In this paper, I will focus on a particular debate, which was a hot topic in Turkish media in the summer of 2005. The debate was about the leisure time activities of lower class inhabitants of Istanbul, who were blamed to spoil the Istanbul panorama. Their leisure time habits, like swimming with underwear, were identified as a problem of “incivility” in accordance with the interchangeable use of “civilized” with “modern”, “Westernized” and/or “contemporary” in Turkey. Once cited as a problem to tackle, a variety of positions, propositions, classifications, and also solutions were put forward in media, through which I will interpret certain claims on the Turkish Nation, culture, poverty, and modernity. These claims, I will argue, are bound with disciplining of certain populations in line with the middle class aspirations. Throughout, certain practices, objects and bodies are considered to be a “problem”. They are put on view as to be corrected and fit the dominant representations of “proper citizen”. Hence, I will discuss that the problem about “non-modern” is a problem of governance. So, this paper is an attempt to bring objects and practices marked as “backward” and “non-civilized” back “‘into touch’ with the larger, less tangible and less coherent network of relationships” (Hebdidge, 1988).
My short discussion will not cover all the claims, and for that matter, all the parties involved. I have to exert from the beginning that the maneuvers, complicities, appropriations or rejections that lower class inhabitants of the city take on, are beyond the scope of this paper. My analysis is not about how power is assumed or subverted by lower classes; rather, I will focus on the desires and aspirations of middle classes in respect to their taste for leisure time. That is to say that although the subject matter of this paper seems as the practices of lower class people, it is actually about the normative framework of middle classes.
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As Judith Butler suggests, it is through repetition of norms that worlds materialize, and that ‘boundary, fixity and surface’ are produced. (Butler, 1993: 9) Throughout this essay I will try to search how this boundaries, fixities and surfaces are produced through the repetition of emotions, emotional discourses and practices. I will especially look at the production process, perception and politics of fear. As a fact I try to compare the discourses and practices of the American and Turkish governments against the so-called terrorist acts. Therefore, I want to show that the politics of fear is not unique to US. On the contrary the detention of civil rights in the advantage of the expansion of the governmental interventions to the citizen’s everyday life is a new global trend for most of the governments around the world. At that point, Turkey is not an exception. The discourse produced after the events in Şemdinli, Diyarbakır and Hakkari are the last instances of such a politics of fear. Nowadays the amendment to the Terrorism Act in Turkey, which is inspired very much by its counterparts in US and UK, is debated, discussed and criticized (look at http://www.tmykarsiti.org/) As we see, in our contemporary world the experiencing and processing of fear is diffused and repeated dramatically.