Gezi Assemblages: Emergence as Embodiment in the Gezi Movement INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY DOCTORAL PROGRAM UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA (UOC) Autor: Öznur Karakaş Research Group: CareNET Supervisor: Israel Rodriguez-Giralt (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) BARCELONA December 21, 2017 1 TABLE OF MATTERS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ....................................................................................................... 5 ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................... 6 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER 1 ....................................................................................................................... 25 The Gezi Movement: Emerging contentious communities in-the-making ...................... 25 1.1. How were Gezi communities made? Accounting for embodied emergence of new dissident communities ............................................................................................................ 30 1.2. Some methodological concerns: how to dwell on community-making..................... 42 1.3. Conceptualizing the communities-in-the-making: From network to assemblage ... 56 CHAPTER 2 ....................................................................................................................... 70 Action in Translation: The Action Repertoire of the Gezi Movement .............................. 70 2.1. Occupation and encampment ......................................................................................... 73 2.1.1. From ParkWatch to Encampment and Occupation ............................................... 73 2.1.2. Occupation and the maintenance of daily life ......................................................... 80 2.2. Gezi Park Assemblies .................................................................................................... 101 2.3. Heterogeneity in Action ................................................................................................ 107 2.3.1. Standing Man: “I stood in the right place at the right time” ................................ 107 2.3.2. Feminist Corrective Action .................................................................................... 109 2.3.3. Earthmeals: “The coalition of the Street” ............................................................. 115 CHAPTER 3 ..................................................................................................................... 121 Park Assemblies: All parks are ours, let alone Gezi… We are the seeds of a tree that grew up in Gezi Park ............................................................................................................... 121 3.1. What Matters: ‘It is not just a question of few trees’................................................... 126 3.1.1. Defense of Life Spaces ............................................................................................ 132 3.1.2. An Alternative to Representational Democracy .................................................... 140 3.1.3. Anti-sexism and anti-homophobia ......................................................................... 148 3.1.4. Anti-nationalism, anti-racism: Medeni Yıldırım, a Gezi “martyr” ...................... 156 3.1.5. Inclusivity: Everyone is welcome, but…................................................................ 166 CHAPTER 4 ..................................................................................................................... 176 Body and technological mediation in the Gezi Movement............................................ 176 4.1. Dissident Bodies in Contentious Action ........................................................................ 176 2 4.2. Technological Mediation in the Gezi Movement .......................................................... 185 SECTION II ...................................................................................................................... 192 CHAPTER 5 ..................................................................................................................... 202 Accounting for the Making of a Dissident Community: From Network to Assemblage 202 5.1. Accounting for the making of a dissident community: the concept of network .......... 203 5.1.1. Social Movement Networks ................................................................................... 206 5.2. Network in perspective ................................................................................................. 225 5.2.1. Chesters and Welsh’s complexity-informed network account .............................. 225 5.3. Network in ANT: A material-semiotics ........................................................................ 230 5.3.1. Critics against the use of the term of actor-network ............................................. 235 5.3.2. The ANT in its aftermath: New Directions ........................................................... 241 5.3.3. Situated Knowledge, Partial Connections ...................................................... 246 5.3.4. Assembling with Care ..................................................................................... 251 5.3.5. Social movements as actor-networks: contributions of the ANT to the analysis of social movements ......................................................................................................... 255 5.3.6. From Actor-Network to Assemblage .............................................................. 262 CHAPTER 6 ..................................................................................................................... 269 Embodiment and Body Politics in Gezi Assemblages .................................................... 269 6.1. Reading Gezi Communities via the concept of Assemblage (Agencement) ................. 269 6.1.1. Assemblage and the exteriority of the relations to their terms ............................. 272 6.1.2. Material Semiotics and the concept of assemblage ............................................... 280 6.2. What can a body do? Assemblage as Body: Some Thoughts on Embodiment in Social Movements ........................................................................................................................... 284 6.2.1. Spinozist Affect politics against representation .................................................... 294 6.2.2. Park Assemblies: the milieu of the contentious action .......................................... 303 6.3. Material Semiotics Revisited: struggle over ‘life spaces’ ............................................. 310 CHAPTER 7 ..................................................................................................................... 316 Accounting for emergence in social movements: Gezi, an Actor-Event........................ 316 7.1. Beyond ‘Spontaneity versus Organized Action’: Aleatory Materialism and the Gezi Movement as an Encounter ................................................................................................. 323 7.1.1. Continuity in social movements: Spontaneous versus organized action............... 323 7.1.2. Continuity from a Different Perspective: Materialism of the Encounter ............. 330 7.2. Relations not reduced to their terms: Doing Justice to the Event ............................... 336 7.3. Assembling a dissident community ............................................................................... 344 7.3.1. The critic of the ‘social’ as a substance: Social as an Assemblage ........................ 344 3 7.3.2. The Axiomatic: The social (de-)assembled in capitalism ...................................... 349 7.4. Gezi communities: war machines against the capitalist axiomatic .............................. 355 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 360 ANNEX I: The Chronological Deployment of Gezi Protests ............................................ 376 ANNEX II ........................................................................................................................ 381 Literature on the grievances that led to the upsurge of the Gezi Movement ............... 381 ANNEX 3 ........................................................................................................................ 393 List of Interviewees ....................................................................................................... 393 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................. 395 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Firstly, I need to thank all my informants for telling me their Gezi stories. This dissertation wouldn’t be written without their enthusiasm and care for the Gezi Movement and my research. Among them, I would like to thank the activists of Caferağa Neighborhood Solidarity and Mahalle Evi Squat with whom I spent five months in our lovely squat and neighborhood. Mahalle Evi was indeed home to us, we miss it dearly. I would like to thank my supervisor Israel Rodriguez-Giralt for guiding me through this process. I thank the entire CARENET team of the UOC for the lovely atmosphere they created. I also owe special thanks to Tania Pérez Bustos for hosting me in the Universidad National de Colombia and collaborating to my research. I thank all my colleagues and professors in our beloved