Monsters That Remember: Tracing the Story of the Workers’ Monument in Tophane, İstanbul – Part II

Monsters, monuments, and power

Georges Canguilheim has argued that “what is contrary to life is not death but monstrosity” (cited in Ancet, 2010: 18); monstrosity is the inability to recognize a living being as living. Similarly, the French philosopher Pierre Ancet has claimed that, although it is a liminal concept like death, monstrosity is different from death. Death imposes a necessary external limit, while the monster threatens from the inside. Thus, Ancet has defined monstrosity as a problematic field of humanity, rather than simply being the form of the Other (2010: 21). It cannot be simply defined as an “alterity” that is projected away from the self; instead, monsters evoke a painful interrogation about both the Other and the Self (Ancet, 2010: 2).

The meaning of the monster in popular usage is not independent from its disturbing connotations. Ancet has cited Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire who as a zoologist in the nineteenth century specialized in the classification of anomalies and deviances from the “normal” structure in living beings. He created the concept of “teratology” (the science of monsters) and claimed that, “for the people, the monster is something whose appearance always leads to astonishment and that always disturbs” (cited in Ancet, 2010: 24). Ancet has furthermore argued that the mentioned disturbance implies that the subject who looks and classifies the anomaly is rather central to the definition of the monster: the monster does not exist apart from the very judgment of difference. In Braidotti’s words, “the monstrous other is both liminal and structurally central to our perception of normal human subjectivity” (1996: 144, emphasis mine).

The critical discourse on monsters emphasizes the normativity that weighs on the labeling of a living being as a monster, as a way of refusing to recognize another form of being, which seems alien yet threateningly familiar. The monsters have an excess that makes them both too visible, yet at the same time invisible: “Just as too much light creates a blind spot at the center of the field of vision, the excess that characterizes monstrosity could lead to an invisibility behind the visible” (Ancet, 2010: 31) Therefore, has argued Ancet, the monster does not refer to a particular object, but to a highly subjective experience. It tells us more about the subject than about the object. Similarly, Margrit Shildrick has noted that “the monsters that engage us most, that command intricate explanation, are those which are closest to us, those which display some aspect of our own form, and speak both literally and metaphorically, a human language” (1999: 81).

Until now we have referred to organic “monsters” that are born from a human being, but cannot be accepted as human. In fact, the first denigrating utterance of the word ucube by the Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan was back in 2008, in order to characterize the Roma neighborhood in Sulukule, İstanbul, as a monster, before he used the same word again for the Humanity Monument in Kars in 2011. The Prime Minister was then reported to say: “We will get rid of the monster,” pointing to the existing conditions of life of the Roma people in the Sulukule district. These words are significant in that they reveal how racist discrimination turns the local people who have been living in Sulukule for about a millennium into monstrous objects that should be discarded during the “contemporary” transformation of the city.^[1]In the opening ceremony of the Akaretler Sıraevleri in Beşiktaş, İstanbul, a series of historical buildings which constitutes one of the first examples of community housing in the Ottoman Empire … Continue reading But what happens when the term “monster” is used for a monument, an artifact-that is, not for a living being? It is noteworthy that the boundaries between the living and the non-living are blurred here. This is exactly how Ancet has utilized the concept of the “fantastic” in relation to organic monsters. He has argued that in the perception of a monster there is confusion with regard to categorization in terms of differentiating “human art” from the “natural.” The natural is mostly likened to an artifact, as if it was artificially created by human art. The monster as a living being, such as the Roma people in the above example, is turned into an object and not regarded as human. Ancet has named it a “natural-artifice” (2010: 97). However, in the case of monuments, I contend that it must be just the opposite. The same failure of categorization holds, but this time the monument is treated as a living being, and not as a product of human art. Could we call this artificial-natural?

In a short story about the Workers’ Monument in Tophane, probably written in the late 1970s,^[2]I found the story on the web; its publication date is not mentioned, but the story seems to belong to the 1970s in terms of its symbolism of the worker. Refik Yoksulabakan, “İşçinin … Continue reading the author Refik Yoksulabakan has narrated the destruction of the monument in such a way as to evoke the artificial-natural. The story constructs a fantasy of revenge, in which first the broken hands (holding the sledgehammer) of the Workers’ Monument and then the entire destroyed body walk away from its place to haunt the “monument-breakers” (anıtkıranlar), as the author calls them, and claim the workers’ rights back in a nightmarish setting. The blood dripping from the monument as it walks away implies that this is not just a work of art, but also a living body. And is it not this conception of the artificial-natural that has played a role in the destruction of monuments, as we have witnessed in many parts of the world, especially during the collapse of the former “communist” regimes?^[3]Among the stories of destruction of monuments in the world, the blasting of two ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by the Taliban in March of 2001, with the aim of erasing the remains of … Continue reading The surviving monuments now live as monsters in the memory parks of many cities.^[4]Svetlena Boym has written about the statue park in Moscow (2001). I personally visited the statue park in Budapest, which brings together statues and monuments from different eras of the … Continue reading Svetlena Boym has noted that

“the violence against monuments at the end of the Soviet Union paradoxically revealed that the art of monumental propaganda, dreamed up by Lenin in the first years of the revolution, clearly had succeeded in one thing: blurring the relationship between actual agents of power and their monumental incarnations. If the perpetrators of the crimes were never punished, at least their monuments would be” (2001: 89, emphasis mine).

Boym has regarded that the monuments were symbols of power and as such became scapegoats onto which anxieties and anger were projected:

“Symbolic violence gives instant gratification-the intoxication of revenge; yet there was more to that monumental catharsis. This was the only collective attempt on the part of the Soviet citizens to change the official public sphere without intervention from above, by using direct action, not private irony, jokes or doublespeak” (2001: 89).

Boym is right to point to the symbolic incarnations of power in monuments and interpreting their destruction by the people as a way of re-claiming the public sphere. Yet, there is another crucial dimension about power here. I would say, in the light of the above reflection on the concept of the monster, that monuments are not just symbols of power. Although their meanings are produced within a regime of representation, they also function beyond and above representation. They commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings, as Arthur Danto has said.^[5]Arthur C. Danto, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” The Nation, 31 August 1985, p. 152. They are there to immortalize a mythical memory that constructs an imagined community through an intricate play with life and death, and by blurring this boundary. Monuments deny death by giving life to the dead, but they also deny life since they are nothing but stones. Monuments petrify life in a way that buries the living, according to Nietzsche’s disdainful remarks against the monumental.^[6]Foucault has embraced Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy to criticize the power discourse of monumental history and to evoke a different conception of historical knowledge and counter-memory … Continue reading In that sense, they are the artificial-natural or, in other words, always already non-organic monsters.

Reflecting on the always already monstrous character of monuments, I do not suggest discarding the question of monuments altogether. On the contrary, the ongoing political debates in different parts of the world regarding how monuments should be built reveal a lot about the relationship between power and memory. I would say what is at stake in these debates, such as in the controversial cases of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC,^[7]The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, designed by the young Chinese-American artist Maya Ying Lin, stirred a great debate right after its completion in 1982. The black color and the … Continue reading the Berlin Holocaust Memorial,^[8]The Berlin Holocaust Memorial was designed by the US architect Peter Eisenman and opened to the public in 2005. It consists of 2,711 massive rectangular stones on a sloping stretch of land (19,000 … Continue reading the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires,^[9]The Parque de la Memoria is Argentina’s first state-funded monument dedicated to the estimated 30,000 desaparecidos (“disappeared”) who were victims of state terrorism in Argentina … Continue reading or regarding the various examples of counter-monuments in Germany,^[10]James Young has discussed very interesting artworks designed by German artists and sculptors such as Jochen and Esther Gerz, Norbert Radermacher, and Horst Hoheisel, which deal with the memories of … Continue reading is exactly about how the monument relates to the dead and the living. All these controversial cases have raised debates about how the commemoration of the dead should find life in the present. Will the monument replicate the general patriarchal canons embodied in the state and reproduce the memory as an eternal dead body, or will it open a space for expressing the differences and various temporalities of lived experiences? Will the monument fix the present as it is and create complacency, or will it convey a sense of elsewhere (Lefebvre, 2003: 22)? These are critical political questions that lie at the heart of how to remember.

I would argue that the concept of artificial-natural may be illuminating for understanding how the modern state commands or attempts to command memory. Here it is not so much the ideology of the state or the representation of the state that I am dwelling on, but the performative command of the state that is legitimated by and gives legitimacy to disregarding and even destroying the forms of living for the sake of a closure of a dead body of norms-in other words, to petrify the living memory so as to keep the state, as a non-living body, alive. The power embodied by the modern state turns life into a political question of government, as is well known from Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and bio-power (1990; 1991; 2003). The government of life is intricately related to the critical question of dividing people into who must live and who must die, which Foucault explicates with regard to state racism (2003).^[11]Achille Mbembe has criticized Foucault for merely focusing on Europe and offered the concept of necropolitics to point to the limits of bio-power particularly in the colony where the state of … Continue reading However, Michel-Rolph Trouillot has reminded that the state cannot be reduced to government:

…though linked to a number of apparatuses not all of which may be governmental, the state is not an apparatus but a set of processes… its materiality resides much less in institutions than in the reworking of processes and relations of power so as to create new spaces for the deployment of power (2001: 127).

Then, as Navaro-Yashin has shown in her study of the faces of the state in Turkey (2002), the state is not solely an empirical category;^[12]Navaro-Yashin has said that “instead of looking for the state in tangible social institutions or stately persona, the sites of everyday life, where people attempt to produce meaning for … Continue reading it cannot be recognized as such, but only through its effects on society.^[13]Timothy Mitchell, writing on state effects, has argued that “mundane material practices take on the appearance of an abstract, non-material form” (1999: 77). Trouillot has formulated four … Continue reading I would furthermore claim that these effects, while on the one hand giving a class-based order to life in the capitalist society by deploying material resources as well as language, knowledge and affects in a particular way, also feed on death. In other words, the state also enacts the capacity (and delegates the capacity) to destroy particular forms of life through social processes either before or beyond the law, thus transforming death into a mystical and mysterious source of life for the continuity of power.^[14]Svetlena Boym has cited Dostoevsky’s thought-provoking phrase: “mystery and authority” should be seen as clues to power (2001: 99). Therefore, it is not only the ordinariness of the state that we must take notice of (Navaro-Yashin, 2002: 135), but also its mysterious spell. It must be this spell of death that the state constructs and propagates through various means, including monuments, to which Foucault has referred when mentioning fascism in connection to monumental seduction: loving power and desiring “the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (1983: xiii). When one embraces the logic of the performative command of the state, paradoxically death, even one’s own, can become desirable.

Simonetta Falasca Zamponi has analyzed the master narratives of history/memory in Fascist Italy by emphasizing the mythical appropriation of the past as a “sacred” tradition nourished by violence. Mussolini had said: “We must act, move, fight, and if it is necessary die… It is blood that moves history’s wheel.” Zamponi has commented on these words by arguing that “violence was sacred, and sacred were those who promoted it” (2003: 53). In Zamponi’s words, “fascism imposed an artificial, auratic tradition that, through recourse to aesthetic politics, and by appealing to history as its cultural legitimator, crushed the modern individual and presented Mussolini’s regime as the authentic and true expression of the Italian ‘community'” (2003: 68). Although one needs to differentiate between totalitarian and so-called democratic regimes, and even between different cases of fascist rule in modern history, the power of nationalist modern states share some common characteristics in the way in which they appropriate the past in order to create an artificial “aura” of the state which feeds on violence and death to nourish a particular community.^[15]The monopoly of violence that the modern state holds in Weberian terms can also be thought of in this respect. The state uses violence not for reasonable ends, but to assert its opaque truth. As … Continue reading)

Continue to part III

Meltem Ahıska