate and understand the concept of citizenship still continues. A social-spatial inquiry still needs a connection to the concept of citizenship, and access to the complex way citizenship is studied. Especially the way Ankara City Gates are instrumentalized reveals how the power relation between the citizen and the state is reproduced. The
under-stander, the individual standing under and trying to understand what Ankara
City Gates mean is invited to be positioned in a mode of subjecthood, a citizenship reproduced by these structures in relation to the ideological basis of the AKP and the Turkish State. In order to understand how citizenship is reproduced by the city gates built by Gökçek, the relationship between citizenship and subjecthood should be outlined.
In an attempt to answer the question of “Who comes after the subject?” posed by the editors of the book titled likewise, Balibar (1991) establishes an antinomy which defines the passage between the subject and the citizen: “Citizen Subject” (p. 48).
Through this antinomy, he refers to the complication that the citizen is both “above the law” -a position enabling the citizen to legislate-, and “under” it -a position requiring the citizen to abide- (p. 49). Moreover, he believes that the adventure of the subject -thus, the citizen- in Western European political history can be studied as a “transmutation of subjection, of the birth of the “Citizen Subject” (p. 55). This contrast becomes analytically valuable when Ankara City Gates are taken into consideration. Gates are non-legislative structures that do not have anything to do with attaching or depriving rights to/from citizens. They are, indeed, more of
imposing, totalistic structures interpellating citizens of Ankara and Turkey; therefore, they stand in between, they recruit citizens into a new mode of citizenship. In a country in which citizenship is constitutionally -and controversially- initiated, Ankara City Gates do something beyond reproducing a legal framework, they reproduce a cultural substance to citizenship of those who stand under the city gates. They continually render citizens as subjects, “citizen subjects” if it is convenient to use Balibar’s concept in a slightly different sense.
The liminal, non-legalistic act that is observed in Ankara City Gates is more thoroughly theorized and analyzed with the concept of “cultural citizenship”. Ong (1996), as an anthropologist, investigates how citizenship is continuously reproduced within intricate power settings, schemas as a cultural product. She uses the concept of cultural citizenship “to refer to the cultural practices and beliefs produced out of negotiating the often ambivalent and contested relations with the state…” (p. 738). The ceaseless confrontation between the individual and the state -and its agents, such as Gökçek, and the AKP- is also a cultural process based on a dynamic negotiation. More so, as this study also argues in the case of Ankara City Gates and its
being-made within webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society.” (p. 738). This dual-process, in which citizen becomes both empowered in terms of being part of an ideally egalitarian crowd, and weakened by being subjected to a position of citizenship, can be observed in the moment of under-standing. Noting that it will be clearer in the discussion of how Ankara City Gates interpellates the citizens of Ankara, it is sufficiently observable that these gates serve to reproduce a certain understanding of citizenship and inviting the citizens of Ankara into it. These gates are built by a political party that draws ideological power from Ottomanism, nationalism, Islamism, and neoliberalism. Therefore, it can be argued that these structures are products of inner workings of a set of power relations. Ankara City Gates are part of the city of all citizens, they do not exclude any passenger on the highways of Ankara. In their totalistic attitude, city gates of Ankara are
representative of the fundamental egalitarian idea of citizenship. However, how Ankara City Gates are designed to be imposed on the citizens of Ankara brings the subject-forming aspect of these structures.
These gates come with a conflated baggage containing certain ideological-historical power schemas, and naturally, they represent a “web of power”, and impose it to their under-standers. Following what Ong has to say on cultural citizenship as a process of “subjectification as citizens” (p. 740), Ankara City Gates can be argued to function to subjectify citizens, interpellate them, recruit them into a mode of cultural citizenship corresponding to the conception of citizenship of the AKP and the Turkish State which present an ideological mélange as discussed above. Although “there are no stable, fixed answers to the questions of where citizenship and citizen-subjects are located,” (Staeheli, 2011, p. 399), Ankara City Gates provide a space in
which one can observe how individuals are transformed into citizen subjects, cultural citizens living in the AKP’s Ankara, and ultimately under-standers.
Ankara City Gates functions to provide a substance to the cultural citizenship that is reproduced in correspondence with the ideological inclinations of the Turkish State and the AKP to subjectify their citizens. How this cultural substance of citizenship -subjecthood- is reproduced is also a significant issue to understand Ankara City Gates. Billig (1995), for instance, uses the metaphor of “flag” in order to explain how nationalism is embedded into the daily life. As distinct processes, nation-building and the preservation of the national identity through various tools involve approaches towards citizenship and subjectification. Billig suggests, “…there is a continual 'flagging', or reminding, of nationhood,” (p. 8) and present a case how this “flagging” can be observed. In a close vista to Billig’s, Ankara City Gates “remind” their
under-standers the presence of a dominion -of the AKP, and ultimately the Turkish State-,
and a certain mode of cultural citizenship. Bearing various symbols referring different aspects of the AKP’s ideology, drawing boundaries to Ankara, these city gates invite individuals who pass by/through/under to a position of the
under-stander, a mode of cultural citizenship that is hierarchically disadvantaged, residing
in a dominion reconstructed by the AKP, and the Turkish State.
Ultimately, in the case of Ankara City Gates, the formation of the cultural citizenship corresponding to the ideological codes of the AKP and the Turkish State, is observed through the use of space and the metaphor of gate. This type of effort to position the citizen subject into a certain mode of citizenship can also be observed in the works of political scientists who problematize the negotiation practices of Turkish State in approaching its citizens to position them in a mode of subjecthood. Ünlü, for instance, utilizes the concept of “contract” to refer to the escapade of the Ottoman
and then the Turkish State in putting forth and defining a certain form of citizenship. Although Ünlü’s historical work also includes the citizenship-as-a-status approach, his line of argumentation involves a description of the formation of the cultural citizenship formed by the state. He regards the formation of citizenship as a process of “inclusion and exclusion” (2014, p. 48) and thus as a practice of division, similar to the way Ankara City Gates form a new dominion which gives out the sense of an inside and an outside. The concept of “Turkishness Contract” denotes Ünlü’s final description of the citizenship regime in Turkey. He argues that the state formed a mode of citizenship that imposes a certain way of “…seeing, hearing, feeling, perceiving, and knowing- as well as not seeing, not hearing, not feeling, not
perceiving, and not knowing,” (p. 48) in line with the cultural-ideological identity of the Turk. Like the city gates of Ankara, the contract described by Ünlü provides the citizens with a cultural substance in a totalistic manner. Regardless of whether one is ethnically not a Turk, or religiously not a Sunni; the metaphor of contract is as much totalistic as the metaphor of gate. Once the Turkishness contract is signed, a non-Turk is regarded by the state as a non-Turk; in the same spirit, once a citizen stands under the city gate, his/her previous identity, ideological positions become susceptible to the totalistic mode of subjecthood, under-standing. The ones who would not sign it, even a Turk would be “outside” of the mode of citizenship, thus deprived of the privileges attached to it. Ünlü’s recent book (2018) delves deeper into this metaphorical outlook towards citizenship and discusses cases of signing and not signing the contract. The fundamental point in Ünlü’s outlook is the observation that the Turkish State puts forth and reproduce a mode of citizenship to each individual within its dominion. After it is put forth, citizen subjects decide to participate or ignore this act of negotiation, of course, with certain repercussions of the decision in
mind. Regardless of the totalistic, dividing, and imposing nature of the state’s call to its citizens, it can still be identified as a negotiation process. This type of outlook also benefits this thesis since Ünlü sets precedence for using a metaphor to epitomize how citizenship is formed reproduced by the Turkish State. As he also takes note of the implications of the metaphor he uses -such as the practices of division, totalistic manner of the metaphor of contract-, the concept of “Turkishness Contract” can be used as a contrast to the mode of cultural citizenship which are reproduced by
Ankara City Gates. The fundamental difference, however, the symbolism attached to the city gates of Ankara leads the observers to argue that the citizenship formed by the structures is not only a form of Turkishness, but also of a conflated cultural basis consisting of Ottomanist, nationalist, Islamist, and neoliberal elements.
2.1.2 Metaphors: A Theory of Imagination and Reason
Although the emerging and rich literature on the intersection between the social and the spatial in the Turkish context has indispensable contributions to this particular thesis project, the theoretical basis of this research should be outlined, as the original goal of this thesis is regarding metaphors in relation to the social/spatial. As a new conceptual vista to look at how social is constructed, the concept of metaphor was revisited by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) in a book titled Metaphors We
Live By. Influenced by linguist Micheal Reddy’s concept of “conduit metaphor”
(1979), Lakoff and Johnson argue against the traditional understanding of metaphor, rooted back to Aristotle (p. 153). They suggest that rather than mere linguistic
deviations, metaphors have the active capacity to determine how people conceive the world around them and execute certain social actions. Therefore, using a metaphor
while communicating is not an example of someone talking with abstractions, but of someone revealing the inner workings of his/her conceptions.
Two linguists assert that various types of metaphors shape our conceptions and social relationships. The fundamental type of metaphors, “conceptual metaphor” has the function to construct social institutions in relation to a metaphor. For instance, the conceptual equation “ARGUMENT=WAR” has the capacity to equate the social practice of argument to fighting a war. This metaphorical relation has social
consequences. Lakoff and Johnson warn that one does not talk about an argument in terms of war, but he/she “wins or loses” the argument (1980, p. 4). The way
conceptual metaphors work is not descriptive, they do not primarily summarize or express a social phenomenon, but conditions it instead. In a culture in which
“ARGUMENT=WAR” conceptual metaphor is embedded, arguments are conducted quite differently from a culture where another conception of argument is at the heart of the conceptual metaphorical equations.
This insight provided by Lakoff and Johnson led into a research domain where politics is problematized in relation to the concept of metaphors. For instance, Mio (1997) provides a state of art up to his writing time where metaphors like DISEASE, CANCER, CONTAINER, MACHINE are studied in political research (p. 124). The premise of these research pieces is mainly based on discourse analysis. As metaphors make sense within a greater network of metaphors, the political discourse becomes open to this sort of analysis. For instance, a political discourse using the
CONTAINER metaphor has a life of its own reinforced with the use of other metaphors of "spillovers, " "power vacuums, " "outbursts, " "explosions, " "leaks," and "seepages" (p. 124). In order to understand to what extent this research domain
can reach, Semino and Masci’s (1996) inquiry into Italian politics by studying the metaphorical relation (POLITICS=FOOTBALL) in Berlusconi’s discourse is an adequate example. Noting that Berlusconi is also a significant figure in Italian football, the political leader/ football club president becomes a social, experiential case and stops being a matter of solely discursive. This vista is linked with the approach this thesis project takes towards Ankara City Gates. Rather than only looking for Gökçek’s and other figures’ speeches, interviews, articles, and books, the material/architectural production they initiated or facilitated becomes an important element to analyze their political perspective, the social consequences of their discourse. At the very beginning of this intellectual opening regarding metaphor’s active functions, Lakoff and Johnson share a hunch, “…no metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis,” (1980, p. 19). This research project is an expansion of the conception of the experimental basis which is initially assumed to be exclusively linguistic and discursive. However, revising this hunch, the author of this thesis suggests that no metaphor of gate in modern Turkish politics can ever be comprehended
independently of its material, urban basis.
Lakoff himself has come to the theoretical moment where he admits that any interaction with the material reality surrounding us has a schematic, metaphorical aspect. “Even the most basic actions, like physically grasping an object, have a frame structure that can be observed at the neuronal level,” (2008, p. 23) says Lakoff, suggesting that there is a schema which involves an object and a grasper. He actually hints at the more complex political schemas, frames where political leaders are equated to saviors, heroes/heroines, etc. A political leader in a certain political
that is metaphorically constituted. For instance, in a culture where the state officials are seen as SERVANTS, a prime minister works in a consciousness which bounds his/her political career to certain social consequences. If a servant fails to serve, or breaks the rules, the ones who are served in this schema has a hierarchically advantaged position. This schematic vista also calls forth a refined outlook of citizenship. As the state is metaphorically put into a position, his/her counterpart the citizen -the subject- is also positioned accordingly. While the metaphor of
SERVANT positions the state -and the representative of the state- in a disadvantaged position regarding the citizens who are “served; the metaphors of COMMANDER or BUILDER position the state in a higher position with regard to the commanded citizen. This schematic thinking, which assigns roles and positions to the parties in the map of society and state, actually continuously contributes to the formation of citizenship. City gates as metaphorical structures constitute a new testing area for this domain. After all, metaphors are born out the combination of reason and
“imagination” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 193), as Ankara City Gates are.
Moving the intellectual lens to a more political theoretical scale from the linguistic, it becomes more and more vital to consider spatial structures in a metaphorical relation to the formation of citizenship and social-political transformations. Giorgio
Agamben (1998), for instance, starts off his intellectual project to study biopolitics, power and the powerless with a fundamental reference to space. He suggests that the biopolitical paradigm is the camp (p. 181), as this specific spatial entity -and
comprehensive metaphor- has the capability to reproduce -and reveal- certain biopolitical power practices, settings. Agamben here though presents a counter-argumentative case to this thesis as he suggests that camp replaces the city as the biopolitical paradigm. In a way, metaphorically, and biopolitically, the city is
announced insignificant by the Italian thinker. However, theory-wise, Agamben is pursuing a biopolitical inquiry and does not necessarily refute the conditions of possibility of studying the city in deep relation to the social. The significant fact for this study is that Agamben delves into the two-way use of a spatial entity as a
metaphorical tool. Whereas biopolitical arrangements, interventions, and governance practice can generally follow and be expressed by “the camp”; the city and certain urban structures can still be utilized as objects of social scientific study. In this metaphorical usage, the camp both expresses the biopolitical acts upon the powerless, but also it shapes what the biopolitical can entail. More importantly, although in a slightly different way, Agamben too pursues a chance to observe how citizens and non-citizens are formed in metaphorical level. The spatio-metaphorical entity, the camp, serves a metaphorical function to transform refugees into powerless subjects. In a similar way, although Ankara City Gates do not have outright
biopolitical consequences, they still operate to form citizen subjects by calling, interpellating the citizens of Ankara -and Turkey- to a particular mode of cultural citizenship that is negotiated between the citizen and the Turkish State, which is the ideologically conditioned by the AKP for the near future.
Another influential study of the spatial opening new ways to understand the social, Wendy Brown’s (2017) problematization of the recent surge of the act of building walls is in parallels with this thesis project which problematizes the gates of the Ankara. She argues that walls help to form an “imaginary of intact nationhood,” while they “…dissimulate declining state sovereignty with a spectacle of its rectitude and might,” (p. 104). These arguments about political theory, sovereignty, state power, and subversion all revolve around the spatial structure “wall”, in a way that acknowledges its materiality, spatiality, but also its ability to become a metaphor of
“waning sovereignty” of the modern nation-state. At first, Brown’s use of the wall seems to be an expressive way, which means walls only represent a certain political phenomenon. However, her inquiry into the discourse and act of building walls possesses the hints about how the presence of metaphors and the persistence to build walls along with the use of metaphors shapes and reproduces certain conceptions (e.g. sovereignty), and problems of the builder (e.g. waning sovereignty). Furthering Brown’s project, one can study how walls as metaphors engage with the political crisis surrounding them both in terms of expressing those crises and reproducing them. For instance, the Gaza Strip, first of all, represents the ideological standpoint and the understanding of citizenship of the builder, probably a security-based, nationalist, statist mentality. The wall, then, stands in Gaza as a metaphor of this builder’s ideological schemas, positioning the Palestinian subject -and non-citizen- outside the wall. This metaphorical, expressive side of the Gaza Strip is then reinforced by the pragmatic use of it by Israelis to control the mobility, contain a people in a limited space. The metaphorical implications of the wall do not only correspond to but also interact with pragmatic, political consequences. Rendering the Palestinian an outsider, a refugee, a non-citizen unable to enter the dominion of the state is indeed an act empowers the powerful, rather than mere utterance, or a linguistic nuance. Like Brown analyzes walls which exist throughout the globe both in material and metaphorical forms, Ankara City Gates can also be analyzed in terms of how these gates advantage the builder of them, Gökçek, thus the AKP, and
ultimately the state, and position the under-standers within a mode of cultural citizenship whose substance is reproduced in accordance with the ideological standpoint of the builder.
This theoretical path enables this study to consider the modern gates of Ankara in a political-metaphorical vista that can see through the elements of reason and
imagination in its objects of study. Rather than only taking a one-way relationship between the gates’ representativeness of the ideology of the AKP and their
materiality, gates become active in their presence within the city. Besides expressing an ideological schema, and a mode of citizenship that in line with the AKP’s and the Turkish State’s conceptions of citizenship. Ankara City Gates also participate in the reproduction process of this schema. Metaphors studied by Lakoff has the ability to shape conceptions they are about, gates as metaphors of power also shape the power relations as they represent them at the very same moment. This schematic thinking is deeply related to the cultural aspect of citizenship. Ankara City Gates’ metaphorical presence connotate with the cultural citizenship, a mode of subjecthood in parallels with the citizenship schema of the AKP and the Turkish State. The builder, the state, builds a gate to invite the under-standers, Turkish citizen-subjects into the dominion. This paper argues that the metaphor of BUILDER calls forth a metaphor of the
under-stander, the citizen who is mandatorily invited to stand under what is built.
Ankara City Gates, which are positioned on highways5 of Ankara participates in the
genesis of this metaphorical map. The schematic, metaphorical relation between the builder -the state- and the under-stander gains the ability to shape the understanding of citizenship in Ankara, and, by extension, Turkey.
5 Another case of the metaphor of BUILDER which enables the AKP to argue for successful
performance as the government, and to locate itself in a hierarchically advantaged position. This position, in return, shapes and positions the citizenship in Turkey: Citizens using what is built, citizens confronting the cultural baggage (naming of the roads, symbolisms on public structures) of what is built, citizens invited into a new subjecthood by recognizing the state as the BUILDER.
2.1.3 Space: Another Theory of Imagination and Reason
Jumping from metaphors to space, this thesis project has the goal of standing on the point of intersection between these two theoretical revolutions. As metaphors are seen in a new theoretical lens, space itself is also led into a long journey of
transformations. Doreen Massey (1992) suggests that the regard of space has been subjected to three phases in a simple sense. Firstly, space was exclusively embraced by geographers, architects, and urban planners. Then this isolationist phase was followed by a transformation in the 1970s which let the concept of space to meet the social. Space was discussed in relation to its genesis, being produced by the social. Ultimately, “the other side of the coin” was explored and the idea that society was also spatially conditioned started to circulate (p. 70). In this long journey of
intellectual epiphanies regarding the relationship between space and society, one of the milestones was Lefebvre’s revolutionary regard of the space as an entity capable of representing and being represented. Another important figure of this domain, David Harvey simply summarizes what Lefebvre thought of the space by suggesting that he “…insists that we do not live as material atoms floating around in a
materialist world; we also have imaginations, fears, emotions, psychologies, fantasies, and dreams.” (2006, p. 279) One surprising aspect of this transformation was the fact that the Marxist lens helped these geographers, city planners to problematize the space as a socially conditioned entity. This Marxist scientific revolution did not only facilitate the Marxist interpretation of the space. One of the fundamental contributions of Lefebvre is his observation that there is a class-hegemonic aspect in the formation of space (1991, p. 10), however, this interpretation of Lefebvre does not have to exclusively be a Marxist one since
hegemony can refer to any hierarchic power relation. In a sense, if there can be a class-hegemony in space, other hegemonies, power relations might also be resident.
This theoretical adventure of the spatial becomes more intriguing in relation to the concept of city, and place. Occupying a specific point, and a specific political weight within space, the city is taken as “…the spatial manifestations of deeper societal processes that emerge from multiple levels of activities connected with production, exchange, and exercise of power.” (Malekandathil, 2009, p. 13). This definition of the city leads this study to take the Turkish capital city, Ankara as a manifestation of what has been unfolding in the general political context. Each of the
above-mentioned pieces of literature on “neoliberal”, “Islamist”, “Ottomanist”, “nationalist” ideology of the AKP and the political use of space in Turkish political history has a representation in the space, in the city and in specific places. Even in narrations of Evliya Çelebi, the city becomes a representative, a textual entity to further analyze the power relations in both the time of his writing and the time Seyahatname is transcribed, translated and put into circulation. For instance, Donald (1992) is a pioneer in taking the city as text, and he argues “…attempts to describe Western cities in the 19th and 20th centuries tell us a great deal about ways of understanding modernity … The city has become a sort of metaphor for modernity itself.” (p. 419) This capability of the city to become metaphors of any broader, less concrete notions such as modernity is another intellectual opening which is parallel to the revolution Lefebvre (1976, 1991, 2008), Harvey (1989, 2003, 2006; Harvey & Braun, 1996), Soja (1980, 1996, 2003) and others have started, facilitated and sustained. In this line of thinking, Ankara City Gates, and other historical instances of building, gate-descriptions are taken as research opportunities to understand what metaphorical functions space and spatial structures can serve.
In specifics of this thesis project, in a methodologically selective way, a certain definition of place is taken into account to approach towards Ankara City Gates. Thomas F. Gieryn’s 3 ground rules to define a place are parsimonious rules to inquire into certain spatial instances. In his own quest, Gieryn sets out to come up with some succinct criteria to define what place is and “to bring together several literatures now rarely connected.” In his three rules, Gieryn puts the location as the first criterion, “a unique spot in the universe.” After locating the place, he takes “material form” as the second criterion.” Although it becomes a more and more controversial statement with the internet solidifying its base, materiality is an
indispensable feature, especially in this study which investigates how certain material entities are used as political metaphors. And connecting these two criteria to a textual manner, Gieryn points out the necessity of an “investment in meaning and value,” (2000, p. 464-465). By meaning and value, he implies a notion of story, a textual existence in the eyes of the beholders, bystanders, and under-standers.
In a recent book, Gieryn himself puts this ground rules into practice and studies “truth-spots”, which are places condition people to believe in certain narrations, authorities, and, in short, “truths” (2018). More than location and materiality, the investment in value and meaning, the story of the places seems to be of higher significance in this book. This investment resembles Lefebvre’s account of
monumentality, both in terms of what a place, a spatial structure reveals and hides: “Monumentality … always embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message.” Gates, for instance, have certain symbolism attached upon themselves in a quite open, “intelligible” way. However, the monument for Lefebvre is also a spatial instance of a deeper character, “…it hides a good deal more”. “Monumental buildings” such as Ankara City Gates, “…mask the will to power and the
arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces…” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 143). How power is hidden by the monuments brings an observer of the monument, the gates to the question of “What are these structures monuments of?”. A paraphrasing of this question reveals the significance of the concept of metaphors in relation to the analysis of spatial phenomena: What are these structures metaphors of? In a similar manner, keeping in mind the 3 ground rules of Gieryn and now-thriving literature on how space in an active relationship with the social, this thesis project sets out to its intellectual quest of finding out the metaphorical function of spatial structures, Ankara City Gates. What these gates tell the citizen, what they hide and express metaphorically are central to this thesis project.
2.1.4 A Tale of Two Functions: Ideological Spolia and Boundary Drawing
The argument of this study is based on the premise that Ankara City Gates reproduce a mode of subjecthood that positions the under-stander within a cultural citizenship in parallels with a power relations schema that is resulting from the ideological basis of the Turkish State and the AKP. The question of how this reproduction takes place is answered throughout the thesis by revealing the subject-forming aspect of Ankara City Gates which is based on two distinct metaphorical functions: Ideological Spolia and Boundary Drawing. By presenting a selective historical narration through symbolism, aesthetic conceptions, and metaphorically drawing new boundaries to Ankara, these city gates position the under-stander, the citizen subject living in or visiting Ankara in a subjecthood, a position that is hierarchically lower than the builder. This forming of a cultural citizenship and subjectification process based on two metaphorical functions is conceptually at the core of this study.
As it is analyzed in the following chapters, Ankara City Gates are not a mere
accumulation of building material, but structures occupying different registers in the political space of Ankara and Turkey. Their relation to the subjects, citizens,
inhabitants, under-standers of Ankara and Turkey is fundamentally put into the moment of going through, standing under or under-standing these gates. This moment’s ideological aspect can be best explained by taking Althusser’s notion of “interpellation” into the center. In doing so, it can be argued that although it takes only seconds to under-stand Ankara City Gates, the AKP’s -thus the Turkish State’s-“...ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way as to 'recruit' subjects among
individuals or 'transforms' individuals into subjects,” (Althusser, 2014, p. 190) in that limited time frame. What Althusser calls this “recruitment” process is
“interpellation”, being called into a state of subjecthood. Ankara City Gates’ material presence becomes a metaphorical, ideological one that represents the AKP’s
ideology in a totalistic, continuous basis6. He suggests that “the existence of ideology
and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing,” (Althusser, 2014, p. 191). Ideology, at this moment, is not just a bunch of witty slogans about politics, but a deeper, more expansive, resilient mind frame, a view of life entailing existential categories and schemas. In this line of
argumentation, what the AKP and the Turkish State are pursuing can be simply called the goal of ideological survival, not only a financial, electoral one, but a prolonged endurance in an existential, metaphorical place in the minds of the
under-standers.
6 While Althusser discusses this process of subjectification, he accentuates the totalistic aspect of it by
providing sentences in brackets: “(it recruits them all), (it transforms them all)”. As Ankara City Gates occupy points of mobility that requires the citizens to under-stand these structures, it subjectifies all.
