Using Slogans to Affect the 21st Mob

This weekend the street swallowed up a military coup in Turkey. Called to flood public spaces and to put their bodies in the way of tanks, by daylight a mob of men had overwhelmed the inertia of a takeover inaugurated menacingly with low-flying jets and reduced it to no more than a pile of young soldiers shielding their individual bodies from a live-broadcast lynching. It all ended in a bizarre visual reversal of the historic equating of violence and sympathy usually given to armies and civilians, especially during a coup:  the terrified faces of soldiers in uniform looking directly at cameras while ordinary citizens remained anonymous threats in the background of the frame. But hidden among the seemingly random snapshots of violence in the scenes of the coup coming apart, the man stripped to his waist and lashing a group of cowed soldiers with a belt, the jumble of men dancing on top of a tank, the soldiers being ripped at by a crowd of hands, were small signs which belied the anonymity of the mob. In one picture from that morning, as several men stood smiling victoriously astride a tank, they all showed off an identical gesture with a hand that resembled an animal, with the thumb touching the middle and ring finger while the pinkie and pointer finger were held up to resemble ears. This was a clear visual queue for the right. The animal hand gesture is that of the grey wolves, a nationalist cult of Ur-Turkic mythology and ethnocentric nonsense begun in the 1960s and which continues to hold symbolic weight even now that its most sacred object, the army, was being flogged by its own adherents on live television Saturday morning.

This was a hand gesture that had been flashed on the streets of Istanbul before the last coup all the way back in 1980. Back then, it was civil unrest and street fighting which brought on the coup rather than brought it down. Major cities like Istanbul and Ankara were rocked  by battles between left-wing and right-wing groups, divvying up neighborhoods like gangs and hunting one another’s members down at night. This street violence was ordered by a strict political semiotics. Oft-repeated leftists slogans and jargon on flyers, well-worn salutes and mottos of the right spraypainted on walls. The left had its martyrs, the right had its totems. Leftists wore straight moustaches while the grey wolves had theirs bend down in a visual reminder of the crescent moon. Being caught in the wrong neighborhood with the wrong moustache could prove fatal.

Despite the 36 years of intervening history since the coup in 1980, a coup which sought to smash this polarized landscape with a mix of martial law and neoliberalism, these symbols have retained their ability to index political crowds. The protests at Gezi, for example, showed an amazing nostalgia for Turkey’s leftist archive, with the image of the famous leftist icon Deniz Gezmiş on the walls around Taksim along with the poetic slogans of long-dead poets and writers. Whether celebrating the victory of their soccer team in a match or their own majoritarian rule in an election, you will be sure to see those same right-wing slogans now scrolled on decals on the windows of cars in cavalcades honking up and down the major avenues of the city. Even the army seemed to be conjuring up the spirits of the past to their service, choosing to broadcast the news of their coup this weekend on the same public newschannel on which they had announced martial law three decades ago. But ironically, despite having all of the political coherence afforded by a chain-of-command and actual uniforms, it was the army this weekend who was unable to wield nostalgia and bring the crowd in line. The coup plotters didn’t seem to understand the fact that the army is everyone else’s empty signifier.

The scene of traditional state power on its knees before a crowd in t-shirts, of facetime out-legitimizing a somberly read declaration on behalf of a military council, reminds us of the strategic importance in our day and age of learning how to affect the crowd. Interpellating a crowd with symbols seems far more important than organizing them in institutions — especially as our institutions are being stripped bare while our identities are being ever more finely tuned and marketed to. Whereas you’d be hard pressed to find anyone outside the 1% who identifies with a party platform these days, the allegiance to partisan icons, be they a moustache or a howling wolf, seems to be alive and well. This is especially true with national mythologies. You are far more likely to find a crowd clinging to patriotic fetish objects like the constitution here in the U.S., or Ataturk in Turkey, than in soberly evaluating what either may have actually said.  What people think a flag symbolizes, or which historical figure they put on a t-shirt, aren’t just the stupid epiphenomenon of a culture war, but the currency of an emerging political ethos more invested in tribal allegiance than economic policies.

If, as Sean McFate of the Atlantic Council argues, the world is moving toward a “durable disorder” more like the Middle Ages, “characterized by overlapping authorities and allegiances”, than the building of political order will seem to increasingly rely on learning to use slogans. Without the hegemonic ability of a state to control subject formation, it will be an open market for sloganeering. This shift corresponds with Jean-Jacques LeCercle reworking of Althusser’s theory of interpellation as a power not of institutions, but of language.

‘Language is not only a battlefield and one of the instruments of the class struggle, but also the site and instrument of the transformation of individuals into subjects’

The mob will no longer be anonymous or uncontrollable. It will be heroic or threatening depending on whose slogan it takes up. We saw this this weekend as Erdogan confidently called the mobs into the street better than the army could keep them home. No doubt he could have read these symbols in the crowd himself and be comforted in the knowledge that, unlike the marauders in Gezi Park, this mob was his.