Embodying the State: Approximating Potency and Knowledge

would undermine the state’s capacity, conspiracies emerge as narrative means to bridge the gap between the state and the narrating individual by bringing the state and local bodies together as targets of foreign activities. Local concerns and narratives about the potential loss of erkeklik (masculinity/virility) of local men and kadınlık (femininity/mulibreity) of local women, in this sense, might reflect how one’s body might be the very surface and front upon which states, for locals, confront each other in covert ways. What enemy targets, then, happens to be the body of both the subject and the state, producing equivalence between the two, overlapping at local corporealities. What is produced through this process of vigilantism, reification, and augmentation, in this sense, is an account that is not solely confined to the limits of the individual narrator—it should rather be understood as a performative extension of his corporeal limits.

This equivalence between the state and the narrator’s body illustrates how locals overgrow corporeally to embody the state and acquire a sense of potency. Hence, the subject circulating conspiratorial narratives is no longer a mere individual;

he becomes an extension of the omniscient and omnipotent state, generating local masculinities qua potent subjects. In their endless vigilance against potential theft of national treasures or in their willingness to defend the motherland, local men become a part of the Turkish nation and acquire a stately potency against what attempts to undermine both their bodily capacities and national riches.

II. Embodying the State: Approximating Potency and Knowledge

Conspiratorial narratives in the Valley also present us with a particular stream of thought and action that sets them apart from conventional effects of conspiracies. In close connection to this extension of the narrator’s body, I argue that the utterance of conspiracies is structurally related to the way the states are conceived and operate, leading to the embodiment of the state by narrators. I shall recount Fahri’s story to set out both the particularities of conspiracies in

the Valley and to clarify what I mean with the embodiment of the state by the in his ancestral home in the Valley while retaining his contact with his Greek friends. Enigmatically, though, Fahri also upheld extremely Turkish nationalist views and endorsed political parties whose discourses included racism and conspiracies.⁴⁵⁸

While in Greece, He had compiled an inventory of all Turkish Islamic heritage sites and buildings in Athens and presented the list to Greek and Turkish prime ministers to protect the Ottoman heritage in the country.

The zenith of his nationalist endeavours in Greece was, however, related to his discovery of the PKK headquarters in Athens. Back then, in Athens, while he worked for an EU funds allocation agency, he saw an association with “North Anatolian” in its name. Moved by the affection he felt, he decided to call this agency to inform them about possibilities of acquiring EU funds. When he called, the phone was answered by a Greek man, yet, he managed to talk to a person in Turkish after an explanation.

Interestingly, he underlined, this man he spoke to in Turkish had an eastern accent, implying that he was possibly Kurdish. Even though intrigued by this twist, Fahri wanted to visit the NGO to counsel them about funding opportunities, as they were his fellow countrymen. The man gave Fahri directions to their office and told him that they would pick him up from there. Fahri was already puzzled and suspicious as the directions the man gave were not compatible with the address listed in the document. He was picked up from the location as indicated and brought to the office, which was “full of PKK and Apo⁴⁵⁹ posters.”

Realising that this was a Kurdish organisation, he sat down by the wall so no one could take his photos with these posters. They talked about their lives in Athens, and yet he allegedly lied not to reveal too much about himself. At the first opportunity, he ditched them and without wasting much time contacted the Turkish Embassy in Athens, asking them to

458 The party he supported was Vatan Partisi (Patria Party) that emerged out of the re-organisation of the Labour Party. Although the party is insignificant in terms of votes it receives, its extremely nationalist and paranoid accounts and activities, ranging from denying Armenian Genocide in Switzerland to filing lawsuits against intellectuals, are known widely. The party is known to bring together a weird and fading form of leftist legacy with an intense and conspiratorial nationalism.

459 Apo refers to the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan.

conduct an operation (nokta operasyonu) to eliminate this PKK nesting.

After a while, the Embassy contacted him and stated that they cleansed the area and chased these PKK sympathisers to outer parts of Athens. His mission was accomplished.

Fahri’s national quests, however, did not end there. At the beginning of April, I was invited to a casual dinner with some other locals. Through the night, Fahri talked about a number of issues ranging from politics to local affairs, while playing Greek songs on his laptop. As the night progressed, he turned to me and said that it was Easter in Greece then and he had been planning to be there. We talked some more about how he sometimes missed Greece and his friends there.

Toward midnight, though, his attitude was inverted completely. There was a minutes-long commercial on TV, which advertised plots in the Thrace region, close to the Turkish-Greek border. As they are generally dodgy, I did not pay that much attention to the ad, other than a few occasional glances. Intriguingly though, Fahri indicated that he and a few of his friends planned to buy some plots in Thrace. When I asked why, he explained: Greeks bought land in Thrace region en masse and aimed at annexing the Thrace into Greece, acting as agents of an irredentist policy.

By buying plots in the region as a group, they were planning to create a bloc that would effectively stop any annexation plans of Greek buyers!

Although I could not confirm Fahri’s claims, these narratives nevertheless ascribed a particular form of subjectivity and agency. I was particularly intrigued by the way Fahri aligned himself with (the Turkish) state and shouldered stately responsibilities with regards to any enemy, which intriguingly happens to be Greece in his case.

As in Fahri’s quests, another such narrative from the Valley illustrated this embodiment of the state by locals clearly. Apparently, a decade ago or so, there were rumours that some “PKK terrorists” found their way into the Valley, which, according to locals, was part of terrorists’ greater scheme to expand into the Black Sea region. Eventually, terrorists attacked a local businessman in Şerah.

Motivated by their strong nationalist sentiments, almost all men in the Valley spontaneously armed themselves and organised hunts for the assailant(s) even before the arrival of the gendarmerie. When the security forces arrived, the commander allegedly just stationed his troops nearby and allegedly told them that he would not intervene in any of their dealings, as he knew that locals, as loyal and nationalist citizens, would “handle” the situation—he trusted locals

and their fierce nationalism so much that he would let them hunt for the terrorists. Locals took it as their duty and right to initiate these armed hunts and gunfire exchange with terrorists to such an extent that they defined Trabzon, in one such encounter in July 2016, as the place where you could hear such expressions as, “terrorists are shooting, keep the police away.”⁴⁶⁰

All narrators of this specific story were full of pride while recounting in more or less the same form. What mattered, at least for them, was the fact that the state trusted them to such an extent that it delegated its mission. What intrigued me, however, was locals’ willingness to take over the duties and capacities of the state, hence, the way they uphold the law while simultaneously breaching it.

Similar to Fahri’s self-commissioned intelligence duties, locals also collectively acted as auxiliaries of the state, by forming a spontaneous extra-legal paramilitary force to confront the illegal threat they encountered. The difference between these two categories, undeniably, is reflected in the commander’s not-so-tacit approval of pervasive and widely known illegal/unregistered⁴⁶¹ possession of firearms by locals thanks to their ardent nationalist allegiance.

II.I. Embodying the State

How should we comprehend this willingness of narrators to act as the state in their dealings with tangible or figurative enemies? How are we to understand

460 In late 2016, when a number of militants were spotted in the city, local men initiated a gunfire exchange with the suspects without waiting for the arrival of security forces. In one of the social media pages of the Valley, this expression was uttered as a proof of the strength of local nationalist sentiments and their willingness to take matters into their hands, especially with regards to national security. Original in Turkish: “Siz hiç bir yerde ‘teröristler ateş ediyor, polisleri uzaklaştırın’ diye birşey duydunuz mu? Eğer duyarsanız bilin ki orası Trabzon'dur, ya da bunu diyen bir Trabzonludur.” (Have you ever, in anywhere, heard something like ‘terrorists are opening fire, take the police away’? If you ever did, know that [this] place is Trabzon, or the one who says that is from Trabzon.) (July 2016) Another social media page shared similar posts where almost exactly the same pattern could be observed: Maçkadaki çatışmadan (From the skirmish in Macka) / Yapılan telsiz konuşması: ([Gendarmerie] Radio Communication) / Ek destek yolluyoruz orda durumlar nedir? (We are sending backup, how is the situation there?) / Jandarma: Trabzon halkıyla beraberiz burda inanılmaz bir destek var bize. Siz olduğunuz yeri koruyun burda size ihtiyaç yok. (Gendarmerie: We are with the people of Trabzon here, there is an incredible support for us. Just do protect where you are, there is no need [for you] here.) (July 2016)

461 In Turkey, one needs to acquire a license from the state to own and carry a firearm. However, it is not that uncommon to have an unregistered gun/rifle at home, a phenomenon that is especially prevalent in the countryside of the Black Sea littoral.

this individual shouldering of state’s responsibilities? This embodiment of the sovereign position, that of the state, needs to be underlined, as it constitutes the culmination of the masculine reification and enactment of the state in this peripheral geography of the country. These engagements of local men also provide us with hints about how local masculine subjects strive to be sovereign actors, similar to states, unwounded and omnipotent, through which they position themselves as knowing and potent bodies in opposition to subjugated and passive positions.

It should also be stated that secrecy, knowing the “truth” that the others do not, is conceived to be an integral element of statehood that the subjects strive to approximate. What (the Turkish) state is imagined to be, an omnipotent and omniscient entity that fully controls the geography,⁴⁶² is strictly related to this understanding of the “truth” of conspiratorial narratives, highlighting the connection between the state enactments and the subjectivities produced through conspiracies. By claiming to know a secretive truth that is not readily visible to all, these narratives assert proximity between the state, assumed to be omnipotent and omniscient, and the masculine narrator, elevating them above the audience they address and enhancing their claim for power and potency.

Needless to say, these claims either generally border on the absurd or state the obvious, as Abrams pertinently underlined.⁴⁶³ Through this claim for knowing, however, narrators construct and represent themselves as subjects that are on a par with the state with regards to their supposedly exclusive access to secret information, approximating omniscience. In this embodiment of the state and enactment thereof, the narrating subject’s life gets augmented and empowered to such levels that he can claim authority, as states do, vis-à-vis others, as in local armed quests against “terrorists” in the Valley, since they claim to uphold the law through their absolved breach of it. Thus, I argue, the circulation of conspiratorial narratives also produces subjects that embody the state with regards to its capabilities and potency.

462 Hansen and Stepputat, “Introduction,” p. 7.

463 Abrams, “Notes,” p. 62.

Hence, although conventional conspiracies position the subject in opposition to (imagined) persecutory centres of power,⁴⁶⁴ local conspiracies align and unite the subject with the state rather than producing an antagonism.⁴⁶⁵ Harding and Stewart, for instance, argue that conspiratorial narratives in the West aim at deciphering sinister mechanisms that undermine one’s “free, autonomous, self-controlling”⁴⁶⁶ standing. In contrast, conspiracies in the Valley elevate the subject to the level of omnipotence and omniscience through establishing proximity between the (publicly) speaking subject and the power. Circulation of conspiracies, then, produces a subject whose body is the body of the state. Thus, in a double act, conspiratorial enunciations disintegrate the self as local men dilute themselves within the existence of the state while simultaneously strengthening it as the one whose devoted body becomes the body of the state and is fantasised to be potent and inviolable. This fusion between the subject and the state renders both “ghostly and persecutory, giving rise to forms of paranoiac acting from the state as much as from the subjects” through which the narrator

“acts like the permanent body of the state.”⁴⁶⁷ Local men, hence, reproduce, identify with, and embody the state and become sovereign subjects.

These conspiracies, then, might be seen as reflection of local men’s willingness to be swallowed by the state, to be a part of it, to be an auxiliary of the imagined-to-be-unitary, inviolate, omniscient, and omnipotent state. He, who enunciates these narratives, is not the one who complains about the surveillance and control

464 Steve Clarke, “Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2002, p. 134.

For instance, in his ‘analysis’ on the pervasiveness of conspiracies in the Middle East, Roger Cohen illustrates this perception vividly: “Such minds resort to conspiracy theory because it is the ultimate refuge of the powerless. If you cannot change your own life, it must be that some greater force controls the world.” Roger Cohen, “The Captive Arab Mind,” The New York Times, December 20, 2010.

465 Todd Sander and Harry G. West, “Introduction: Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order,” Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, Todd Sander and Harry G. West (eds.), 2003, p. 7.

In her analysis of AIDS epidemic, sex industry, and conspiracy in Papua, Indonesia, Leslie Butt highlights this antagonism among local Papuans who think that the Indonesian state deliberately sends seductive women to the region to harm local population, producing a rift between the narrator of the conspiratorial narrative and the state. (p. 428).

466 Harding and Stewart, “Anxieties of Influence,” p. 262.

467 Aretxaga, “Maddening States,” p. 406.

by a powerful group or the state, but the one who desires to be the one that conducts these operations, as reflected in the adamant local support for the draconian anti-terror laws and state violence. The enunciator of these conspiratorial narratives in the Valley is not the one who gets wounded, but the one who wounds others in the name of the state, as crystallised in the case of Ogün Samast who “knew” the threatening other, an Armenian intellectual, and was “able” to act on this knowledge. In a similar vein, through her analysis of

“societal violence in Turkey,” Gambetti stresses the emergence of citizens, as “the willing executioners of the state,” which “buttresses the state.”⁴⁶⁸ How certain non-state actors are hailed to act in the name of the state, then, should be kept in mind while reading how local men in the Valley also take over certain state functions to reproduce not only the image of the state as a potent, coherent, and omnipresent agency, but also themselves as the potent and stately men.

III. Enacting the State and the Emergence of Stately, Potent, and Sovereign