http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/0...ngs-of-spades/
A woman raped, disenchanted, and sickened by the burden of proof. Dogmatic, hypocritical, cowardly students. The first represents the Armenian Diaspora, and the second, politicized Kurds, in two telling fantasies that have adorned the pages of Taraf, the sometime-contrarian Turkish newspaper, which recently boasted the Wikileaks first-publication rights in Turkey, and which is best known for its profound ambivalence with respect to just about everything but the military establishment. The fantasies in question were featured in columns by Alper Görmüş, in “Why are Armenians ‘stuck’ in 1915 . . .”, and by Halil Berktay, in “Not that I was asked, but no, I do not want to teach at the BDP,” which appeared at the tail-end of 2011.
These pieces exemplify a kind of quick psychologizing discernible in many writings that, while purporting to lend some kind of sociopolitical support to Armenians and Kurds, in fact objectify them as highly irrational, unstable, susceptible subordinates trapped or reveling in victimhood. The writers slip into the shoes of authority they criticize, and identify themselves with its gaze—the venerable older brother, the master professor—in formulaic, instrumentalizing readings of the other as though in a laboratory experiment. Gutted by the very fantasies they conjure up in order to illustrate their anti-authoritarian claims, their analogical and interrogative tautologies delineate the very bounds and fabric of the imagination.
‘HEY, I GOT A SOCIAL DISEASE!’2: THE DISEASE ANALOGY
In the title of the column by Alper Görmüş, a seasoned journalist who received the Hrant Dink prize in 2009, the quotation marks around the word ‘stuck’ (‘takılıp kaldı . . .’) foreground the citable, repeatable quality of the word while mirroring the responsibility-shirking attitude of the column. Unlike other, affirmative or critical, uses of scare quotes in a title, the quotation marks here serve as a safety net around a phrase left hanging (a sense reinforced by the ellipses placed within the quotation marks in the original) as someone else’s qualifier about Armenians. The entire title is a question that the writer himself simultaneously poses and withdraws by replacing the question mark with ellipses: “Why are Armenians ‘stuck’ in 1915 . . .” Other than a disclaimer of the kind it’s not me who said it, the title registers no distance, no analytical or critical distinctions.
The same attitude is visible in the more earnest overarching descriptions of crime denial, and the denial of the “1915 massacres” in particular: “The perpetrator’s denial of his crime can, in some cases, be even more damaging than the crime itself,” reads the very first sentence, which would clearly have the reader empathize with the hypothetical victim. But the tentative nature of the qualifier “in some cases” is quickly lost in the “fated” (mukadder) damage which comes to possess the victim in the most absolute terms:
“Every victim who encounters such a denial will expend all their energy on turning the ‘denial’ into ‘acknowledgement,’ unless they have exhausted all of their life energy and retreated or ended their lives. . . The primary feeling of such a person will inevitably be ‘rage.’ On the other hand, a huge ethical problem presents itself when deniers, forgetting that they are the very cause of this ‘rage,’ further attempt to accuse a person almost sickened [neredeyse hastalanmış] with rage for being in that state. Forgiving does more good to the forgiver than to the forgiven . . .” (italics mine, quotations in bold in the original).
What Görmüş objects to here and later is not the characterization (“almost sickened with rage”) of the victim who, he further adds, will need to “pour out the venom inside her,” but the deniers’ attempt to lay the blame for some such “almost sickness” on the victim herself. The vagueness of the phrase “almost sickened” itself captures the status of “sick” between a metaphor and a medical diagnosis, thus echoing the responsibility-shedding quality of the quotation marks in the title. The moment unfolds as yet another instance of misplaced analogies to human physiology, pathology, and contagion in reference to social problems, as well as imputations of social psychological illness, that pervade the Turkish media and the columns of many self-proclaimed democrats. Before analyzing imputations of psychological illness, it is interesting to note how anti-discrimination writings analogically slip into biological determinism, and how the language of “disease” (hastalık),3 marshaled to metaphorically displace sociopolitical problems, taps into a repository of fear and mystification surrounding the number one historic cause for death en masse: epidemics. As a political analogy, the language of “disease” is an alarmist and mystifying concoction that pushes many buttons at once: It evokes images of personal stigma (through additional metaphors stigmatizing diseases),4 doom, and global apocalypse; it blurs agency through connotations of natural determination and preordainment, and recalls epidemic-related states of emergency that have historically licensed witchhunts, minority pogroms, and even anti-(bio-) terror laws. The disease analogy rather successfully intensifies angst, mystifies all, and explains nothing.
One is tempted to joke that the use of disease as a metaphor is so pervasive as to be called, well, a disease. Nor are all of its uses metaphorical. Lamentably, in 2010 the same Taraf hosted in the guest column “Every Side [Her Taraf]”5 edited by Markar Esayan what amounted to a relentless “debate” amongst conservatives as to whether homosexuality is a sin, or quite literally, a disease.6 But the analogical use of the word disease proves the most fruitful and, as I will try to show, relevant. Markar Esayan himself privileges “disease” as one of the many introductory metaphors in his book The Tight Room of the Present (Şimdinin Dar Odası).7 Quoting the opening paragraph of his own award-winning book in his Taraf column, “The Past,” he writes: “To be a person without a past… This hang-up is not new. . . This disease is not one acquired on purpose or knowingly. [We Armenians,]8 [w]e Easterners [and] we Anatolians live mostly in the Narrow Room of the Present, and fear the past just as much as the mouse fears the cat and the cat fears the dog.” Elsewhere, ruminating on “the Kurdish issue,” Esayan declares: “We are all sick; we have all gotten sick and we maintain a very good relationship with our sickness. Writing our immoralities backward, we read them as virtue.”9
The analogy of “disease” is also a favorite of Ali Bayramoğlu’s. A columnist in Yeni Şafak and one of the leaders of the “Great Catastrophe” apology campaign,10 Bayramoğlu has no fewer than 12 columns with the word “disease” in the title, in immediate or latent reference to “symbolism defect disease,” staunch laïcité, militarization, misconceptions of society, anti-government prejudice, the deep state, nationalism, power, and “The Kurdish and Military Problem: Two Intertwined Diseases.” Concerning nationalistic objections to the protest slogan ‘We are all Armenian’ in the aftermath of the murder of Hrant Dink, Bayramoğlu observes, “we are faced with a structure that does not understand metaphor, that has nothing whatsoever to do with simile, that is literalist, that attempts to explain everything by way of straight signs, that tries to graft even Islamism and nationalism on this symbolic defect.” Perhaps in defiance of such pedantry, that last column is titled “Political Symbol Disease.”11
Of all the devotees of the “disease” analogy, Etyen Mahçupyan, writing earlier for Taraf and now back in Zaman, is the most committed to making it work. In a column titled, quite simply, “Disease,” Mahçupyan asserts that “human perception” (insani bir algılama) accounts for the corollary between medicine and politics, and defends its salience despite acknowledging its flawed positivist thrust (never mind that defining as natural the metaphorical corollary between the body and society is tautological). The quotient of social “health” according to “sociopsychology,” in this view, is the ability for co-existence and functional communication, as opposed to assimilation, the use of force, and blame-game (itemized as the Turkish state and society’s “sick” attitudes toward the Kurds).12 In another column titled “Acute and Chronic,” the writer explores the etiology of infectious and autoimmune diseases, only to analogically find that European racism, even as it takes the immigrant to be a “germ,” itself constitutes the “chronic” and “self-generated” (bünyenin kendisinde) disease issuing from European modernity and liberalism. By contrast, racism—and according to the writer, its root-cause nationalism—“entered” the otherwise robust Ottoman Empire as an “infection,” but then became “chronic.”13 European racism was thus a self-generated disease of seeing immigrants as germs, as opposed to the Ottoman Metabolism’s originary good health. One begins to wonder whether European racism should more concisely be diagnosed Regional Congenital Hypochondria.
Where does this analogical thinking come from and where does it lead? Languages have disease-related dead metaphors such as “plagued by, poisoned by, infested with, congested, contagion, immunity, virus, toxic, antidote,” and, of course “social ills.” Words that once literally spelled horrors in human existence or exuded a sense of new scientific explanatory power can in their next or parallel lives adopt secondary or idiomatic meanings that are, nevertheless, unsuitable for rhetorical heavy-lifting. Disease-related dead metaphors gain discursive power when used pervasively and superficially to stigmatize an opponent group or theory. But they crumble under the weight of one bold-faced, capitalized title after another. And as a social theory, extended metaphors of disease not only hark back all the way to Antiquity but are rather antiquated themselves.
This last point is no small matter. The notion of a “body politic,” grafted upon an analogy between society and the individual organism, dates back to a determinable point in history not because there is a similarity grounded in “human perception,” but because political discourse, historically that of ruling elites, co-opted the body as a resource for metaphor as well—a resource that is readily experienced as a unit of coherence by the individual subject and that can never be avoided by her. As metaphors, the body politic and its pathologies evolved along with societies and with increasingly elaborate scientific understandings of the body. And yet, “the body that featured in comparisons of body and society did not have a historical dimension.”14 Colorful physiological analogies for social problems and ideals pervaded pre-modern Europe, and fueled the French Revolution (the body as a metaphor for sovereignty, as a narrative device concretizing political abstractions, and as an element of ceremonial spectacle), followed by another peak in social functionalist organicism in 19th-century sociology and anthropology. Social theories scripted on the body-society analogy assume and idealize social integration and cohesion, using the analogy as a narrative tool to create the illusion of and excuse for “scientific” claims.15 The history of the categories of the normal versus the pathological in “hard” sciences itself has long been a subject for study, as have the analogies to physiological pathology favored by totalitarian regimes—such as Nazism with its “body politic” and the racially designated “toxins, parasites, tumors, bacteria,” etc., of which it should be “purged.”16 If knowing that extended metaphors comparing society to the body are, and have always been, thoroughly ideological is not enough to dissuade a social theory enthusiast from searching for the “right” physiological analogies for society in lieu of the “wrong” ones, then perhaps a step-by-step invitation to consider both the individual psychoanalytic dimension of otherness and the historical, fluid stereotypes of racial, sexual, and psychological “pathology” would prove liberating.17 It may be difficult for us all to recognize the stereotypes going into our assumptions; it should not, however, be difficult to realize that the problem is not this or that particular stereotype attributed to a group, but the ever-present endeavor of stereotyping itself.
A woman raped, disenchanted, and sickened by the burden of proof. Dogmatic, hypocritical, cowardly students. The first represents the Armenian Diaspora, and the second, politicized Kurds, in two telling fantasies that have adorned the pages of Taraf, the sometime-contrarian Turkish newspaper, which recently boasted the Wikileaks first-publication rights in Turkey, and which is best known for its profound ambivalence with respect to just about everything but the military establishment. The fantasies in question were featured in columns by Alper Görmüş, in “Why are Armenians ‘stuck’ in 1915 . . .”, and by Halil Berktay, in “Not that I was asked, but no, I do not want to teach at the BDP,” which appeared at the tail-end of 2011.
These pieces exemplify a kind of quick psychologizing discernible in many writings that, while purporting to lend some kind of sociopolitical support to Armenians and Kurds, in fact objectify them as highly irrational, unstable, susceptible subordinates trapped or reveling in victimhood. The writers slip into the shoes of authority they criticize, and identify themselves with its gaze—the venerable older brother, the master professor—in formulaic, instrumentalizing readings of the other as though in a laboratory experiment. Gutted by the very fantasies they conjure up in order to illustrate their anti-authoritarian claims, their analogical and interrogative tautologies delineate the very bounds and fabric of the imagination.
‘HEY, I GOT A SOCIAL DISEASE!’2: THE DISEASE ANALOGY
In the title of the column by Alper Görmüş, a seasoned journalist who received the Hrant Dink prize in 2009, the quotation marks around the word ‘stuck’ (‘takılıp kaldı . . .’) foreground the citable, repeatable quality of the word while mirroring the responsibility-shirking attitude of the column. Unlike other, affirmative or critical, uses of scare quotes in a title, the quotation marks here serve as a safety net around a phrase left hanging (a sense reinforced by the ellipses placed within the quotation marks in the original) as someone else’s qualifier about Armenians. The entire title is a question that the writer himself simultaneously poses and withdraws by replacing the question mark with ellipses: “Why are Armenians ‘stuck’ in 1915 . . .” Other than a disclaimer of the kind it’s not me who said it, the title registers no distance, no analytical or critical distinctions.
The same attitude is visible in the more earnest overarching descriptions of crime denial, and the denial of the “1915 massacres” in particular: “The perpetrator’s denial of his crime can, in some cases, be even more damaging than the crime itself,” reads the very first sentence, which would clearly have the reader empathize with the hypothetical victim. But the tentative nature of the qualifier “in some cases” is quickly lost in the “fated” (mukadder) damage which comes to possess the victim in the most absolute terms:
“Every victim who encounters such a denial will expend all their energy on turning the ‘denial’ into ‘acknowledgement,’ unless they have exhausted all of their life energy and retreated or ended their lives. . . The primary feeling of such a person will inevitably be ‘rage.’ On the other hand, a huge ethical problem presents itself when deniers, forgetting that they are the very cause of this ‘rage,’ further attempt to accuse a person almost sickened [neredeyse hastalanmış] with rage for being in that state. Forgiving does more good to the forgiver than to the forgiven . . .” (italics mine, quotations in bold in the original).
What Görmüş objects to here and later is not the characterization (“almost sickened with rage”) of the victim who, he further adds, will need to “pour out the venom inside her,” but the deniers’ attempt to lay the blame for some such “almost sickness” on the victim herself. The vagueness of the phrase “almost sickened” itself captures the status of “sick” between a metaphor and a medical diagnosis, thus echoing the responsibility-shedding quality of the quotation marks in the title. The moment unfolds as yet another instance of misplaced analogies to human physiology, pathology, and contagion in reference to social problems, as well as imputations of social psychological illness, that pervade the Turkish media and the columns of many self-proclaimed democrats. Before analyzing imputations of psychological illness, it is interesting to note how anti-discrimination writings analogically slip into biological determinism, and how the language of “disease” (hastalık),3 marshaled to metaphorically displace sociopolitical problems, taps into a repository of fear and mystification surrounding the number one historic cause for death en masse: epidemics. As a political analogy, the language of “disease” is an alarmist and mystifying concoction that pushes many buttons at once: It evokes images of personal stigma (through additional metaphors stigmatizing diseases),4 doom, and global apocalypse; it blurs agency through connotations of natural determination and preordainment, and recalls epidemic-related states of emergency that have historically licensed witchhunts, minority pogroms, and even anti-(bio-) terror laws. The disease analogy rather successfully intensifies angst, mystifies all, and explains nothing.
One is tempted to joke that the use of disease as a metaphor is so pervasive as to be called, well, a disease. Nor are all of its uses metaphorical. Lamentably, in 2010 the same Taraf hosted in the guest column “Every Side [Her Taraf]”5 edited by Markar Esayan what amounted to a relentless “debate” amongst conservatives as to whether homosexuality is a sin, or quite literally, a disease.6 But the analogical use of the word disease proves the most fruitful and, as I will try to show, relevant. Markar Esayan himself privileges “disease” as one of the many introductory metaphors in his book The Tight Room of the Present (Şimdinin Dar Odası).7 Quoting the opening paragraph of his own award-winning book in his Taraf column, “The Past,” he writes: “To be a person without a past… This hang-up is not new. . . This disease is not one acquired on purpose or knowingly. [We Armenians,]8 [w]e Easterners [and] we Anatolians live mostly in the Narrow Room of the Present, and fear the past just as much as the mouse fears the cat and the cat fears the dog.” Elsewhere, ruminating on “the Kurdish issue,” Esayan declares: “We are all sick; we have all gotten sick and we maintain a very good relationship with our sickness. Writing our immoralities backward, we read them as virtue.”9
The analogy of “disease” is also a favorite of Ali Bayramoğlu’s. A columnist in Yeni Şafak and one of the leaders of the “Great Catastrophe” apology campaign,10 Bayramoğlu has no fewer than 12 columns with the word “disease” in the title, in immediate or latent reference to “symbolism defect disease,” staunch laïcité, militarization, misconceptions of society, anti-government prejudice, the deep state, nationalism, power, and “The Kurdish and Military Problem: Two Intertwined Diseases.” Concerning nationalistic objections to the protest slogan ‘We are all Armenian’ in the aftermath of the murder of Hrant Dink, Bayramoğlu observes, “we are faced with a structure that does not understand metaphor, that has nothing whatsoever to do with simile, that is literalist, that attempts to explain everything by way of straight signs, that tries to graft even Islamism and nationalism on this symbolic defect.” Perhaps in defiance of such pedantry, that last column is titled “Political Symbol Disease.”11
Of all the devotees of the “disease” analogy, Etyen Mahçupyan, writing earlier for Taraf and now back in Zaman, is the most committed to making it work. In a column titled, quite simply, “Disease,” Mahçupyan asserts that “human perception” (insani bir algılama) accounts for the corollary between medicine and politics, and defends its salience despite acknowledging its flawed positivist thrust (never mind that defining as natural the metaphorical corollary between the body and society is tautological). The quotient of social “health” according to “sociopsychology,” in this view, is the ability for co-existence and functional communication, as opposed to assimilation, the use of force, and blame-game (itemized as the Turkish state and society’s “sick” attitudes toward the Kurds).12 In another column titled “Acute and Chronic,” the writer explores the etiology of infectious and autoimmune diseases, only to analogically find that European racism, even as it takes the immigrant to be a “germ,” itself constitutes the “chronic” and “self-generated” (bünyenin kendisinde) disease issuing from European modernity and liberalism. By contrast, racism—and according to the writer, its root-cause nationalism—“entered” the otherwise robust Ottoman Empire as an “infection,” but then became “chronic.”13 European racism was thus a self-generated disease of seeing immigrants as germs, as opposed to the Ottoman Metabolism’s originary good health. One begins to wonder whether European racism should more concisely be diagnosed Regional Congenital Hypochondria.
Where does this analogical thinking come from and where does it lead? Languages have disease-related dead metaphors such as “plagued by, poisoned by, infested with, congested, contagion, immunity, virus, toxic, antidote,” and, of course “social ills.” Words that once literally spelled horrors in human existence or exuded a sense of new scientific explanatory power can in their next or parallel lives adopt secondary or idiomatic meanings that are, nevertheless, unsuitable for rhetorical heavy-lifting. Disease-related dead metaphors gain discursive power when used pervasively and superficially to stigmatize an opponent group or theory. But they crumble under the weight of one bold-faced, capitalized title after another. And as a social theory, extended metaphors of disease not only hark back all the way to Antiquity but are rather antiquated themselves.
This last point is no small matter. The notion of a “body politic,” grafted upon an analogy between society and the individual organism, dates back to a determinable point in history not because there is a similarity grounded in “human perception,” but because political discourse, historically that of ruling elites, co-opted the body as a resource for metaphor as well—a resource that is readily experienced as a unit of coherence by the individual subject and that can never be avoided by her. As metaphors, the body politic and its pathologies evolved along with societies and with increasingly elaborate scientific understandings of the body. And yet, “the body that featured in comparisons of body and society did not have a historical dimension.”14 Colorful physiological analogies for social problems and ideals pervaded pre-modern Europe, and fueled the French Revolution (the body as a metaphor for sovereignty, as a narrative device concretizing political abstractions, and as an element of ceremonial spectacle), followed by another peak in social functionalist organicism in 19th-century sociology and anthropology. Social theories scripted on the body-society analogy assume and idealize social integration and cohesion, using the analogy as a narrative tool to create the illusion of and excuse for “scientific” claims.15 The history of the categories of the normal versus the pathological in “hard” sciences itself has long been a subject for study, as have the analogies to physiological pathology favored by totalitarian regimes—such as Nazism with its “body politic” and the racially designated “toxins, parasites, tumors, bacteria,” etc., of which it should be “purged.”16 If knowing that extended metaphors comparing society to the body are, and have always been, thoroughly ideological is not enough to dissuade a social theory enthusiast from searching for the “right” physiological analogies for society in lieu of the “wrong” ones, then perhaps a step-by-step invitation to consider both the individual psychoanalytic dimension of otherness and the historical, fluid stereotypes of racial, sexual, and psychological “pathology” would prove liberating.17 It may be difficult for us all to recognize the stereotypes going into our assumptions; it should not, however, be difficult to realize that the problem is not this or that particular stereotype attributed to a group, but the ever-present endeavor of stereotyping itself.
Comment