Gazing at monsters: aesthetics, politics, and the national distribution of the sensible

ABSTRACT

The Humanity Monument, a gigantic monument in Kars, a northeastern border city of Turkey, was intended to be visible from the Armenian side of the border and supposed to send messages of peace, apology, and reconciliation, implicitly alluding to the Armenian genocide of 1915. It depicted two halves of a human, or two humans, looking at each other in the eye. However, the then prime minister Erdoğan called it a “monster” in a public speech, leading to the monument’s demolition. He then suggested that his comments were just aesthetic judgments free of political convictions, echoing the familiar paradigm of “aestheticizing politics”: covering over or obscuring a political motive (“the ideological”) through the aesthetic. Although a useful understanding, this reduces both aesthetics and politics to ideology and establishes a binary between the sober critic and the a(n)esthetized masses. Instead, drawing upon Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic as what disturbs “the distribution of the sensible,” that is, the partition of roles, territories, parts, and visibilities, this essay reads the story of the monument as a disturbance of the national distribution of the sensible, pointing to the ways it embodies and reveals the monstrosity of the modern state founded upon the event of genocide and further complicates the distinctions between critic and masses, self and other, and gaze and object that the aesthetic ordering of the nation-state relies on.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics and politics
• nation-state
• monsters
• gaze
• the humanity monument
• the Armenian genocide

Acknowledgments

This paper first emerged in Meltem Ahıska’s experimental seminar on aesthetics and politics in the Spring of 2020. I am grateful to her for comments and encouragement. Carla Freccero patiently read and commented on multiple versions of it. Naz Oktay provided feedback and encouragement many times. Ecem Sarıçayır saved me from some errors about the material details of the monument and directed me to relevant sources. Pablo Escudero, Justine Parkin, and Shaun Terry read and thought about the paper with me. I presented versions of the paper at the Medusa Graduate Conference at the University of Toronto and the Cultural Studies Association Conference at Columbia College Chicago in 2022. Thanks to the panel participants for their comments and questions. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and criticisms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Both the former mayor Naif Alibeyoğlu and the sculptor Mehmet Aksoy underlined the fact that the monument was specifically designed to be seen from the Armenian side of the border. When Alibeyoğlu commissioned the monument, he was still mayor of the city elected in 2004 as a member of the ruling party AKP. Due to what seems to be an intra-party conflict, in the 2009 elections, he competed as a candidate of the main oppositional party CHP and lost to the AKP candidate. So, the monument was already authorized and in progress at the time of elections (Ahıska 2011, 19–20).

2. This also resonates with another aim of the monument, and a rather more explicit one, which was to reduce the present geopolitical tensions in the region between Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Reminding this aspect of the monument, Egemen Özbek points out that both the sculptor and the mayor have a vague attitude toward the past and simply imagined the monument “as a future-facing symbol of peace, moving away from any historical specificity as to the Turkish-Armenian conflict.” He also notes that the blanket category of “humanity” obscures the difference in responsibility for the genocide and that the monument would have been built in conversation with Armenians were it a “genuine attempt at reconciliation” (Özbek 2018, 2, 4). Without setting aside these problems with the monument, I am more interested in the ways in which the monument as a monster disturbed Erdoğan’s “taste.”

3. When Erdoğan turned authoritarian is a big question for political scientists. They cite different “events” as possible thresholds such as the 2007 general election, the 2010 constitutional referendum, the violent suppression of the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the 2016 coup d’état attempt, among others. Some object that he was always authoritarian but waiting to definitively consolidate his power first to disclose his “true face”

4. It is this past against which Erdoğan positioned himself and his party. He often claimed to introduce a radical break with “the past” as a whole, by which he “vaguely” points to a variety of things such as excessive military power, violence and discrimination against minority groups, economic crises and poverty, secularist imposition, and so on.

5. As I noted, most of the gestures toward “the Armenian genocide” are vague and implicit in Turkey on both societal and state levels. For instance, in 2014, Erdoğan issued a statement of condolence for the Armenians murdered in 1915 but still failed to recognize the events as “genocide” or “massacre” (Tambar 2017, 763). This is because “the Armenian genocide” is a debate on “name.” All discussions, in one way or another, are trapped in the question of whether it is “really,” “historically,” or “empirically” a genocide or not, whether “we” should call it a genocide or not, and whether it should be named as genocide or not. The definitive authority of archives and history shapes all these discussions, and the law is enforced whenever this authority falls short: the law that bans calling it genocide, the law that recognizes it as genocide, and the law that bans not calling it genocide. That is partly why I am not interested in this essay in how genuine, vague, or implicit intentions behind the monument were. Framing the discussion as a matter of historical facticity and how genuinely one recognizes, or “names,” this fact reproduces the genocidal logic of the nation-state, as Marc Nichanian pointed out (Nichanian 2009).

6. Even the sculptor himself, hijacked by the discussions of the beauty and appropriateness of his work, suggested that one cannot judge the monument’s aesthetic value and its relation to the surrounding cultural artifacts because it was not even completed yet. As problematic as he is, he also likened the demolition of the monument to Taliban’s destruction of cultural heritages (Özbek 2018, 1).

7. The court came to a decision in 2015 and sentenced Erdoğan to pay 10,000 Turkish liras for defamation. Beyond this case, the sculptor Mehmet Aksoy is seemingly known for political controversies around his works. Previously, his statue called “In Fairyland” was removed from a public park in Ankara by the mayor of city Melih Gökçek (a controversial AKP mayor ruled between 1994 and 2017) for allegedly depicting a scene of orgasm. The sculptor took the case to court and won. The statue was put back in its place.

8. Kars is a small, snowy city with a history dating back to ancient times. It is a passage point where Russian, Armenian, and Turkish heritages, among others, interact, compete, and transform one another. The city is inhabited by plenty of historic artifacts: the Castle of Kars; the Cathedral of Kars (the Holy Apostles Church or more recently Kümbet Mosque), an iconic domed structure dating back to the tenth century, which was transformed into a Russian Orthodox cathedral, an Armenian cathedral, and a mosque several times as the city changed hands throughout history; and the Stone Bridge (Taşköprü) over Kars river partly remaining from the sixteenth-century Ottomans; and the tomb of Abu al-Hassan al-Kharaqani. Seemingly Erdoğan aesthetically did not find appropriate a “monster” standing alongside and casting a shadow on the last one.

9. The term “aesthetic ideology” is associated with Paul de Man’s late essays on aesthetics, Kant, Schiller, and Kleist, brought together in The Aesthetic Ideology (1996). According to his understanding, aesthetic ideology is what reduces cognition to phenomenality, the sensuous to the conceptual, the perceptible to the intelligible. And, as other critics of aesthetic ideology points out, he seems to think that this serves to fascism and the fascist understanding of state as an organic unity that erases the distance between the state and the people for immediacy, totality, unity of experience, and the immediate and poetic presence of the people in the state and the state in the people. Against this, insisting on the apartness of the literary and the aesthetic, de Man suggests that literature, or the rhetorical form of language, is able to identify and resist the closure between the cognitive and the phenomenal, that is, the aesthetic ideology (De Man 1986, 9–12). Literary critic Jonathan Culler argues that De Man’s late interest in formulating a critique of the aesthetic ideology could be seen as a critique of his earlier wartime journalistic writings that contain traces of anti-Semitism and an aesthetic idealization of the German nation, which were informed by such an ideology (Culler 1989). De Man’s understanding of the “fascist state,” for me, is the core of the nation-state and its aesthetic ordering as a unified, organic, and homogenous totality. That is to say, I do not make an active distinction between a fascist state and a (“normal”) nation-state. The former is inherent in the latter. And, unlike de Man and other critics of aesthetic ideology, I discuss that the aesthetic ordering of the state can be unsettled by the aesthetic as the redistribution or conflation of senses and not by doing away with the aesthetic.

10. For example, an influential Young Ottoman and intellectual who later come to be known as “the poet of the nation,” Namık Kemal, wrote a critique of Renan’s 1883 lecture “L’Islamisme et la science,” which suggests that the religion of Islam is an impediment to scientific progress. Namık Kemal wrote a response in the same year, although published later, and he argued that Islam is quite compatible with science rather than an obstacle to it.

11. The spectrum of denialist discourse is wide in Turkey. One claim is that it was in fact Armenians who slaughtered Turks. Another one, or a version of this, is that it was a two-sided wartime conflict where both sides killed each other. These are usually accompanied by a claim that estimations concerning numbers of deaths are either exaggerated or fake. There was not so much death, so it cannot be called genocide. This relies on the conviction that the genocide talk is designed to harm and disintegrate the Turkish nation and its borders, to claim lands and money from Turkey, and to dishonor the Turkish people. Another, a rather “refined” version, is that “what happened” is dictated by history. In an era of emerging nation-states, what happened (i.e. homogenization of the designated territory by excluding and dispossessing “minorities”) was what had to happen. “We” had to keep up with history, as “We” were trying to catch up with European civilization, as “We” were following Renan’s advice. This “historicist” position implicitly acknowledges the genocide without naming it as such. In his theses on history, Benjamin sees such historicist arguments as faulty and corrupting. Concerned with their Marxist version, he says, “Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving” (Benjamin 1968a, 258).

12. Nichanian suggests that the archive and nation-state do not contradict each other. The nation-state is not afraid of the archival truth because the making of the archive is, in fact, correlative to the making of the nation-state. Pointing to the ways in which discussing the genocide solely as a matter of historical facticity reproduces what he terms “the genocidal will,” which Nichanian argues erases the very factuality of the fact.

13. In his essay investigating the conceptions of aesthetic ideology, Martin Jay argues that the aesthetic should not be too readily disregarded as ideological. A curious move Jay makes is that he finds Arendt’s account of aesthetics—which he sees as a possibility, an alternative—faulty for “failing to resolve the implicit tension between her stress on the virtues of action, on the one hand, and her praise of the spectatorial role of judging, on the other” (Jay 1993, 82). It seems to me that Arendt’s theory is a call for politicizing aesthetics rather than aestheticizing politics because she literally politicizes Kant’s aesthetics (Critique of Judgment), which is the place she locates his political philosophy, unlike the usual Kantian accounts which identify his political philosophy in the categorical imperative or his other “political” writings like Perpetual Peace. More importantly, Arendt appears to intentionally abstain from choosing between actor and spectator, from suggesting whether one should be actor or spectator. For Arendt, this would prevent the spectator from acting and the actor from judging by assigning them to their proper spaces. The political possibility opens up when acting and looking come together or are conflated. That is why she sees a political possibility in Kant’s aesthetics, because it cannot be subsumed under some pre-given universals like actor and spectator, it is a continuous exchange and entanglement: a constant disrupting of the distribution of the sensible, exemplified in Arendt’s very act of disrupting the given space of Kant’s political theory.